The Trout

Doesn't this movie have any defenders? Even Losey's biographers don't seem to be able to find a kind word for it. What I see is the work of a serene master who has left behind the trappings of drama and psychology to contemplate a world of pure cinema. Unfortunately the late masterworks of great directors are often misunderstood (see Griffith's "The Struggle", Lang's "1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse", Zinnemann's "Five Days One Summer") - maybe because there isn't a critical middle ground between workaday reviewers who are unable to see beyond story and acting and academic critics who are busy applying their pet theories. In any case, it's available on a beautiful DVD and ripe for (re)discovery.

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!)

La Truite opens to the unedifying sight of a glum-faced Isabelle Huppert squeezing sperm out of a dead fish. No prizes, then, for guessing this is a drama of sexual dysfunction. Huppert has a homosexual husband (Jacques Spiesser) who is unable to consummate their union. (Nor is he able to act, incidentally, but in a film this bad that is no grounds for divorce.)

Naive souls may imagine that a severe lack of sex explains the scowl of dour misery that Huppert tries to pass off as a performance. Not a bit of it! Her character made a vow in her teens to leech everything she could out of men - without ever once gratifying their sexual desires. So when two mega-rich businessmen (Daniel Olbrychski and Jean-Pierre Cassel) just happen to wander into her local bowling alley and find her simply irresistible...

Sorry, but I don't know which is more improbable. Members of the style-conscious haute bourgeoisie going bowling, or any person - male or female, gay or straight - becoming obsessed with Isabelle Huppert. If Losey had only shot this film with Brigitte Bardot back in the 60s (as he longed to do) then we might just about buy into its ludicrous plot. Given the sour-faced Huppert and her gaping charisma deficit, he was a fool even to try.

La Truite is a textbook illustration of the melodramatic bathos and aesthetic self-abuse that Losey could fall into when he didn't have Harold Pinter (or some other ace script-writer) to keep him in line. Only a hypnotic Jeanne Moreau (as Cassel's aging and ill-treated wife) does anything that resembles acting. Spare a thought, though, for the stunning Afro-Caribbean dancer Lisette Malidor - wasted here in a minor role. In any sane universe, she could have played Huppert's part.

Joseph Losey established himself as a gifted filmmaker in the late '40s with The Boy with Green Hair, my favorite film from childhood. The thing about genuine artists is they can't kick the truth. Regardless how wayward they become in their obsessive lifestyles or imaginations, their deepest obsession remains with the truth. Losey would eventually make in the early '60s what was up to that point the best film exploration of the sado-masochistic impulse, The Servant, with the great film actor, Dirk Bogarde, and during that same period the effects of child sacrifice in The Damned. He would later explore the very dark dead-end of multiple sexual partners as a way of life in his film adaptation of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1979). But his great masterpiece, in my view, is his penultimate film, La Truite (The Trout, 1985). He must have experienced great satisfaction in knowing that every critic missed the central theme and all the deeper nuances of what he was conveying in the film, most thinking that it was simply a comic film about a cold-hearted bitch, played perfectly by the ever-surprising Isabelle Huppert. I will not dwell on the complexity of what this film is about, only to mention that it involves a precocious child, Frederique, who discovers much too early in life the sado-masochistic matrix of the world and begins her trek on finding ways to adapt to it while not allowing a core innocence to be destroyed by it, to keep an upper-hand in distance, a postmodern Fanny Price who is elevated not by dominance but by a detachment that, in its severance from God, borders on being the ultimate act of cruelty, indifference. She keeps in tow a hyper-sensitive, self-destructive husband who is gay and who, in discovering the dead-ends of sado-masochistic delight, is devastated every second of every moment by looking long and hard into the reality of love lost in the only territory he knows, the valley of the void where he commits to drinking himself to death. The heroine played by Ms. Huppert has only one ally, an elderly Japanese man who has achieved a similar detachment in his life, and they become spiritual friends. This film is not about a bitch, but about "misdirected transcendency" (Girard) in a world that is severed from God.