The Trout

In a small coastal town, the youngster Frédérique (Isabelle Huppert) works in a trout-farm. She marries the gay Galuchat (Jacques Spiesser) and they lure the upper-class businessmen Rambert (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and Saint-Genis (Daniel Olbrychski) in the bowling, pretending that they do not play well and winning a large amount in a game, despite the protest of Rambert's wife Lou (Jeanne Moreau).

Saint-Genis invites Frédérique to travel with him in a business trip to Japan, where he has a meeting scheduled with the Japanese businessman Daigo Hamada (Isao Yamagata) and she leaves Galuchat and has a brief love affair with Saint-Genis. She returns when she is informed that her husband is in the hospital. Then Rambert tries to convince Frédérique to be his lover, with tragic consequences.

"La Truite" is a deceptive movie by Joseph Losey with a messy story that wastes a cast with the names of Jeanne Moreau, Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Pierre Cassel. I finished watching this pointless movie and I honestly did not understand what the point is. Further, what three old bourgeois are doing in a bowling? My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Uma Estranha Mulher" ("A Strange Woman")

"Our village called us 'the savages.' We founded a club. ... A club whose aim was to get things out of men without ever giving them anything"

I confess I'm not a big fan of movies that have as their story line a young woman who uses sex with a series of men to rise above her humble upbringing, ala Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face(1933). They feel in some way as misogynistic as they are empowering. I'm even less a fan of movies that relegate Jeanne Moreau to such an undeveloped role, although she does get one nice scene standing up for herself towards the end. Oh, Isabelle Huppert is fine here, flirting and beguiling men to get what she wants out of them and flashing her pert little body along the way, but the story was one-dimensional, outdated, and sloppy.

At one point we see Huppert's reflection in multiple mirrors and it brought to mind Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Brigitte Bardot in La Parisienne (1957) from decades earlier. Maybe that's because Joseph Losey originally conceived of this film in the 1960's with Bardot in the lead role. There is an attempt to update things via the acceptance of being bi or gay, and Moreau's character is allowed to say "Nowadays, heterosexuality and homosexuality mean nothing. You're either sexual or you're not," which is pretty remarkable for 1982, but it didn't really feel integrated into what was a meandering plot, and the gay husband never seemed like a real person to me.

The young woman's backstory on the trout farm, in particular seeing her father and his buddy molest girls, tries to explain how she became so manipulative, but it could have been so much better told. The dialogue in the film wasn't very satisfying either. When asked what her first impressions of Japan are, she says that there are lots of Japanese. She meets an older woman who encourages her to have sex without shame, saying she's had it 33,000 times in her life. It's not exactly deep, but maybe this banality was part of the point. How sex relates to power is of course the main thing - as a means of social advancement for the young woman, and as a way of dominating and seeking pleasure for the older men after her. Unfortunately, too often there are scenes that don't push a cohesive narrative or develop these characters, only serving to elongate the movie. It just never pulls itself together, which is a shame, given those who worked on it.

This is the Cinderella story updated to include a dysfunctional Prince Charming who is unable to satisfy his Cinderella so she has to get her jollies by seducing and outsmarting a pair of evil princes (whom she meets bowling...a wonderful surreal touch that is so improbable it actually is quite amusing...think Big Lebowski here)...the only actor out of place is Jeanne Moreau who is simply wasted in a secondary role. I will admit that I am a rabid Huppert fan and would watch her in anything...there is simply no one else like her around and she rescues this film from complete inanity by the sheer weirdness of her beautiful being.

It is surprising that the swansongs or the penultimate works of eminent directors, often their favorites, are dismissed by many critics. Examples: Zinnemann's "Five Days, One Summer," Lean's "Ryan's Daughter." One can add Losey's "The Trout" to that list. All of Losey's works looked at social and economic disparities--"The Trout" underscores that. Audiences who rave about the Korean film "Parasites" might not notice the similarities in this French work because the messages are subtler. Additionally it is a women's film made by a male, where all the male characters are found wanting except for an elderly Japanese man. It is also a fascinating study of a woman's love for her husband who is gay.

The last conversation in the film: Q to Frederique (Ms Huppert): It is better than in France?

Frederique: It is the same. But Galuchat (Frederique's husband) is in charge.

Those closing lines are spoken with the liquor-addicted Galuchat walking alone with a glass of alcohol outside the restaurant, while his wife has transformed from a village girl of limited means into an incredibly successful international trout farmer. The "trout eggs" have hatched! A small detail that might escape many--towards the end as rich trout farmers from around the world, including Frederique, arrive at the Japanese hotel in a long convoy of limousines, the only sound one hears are the closing of the limousine doors (recalling the final scene of Losey's "Accident" when you don't see the accident but hear it on the soundtrack!)

In LA TRUITE Isabelle Huppert plays a cold-blooded trout of a woman, Frédérique, supported by Jeanne Moreau as a wife whose husband, Rambert (Jean-Pierre Cassel), throws himself (repeatedly) at Frédérique. Frédérique, who is married to a gay husband (Jacques Spiesser) agrees to accompany Saint-Genis (Daniel Olbrychski) to Tokyo, as much to annoy Rambert as to torment Saint-Genis.

The movie has many luscious sequences in Tokyo and France, and Huppert acts most of the other protagonists off the screen in a difficult role. There are flashbacks of her learning how her father and his friends used women, which increases her resolve not to be abused in similar fashion. She comes across as outwardly unsympathetic, but we understand her motives in a world where rich people treat those around them with the same lack of concern as they do their possessions. Rambert is even less sympathetic and less capable of love than Frédérique.

In this slow-moving narrative style definitely assumes more significance than content, but the film does have a particularly satisfactory ending.