Haaretz

February 1, 2006

Close Encounter Of The Ardant Kind

by Dror Mishani

Arbitrarily, I can say that my films are composed of the
following:

20 percent autobiographical material,
20 percent stories I read in the papers,
20 percent things that happened to people
around me,
And 20 percent pure invention.
~ Francois Truffaut
 

Scene 1. Interior. Day
A sitting room on the 24th floor of a Tel Aviv hotel. The window looks on to the sea. In the role of Fanny Ardant, Fanny Ardant:

"I always dreamed of being an actress because I loved words and I loved the theater, poetic language. As a girl, whenever I read a beautiful passage in a book I would run to my sister and read it to her. It is the feeling that you have to share the beautiful with someone else.

"So I arrived at acting in the theater. First I studied political science, in order to find out whether the desire to act was only a caprice. After completing my studies, at the age of 22, I told myself that suddenly I was free. I came to Paris alone. I lived in a small flat in the Fifteenth Quarter. It's strange to think now about the beginning. You are alone in a city in which you do not know a soul. It is like entering the dark alone. One day I met someone who introduced me to a person from the theater and he offered me a part in a play by Corneille at the Festival du Marais. That was the first time, and that was my true school: the theater. To go onstage and act in plays by Racine, Corneille, Claudel. To play larger-than-life characters who become like me and like you and speak the truth in sophisticated language, speak truth."

Fanny Ardant is not an actress; she belongs to a small group of flesh-and-blood men and women who have become, through the history of the cinema, the carriers of a cultural idea. They have something in their bodies, their faces, their movements, their voices that makes it possible for different filmmakers to speak through them about a subject, to develop a theme through their way of moving, so that viewing the films they have been in over the years is to observe the evolution of a cultural image -that is, of a thought about a subject within a culture. They are not actors who shed one role and assume another: they bring to each of their screen appearances their history in the cinema and more especially the history of the cultural theme of which their face or body has become the image (think of John Wayne, of Clint Eastwood, of Marilyn Monroe or of Jeanne Moreau).

Here are two photos from Ardant's cinematic memory album, which say something about the changes that have occurred in recent decades in understanding one of the great themes of French cinema: love as a yearning for a world not fully realized, as desire that is opposition to
order, lawless passion.

In the first scene of her first important film (and perhaps her greatest film, "La Femme d'a cote," "The Woman Next Door, 1981"), she (playing Mathilde) meets Gerard Depardieu (Bernard) in a parking lot. He was once her lover, though we do not yet know much about that love, other than that it ended long ago in tragic circumstances. She is now married to another man, who by chance rents a house opposite Bernard's, window looking at window. The old lover has since married, too, and has children. The burning looks of Mathilde and Bernard have already struck each other before the meeting in the parking lot, but were silent, so as not to give away their secret. Now, in the parking lot, he is by himself, she is by herself. She almost runs him over. She gets out of the car, he walks toward her. They kiss. She faints and falls, unconscious, into his arms. This operatic love story will end with a death by shooting.

Francois Truffaut, the director of "The Woman Next Door," chose Fanny Ardant, who was then a novice actress, to be the image of this theme, which preoccupied him in all his work: love as both a creative and destructive passion, as a political passion, the only possible resistance to the bourgeois order of the family and the house-and-garden and the 2.5 children, love as disobedience to the law (she would play this love afterward in many more films, and was even Madame Hanska, the tremendous and unrealized love throughout almost the whole life of one of the developers of this theme in French literature, the great writer Honore de Balzac, played by Gerard Depardieu, of course).

Similarly, in the second scene from the successful film "Nathalie" (2003), Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu, the tragic couple from "The Woman Next Door," are onscreen. Twenty years later, something has been extinguished in these two tempestuous actors. Now they are playing a married couple, bourgeois and bored. In no other film is the hefty and violent Depardieu so subdued and silent. She suspects he is no longer faithful to her and asks a beautiful call girl (Emmanuelle Beart) to seduce him, in order to put him to the test. For several weeks she listens to the call girl's stories about their developing affair, imagining the passion that is being awakened in her husband. But in the end, in the "happy end," it turns out that the call girl's stories were all made up. Depardieu passed the test. The fantasy is only a fantasy. Passion is something that can only be imagined, invented. Fainting, losing consciousness belong to the theater or to another era. No one will be shot in the final scene of this film. The Depardieu-Ardant couple will walk hand in hand along the river. In silence. There is no need to talk, or maybe there is nothing left to say. Marital fidelity has triumphed.

Whether inadvertently or not, the director of "Nathalie," Anne Fontaine, has distanced the thinking about love in the French cinema from its sources in the classical French theater and in the 18th- and 19th-century French novel and drawn it close to the thinking about love in the American cinema, for example (not in all of it, of course), and more especially on television, which more than any other artistic medium has sanctified the family and conjugal fidelity (in the past covertly, nowadays openly; there is now a docudrama series that seeks to resolve problems between couples).

Fanny Ardant's presence in a film - the same Fanny Ardant who came to the cinema from the theater and in it became a living image of tragic, consuming love, of love-unto-death enables the viewer to observe the death throes of this image, but simultaneously she also restores it to us from the depths of cinematic memory: because Fanny Ardant came from a different cinema, from a different era, from a different culture of thinking about the cinema and about love.

Scene 2. Interior. Day
Lying on the glass table of the sitting room is Francois Truffaut's book "Le Plaisir des Yeux" (The Pleasure of the Eyes) on the cover of which is a photograph of Jean-Pierre Leaud, the directors cinematic stand-in. Opposite Fanny Ardant, in the role of Fanny Ardant, sits the interviewer, in the role of the mute. He is thrilled at the proximity to the great actress, the actress who not only played in two of the films made by Truffaut, his favorite director, but was also Truffaut's lover and the mother of his daughter. He wants to tear a small crack in the movie screen, to him, to his life.

Fanny Ardant, in the role of Fanny Ardant:

"One day a woman named Nina Companeez called me. She had written a television story about women in Normandie during the First World War. Someone told her that he knew someone who was exactly right for one of the female roles in the film, whose name was also, by chance, Fanny: a young woman, large, dark, not especially pretty. She had never even seen me act before in the theater.

"The film was very successful. At the time there were only three television channels in France and the audience liked the film so much that it was rebroadcast a month later. Can you imagine anything like that today?

"Francois saw the series. He was addicted to television, so much so that, believe it or not, he was one of the first people to subscribe to cable TV, even though he did not like soccer.

"He called and said he had seen Companeez's film and invited me for a meeting. He was then working on "The Last Metro" and had no concrete offers, but I thought it's always nice to meet and talk.

"As a young girl I did not see either "The 400 Blows" or "Jules and Jim." As I said, I had no cinematic education. I was not from Paris, and in Monaco, where I grew up, there was perhaps one movie theater. I read everything, but saw nothing. Of course I knew who Francois Truffaut was, but in the end I did not really know, which was a good thing. The first meeting was in his office, at the headquarters of the independent production company he established, Les Films du Carosse. I remember that there was a lot of noise in the background, because just then they were making the final preparations for "Metro." It was only a year later that he asked me to be in "The Woman Next Door."

"The Woman Next Door," what a royal way to enter the cinema. The shoot was wonderful. It was a tragedy, yes, but on the set we laughed, we laughed the whole time. Of course we paint ourselves an ideal picture of the past, of what we were. I remember that the filming went very quickly. We shot for only six weeks, in a small town near Grenoble. Francois wanted two adjacent houses, in which one could see from one window into the other. He did not want the shooting to be in Paris, because then everyone in the crew goes to sleep in his own home and no atmosphere of partnership is formed. When the screenplay reached me it was thin, just a synopsis, really. Truffaut wrote the dialogues on Saturday and Sunday and we filmed at the beginning of the week. The skeleton was there all along: the great love, the great suffering. The words came after.

"He wanted to tell a criminal story, of the sort one reads about every day in the papers - 'Woman kills herself with her children' - in order to describe the human drama that led up to it. What is "The Woman Next Door," really? The true drama that lurks behind a routine story in the newspaper. A woman who in the end did not get love. I always thought that if one is acting love, it should be the sick love. Happy people have no stories, they are boring.

"I never knew how to talk about the working method of great directors. They choose you, you give yourself, and from what you give they make a film. They have passion. An abiding love for art. A tremendous commitment. Truffaut had a great love for actors. And respect. He wanted each to speak in his way, even me, who was always told that I speak strangely. But think also of Jean-Pierre Leaud.

"What happened to Jean-Pierre Leaud since then? Not much. I saw him on the set of an English film. A poetic man. Wonderful. Not afraid of anything. I love odd people. Francois loved him so much. After all, he was his alter ego. He really made him laugh. He moved him deeply. I think that Jean-Pierre Leaud saw him, too. He saw how sensitive Truffaut was. Listen to Francois Truffaut's voice in "The Wild Child" or "The Green Room" or even in Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." It's as though the voice catches something of his fragility."

*
In 1982, two years before his death, Truffaut wrote a short text that is really a love letter to the cinema and its great stars. In it he set forth (not for the first time) his artistic credo, which was wholly based on love - love of art and love of man. Here is a brief excerpt:
"Whenever I read an interview with a director who says, - In order to interest producers, I had to cast female stars - I know that this opportunist will no longer be in the profession in another five years. His distorted logic, which will make him constantly hesitate between a theoretical approach and a compromise, will render him unfit to direct a film such as "Bicycle Thieves" (Vittorio De Sica), who insists on a crew of anonymous actors, or a film such as "Madame de ..." by Max Ophuls, who insists on a crew of three stars. Of all the concessions a director can make, the most serious is to place in front of his camera an actor he does not love and who will not feel loved, and therefore cannot give a good performance."

Fanny Ardant, the woman in the next chair, is not only a memory-image of the cinematic theme of love-unto-death; her language also resonates with the love of cinema and art which characterized the age of splendor of French ?(and European?) filmmaking, the period before the industrial language of America took over talk about the cinema and "a film" was replaced by "a project" and "masterpiece" by "blockbuster." True, she joined the film world toward the end of those great years, the 1960s and 1970s, but managed to work not only with Truffaut but also with Alain Resnais ("Melo," "Love Unto Death"), Volker Schloendorff and Ettore Scola. When she talks about film (Tartovsky), about literature (Marguerite Duras) and theater (Racine), she returns to the language of passion, which so much evokes the language of Truffaut when he wrote about the cinema and about actors. She restored to film the language of love of art, before it was appropriated by the industrialists.

Scene 3. Interior. Day
Still the sitting room, but on its other side, with the view of Tel Aviv, both so that the film will be visually richer and also because the cleaners have to clean. The interviewer, now in the role of listener to Fanny Ardant, in the role of Fanny Ardant, refuting his thesis about a crisis in the French cinema.

"The French cinema perhaps has a problem of market, a commercial problem. As everywhere, the American cinema has crushed the local cinema. Have I ever been in an American film? I am sorry I did not work with Louis Malle and I would be happy to work with Andre Techine?

"It is true that there are moments in the history of the cinema, as in the history of literature, of great films and great directors. But of course after Balzac, after Flaubert, after Proust one can say, "It is over." Maybe there is no longer a group, but there is always a director or two. What I love in the cinema is that you don't know where the pleasure will come from, where the surprise will come from. One day you receive a script, maybe from a director who has done nothing yet, but wow, it is wonderful. Because what is important in a director is his passion, not his experience. He can make mistakes, but that is nonsense. What is important is the passion."

*
Of Fanny Ardant, his actress in "The Woman Next Door" and afterward his lover and the mother of his daughter, Francois Truffaut wrote, "When I discovered her on my television screen, I was entranced by her large mouth, her big black eyes, her triangular face, but immediately I recognized in Fanny Ardant the qualities I generally look for in the female protagonists of my films: courage, enthusiasm, humor, strength, but on the other hand also secrecy, a cruel, wild side, and above all, something throbbing, alive ... She concentrates quickly before she begins to play a difficult scene and she never has to initiate a quarrel with someone from the crew in order to enter into the atmosphere. When the scene ends, her face softens and she is quiet and lets a smile come to her face, a smile that seems to say: "I am complete, I am whole, I am brimming over." In 1961, when I was shooting "Jules and Jim," I felt every day how, thanks to Jeanne Moreau and Oskar Werner, the film would be far better than the screenplay. During the filming of "The Woman Next Door," I had the same feeling again, thanks to Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu, that we were doing good work, and actually something that is far more than good work - that we were making a film."

Final scene. Interior. Night
Study. On the table lie a tape recorder and a photograph of Fanny Ardant from "The Woman Next Door." Next to them are pages containing the following notes (camera pans over them slowly): "Ask about the start, about "The Woman Next Door"; maybe she will agree to talk about the relations between them; who Truffaut was!!!; to gaze at her closely and to remember; to ask whether she knows what he meant when he said that his work consists of 20 percent and another 20 percent and another 20 percent and another 20 percent, what does that mean, where did the other 20 percent go? To offer my interpretation, which is that this is not a mistake but refers to the imperfection of the created work.|

The interviewer, in the role of the observer of the photograph of Fanny Ardant, presses the play button of the tape recorder and hears the voice of Fanny Ardant in the role of Fanny Ardant:

"A person's life is very moving. Everyone simultaneously succeeds in their life and everyone fails, and it is really the same thing. To succeed in a relationship is like creating a masterpiece. Have I ever succeeded in a relationship? I think not. Even though I grew up in one house with my parents and my grandfather and grandmother, who were wonderful couples, genuine, and adored each other. When I got to university I believed in eternal love, but I, too, when I started to live, did mostly nonsense.

"Maybe that is how it is when one places something so high, so hard to touch, so hard to reach."

The End