France, 1967
Directed by Guy Gilles
With Macha Méril (Jeanne Delaître), Patrick Jouané (Jean Doit), Bernard Verley (Pierre), Frédéric Ditis (Jeanne’s father)
The title refers to the name of the small Paris bistrot, or small neighborhood café, where Jeanne Delaître and Jean Doit meet at the beginning of the 71-minute feature – and which turns out to be the last meeting between the lovers, since the young boy once again explains how unsuitable he feels to live in the wider society and to enjoy the relation he has with the young woman, how unhappy he thinks he actually is, and how keenly he wants to get away from his job, to run away from the city, to live away in the wider world. The café will become later the place Jeanne would eagerly revisit, the repository of her fond memories about Jean after he vanished forever.
The name of this café does has a specific meaning in French – which makes it rather an odd phrase to name a shop, although it is not that far-fetched given where it is built. A “pan coupé” is a linking wall connecting two others walls in lieu of a built angle that has been destroyed. As it happens, the café is on a street that is sloping downward, a charming, colorful rectangular whose base is actually a triangle resting on the slanted sidewalk, and which is standing between two other front doors, the whole street adjoining two construction sites – this is a very old neighborhood getting partly rebuilt.
The film is indeed a reconstruction effort on its own, a relentless, fluid, moving (in all the word’s meanings) link, or more appropriately a bridge between past and present, joy and pain, misunderstanding and acceptation. The film stocks are either in a soft black and white or in garish colors – these opposite images alternate, though not always in an absolutely rational and obvious manner, the former usually showing the present time defined by the sad absence of Jean, once he makes clear he wants to go, while the latter evokes the past time brimming with Jean’s ambiguous presence.
The film is the never-ending, obsessive effort by Jeanne to remember, to articulate her feelings, and to find out what went wrong with Jean. She paces frantically the streets and the little apartment they used to rent, wrapped up in her pain, staring at the pictures of happier times; she regularly talks about Jean with a friend, Pierre, who tries to find the best words to relieve her pain and to make sense of the failed affair; but she avoids her father, who has never been fond of the young man but is nevertheless secretly investigating his life. Jeanne’s father eventually realizes what the film has pointedly, and soberly, recorded: that after a brief spell as a wandering homeless, Jean had died alone in the garden of an abandoned house.
This death makes Jeanne’s work of reminiscence and analysis even more heartbreaking, but also even more pressing. Why did their relationship break up? She tried hard to reach out, did so really, but Jean was just too dissatisfied with life, too afraid of the world, too uncomfortable with his own lacks and flaws to enjoy a genuine relationship and the struggle to make something out of life on his own terms.
This latter idea could mean in French, “vivre sa vie”. This is the title of an important 1962 feature of Jean-Luc Godard, and “Au Pan Coupé” shares the same mesmerizing, upsetting knack for shooting intense closeups capturing the beauty and tension of the human face – the first time Jeanne appears brings in mind the first images of Godard’s Nana. And death puts abruptly an end to the lead character’s life each time. This taste for deeply riveting and striking closeups was already a specific element of director Guy Gilles’s previous film, “L’amour à la mer” shot in 1965.
The way past suffuses and is surveyed also stirs memories in the moviegoer: the sophisticated, emotionally subtle, way colors spring from a single image from the long black and white long mourning, evokes the earnest and poignant investigations of Alain Resnais, like “Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour” in 1963. And there is the awesome presence of actor Patrick Jouané, whose struggles with sentiments and personal odyssey from a reformatory to a dull working job mirror in part what befall to Antoine Doinel, the hero of François Truffaut – as it happens, Guy Gilles would work on other films with this young actor, a little like Truffaut did with Jean-Pierre Léaud, the face of Antoine Doinel for many years.
And like Truffaut, Gilles likes to use literature: the voiceover in “Au Pan Coupé” sounds like a narrator who knows it all, and thinks it all, of a 19th century novel – a little like those by Honoré de Balzac, which Truffaut was fond of. But what clearly moved Gilles even stronger was Marcel Proust’s inquiry of time and Jean Genet’s bad boys, which makes a big difference.
Despite the bonds that can be drawn to the rest of the French cinema of his time, Gilles was at the fringe of the system, battling to get his films made, doomed to get barely noticed, becoming an overlooked, diminished figure in film history. But his films do deserve attention, and “Au Pan Coupé” is more than a clever work clearly inspired by others. It is a scattered, stubborn, and searing examination of a life failing to fulfill its promises, of a love unable to support the lovers, of an unremitting corrosion of hope. Memories simultaneously reconstruct and celebrate a fiery, passionate, worthy lover whose partner cannot accept the disappearance.
Jean is a deeply melancholy, tragic young man whose failure to fit in life partly resonates with what troubled then teenagers across the world at the time, and still can draw the attention of later generations. He is a remarkably beautiful, delicate, frail boy, with zest and charm, but, as Jeanne’s father angrily points out, with a void at the core of his soul. Both his gazes and his soft voice, so keenly, movingly captured by those special closeups, fully express this fragility, discomfort, and existential wound. The long sequence when he imagines the whole life of a family, as he pores over a collection of old postcards and photos Jeanne bought in a market, though it highlights how joyfully, deeply both lovers can get along, is his personal statement about how futile human lives are, set to leave the world without leaving traces, and yet acknowledging how building these lives can be important, interesting. If only the means to do it were readily available, that is: but the point is that Jean would never feel he would get them. Afraid to lose, he eventually lost himself.
The film ends with the final struggle of Jeanne as she tries to come to terms with her failure to help him marked by a long talk with an older woman who is going insane, yet other painful moments in the café, a sudden illness. Jeanne, who has always been shot with great tenderness, at long last understands that one cannot live with just memories. Common sense thoughts look like a healing belatedly but happily coming to her. Meanwhile, the audience gets the rewarding sense that cinema had delved as deep as possible in the possibilities offered by exploring and exploiting time and emotions on film, managing to express, in a poetic vision, how fragile youth is and how transient relations are.