A Simple Story

Although co-produced by French TV ,"Une Simple Histoire" was theatrically released and was included in "La Saison Cinematographique 1959":it's completely forgotten today and is not even included in "Le Dictionnaire Des Films";to my knowledge ,culturel channel Arte has never screened it .

It was bound to fail when it was released :a 65 min work ,in a country where the notorious Nouvelle Vague began its reign,and where people were heading for the consumer society .

The N.W. cinema recurrent features ,cult of youth contemplating their navel,middle-class or bourgeois milieus,are absent here .Hanoun's heroine is ,much more than Antoine Doinel,part of the society's rejects ,the kind of people progress will leave out in the cold when the French enjoy the sixties fruit of the thirty-year boom period after WW2.

It's actually closer to Bresson's style,but without the way that director distanced himself from events.Hanoun wants us to feel the unfortunate woman's plight within our heart and within our soul,without falling into the trap of sentiment or pity.

In the form itself,he makes us feel that his heroine is an outcast ,who cannot relate anymore to the world she lives in:we never hear her lines and a constant voice-over ,which could be overkill but is never so,repeats the answers of the persons she's speaking to.Her frames of mind are devoid of self-pity and rebellion against a selfish city.Her only joy is when she sees her little girl smile :simple pleasures,enjoying a cup of hot chocolate or fresh made croissants . She takes the subway to go to places where she may find a job,but sometimes she wanders aimlessly .

The outside world appears ,but behind the window of a car seller,or in the photo romance she tries to read ("they are good-looking,they do nothing and they've got cars").The people she meets are not all unkind: Sylvie,the daughter,is given a toy,and a man called MonsieurJean helps her find an hotel;but a woman calls her names (bitch) because a woman carrying a case with her daughter is certainly,in her mind,an unwed woman,which was a shame in those years.

We know almost nothing of this woman who tries to survive in a city hard on the poor:she comes from Lille,and she can't come back because of her mother-in-law (which proves she is married ,but we never hear about her husband)

In stark black and white ,the movie is a long flashback which ends without the usual return to the present.This is not an optimistic movie,all in all,even if a middle-age woman gives her a shelter after ,as a last resort,they both sleep on a waste ground.

A brief dream at the beginning shows the woman in a sunny landscape ;perhaps some sunlight does break through in the end.

The 1959 review read "the actor are non-professionals ";However,at least one of them ,Maria Meriko (here cast as a hotel manageress) ,was a brilliant thespian.

Anyone interested in the past of the French cinema should watch it .

Bresson's influence is clear in this small and surprising film that already announces the nouvelle vague. But it is so quiet and modest that it seems to have gone unnoticed.

If Isidore Isou proposed a few years earlier the total dissociation of image and sound, here it is the opposite, the text and the image complement each other, they are two testimonies of the same reality, the voice-over a first-person vision, and the image generally the third person point of view (not always, sometimes we see through the woman's eyes). Both visions often overlap, repeating phrases of dialogue, describing exactly the same thing we are watching, while other times they provide complementary information, or present a clear gap.

There is a very brilliant moment that shows this ambiguity in the function of the image: the camera shows a waitress making a strange gesture while the woman is opening a door, which we do not identify, and then the voice-over clarifies the interpretation that the protagonist has given of that gesture with the image of what she sees reflected in the glass.

Sometimes it seems that the image is an illustration of what the voice-over says, and the montage of images reproduces what the voice comments, but manipulated here precisely in that montage, thus the repeated shot of her entering and leaving a place were she ask for a job.

The image is very Bressonian, with that characteristic purity, although there are frames and movements that give greater volatility and a less deliberate character, which brings it closer to the first babblings of the nouvelle vague. But everything has that marked transcendental accent (the usual baroque music helps), like a via crucis, so characteristic of Bresson.

The music, as in so many French films of the time (the first Bresson, Les enfants terribles, then Godard etc...), is the usual baroque classics in those very romanticized versions of the time, in this case especially Bach and his violin concerto.

The plot is minimalist, in fact it is a long flashback that does not reach the moment of the first scene of the film.

A simple and beautiful film, but dithyrambic comments like Noel Burch's are ludicrous.

Shot in 16 mm in Paris & its suburbs and co-produced by French television on a very low budget. This was inspired by an item on the back page of a newspaper. The essence of the film is captured by its first person voice-over commentary, and was considered "one of the few genuine masterpieces in the entire history of cinema" by film theorist Noel Burch. The film is not available in English translation, either dubbed or subtitled. But it works very well in simultaneous translation, if prepared in advance.

I recently scored a copy of this movie based entirely upon the 1970 review by Roger Greenspun of the New York Times, and I must say that I am very happy to have done so. Although filmed in 1959, this film has the look and feel of something filmed much earlier. I would compare its video quality to an unrestored copy of "Rome, Open City" (Roberto Rossellini), which was filmed during the war years. The plot centers on the troubles and travails of a mother and daughter recently relocated to Paris and at the end of their financial rope. The performance by Micheline Bezancon as the mother is absolutely believable. If you get a chance to see this film, do so. You won't be disappointed, and its running time of 68 minutes goes all too quickly.