Jacques Audiard 9781526133014

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Jacques Audiard

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diana holmes and robert ingram  series editors dudley andrew  series consultant Chantal Akerman  marion schmid Auterism from Assayas to Ozon: Five directors  kate ince Jean-​Jacques Beineix  phil powrie Luc Besson  susan hayward Bertrand Blier  sue harris Catherine Breillat  douglas keesey Robert Bresson  keith reader Laurent Cantet  martin o’shaughnessy Leos Carax  garin dowd and fergus daly Marcel Carné  jonathan driskell Claude Chabrol  guy austin Henri-​Georges Clouzot  christopher lloyd Jean Cocteau  james s. williams Jacques Demy  darren waldron Claire Denis  martine beugnet Marguerite Duras  renate gÜnther Julien Duvivier  ben mccann Jean Epstein  christophe wall-​romana Georges Franju  kate ince Philippe Garrel  michael leonard Jean-​Luc Godard  douglas morrey Robert Guédiguian  joseph mai Mathieu Kassovitz  will higbee Diane Kurys  carrie tarr Patrice Leconte  lisa downing Louis Malle  hugo frey Chris Marker  sarah cooper Georges Méliès  elizabeth ezra Negotiating the auteur  julia dobson François Ozon  andrew asibong Marcel Pagnol  brett bowles Maurice Pialat  marja warehime Jean Renoir  martin o’shaughnessy Alain Resnais  emma wilson Jacques Rivette  douglas morrey and alison smith Alain Robbe-​Grillet  john phillips Eric Rohmer  derek schilling Coline Serreau  brigitte rollet Bertrand Tavernier  lynn anthony higgins André Téchiné  bill marshall François Truffaut  diana holmes and robert ingram Agnès Varda  alison smith Jean Vigo  michael temple

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Jacques Audiard Gemma King

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Gemma King 2021

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The right of Gemma King to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3300 7 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Emmanuelle Devos in Sur mes lèvres © 2001 - SEDIF - PATHE FILMS - FRANCE 2 CINEMA and Jean Marie Leroy

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For Sam and Lumi

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Contents

Figures Series editors’ foreword Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Body: physical boundaries De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os 2 Society: cultural barriers Regarde les hommes tomber, Un prophète and Un héros très discret 3 Globe: national borders Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters

page ix xi xii 1 20

70

115

Conclusion

158

Appendix 1 Career timeline Appendix 2 Frequent collaborators Appendix 3 Critical and commercial reception, feature films Appendix 4 Languages and co-​production countries, feature films

162 165 166 172

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Filmography Select bibliography Index

Contents 173 180 183

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Figures

0.1 Malik’s hands and face, the first shots of Un prophète, 00:00:51, 00:01:03 1.1 Carla adjusts her hearing aid, Sur mes lèvres, 00:01:22 1.2 Miao Lin communicates with gesture, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, 01:19:42 1.3 Tom mimes Miao Lin’s performance with bloodied hands, De battre, 01:41:46 1.4 Keyhole shot as Carla reads lips on a train, Sur mes lèvres, 00:50:19 1.5 Stéphanie removes her stockings, De rouille et d’os, 01:07:55 1.6 Stéphanie watches Ali box, De rouille et d’os, 01:21:16 2.1 Johnny and Mme Rajenski ‘watch’ television, Regarde les hommes tomber, 00:44:26 2.2 Malik teaches himself Corsican, Un prophète, 00:37:42 2.3 Albert poses with soldier in real time, Un héros très discret, 00:52:16 2.4 Albert poses with soldier in newsreel, Un héros très discret, 00:52:31 3.1 Flashing lights, Dheepan, 00:06:40

page 2 21 23 36 40 58 61 82 94 106 107 123

x

Figures

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3.2 Dheepan’s improvised border, Dheepan, 01:23:02 3.3 Tub and Eli, human–​animal relationships, Les Frères Sisters, 00:35:24 3.4 ‘Jacques Audiard’: the opening of the French trailer for Les Frères Sisters

133 140 147

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Series editors’ foreword

The aim of this series is to provide original, theoretically informed, properly analytical studies of the work of French film directors ranging from the already canonical to the lesser known and critically marginalised, and to do so in a style that is accessible for a wide readership ranging from students and film enthusiasts to specialist scholars. The first volumes were published in 1998. More than two decades later, only one of the three words of the series title remains uncontroversial: ‘film’, though even here the material form that this signifies has altered during the life of the series. ‘French’ raises complex questions about the meanings and boundaries of national identity, and about the relationship between national, transnational and ‘world’ cinema (cinéma-monde). ‘Directors’ evokes debates about auteurism, and the danger of reducing a thoroughly collective, team-based medium to the product of solitary inspiration. Throughout its many volumes, the series explores and challenges each of these underpinning concepts, reflecting on the nature of the medium itself, interrogating the meanings of ‘French’, seeing in the director one highly significant element in the multifaceted process of film production and reception. The series’ essential aim, and its achievement so far, is to host studies of many of the most exciting and significant bodies of film produced in France since the origins of cinema. We intend these volumes to contribute to the promotion of the formal and informal study of French films, and to the pleasure of those who watch them. Diana Holmes Robert Ingram

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Acknowledgements

Even a solo project is a collaborative effort. I am grateful to many people who helped bring this book into being. To my editors, Matthew, Diana and Robert, for their expertise, professionalism and confidence. To my readers and mentors, Natalie, Leslie B., Ben, Andrew, Michael, Leslie K. and Thibaut, for their advice, generosity and overall brilliance. To my students, whose discussions of these films inspired and motivated me. To my colleagues at the Australian National University, who supported me in many ways to do this research, and at Paris Sciences et Lettres, who gave me resources and community so I could write in Paris. To my family, friends and partner, Sam, for their love, wisdom and willingness to stretch their tolerance for screen violence in order to watch these films with me. And to Jacques Audiard, for meeting with me, and for making films that have beguiled me ever since I was a bright-​ eyed undergraduate who enrolled, on a whim, in a unit called ‘French Cinema: The New Wave and Beyond’.

Note on translations Unless otherwise stated, all French quotes in this book have been translated into English by me.

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Introduction On a longtemps considéré Jacques Audiard comme le fils de Michel. Après Un prophète et De rouille et d’os, on se dit maintenant que Michel Audiard est le père de Jacques. (Kaganski, 2012)1

Fingers skitter across piano keys, spilling forth a frenzied melody. Hands curl into fists, rage turning the knuckles white as they pound into flesh. Fingertips reach up to an ear, delicately stroking a hearing aid to calibrate ambient noise. Hands run gently over skin, feeling the stumps where thighs once extended to knees, shins and feet. Small fingers gather into points to scoop up rice from a communal plate, before being prompted to contort around the unfamiliar implement of a spoon. Large hands grasp at another spoon, pressing it into the eyeball of an enemy in the confines of a prison cell. A father’s fists, usually encased in boxing gloves, are cold and naked as they pound at thick ice, the bones breaking as he reaches for his son in the water below. Out of the void of a black screen, a keyhole shot emerges, a dim circle of light revealing shaking fingers, then opening a little further to reveal a man’s face held in his cuffed hands. From a prison outside Paris to a war zone in Sri Lanka; from a marine park on the Côte d’Azur to the goldfields of the 1850s Pacific Northwest; from stories of the Second World War Resistance to asylum-​seeking, boxing and the many faces of French organised crime, the cinema of contemporary French filmmaker Jacques Audiard revolves around the movement 1 ‘We have long thought of Jacques Audiard as the son of Michel. After Un prophète and De rouille et d’os, we now say that Michel Audiard is the father of Jacques.’

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Jacques Audiard

Figure 0.1  Malik’s hands and face, the first shots of Un prophète, 00:00:51, 00:01:03

of bodies. Fragile yet powerful, dark yet hopeful, intimate yet lonely, each of his films dwells upon differently abled, marginalised or otherwise non-​normative bodies in constant states of crisis and transformation. Central to this representation is the physical and symbolic power of hands, those profoundly cinematic body parts whose contortions, tremblings and applications of pressure express the characters’ inner turmoils in physical terms. To evoke the work of Laura Marks

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(2000), this is a ‘tactile cinema’ in which trauma, dislocation and shifts in identity are expressed through the body, and in which ‘extreme close-​ups abound –​of faces, hands, disembodied parts’ (Hastie, 2016: 102). From 1994’s Regarde les hommes tomber to 2018’s Les Frères Sisters, and beyond to his work in music videos and screenwriting, Audiard explores movement in all its manifestations. His films follow the passage of families and individuals across geographic borders; trace the gestures of body parts engaging in violent, creative and intimate acts; portray the inhibition of movement by societal and criminal justice structures; convey the experience of everyday space by different or damaged bodies; unveil the complex shifts and interplays of moving between languages, subgroups and cultural identities; and, perhaps above all, map the social ascent of the marginalised underdog. Audiard’s cinema is extremely physical. It reveals the human body’s capacity for physical and intellectual prowess, its use of and submission to violent force and coercion, and its fragility. In terms of form, his films invariably include naked torsos, close-​ups of body parts, legs, lips, hands and feet in particular, and slow-​motion sequences of sensorial disorientation such as blurred vision and blackouts. (Kitchen, 2016: 230–​1)

Produced both within and beyond metropolitan France, Audiard’s films vary wildly in terms of setting, era, genre and subject. Yet these films are linked together by a cluster of key themes for which Audiard has become increasingly well known in domestic and international contexts. Despite their differences, they all tell stories of oppression and marginalisation, but also of growth and power. They are filmed in shaky keyhole shots, dramatic chiaroscuro shadows contrasted against scenes drenched in natural light, light-​handed CGI that blends into natural environments,2 subjective scores that 2 See, for example, the protagonists’ amputated legs in De rouille et d’os; the ghostly, burning figure of Reyeb in Un prophète; and the violence against animals and glowing river gold of Les Frères Sisters.

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Jacques Audiard

immerse us in characters’ sound worlds and pared-​back colour palettes that reveal the beauty to be found in the bleakest of settings. They play with the traditional ‘ingredients’ of genre and its connections to gender representation and national cinemas –​the French polar (crime/​noir thriller), the American prison film, the frequently feminised melodrama, the Western –​ and yet they also modify the formula to create something new. They are resolutely and at times disturbingly masculine, their male characters constrained by heteronormative and toxic models of masculinity, their female ones usually sexualised and immobilised –​with some important exceptions. More often than not, the characters of these films find themselves in substitutive and ambiguously defined masculine relationships, structured by displaced paternal–​filial power relations and expressed less through affection than through a violence that betrays ill-​concealed failings and fragilities. Geneviève Sellier writes of this dominant motif of troubled masculine bonds and identities: ‘On retrouve là l’opération à laquelle se livre tout le cinéma d’Audiard: faire percevoir des hommes violents comme des hommes fragiles, vulnérables’ (Sellier, 2016: 208).3 Raised in the inner circle of the Paris film world, his father being the famed cinematographer Michel Audiard, Jacques Audiard enjoys a widespread reputation as a stereotypically French director working within an established, auteurist cultural frame. Such an image is supported by his long-​term success within institutions such as the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), the Festival International de Cannes and the Césars national French film awards, as well as his membership of groups such as the Cannes 50/​50 gender equality initiative and the Club des 13, alongside fellow French directors Pascale Ferran and Claude Miller. Yet Audiard’s films are also frequently intersectional and even transgressive, 3 ‘Here we find the mechanism that is constantly repeated throughout Audiard’s cinema: to represent violent men as vulnerable, fragile men.’

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5

often looking far beyond domestic frames of reference and crossing cultural, linguistic and national borders to explore hybrid and non-​normative identities that challenge the norms of French cinema. Perhaps more than any other French filmmaker working today, Audiard traces the line between centre and periphery, France and beyond. This is the first book-​ length study of the cinema of Jacques Audiard. Like Audiard’s cinema itself, it takes the border, both literal and figurative, and the body that crosses it as its central focus. This introduction covers some of the broader themes of Audiard’s border-​crossing filmmaking, his oscillations between (and reworkings of) auteur and genre cinema, his collaborative working practices, his French heritage and international movements, before moving on to three analysis chapters: ‘Body’, ‘Society’ and ‘Globe’, which delve deeper into how this eternal border-​crossing manifests in, and defines, his films themselves.

Beyond directing: influences, collaborations, engagements In order to understand Jacques Audiard’s work as a French film director, it is necessary to step back and consider his films within the context of his upbringing and career as a whole. Audiard was born in Paris in 1954 to Marie-​Christine Guibert and Michel Audiard. By the time of his birth, Audiard’s father was already building a reputation as a screenwriter, having written the scripts for twenty French films, including Henri Verneuil’s L’Ennemi public numéro 1 (1953) and André Hunebelle’s Massacre en dentelles (1952). He would become increasingly well known for his idiosyncratic dialogue, especially for polars and films noirs in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Gilles Grangier’s La Cave se rebiffe (1961), and Georges Lautner’s Les Tontons flingueurs (1963) and Les Barbouzes (1964). The younger Audiard studied literature

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Jacques Audiard

and philosophy at the Sorbonne but it was through his father that Jacques secured his first film job, as an assistant writer on the latter’s final directorial project, Bons baisers… à lundi (Audiard, 1974). He then worked as an assistant editor on Roman Polanski’s (1976) thriller Le Locataire (better known under its English title The Tenant). This first independent job would foreshadow Audiard’s own future films in several respects: Le Locataire is set in Paris; focuses on a male protagonist’s psychological trauma and identity crises; and features subjective sound design that recalls the sound world of Sur mes lèvres, as explored in Chapter 1 (pp. 20–​69). It can be tempting to draw direct parallels between directors’ films and their personal lives, a temptation that can prove a reductive frame through which to analyse their work. However, it is difficult to discount the potential influence of several of Jacques Audiard’s experiences and relationships on his cinema. Of course, on a practical level, he owes at least his first couple of film jobs to his father’s connections. I am also not the first to link the elder Audiard’s work in mid-​century polar/​film noir screenwriting and his contribution to the establishment of some of the most iconic elements of 1950s French genre film, with the younger’s career-​long reworking of these elements (Morice, 2018; Vanderschelden, 2016; Met, 2006). Jacques Audiard’s films feature the recurring motif of the son who must choose how or whether to inherit the (biological or substitutive) father’s professional role. They often feature a central master–​apprentice dynamic, and follow the learning curve of the protégé who must ultimately decide the point at which he departs from the master’s path. Indeed, Jacques’s own comments in several interviews support the reasoning that his film career is at least in part shaped by this formative relationship (see, for example, Fornerod (2015)). As Stéphane Bouquet describes it, ‘[C’est] l’histoire d’un homme qui a dû se demander bien souvent, comment faire du cinéma quand on est le fils de quelqu’un, et qui répond, avec une belle audace, en se confrontant directement au cinéma de papa,

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Introduction

7

en investissant l’espace du polar où officia son père … et en cherchant dans ce cadre, une légitimité’ (Bouquet, 1994: 65).4 In a similar vein, the dominant theme of familial loss –​the mother in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté; the father in Un héros très discret; the (near-​loss of the) son in De rouille et d’os; the complete absence of biological family in Un prophète, Sur mes lèvres and Regarde les hommes tomber –​also seems to point to the loss of Audiard’s only sibling, his elder brother François, who died in a car accident in 1975 at the age of twenty-​six. In multiple Audiard narratives, only children lack the support of siblings, brothers assume the role of inadequate fathers and friends assume the role of missing brothers. It is not my intention to suggest that this death directly led to the motif of loss that marks Jacques Audiard’s films. However, Audiard himself has remarked on the links between his own experiences and his films, particularly Les Frères Sisters, whose central relationship is between two brothers who each assume the mantle of the leader and ‘eldest’ at different points in their lives. Audiard has revealed: ‘C’est d’ailleurs moi qui ai eu l’idée de raconter comment l’aîné des frères Sisters, qui était sous le joug du cadet, retrouve à un moment une certaine stature … Parce que quand vous perdez votre [seul] frère aîné, vous devenez instantanément l’aîné’ (Balle, 2018).5 Though Audiard has also expressed surprise at how long it took him to notice the parallels between the film and his own life (Balle, 2018), Les Frères Sisters is dedicated to François.

4 ‘[It’s] the story of a man who must often have asked himself how to make films when you’re somebody’s son, and who responded, with great daring, by directly confronting the cinéma de papa, by investing in the space of the crime thriller where his father reigned … and by seeking legitimacy within this setting.’ 5 ‘It was actually I who thought of showing how the elder Sisters brother, who was under the younger’s yoke, recovers a certain stature … Because when you lose your [only] elder brother, you instantly become the eldest.’

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Jacques Audiard

Despite Audiard’s being best known for the eight feature films he has directed since 1994, his career in the cinema has been far longer and more varied. After his initial editing roles, Audiard took on a wide range of screenwriting jobs throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Like his father, he specialised in polars, writing the scripts for films such as Georges Lautner’s 1981 Le Professionnel (Michel wrote the dialogue while Jacques adapted the screenplay) and Edouard Niermans’s (1988) Poussière d’ange (which marked his first role writing dialogue, and his first collaboration with Alain Le Henry, with whom he would later co-​write Regarde les hommes tomber). Alongside this core oeuvre of polars, he also wrote the scripts for such varied films as Lautner’s 1985 drag comedy La Cage aux folles III (Lautner, 1985); Jean-​Jacques Andrien’s (1988) postwar drama Australia; and even Jérôme Boivin’s 1989 dark comedy about a murderous talking dog, Baxter (Boivin, 1989). He made a brief foray into sound-​mixing with Costa-​ Gavras’s (1979) Womanlight; took on five jobs in assistant-​ editing; and even played the part of ‘decapitated jogger’ as an extra in Alain Robak’s 1990s gore film, Baby Blood (1990). Though he transitioned to directing in 1994 with Regarde les hommes tomber, Audiard has never ceased screenwriting, and currently has twenty-​six writing credits. And even after his directorial career was well established, and his reputation in the French film world had (arguably) exceeded that of his father, Jacques Audiard continued to take on left-​of-​field projects. For example, he wrote the script for Tonie Marshall’s (1999) low-​profile Vénus beauté (institut) (after both Regarde and Héros); filmed a live concert for French musician Raphaël in 2011; and has signed on to direct several episodes of the television series Le Bureau des Légendes (2020), starring Mathieu Kassovitz, at the time of this book’s completion.6 6 Appendix 1, pp. 162–​4, lays out Audiard’s career timeline and shows his gradual (and not entirely linear) transition from screenwriting to direction.

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9

However, it is for the eight feature films he has directed so far that Jacques Audiard is best known. These began with 1994’s Regarde les hommes tomber (See How They Fall), a subversive neo-​noir shaped by unrealised sexual desire and ambiguous male relationships, starring Jean-​Louis Trintignant as the wizened villain Marx; Mathieu Kassovitz as the homme fatal Johnny; and Jean Yanne as Simon, a confused reimagining of the hard-​boiled detective. Next came 1996’s Un héros très discret (A Self-​Made Hero), a hybrid of narrative cinema and mockumentary in which Kassovitz’s Albert is an unremarkable young man who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, reinvents himself as a member of the French Resistance. Third, Sur mes lèvres (Read My Lips) of 2001 is an immersive, sensorial thriller about a hearing-​impaired woman, Carla (Emmanuelle Devos), whose ambiguous relationship with her assistant Paul (Vincent Cassel) draws her into a world of crime in which her lip-​reading skills are an unexpected asset. Following Sur mes lèvres’s study of translingual communication, 2005’s multilingual De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (The Beat My Heart Skipped) is a tense drama in which Tom (Romain Duris) is caught between the classical music world of his deceased mother and the ethereal pianist Miao Lin (Linh Dan Pham), and the dirty real-​estate world of his father (Niels Arestrup). Transplanting some of De battre’s patriarchal overtones to the multicultural world of a Parisian prison, 2009’s Un prophète (A Prophet) is a grim Bildungsroman in which the naive young prisoner Malik (Tahar Rahim in his breakout role) slowly learns how to use language and violence to wield power over the prison’s rival gangs, and to dethrone the reigning Corsican mafia boss, César (Arestrup). In 2015, the Palme d’Or-​ winning Dheepan’s tale of Tamil asylum seekers in outer Paris (Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan and Claudine Vinasithamby) combined familial and migration drama with elements of the French banlieue film tradition, with one half of its dialogue in Tamil. And in 2018, The Sisters Brothers departed French territory entirely,

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Jacques Audiard

for an English-​language, Oregon-​and California-​set twist on the Western genre, starring Hollywood actors John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed. Despite the vast diversity of topics, characters and genres his films treat, upon examining Audiard’s career timeline and upbringing, one can identify many striking parallels with the protagonists of his films. Like Malik in Un prophète, Audiard began his career as an apprentice, eventually working his way up to a position of control. Like Charlie and Eli in Les Frères Sisters, he followed in his father’s footsteps and his work processes what it means to be a brother. Like Dheepan and Yalini in Dheepan, he often works in a language he does not speak. Like Albert in Un héros très discret, he slips between the roles of writer, actor and director in the service of building stories from multiple angles. Like Tom in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, he was born into his exclusive Paris-​based profession. But like Stéphanie and Ali in De rouille et d’os, he cycled through multiple professional roles before arriving at the one for which he would be best known. It took a long time for me to accept that I might become a director, just as it took time for me to start writing screenplays. Nearly ten years each time. It probably has something to do with my family background. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that I am slow. In any case, I was definitely not precocious. (Vanderschelden, 2016: 248)7

And finally, like his enigmatic character Hermann in Les Frères Sisters, even as a director, a position –​particularly in the context of French auteur cinema –​so often considered to be one of sole creative autonomy, Audiard prefers to work in a team. Audiard’s record of long-​term working relationships based on collaboration and creative exchange is noteworthy, from his co-​writer Thomas Bidegain, with whom he wrote the scripts for each of his films since Un prophète; to his work 7 Original quotation in English.

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with composer Alexandre Desplat on all but Dheepan; to his nearly thirty-​year collaboration with Juliette Welfling, who has edited every one of Audiard’s features, to great critical acclaim (see Appendix 2, Frequent collaborators, p. 165). He has reflected on his preference for co-​authoring scripts, a practice he has followed since the earliest stages of his screenwriting career. On the release of Regarde les hommes tomber, he said of the script, ‘Ce scénario, je n’aurais pas pu l’écrire tout seul, j’avais besoin de quelqu’un pour me seconder et me guider’ (Vachaud, 1994: 38).8 He has shown deference to other crew members on parts of the filming process, for example shooting action scenes with two cameras (Rouyer and Tobin, 2015: 11). He has even mentioned a need for guidance in general on set, explaining self-​deprecatingly that he relies on partners on set ‘pour m’empêcher de faire des dégâts’ (Vachaud, 1994: 38).9 This collaborative tendency is reflected in Audiard’s membership of the Club des 13, a group of thirteen French film professionals focused on promoting le cinéma du milieu, or mid-​range-​budget French ‘art’ cinema, founded by fellow director Pascale Ferran with Audiard and Claude Miller, but also composed of a scriptwriter, four producers, a distributor, three exhibitors and an export agent. He has also contributed to collaborative sociopolitical projects, including the short films of the Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers (Filmmakers’ Collective for Undocumented Immigrants), Nous, les sans-​papiers de France (1997) and On bosse ici! On vit ici! On reste ici! (2010), and signed the Collectif 50/​50 pledge in favour of equal gender representation at Cannes.10 In fact, despite the fact that Audiard is best

8 ‘I couldn’t have written this script on my own, I needed someone to help me and guide me.’ 9 ‘to prevent me from causing damage’. 10 See www.collectif5050.com (accessed 19 December 2020).

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known as a director, over the several decades of his career he has frequently described a preference for writing over directing: Interviewer:  You write and edit your films as well as direct. Which do you enjoy most? Audiard:  I like writing and editing, but shooting is always an ordeal. There are too many variables, too many things that can go wrong. When you’re writing a script it’s about what is going to happen, and to an extent the producers believe in it and the actors believe they are going to say those lines. But in fact cinema starts when the script dissolves and you’re in an area of angst and contradiction and uncertainty, which is very hard. I lost six kilos while I was shooting this film; if I shot a film a year I’d disappear. (Felperin, 2005: 10)11 This collaborative work and reluctance to assume the mantle of director poses some interesting questions around Audiard’s status as an auteur, a concept whose connection with notions of lone genius, as well as national identity, is often assumed. In their book Cinema and Nation, Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie write that ‘In the early days of the institutionalisation of film as an academic discipline, the study of national cinemas –​in conjunction with auteur theory –​was widely and unproblematically accepted’ (Hjort and MacKenzie, 2000: 2). The connection between nationality and auteur status is particularly noticeable in Audiard’s case. Rosanna Maule acknowledges that the lines delimiting national cinemas and definitions of the film auteur have long overlapped: ‘Author cinema in Western Europe is nationally over-​determined, although variously interfaced with the trans-​European and global dimensions of film and audio-​ visual practices’ (Maule, 2008: 16). Yet Audiard’s cinema continually crosses such lines. He occupies a position within the traditional realm of the French national filmmaking apparatus, 11 Original quotation in English.

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13

while also making films that test its edges (Dheepan), situate themselves in other territories (Les Frères Sisters) and decentre the French space from within (Un prophète). In these ways, Audiard conforms less to traditional ideas of the ‘French auteur’, and more to how Alice Burgin, Andrew McGregor and Colin Nettelbeck see the terms operating in the contemporary world: Although government-​subsidised auteur cinema has traditionally been associated with national cinemas, we argue that France’s state-​based support systems, heavily invested in transnational and transcultural modes of production, challenge any stable division between national and transnational cinemas. We recognise instead a transnational auteur cinema emerging from France that extends the traditional concept of cultural diversity beyond French/​European borders, incorporating transcultural narratives and promoting various forms of cinémas du monde. (Burgin, McGregor and Nettelbeck, 2014: 397)

Thus, on the one hand, Audiard’s collaborative work in the aforementioned networks could be seen to support the traditional concept of the auteur, in its boundedness to a local or national film circuit and contribution to the health of the national French cinema industry in particular. In the other, though, this hybridisation of the filmic creative process could be seen to undermine the concept of the auteur as the sole creative ‘author’ and owner of a film. However, Maule’s work on the redefinition of the auteur in the contemporary European and/​or transnational context allows us to understand Audiard’s directorial role in relation to his collaborative ventures and relationships: Within a post-​auteurist framework of analysis the author no longer refers to an individual artist through whom we infer textual coherence in films; it is instead the result of reading and reception strategies conditioned by cinema’s sociocultural and industrial structures and practices, a function of extratextual discourses in a given sociocultural context. (Maule, 2008: 24)

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Thus, Audiard as writer-​ director-​ collaborator appears to evoke a paradox in which he functions both as an auteur –​ with a coherent creative vision that would be impossible to ignore and that structures the body chapters of this book –​ and a team member whose deference to others and experience across the spectrum of filmmaking roles would appear to undermine the image of the hierarchical ‘author-​director’. Here it is helpful to consider Michel Foucault’s fonction-​ auteur (‘author-​ function’) to parse this paradox. For Foucault, the auteur does not denote any epistemological truth about the individual as genius, creator or owner of a text. Instead, it is a notion of a ‘rational being’ (Foucault, 1970: 8) constructed by and in western (French) society through which we receive and understand a corpus: ‘[La fonction-​ auteur] ne se forme pas spontanément comme l’attribution d’un discours à un individu. Elle est le résultat d’une opération complexe qui construit un certain être de raison qu’on appelle l’auteur … L’auteur est donc la figure idéologique par laquelle on conjure la prolifération du sens’ (Foucault, 1970: 8, 15).12 This book, therefore, does not read the films directed by Jacques Audiard as his sole products or possessions. Nor does it consider his work preceding his role as director as unrelated to or less important than his writing-​directing roles. Instead, while the analysis chapters focus in large part on his most substantial projects –​his directed features –​this first monograph on Jacques Audiard considers his oeuvre and career as a coherent whole. It aims not simply to describe Audiard’s cinema, but to question its place between

12 ‘The author-​function is not spontaneously formed in the attribution of discourse to an individual. It is the result of a complex operation that constructs a certain rational being that we call the author … The author is thus the ideological figure through which we conjure the proliferation of meaning.’

Introduction

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the arthouse and the popular; between le cinéma du milieu and le cinéma du genre; between old and new concepts of the auteur; between the heritage of the French cinema establishment and the contemporary, translingual film world that operates beyond national borders.

Chapter outlines This book is divided into three main chapters. They explore the theme of border-​crossing in Audiard’s cinema in contexts ranging from the body to the nation to the world. Each of these chapters focuses on two or three of Audiard’s eight directed feature films, and the body of the chapters is made up of analyses of these films, illuminated by reviews and scholarship. However, in addition to their primary case studies each chapter also weaves in and out of Audiard’s filmography as a screenwriter, producer, editor and sound-​mixer, and analyses of his smaller-​scale projects, such as music videos, to provide a holistic picture of his role in the French and transnational filmmaking worlds. The first chapter, ‘Body: physical boundaries’, explores the physical body as the site of multiple boundaries, limits and opportunities for transgression, and focuses on the films De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (2005), Sur mes lèvres (2001) and De rouille et d’os (2012). Reading these films through the body-​centric film scholarship of Linda Williams (1991), Martine Beugnet (2007) and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997), and against the more extreme strand of French cinema known as le cinéma du corps (Palmer, 2011), this chapter reveals the centrality of sensory perception –​the eyes and ears, the acts of listening actively and looking differently –​and Audiard’s development of an empathic sense world. It posits that these films’ immersive representation of sex, sensation and disability, while violently gendered in certain ways, provides an alternative vision of these themes

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Jacques Audiard

in which the traumatised body is also capable of pleasure, power and emancipation. The second chapter, ‘Society: cultural barriers’, examines Audiard’s dark, if not completely pessimistic, vision of difference, division and fracture in contemporary French society, focusing on Regarde les hommes tomber (1994), Un prophète (2009) and Un héros très discret (1996). Across a variety of social contexts, in multiple languages and through a diverse range of protagonists, the chapter sketches out the dominant character type that recurs throughout Audiard’s cinema: an isolated and marginalised individual perched on the margins of French society, who learns to refine and deploy traditionally maligned skills to ascend the social hierarchy. Building on the work of Julia Dobson (2011, 2016), Kathryn Lauten (1999), and formative reviews from Positif and Cahiers du cinéma among others, as well as my first book, in which I link Audiard’s underdog protagonists, especially Un prophète’s Malik, with cultural and linguistic diversity (King, 2017), the chapter demonstrates how this central underdog figure effects mobility across class, race, culture and/​or language lines. The third chapter, ‘Globe: national borders’, looks beyond the French borders which contain Audiard’s early films, to the diverse transnational spaces in which his later films have been set and produced. It analyses Audiard’s two most recent features, Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters, and their manifestation of the border-​crossing motif, both in thematic terms, such as through the transgression of genre boundaries, and in physical ones, in their focus on mobile characters who must cross national and territorial borders to survive. The chapter also maps Audiard’s own travel across borders, to interrogate his label as a French auteur, and to situate his cinema in a space that is both quintessentially French, and transcendent of the national.

Introduction

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References Andrien, J. J. (1988), Australia, Paris, Christian Bourgois Productions. Audiard, M. (1974), Bons baisers … à lundi (Kisses till Monday), Paris, Les Films de Montfort. Balle, C. (2018), ‘Jacques Audiard: “On a tourné les Frères Sisters dans les décors de Sergio Leone”’, Le Parisien, 19 September, available at www.leparisien.fr/​culture-​loisirs/​cinema/​jacques-​ audiard-​on-​a-​tourne-​les-​freres-​sisters-​dans-​les-​decors-​de-​sergio-​ leone-​19-​09-​2018-​7894242.php (accessed 1 April 2019). Beugnet, M. (2007), Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Boivin, J. (1989), Baxter, Paris, Alicéléo. Bouquet, S. (1994), ‘Le principe de ruine: Regarde les hommes tomber’, Cahiers du cinéma, 483 (September), 65–​6. Burgin, A., A. McGregor and C. Nettelbeck (2014), ‘Not Dead Yet: Three Takes on Auteurism in Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema’, French Cultural Studies, 25:3–​4, 396–​407. Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers et al. (1997), Nous les sans-​ papiers de France, Paris, Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers. Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers et al. (2010), On bosse ici! On vit ici! On reste ici! Paris, Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers. Costa-​Gavras (1979), Womanlight, Paris, Les Films Corona. Dobson, J. (2011), ‘Jacques Audiard: Contesting Filiations’, in Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, ed. K. Ince, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Dobson, J. (2016), ‘Special Affects: Reconfiguring Melodrama in De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone), Audiard, 2012’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, pp. 215–​28. Felperin, L. (2005), ‘Play It Again, Romain’, Sight and Sound, 15:11, 10. Fornerod, P. (2015), ‘Jacques Audiard: “Je dois tout à mon père …” ’, Ouest-​France, 24 August, available at www.ouest-​france. fr/​ c inema-​ j acques- ​ a udiard- ​ j e- ​ d ois- ​ t out- ​ m on- ​ p ere- ​ 3 638912 (accessed 1 April 2019).

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Foucault, M. (1970), ‘Qu’est-​ce qu’un auteur?’ conference paper, University of Buffalo. Garland Thomson, R. (1997), Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York, Columbia University Press. Grangier, G. (1961), La Cave se rebiffe (The Counterfeiters of Paris), Paris, Cité Films. Hastie, A. (2016), ‘  “I Know That Dog”: Witnessing Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan’, Film Quarterly, 70:1, 100–​6. Hjort, M., and S. MacKenzie (eds) (2000), Cinema and Nation, New York, Routledge. Hunebelle, A. (1952), Massacre en dentelles (Massacre in Lace), Paris, Société Nouvelle Pathé Cinéma. Kaganski, S. (2012), ‘De rouille et d’os, beau film sur la fusion des corps’, Les Inrockuptibles, 15 May, available at www.lesinrocks. com/​cinema/​films-​a-​l-​affiche/​de-​rouille-​et-​dos/​ (accessed 1 April 2019). King, G. (2017), Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Kitchen, R. (2016), ‘The Disabled Body and Disability in the Cinema of Jacques Audiard’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 229–​47. Lauten, K. M. (1999), ‘ “Dusting Off” Dehousse: Un héros très discret (Audiard, 1996)’, in French Cinema in the 1990s: Continuity and Difference, ed. P. Powrie, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 58–​68. Lautner, G. (1963), Les Tontons flingueurs (Monsieur Gangster), Paris, Gaumont. Lautner, G. (1964), Les Barbouzes (The Great Spy Chase), Paris, SNE Gaumont. Lautner, G. (1985), La Cage aux folles III: ‘Elles’ se marient (La Cage aux folles 3: The Wedding), Los Angeles, Columbia Films. Marks, L. (2000), The Skin of the Film, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Marshall, T. (1999), Vénus beauté (institut) (Venus Beauty Institute), Paris, Agat Films. Maule, R. (2008), Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain since the 1980s, Bristol, Intellect.

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Met, P. (2006), ‘Oedipal Mayhem: Rituals of Masculinity and Filiation in Jacques Audiard’s Regarde les hommes tomber’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 43:1, 94–​102. Morice, J. (2018), ‘Jacques Audiard, de père en films’, Télérama, 19 September, available at www.telerama.fr/​cinema/​jacques-​audiard,-​ de-​pere-​en-​films,n5808955.php (accessed 18 October 2019). Niermans, E. (1988), Poussière d’ange (Killing Time), Paris, Président Films. Palmer, T. (2011), Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press. Polanski, R. (1976), Le Locataire (The Tenant), Paris, Marianne Productions. Robak, A. (1990) Baby Blood, Paris, Partner’s Productions. Rouyer, P., and Tobin, Y. (2015), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: A la hauteur des personnages, pas plus haut’, Positif, 655, 9–​13. Sellier, G. (2016), ‘De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (Audiard, 2005): La masculinité comme souffrance’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 205–​14. Vachaud, L. (1994), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: Du côté du cinéma’, Positif, 403, 36–​40. Vanderschelden, I. (2016), ‘Screenwriting the Euro-​Noir Thriller: The Subtext of Jacques Audiard’s Artistic Signature’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 248–​61. Verneuil, H. (1953), L’Ennemi public numéro 1 (The Most Wanted Man), Paris, Cité Films. Williams, L. (1991), ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, in Film Genre Reader II, ed. B. K. Grant, Austin, University of Texas Press, pp. 140–​57.

1

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Body: physical boundaries De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os Audiard est l’un des cinéastes qui filme le mieux le corps des hommes. (Nuttens, 2012: 7)1

The body, and the boundaries that can be transgressed by and within it, are essential to the cinema of Jacques Audiard. This is despite the fact that the face is so often the quintessential body part through which to convey meaning in cinema. Many French filmmakers, among them Agnès Varda, Céline Sciamma and Jean-​Luc Godard, have often employed long takes and close-​up shots of characters’ faces.2 By contrast, Audiard’s films are filled with intimate, lingering close-​ups on less conventionally ‘legible’ parts of the body: legs, torsos, fingers, eyeballs, backs of the neck, ears. In each of his films, the camera is drawn magnetically, obsessively, to the details of characters’ bodies. And in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os, the primacy of the body extends to the narrative, with storylines centred on disability, creation, violence and sensation that place the physical body at the forefront of plot and aesthetics. 1 ‘Audiard is one of the filmmakers who knows best how to film the bodies of men.’ 2 See, for example, Varda and J. R.’s documentary Visages villages (2017), Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019) or Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967).

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Figure 1.1  Carla adjusts her hearing aid, Sur mes lèvres, 00:01:22

The introduction of this book opened with some of the many powerful shots found in Audiard’s films of hands in movement, their physical functions blending into their symbolic and aesthetic ones. Yet hands are not the only body part that is emphasised, even fetishised, in these films. Audiard’s close-​ups of less conventionally expressive body parts evoke Martine Beugnet’s study of the gaze-​like quality of the close-​up: ‘The close-​up holds a key function, in its capacity to grant the content of the image a status of autonomous entity and endow the object or landscape with a face-​like quality, to behold the inanimate object as that which “returns the gaze”’ (Beugnet, 2007: 108). Audiard’s characters occupy spaces between connection and disconnection, intimacy and isolation, detachment and communion. Communication is at the heart of his work, and all his films emphasise unique forms of expression, conjuring the heritage of his father’s idiosyncratic dialogue. Yet despite the narrative and thematic importance Audiard places on language, multilingualism and code-​ switching, his characters experience connection less through talk than through touch. Occasionally, as in De rouille et d’os, intimacy is achieved through physical contact. Yet there is a noticeable

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Jacques Audiard

lack of healthy, sustained sexual relationships or romantic connection in Audiard’s films. Often, attraction is either unrealised (Regarde les hommes tomber, Les Frères Sisters) or untethered from emotion through the mediation of sex work (Un prophète, Un héros très discret, Les Frères Sisters, Regarde les hommes tomber), adultery (De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté) or cultural isolation (Dheepan, Sur mes lèvres). Thus, instead of physical intimacy, touch for Audiard is often violent, and language and violence are frequently interlaced. In Un prophète, César and Malik exert their authority and underpin their verbal orders with violent acts ranging from a punch to the face to full-​blown torture. In De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Tom communicates the consequences of betrayal with bloody beatings that escalate to the brink of murder. In Les Frères Sisters, whenever the innocent Hermann tells another person of his invention, a ‘divining chemical substance’ that illuminates gold in the river bed, he invites not industrious collaboration, partnerships and prosperity, but a new crop of would-​be thieves and assassins determined to rob and kill him. In Regarde les hommes tomber, the polite words of a debt collector (‘Il faut payer maintenant, s’il vous plaît, Monsieur’3) are sinisterly undershot by the fact that he is holding the debtor’s young child while uttering them. In Un héros très discret, the protagonist’s ruse of being a former Resistance leader, nothing but words until that point, is actualised by his command to have a number of deserters killed. As explored in Chapter 2 of this book (‘Society’), and especially the analysis of Un prophète, language is an essential element of Audiard’s cinema, and communication across language barriers is a central thematic focus and narrative device in most of his films. However, when verbal communication breaks down between characters, especially across language barriers, they also find alternative ways to communicate with their bodies. Sur mes lèvres features a deaf protagonist whose opportunities 3 ‘You need to pay now, please, Sir.’

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for using French Sign Language are limited as she has few deaf friends or family who sign, but who lip-​reads as both a day-​to-​ day communication system and as a means of more calculated espionage. In Un prophète, when gunshots render him temporarily deaf, Malik instructs a captive to communicate with him by signing. In De rouille et d’os, transspecies communication between human and orca gives rise to a particularly cinematic sequence through the glass wall of a pool, as the two commune through a dance of co-​learned gesture. And in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, the French Tom and the Vietnamese Miao Lin do not share any common language, so while she teaches him piano and he teaches her French, the two improvise a communication system through a combination of body language, tone of voice, onomatopoeia, mime, and individual English instructions and Italian music terms as pared-​back lingua francas. Indeed, Miao Lin’s expressive, creative enunciations and mime seem to teach us extra-​lingual communication as well, given the lack of subtitles for her Mandarin-​language dialogue. Language barriers, physical distance and cultural rifts separate many of Audiard’s characters. And yet his films are

Figure 1.2  Miao Lin communicates with gesture, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, 01:19:42

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Jacques Audiard

not so much about separation and division as they are about using the body to forge creative bridges across such divides. Tom and Miao Lin are separated by language barriers, but they transcend verbal communication through mime, music and progressive language learning. Malik is initially excluded from the Corsican gang that controls him by their exclusionary use of the Corsican language, yet by learning to read French he is then able to teach himself Corsican and to break down these walls from the outside. Ali and Tom are both emotionally stunted by a culture of toxic masculinity that precludes healthy communication, and yet each finds release and expression in their hands, be they in legal circumstances (Ali as club bouncer, Tom as pianist) or illegal ones (Ali as bareknuckle fighter, Tom as renegade debt collector). Carla is disconnected from the auditory world that others around her live in, and is socially isolated as a result, but she bridges this social distance through her visual skills of lip-​reading, while also transcending the spatial limitations of hearing. In Audiard’s cinema, what remains unspoken, unacknowledged and undealt with bubbles up in the body. Pain is expressed through the muscles and mapped on the skin. Power is enacted in bodily movement, especially through violence and physical domination. Creativity is channelled through the sensory organs and hands, in the consumption and creation of music. Social barriers are enforced through the constraining, oppressing and policing of bodies. The characters work with their bodies: as musicians, cleaners, athletes, cooks, assassins, miners, soldiers. The camera locks on to these bodies as they work, in extreme close-​ups and luxuriantly long takes that foreground the physicality of their experience, and our connection with them. In this way, Audiard’s work is cinematographically and thematically about the body in a general sense. But also, in a concrete narrative sense, his cinema is about the breaking and remaking of traumatised bodies. The prefiguring of the body as central in these films thus forges an intimacy between characters. However, the affective power of Audiard’s bodily cinema also extends this intimacy

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to one between film and viewer. This is a cinema of distance: of barriers, lines, walls and rifts. But this is also a cinema of transcendence: of bridging, touch, movement and connection. Thus Audiard’s cinema recalls Martine Beugnet’s cinema of sensation, which ‘captures most acutely the alternation between the experience of being in the world as one of sensory plenitude or as radical alienation and sense of loss’ (2007: 108). But the focus on the dancing of fingers, the clenching of fists, the stretching of limbs, the caressing of skin, does not serve a purely visual function. In these films, the body is located within and across a series of lines: between differently abled and differently policed bodies, intimacy and detachment, creation and destruction, trauma and healing, pleasure and pain. In this chapter we explore how Audiard’s cinema foregrounds the body in three fundamental senses. The first emphasises creation, focusing on gender, violence and creativity in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté. The second explores sensation and sensory perception, focusing on hearing impairment, body genres (Williams, 1991) and what I call empathic sound in Sur mes lèvres. Finally, the chapter closes on the theme of amputation, focusing on the primacy of touch and the nexus of sex, disability, loss and the female body in De rouille et d’os. Audiard’s cinematographic focus on bodies is inherently connected with the experience of sensation, the expression of sexuality, the articulation of gender and the negotiation of disability. A growing corpus of literature in French cinema studies focused on the body can help us better understand the three films studied in this chapter. In addition to Beugnet’s cinema of sensation, Saige Walton writes of ‘cinema’s baroque flesh’ (2016), Troy Bordun of ‘extreme cinema’ (2017), James Quandt of ‘New French Extremity’ (2004) and Tim Palmer of ‘le cinéma du corps’4 (2011). These scholars each describe the foregrounding of the physical body, extreme violence, taboo intimacy and trauma in a range of contemporary French films, positing the films of directors such as Gaspard Noé, Catherine 4 ‘cinema of the body’.

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Jacques Audiard

Breillat, Claire Denis, Christophe Honoré and Bruno Dumont as genre-​bending examples of embodied experience on screen. While le cinéma du corps is frequently presented as a horror trope, or used to describe extremely graphic images of transgressive sex, cannibalism or other violent (self-​ )harm, this chapter brings these scholars’ work, alongside that of Linda Williams (1991) and disability scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997),5 to bear on De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os. To be sure, Audiard’s cinema is less explicit than that of the filmmakers mentioned above, and scholars of le cinéma du corps have not used the term to refer to his films before. However, even if these films do not represent the same taboo extremes as films such as Ma mère (Honoré, 2004) or Trouble Every Day (Denis, 2001), this literature gives us the tools to explore Audiard’s films as profoundly immersive, embodied and indeed cinematic in their portrayal of the physical body.

Creation: De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté Puis à un moment donné j’ai compris ce qui se passait, tu vois? C’était plus mon père que j’avais en face de moi. C’est comme si j’avais un môme, qu’il est devenu mon fils, que j’étais responsable de lui … que c’était moi le père, tu vois? (Sami, in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, 00:00:30)6

5 This book engages in detail with Laura Marks’s The Skin of the Film (2000), but largely in Chapter 3 in relation to Marks’s understanding of ‘intercultural cinema’. It is worth foregrounding here, however, that book’s parallel focus on touch and the tactility of film. 6 ‘Then at one point I realised what was happening, you know? It wasn’t my father in front of me any more. It was as if I had a kid, as if he’d become my son, as if I was responsible for him … as if I was the father, you know?’

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In a hostile Paris dominated by toxic relationships, violent workplaces and chauvinistic men, the frustrated Tom (Romain Duris) is caught between the opposing career paths of his parents. Already successful as a real estate shark like his father, Robert (Niels Arestrup), he nonetheless dreams of becoming a concert pianist like his late mother, Sonia. As his father is drawn into increasingly nefarious dealings with a Russian crime ring led by the menacing Minskov, Tom becomes absorbed by his musical aspirations, neglecting his responsibilities towards his father and colleagues for daily piano lessons with the preternaturally calm Miao Lin (Linh Dan Pham), a gifted Vietnamese pianist who does not speak French and instead communicates in combinations of the lingua francas of Mandarin, Italian and English (we only hear her speak Vietnamese with her bilingual friend, Jean-​ Pierre, who liaises between her and Tom when setting up the lessons). The film is structured around a dual narrative arc, as Tom grows more obsessed with his upcoming audition, and Robert is threatened, and eventually murdered, by Minskov. The film’s conclusion, set a few years in the future, provides a poetic interlacing of Tom’s opposing lives, culminating in a violent and cathartic resolution that sees him incarnate both professions in a visceral physical form. Surprisingly, considering its contemporary Parisian setting, Audiard’s 2005 film is in fact an adaptation of James Toback’s (1978) New York-​set film Fingers, starring Harvey Keitel. Though both Toback and especially Keitel would achieve significant fame in their careers, Fingers is a comparatively low-​brow genre film that received little critical attention at its release. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote ungenerously of Toback and his film: ‘It’s as if he hadn’t spent much time thinking about what kind of movie he’d like to make or even much about how movies are made … It’s about as close to nothing as can be created out of random feelings’ (Canby, 1978: 19). Fingers had mostly faded into obscurity by the time Audiard picked it up as an inspiration. By comparison,

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De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté was both a commercial and a critical success. The film drew 931,079 domestic box office entries (almost double that of his second-​ most successful film at the time, Un héros très discret, and five times that of his first directed feature, Regarde les hommes tomber)7 and earned eight César awards with two additional nominations (second only to Un prophète’s nine and four respectively). It also received the BAFTA for Best Non-​Anglophone Film, Berlin Silver Bear for Best Music, the Prix Louis Delluc and the Prix Jacques Deray.8 The seeming disconnect between De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté’s elegant profile and Fingers’ low-​ brow reputation, along with the cultural distance between the two films’ settings, was a source of bemusement for many. In Cahiers du cinéma, Emmanuel Burdeau mocked the film for seemingly competing for the prize of ‘Meilleur film américain de France’9 (Burdeau, 2005: 42). The Allociné page for Fingers (Mélodie pour un tueur in France), while kinder to the film than the Times, praises it mostly for its influence on Audiard, describing it as ‘Un succès qui inspire un autre’.10 Even by comparison with Audiard’s other source texts Fingers may seem a surprising choice: all the other works he has adapted are literary, and many are either classic literature (Lettres persanes) or share a similar profile to that of their adaptations (Rust and Bone, The Sisters Brothers): critically appreciated and inventive genre works.11

7 See data on box office takings and awards in Appendix 3, ‘Critical and commercial reception, feature films’, pp. 166–71. 8 These French film prizes are for the Best French Film of the Year (Delluc) and the Best French Thriller of the Year (Deray). 9 ‘Best American Film of France’. 10 ‘A success that inspired another’. Available at www.allocine.fr/​film/​ fichefilm_​gen_​cfilm=4555.html (accessed 26 April 2020). 11 It is interesting to note that De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté was co-​ written by French crime novelist Tonino Benacquista, who shared the César for best adaptation with Audiard.

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Yet upon closer examination, the choice of De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté’s source text is not so left-​of-​field after all. For the foundation that Fingers lays for De battre is built on many of Audiard’s central themes: dysfunctional and substitutive family relations, the interplay of intimacy and isolation, the magnetic pull of violent crime (especially to a young man lacking community), transcultural contact, simplistic and pessimistic representations of women, the narrative arc of learning and social ascension, and a foregrounding of the body in its most generative and destructive forms. In fact, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté could be seen as the most emblematic example of Audiard’s cinema, engaging with every one of his signature motifs. Not least of these is a fundamental focus on sound: ‘In general, we could say that, while Jimmy, and Fingers more generally, are obsessed with seeing and being seen, De battre is a film about listening and being heard’ (Morrey, 2016: 197). More than any other Audiard film, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté focuses on music. Tom spends most of his spare time either practising classical piano or watching others play, or blasting electro through chunky headphones wherever he goes. Most of the film’s music is diegetic, while it occasionally uses incidental music (such as in the ‘Locomotion’ radio scene detailed below) to create disturbing soundscapes that clash upbeat pop with visceral violence. The almost schizophrenic nature of the film is embodied in its switching back and forth between music genres that are both wildly different and essentially similar: the frenzied spilling forth of classical piano and the circular, frenetic rhythm of fast-​paced, contemporary electronica. Though De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté is Audiard’s only feature film with a music-​focused plot, it was not his first foray into music film. In 1997, between the release of Un héros très discret and Sur mes lèvres, Audiard directed two music videos, for Noir Désir’s ‘Comme elle vient’ and Alain Bashung’s ‘La nuit je mens’, the latter winning the prize for Best Music Video of the Year at the fourteenth Victoires

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de la musique awards. Several of his films include clashing sequences of anglophone hip-​ hop and pop to surprising effect, from Katy Perry’s 2010 ‘Firework’ in De rouille et d’os to Nas’s 2004 ‘Bridging the Gap’ in Un prophète. One of Audiard’s most important collaborative relationships is with composer Alexandre Desplat, who wrote the original music for all his films except Dheepan, and who won three Césars for Meilleure musique originale (Best Original Score) for Un héros très discret, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté and De rouille et d’os (plus nominations for Sur mes lèvres, Un prophète and Les Frères Sisters). (Desplat also won two Best Original Music Score Academy Awards for his work on Wes Anderson’s (2014) The Grand Budapest Hotel and Guillermo del Toro’s (2017) The Shape of Water.) And in 2011, Audiard directed the concert-​ length film of a live performance by French artist Raphaël, Raphaël live vu par Jacques Audiard (Raphaël Live as Seen by Jacques Audiard), a dreamy video album that, like Audiard’s narrative cinema, is filled with close-​ up shots of shadowy body parts, partially obscured faces and disembodied hands. Yet despite the narrative and cinematographic focus on music throughout De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, the film is not really about music so much as it is about the communication barriers that surround the creation and consumption of it. Tom is drawn back to the music profession as a means of reconnecting with the world of his late mother, whom he clearly admired and from whom he feels both physically and spiritually distant. Struggling to master the piece he is rehearsing for an audition with his mother’s former manager, he signs up for daily lessons from a woman with whom he shares no common language, beyond a few scattered English and Italian words. Often, we struggle to understand other characters in Tom’s orbit, as their dialogue is almost drowned out by the music from his headphones. At times we are even seated next to him, listening to the diegetic reverberations from his headphones, closed off both sensorially and existentially from this tortured

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character. His use of the headphones accompanies his actions much as non-​diegetic film music might, but cuts him off from the world around him, manifesting in a physical sense the isolation and disconnectedness that haunts him and all his relationships. Douglas Morrey aptly describes this use of music less as a soundtrack than as a ‘sound-​world’: ‘For a film about music, De battre does a much subtler job of creating a sound-​ world, with Tom’s hurried but carefully modulated speech, the mysterious voice of the absent mother, or Miao Lin’s hypnotic combination of onomatopoeia, Italian musical vocabulary and Vietnamese commentary’ (Morrey, 2016: 203). Much like its clashing of music genres, De battre is a film of binary oppositions at all levels. This is particularly apparent in its representation of gender. The film paints an unkind picture of dichotomous gender identity that defines all its characters, but particularly its women. The female characters are either sexualised as whore archetypes or canonised as untouchable Madonnas. The film’s sexually active women, Chris, Aline and the unnamed girlfriend of the Russian mobster Minskov, are all described by the male characters as ‘putes’,12 despite none of them being a sex worker. By contrast, the only other female figures are virtuous, angelic creators who are rendered silent or incomprehensible by either their inability to speak French (Miao Lin) or their literal absence in death (Sonia). Like all the other choices he must make in the film, Tom’s romantic options boil down to a choice between the different worlds of his parents: the meek woman of his mother’s profession with whom he (initially) cannot communicate, and the objectified wife of his real estate colleague with whom he has an illicit affair. Yet alongside its reductive portrayal of women, the film also provides a toxic vision of masculinity that oppresses and perverts its male characters. The film’s men are invariably 12 ‘whores’.

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violent, emotionally stunted, dishonest and sexually depraved. They are unfaithful to their spouses and one another, unsympathetic to marginalised or socioeconomically disadvantaged people, incapable of meaningful verbal communication, and they revert to violence without hesitation. Middle-​aged men in particular are portrayed as pathetic, degenerate and even infantilised, their sons forced to act as displaced paternal figures to their own fathers, shown poignantly in the monologue of Tom’s colleague Sami quoted at the beginning of this section, about his own father’s descent into dementia: ‘C’est comme si j’avais un môme, qu’il est devenu mon fils, que j’étais responsable de lui … que c’était moi le père.’13 Audiard himself has commented on De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté’s dichotomous gender dynamics in interviews, acknowledging –​ though not criticising –​the film’s instrumentalisation of women as motors for Tom’s evolution: Intervieweur:  De battre … est vraiment un film sur un milieu d’hommes, avec des hommes. Ce qui ne l’empêche pas d’accueillir de beaux personnages de femmes, qui ne sont pas que des faire-​valoir. Audiard:  J’espère. La passion de Tom est centrifuge. Les personnages de femmes ne pouvaient que passer dans sa vie de manière anecdotique, mais en même temps importante, pour marquer le changement. (Rouyer and Vassé, 2005: 23)14 While De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté probably provides the most reductive and problematic representation of gender in

13 See n. 6. 14 Interviewer: De battre … is really a film about the realm of men, with men. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t room for beautiful women characters, who aren’t just foils. Audiard: I hope so. Tom’s passion is centrifugal. The women characters can only pass through his life in an anecdotal, but nonetheless important way, to mark change.

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Audiard’s cinema, it signals a broader tendency that emerges across much of his corpus. Masculinity as violent machismo rules many of his films, including De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Regarde les hommes tomber, Dheepan and De rouille et d’os, and especially Les Frères Sisters and Un prophète. Almost no characters other than Tom have active parents in their lives, with mothers especially lacking, and many seek replacement father figures in dangerous places. (A notable exception is Un héros très discret, in which the mother is an oppressive, controlling figure who drives the protagonist’s initial foray into manipulation and lies.) If a man finds a complex and intimate relationship, it is usually with a brother figure, either biological (Les Frères Sisters) or improvised (Un prophète). The Madonna–​Whore complex divides not only the women of De battre, but those of Un héros très discret ten years earlier. And women are mostly absent from several Audiard films, including Regarde les hommes tomber, Un prophète and Les Frères Sisters. In fact, on the latter’s release, Les Inrockuptibles published an article simply titled ‘Les Frères Sisters: Où sont les femmes?’ (Ribeton, 2018).15 Nonetheless, there are notable departures from this trend: Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os feature female protagonists whose narrative arcs centre on the realisation of their own desire, and Dheepan’s Yalini is a fully realised woman whose complex internal experience and exertion of agency rival those of her male co-​protagonists. However, one gendered trope that persists in each of Audiard’s films is the linking of femininity with sex or creation, and masculinity with physical violence. As Geneviève Sellier writes, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté paints a picture of gender relations that leans upon ‘la définition du masculin par la violence (réelle et symbolique) et la définition dichotomique du féminin par la sexualité d’une part, par l’art d’autre part’ (Sellier,

15 ‘The Sisters Brothers: Where are the women?’

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2016: 212).16 We see this in the division of the feminine musicality of Miao Lin and Sonia by contrast with the maligned sexuality of Chris and Aline, each so diametrically opposed to the brutal macho violence of Tom’s colleagues, his father and the murderous Minskov. Yet Audiard lends Tom greater complexity than the rest of the film’s characters (and even Keitel’s Jimmy in Fingers). In Tom, creativity, sexuality and violence combine, a fact that we can read quite clearly on the young man’s body. As Jean-​Christophe Ferrari describes it in his review for Positif, ‘[Tom] fait partie de ces êtres rares dont les états d’âme sont lisibles à même la peau.’ (Ferrari, 2005: 19)17 In a key pairing of motifs, Audiard’s fetishisation of the hand is almost always paired with that of the sensory organs of the eye and the ear. We will see this in particular later in this chapter with Sur mes lèvres, in which close-​up and keyhole camera shots of mouths depict Carla’s gaze as she reads lips, filmed in germane ways to the shots of her ear as she applies her hearing aid. There is even a recurring motif in Audiard’s cinema of the hand as torture implement wielded against the eye: in De battre, Tom attacks Minskov by gouging his eyes with his bare fingers, and in Un prophète, César tortures Malik by pressing the back of a spoon into his eyeball. Yet De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté combines the ear and the hand in new ways. Tom frequently mimes piano playing in the air as he listens to television or radio performances. Miao Lin uses an array of miming gestures and playing to teach Tom piano when her Mandarin dialogue, though audible to him, remains incomprehensible beyond tone. When one of Robert’s tenants refuses to heed the older man’s verbal warnings to pay his overdue rent, Tom makes him heed them by setting a fire in his restaurant and savagely beating him. In several of the 16 ‘the definition of the masculine through (real and symbolic) violence and the dichotomous definition of the feminine through sexuality on the one hand and art on the other’. 17 ‘Tom is one of those rare beings whose inner state can be read on the skin.’

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film’s most violent scenes, in which the weapon of choice is invariably the fist, diegetic sound is eclipsed (for us) by oppressively loud music, such as the disturbing scene in which Tom and his colleagues raid one of their rental buildings to beat up and dislodge a group of squatting families. As the fists fly, the squatters flee and Tom’s colleagues begin to show a sick enjoyment of the violence, the score is progressively drowned out by an eerily jarring song: Kylie Minogue’s 1980s pop hit ‘The Loco-​Motion’. As Tom enters the building, the camera is not fixed, but peers over his shoulder as he flits about the room filled with confused squatters shaken from their sleep. As his colleagues begin to drag the people from their beds, beating some as others flee in terror, Tom looks on in increasingly dissociated horror, and the camera narrows in on close-​up keyhole shots, lit by a flashlight and surrounded by black. The images grow increasingly difficult to read as bodies fall, punch and hurtle across the screen. As the visuals become more disorienting, the music increases in volume, Minogue’s playful call to dance drowning out the other sounds to create a paradox of sensory deprivation and overload. The viewer’s perception is manipulated by a dearth of vision and an excess of sound, just as the victims experience their physical attack in the dark. The ‘Loco-​Motion’ soundtrack, played diegetically from a radio in the corner, recalls previous uses of upbeat music to portray violence as pleasurable, such as A Clockwork Orange’s disturbing use of Gene Kelly’s ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ during a rape scene (Kubrick, 1971) or Reservoir Dogs’s torture scene accompanied by Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ (Tarantino, 1992). These conflicting pairings heighten the perpetrators’ twisted enjoyment of violence, and the viewer’s (and, in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Tom’s) horror before it, in ways that more conventionally ominous music would not. The scene ultimately allows the viewer to experience in part the victims’ sensory confusion and physical assault, while beholding the pleasure the abusers derive from inflicting it.

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However, the hand and the ear are drawn together most powerfully in one of the final images of the film, in which Tom, now Miao Lin’s romantic partner and manager, watches his partner play a solo concert. Moments after a shockingly violent scene in which he brutalises his father’s killer in a stairwell, Tom takes a seat in the concert hall. Through the long closing shot, in which we hear only Miao Lin’s performance, the camera barely shows us the pianist onstage, instead fixed in close-​up on Tom’s hands, bloodied from the bare-​knuckled beating and resting on his tuxedo-​clad knees. As the music swells and the film draws to a close, Tom’s bruised fingers begin to flutter gently, miming the piece he knows by heart, dancing across imaginary keys. Here, before Miao Lin and Tom lock eyes and the screen fades to black, musical creation and physical violence are interlaced, and Tom’s precarious position between the violent underworld of his father and the elite creative milieu of his mother is confirmed through this striking image. On the surface, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté is about music: the creation of it, the consumption of it, the way in

Figure 1.3  Tom mimes Miao Lin’s performance with bloodied hands, De battre, 01:41:46

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which it both stifles and fosters connection. But in fact, the film is really about sound and expression in a broader sense. Perhaps the guiding theme of the film is cultural and social isolation within relationships (between father and son, between lovers, between speakers of different languages, between inhabitants of different worlds) and the learning of new sonic codes (music, languages) to bridge that divide. Ultimately, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté explores the interlinking of the body and sensory connection: touch, pain, desire, music, language, hearing: the hands, the eyes, the mouth and the ears. In this way, it is intrinsically linked with the following film, in which these very elements combine in germane ways, but in very different contexts.

Sensation: Sur mes lèvres Read My Lips crafts its soundtrack around Carla’s perceptions, drawing us into her world without needing too much exposition. The emphasis is on gesture and expression, caught in tight close-​ ups with a foregrounding of hands and objects that verges on the Bressonian. The opening close-​ups of Carla placing her hearing aids discreetly behind her ears, covering them with her hair and scooping water into her mouth from a bathroom tap bind us to her sensory impressions. (Falcon, 2002: 34)

In the dreary office of a Parisian construction company, a lonely, hearing-​impaired woman, Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) struggles to manage the demands of her secretarial job. In public, she turns her hearing aids on and off according to her needs, shutting herself in an enclosed social world, from which she peers out to read the often cruel words of others on their lips. When her manager offers her the chance to hire an assistant, she sees an opportunity for connection and requests a young man ‘avec de belles mains’ (‘with beautiful hands’), receiving a recently released convict, Paul (Vincent

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Cassel), who becomes the object of her timid but absorbing gaze. As the brutish Paul is drawn back into criminal dealings, he becomes aware of the espionage potential of Carla’s lip-​ reading abilities, and the two partner up in a perilous heist that opens up new lines of communication, new possibilities for socioeconomic advancement and new levels of intimacy between them. Sur mes lèvres, Audiard’s third feature film, was a modest domestic success on its release, with 389,355 French box office entries. Though his following film, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, was the first Audiard feature to receive international recognition, Sur mes lèvres was nonetheless successful at the 2002 Césars, winning Best Actress for Devos; Best Original Screenplay or Adaptation; and, fittingly, Best Sound; as well as a further six nominations. While Sur mes lèvres, unlike most of Audiard’s films, is not an adaptation (a fact it shares only with Un prophète), in 2018 Paramount Television signed on to adapt the film into an English-​language television series. Perhaps the most germane film to De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté in Audiard’s filmography, Sur mes lèvres is a generic hybrid at its foundation. Oscillating between the conventions of the polar, romantic drama and erotic thriller, the film borrows from these generic traditions to create something subversive: a neo-​noir in which an homme fatal is the object of the female protagonist’s gaze (Lindop, 2015). The fact that this protagonist is a disabled woman factors in to both the plot (the social isolation that drives her towards Paul, plus lip-​reading as narrative device) and the cinematography. However, the film’s noir blending of eroticism and criminality frame Carla’s disability less as a narrative of disenfranchisement and rather as a progressive arc of economic and sexual empowerment. As Marie Claude Mirandette writes, ‘Aux confins des genres, ce film protéiforme, tour à tour histoire d’amour, drame intimiste, thriller psychologique et suspense enlevant, revisite les clichés du polar pour mieux les détourner au profit d’une machination complexe où la mince ligne qui sépare le manipulateur

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du manipulé est maintes fois transgressée’ (Mirandette, 2003: 57).18 Indeed, as in so many of Audiard’s films, in Sur mes lèvres ‘la … ligne … est maintes fois transgressée’19 between genres, bodies and social milieus in the service of an overarching narrative of learning, socioeconomic ascent and the eventual empowerment of an unlikely underdog. Richard Falcon writes of Carla that ‘Audiard uses her disability –​and his adept blending of everyday office horrors and the crime thriller –​to give a new wrinkle to the paranoia at the heart of film noir’ (Falcon, 2002: 35). In this way, Carla’s body is the literal focus of the film and driver of the plot. However, beyond the narrative instrumentalisation of Carla’s hearing impairment and related lip-​reading ability, Sur mes lèvres is remarkable for the way in which it constructs a rich, subjective soundscape and aesthetic profoundly steeped in the body not only of the protagonist, but also of the viewer.20 Despite its almost suffocatingly muted colour palette, Sur mes lèvres is a profoundly visual film; like Audiard’s other female-​ led work, De rouille et d’os, it is centred on the protagonist’s gaze. We follow this gaze as Carla watches others’ faces to understand what they are saying in a literal sense, but also as she desires through looking: at Paul, at magazine spreads of ideal bodies, at herself in the mirror at night. In many of these looking shots, we quite literally see what Carla sees. In 18 ‘Within the confines of genre, this protean film, by turns a love story, personal drama and breathtaking psychological and suspense thriller, revisits clichés of the crime film in order to subvert them, in the service of a complex plot where the thin line separating manipulator from manipulated is continually transgressed.’ 19 ‘the … line … is transgressed many times’. 20 Throughout this book, I refer to Carla’s disability as ‘hearing impairment’ rather than ‘deafness’. While early in the film she refers to another character as ‘sourd’ (‘deaf’) she never describes herself as such. This is presumably due to combinations of pride, internalised shame and the fact that she possesses relatively strong audition when using her hearing aids.

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Jacques Audiard

the two silent mirror sequences, we begin by viewing Carla in a standard medium shot as she removes her clothing and dons a single, erotically charged item. In the first scene, this is a pair of what she sees as hyper-​feminine strappy heels that contrast sharply with the sensible, flat shoes she wears to work. In the second, this is Paul’s bloodied shirt, which she has taken home to wash, and which she inhales deeply before buttoning over her naked form, incorporating another potent sense –​smell –​ to heighten the sensuality of her voyeurism. Yet after she has donned her costume, in each scene the camera shifts from a shot in which the camera faces Carla to one of the mirror, in which we view her reflection along with her gaze upon herself. And in one cursory but potent scene, as Carla rides the train to work, our own gaze is directed within the frame through the keyhole effect to make us watch exactly what she is watching: not simply other passengers’ faces, but specifically their mouths, as she reads their lips. This effect, which leaves the screen black but for a shifting circle zeroing in on a single object, disconnects the body part from the rest of the figure, making us ‘read’ the body

Figure 1.4  Keyhole shot as Carla reads lips on a train, Sur mes lèvres, 00:50:19

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differently, without the other reference points of the face we usually consult to construct meaning. The shot forces us to inhabit an unfamiliar in-​between space between seeing and reading, between understanding and not. From this visual dissection, so difficult to interpret, Carla can derive meaning and access information to which we are not privy, for the lip-​read words are not subtitled. Thus, in many ways, Carla’s subjective, loaded gaze in Sur mes lèvres could be read as a powerful reversal of Laura Mulvey’s traditional male gaze in the cinema, challenging ‘the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’. Mulvey writes that patriarchal film tradition perpetuates ‘the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning’ (Mulvey, 1975: 6). Sur mes lèvres provides a radical counter to this tradition, with a female gaze that dissects, directs and desires. This subjective and even disorienting form of close viewing is an essential component of Audiard’s films. But especially key to his cinema is the link between the eye and the ear. While the gaze and the lip-​reading dimension of Sur mes lèvres hinge on the visual, the film is unique in its creation of a vivid soundscape that stirs a potent and ultimately empathic experience of subjective hearing, especially of impaired hearing, in ways that are both frustrating and exciting for the hearing and seeing viewer. As we see in Figure 1.1, the close-​up shot of Carla delicately calibrating her hearing aid that opens Sur mes lèvres, Audiard’s cinema is a profoundly sensorial one in terms of both the visual and the auditory. In Sur mes lèvres, we are initially made aware of Carla’s disability by seeing her apply her hearing aid, watching her lip-​read and sign, and listening to her conversations with Paul and her friend Annie about hearing impairment. However, we are also immersed in a sensitive sound design that oscillates between the neutral soundscape of an observer, and a subjective rendering of what Carla herself hears. At times we are a fly on the wall, watching Carla struggle to perceive what

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we ourselves hear clearly, such as when we hear her doorbell ringing incessantly as she calmly reads a magazine, her hearing aid on the table. But at other times we hear with Carla, struggling with unexpected passages of silence and piecing together an auditory patchwork from other reference points –​sometimes comprehensible, sometimes discombobulating –​around us. At times this experience of silence is isolating, even anxiety-​inducing. At others, it opens our eyes to new ways of understanding the complexities and interconnectedness of sensory perception. For example, when Carla first enters the nightclub where she and Paul conduct their reconnaissance work, she is oversensitised to the pounding dance music. She places her hearing aids in her bag and the soundtrack is replaced by flowing, non-​diegetic violin as she begins to enjoy the music –​not through its sound, but through its rhythm as it is expressed in the dancing bodies around her. We also share some of the unexpected advantages of hearing impairment first-​hand: when Carla is minding a friend’s crying baby, the atmosphere transitions from tense to calm when she removes her hearing aid, the cries are muted and she rocks the baby in peace. The film weaves in and out of these objective and subjective modes, at times limiting our own field of sensory perception and at other times expanding it, allowing us to understand Carla’s sensory, social and linguistic experience not only through observation, but through shared perception. La perception déficiente de Carla, magistralement rendue par la rigueur du filmage (ruptures, morcellement, étouffement et dilatation du champ), instaure une atmosphère sensitive, très fine que seule vient déchirer la rectitude brutale des agissements de Paul, électron libre toujours au bord de l’évaporation. (Malausa, 2001)21 21 ‘Carla’s impaired perception, majestically rendered by the camera’s severity (cutting, splitting, stifling and expanding the field), establishes a fine sensory atmosphere that is only torn apart by the brutal righteousness of the actions of Paul, a free spirit ever on the verge of disappearing.’

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Though it is most evident in Sur mes lèvres, this subjective portrayal of sound is not confined to this film. There are moments in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté in which we move between hearing what Tom hears (the music of his headphones, which drowns out all ambient sounds) and what we would hear if seated next to him, where the camera is positioned (the same music reverberating, tinny and faint, from his headphones). And in Un prophète, when Malik is rendered temporarily deaf by gunfire, so are we. In a surreal moment of layered sound design, we hear the same muffled ringing and silence as Malik does, but we also hear the distant sounds of his voice as he remarks, confused, ‘Je n’entends plus rien.’22 Audiard’s interest in sound also extends to his multilingual dialogue, and communication barriers are key to all his films. Yet Sur mes lèvres extends these themes of communication barriers and transcultural contact to the non-​verbal realms of lip-​reading and (in one scene) French Sign Language. As Philippe Rouyer remarks, ‘Même avec une sourde comme héroïne, Audiard confirme que la parole demeure un des enjeux les plus ludiques et les plus passionnants de son cinéma’ (Rouyer, 2001: 28).23 In its multimodal, sensitively rendered portrayal of hearing impairment, Sur mes lèvres immerses us in a new kind of soundscape. The film was not his first engagement with hearing impairment, however. Four years before Sur mes lèvres, Audiard directed the music video for French band Noir Désir’s ‘Comme elle vient’. The video features a diverse group of deaf people performing the song’s lyrics in French Sign Language, the camera oscillating between close-​ups of their hands in signs and medium shots of their bodies combining the signing with expressive dance.

22 ‘I can’t hear anything.’ 23 ‘Even with a deaf heroine, Audiard confirms that speech remains one of the most playful and enthralling concerns of his cinema.’

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At the start of the video, moments before the song begins, the performers are engaged in a passionate, subtitled discussion about politics, lamenting the popularity of a political party (presumably the far-​right Front National) in recent European and French elections. The only sound we hear is the brushing of their clothing and the tapping of their hands as they debate. Just before the song begins, one woman asks what the others think of the situation. Another responds, ‘Qu’il vaut mieux être sourde que d’entendre ça!’.24 Audiard is not the only director in the contemporary French space making films about deafness and hearing impairment. While Sur mes lèvres was the first to focus on a hearing-​ impaired protagonist, Michael Haneke’s (2001) Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages, released in the same year as Sur mes lèvres, features several passages with deaf children who communicate through French Sign Language and mime. In 2014, Jean-​Pierre Améris’s drama Marie Heurtin told the partially true story of the deaf and blind nineteenth-​century French woman of the same name (Améris, 2014). The same year, the blockbuster La Famille Bélier (Lartigau, 2014) shifted the topic to the genre of family comedy. And there is significant interest building in films on deafness and various forms of hearing impairment beyond the French context, as well, especially in contemporary horror and thriller cinemas. For deafness, examples include A Quiet Place (Krasinski (2018), plus the sequel, A Quiet Place Part II (Krasinski, 2020)) from the USA, A Silent Voice (Yamada, 2016) from Japan, Silenced (Hwang, 2011) from South Korea and The Tribe (Slaboshpytskyi, 2014) from Ukraine. There are also films about protagonists with tinnitus (ringing in the ears, which interferes to varying degrees with audition), including Baby Driver (Wright, 2017) from the USA and Noise (Saville, 2007) from Australia. 24 ‘That it’s better to be deaf than to hear it!’

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It is important to recognise that relatively few films about deafness and hearing impairment cast hearing-​ impaired actors in their main roles, leading to some inauthentic and even ‘insulting’ representations of deafness (see important criticisms of the representation of the cliché of hearing ‘loss’, such as Rebecca Atkinson’s (2014) Guardian article ‘La Famille Bélier Is Yet Another Cinematic Insult to the Deaf Community’). Exceptions include Marie Heurtin’s Ariana Rivoire and the Quiet Place franchise’s Millicent Simmonds, who have both been deaf since early childhood, and most of The Tribe’s cast. However, the actress who plays Carla in Sur mes lèvres, Emmanuelle Devos, is a hearing woman. It is difficult to judge whether Devos escaped the criticism the cast of La Famille Bélier received because Devos’s character can hear relatively well using hearing aids, or whether the cultural landscape has changed sufficiently between 2001 and 2014 to elicit a different response from the public (or increased media attention from critical hearing-​ impaired viewers). It is probably a combination of the two, and the seamless lip-​reading Devos’s character manages in the film, which is largely considered to be a myth by hearing-​impaired people,25 would probably not be as readily accepted as plausible in the present day. However, further research is required into the impact of the casting of deaf versus hearing actors in cinemas of hearing impairment, particularly as the number of films featuring hearing impaired actors is increasing in contemporary cinemas from various parts of the world. Nonetheless, despite various inauthentic depictions of hearing impairment as it is lived by many, in Sur mes lèvres we find a particularly intimate and complex representation of auditory disability. 25 ‘Studies show that only about 30 to 45 percent of the English language can be understood through lip-​reading alone. Even the most talented lip-​readers are not able to gather a full message based solely on lip-​reading, although they are often quite skilled at interpreting facial cues, body language, and context to figure it out’ (Callis, 2016).

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The film reveals Audiard’s depth of engagement with transgression and marginalisation, and draws the viewer into an embodied experience that extends beyond traditional film consumption to something verging on the cinema evoked in the work of Tim Palmer, Martine Beugnet and Linda Williams. Sur mes lèvres’s immersive representation of hearing impairment demands further examination of the minimal but important literature around cinematic embodiment. In her influential 1991 article ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Linda Williams posits the film genres of horror, melodrama and pornography as the ‘body genres’: those that aim to provoke a bodily response from the viewer. She explains, ‘The body spectacle is featured most sensationally in pornography’s portrayal of orgasm, in horror’s portrayal of violence and terror, and in melodrama’s portrayal of weeping’ (Williams, 1991: 142). These ‘body genres’, when operating effectively, elicit a bodily response: orgasm, screams or tears, which blur the lines between film and reality and between the bodies that participate in each through their provocative rendering of sensation. This provocative rendering could be considered ‘empathic’, as a form of representation in which perception and sensation cross over from the body of the character to the body of the viewer, allowing the latter to share or at least to mimic the experience of the former. With the exception of De rouille et d’os and its melodramatic qualities, and despite the confronting violence in films such as Un prophète and Les Frères Sisters, Audiard’s films do not fit neatly into Williams’s body genres. However, Williams’s theory provides a jumping-​off point to understand the immersive quality of sensation and perception in Sur mes lèvres. Ultimately, Sur mes lèvres’s subjective soundscape offers an embodied form of perception to the viewer, or empathic sound. The bodily dimension of Audiard’s cinema can be illuminated by engaging with a related strand of film criticism on le cinéma du corps. Originally defined with derision by James Quandt as ‘New French Extremity’ (Quandt, 2004),

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this cinema emerged within the French context at the turn of the twenty-​first century. As Tim Palmer describes it, ‘This, arguably the most notorious tendency in recent French filmmaking, is a cinema profoundly centred on the body, dwelling on the visceral processes of corporeal acts, from body crimes to self-​mutilations, often savage behaviours derived from unchecked sexual and carnal desires’ (Palmer, 2011: 11). Films such as Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), Gaspard Noé’s Irréversible (2002) and Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003) upset narrative and cinematographic conventions; subvert genre expectations; and provide shocking portrayals of graphic sex, sexual violence and physical violence, often veering into gore, even at times causing public controversy.26 Just as Audiard’s films do not correspond exactly to Linda Williams’s body genres, they do not fall neatly into the category of cinéma du corps, either. While macho violence permeates Audiard’s oeuvre, even the torture scenes in Un prophète or the massacre scenes in Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters lack the erotic lingering on the violated body that characterises le cinéma du corps. In Audiard’s films sex is often passionless and perfunctory, or desire remains unrealised and even unexpressed. But sexual violence, pornography and rape are notably absent from his oeuvre. And yet, scholarship on body cinema, particularly Martine Beugnet’s Cinema of Sensation (2007), can help us analyse Audiard’s cinema as a profoundly violent and embodied one. Audiard’s engagement with bodily transgression, immersive representation and its relationship with genre lines, while less explicit and shocking than Breillat’s or Noé’s, nonetheless reveals a deft interplay between the filming of characters’ bodies and the physicality of the filmgoing experience. 26 Irréversible is infamous for provoking 200 of the 2,400 viewers at the Cannes première to walk out of the cinema, and for almost being banned in Australia, largely in response to the film’s brutal, single-​ shot, nine-​minute rape scene (Roberts, 2020).

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Jacques Audiard Audiard tire profit du handicap de Carla pour élaborer une trame sonore riche et complexe, alternant à dessein les sons in, off et out afin de mieux dévoiler les désirs secrets de la jeune femme et de permettre au spectateur de s’immiscer subrepticement dans son univers. A plusieurs reprises, le son se fait subjectif, épousant le point de vue de Carla jusqu’à se confondre avec son appareil auditif qu’elle branche et débranche au gré de ses humeurs et de sa curiosité de plus en plus malsaine. (Mirandette, 2003: 57)27

As the analysis of De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté earlier in this chapter conveys, Audiard’s more masculine-​focused films are often centred on generic and bodily slippage. Yet it is not without significance that his two most body-​centric films (and his only pure example of a body genre, the melodrama), Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os, are also his only two films starring women. Excepting Charlie’s amputation at the end of Les Frères Sisters, Carla and Stéphanie are also Audiard’s only protagonists with physical disabilities. Audiard’s embodied cinema and his unbalanced representation of women recall Williams’s remark, ‘So the bodies of women have tended to function, ever since the eighteenth-​ century origins of these genres in the Marquis de Sade, Gothic fiction, and the novels of Richardson, as both the moved and the moving’ (1995: 142). Troublingly, Audiard’s most physically disadvantaged, damaged and traumatised characters are always women, and his camera follows these damaged bodies in an almost indulgent way that we see far less in his films with male leads. The only able-​bodied woman to play a central role in one of his films is Yalini in Dheepan, though her inability 27 ‘Audiard takes advantage of Carla’s disability to develop a rich and complex soundscape, alternating deliberately between non-​diegetic, diegetic and internal sounds in order to reveal the young woman’s secret desires and to allow the viewer to enter surreptitiously into her world. Several times, the sound becomes subjective, moulding to Carla’s point of view until it’s connected to her hearing aid, which she turns on and off according to her whims and her increasingly morbid curiosity.’

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to speak French is often coded as a social impairment that severely limits and marginalises her in French society. And yet, while both Audiard’s primary female leads are victimised by their physical injuries or deficiencies, they are not portrayed as hopeless or powerless. For despite their differences, these films still follow the established Audiard narrative arc: the progressive ascent of the marginalised underdog as they learn to exploit their limited resources and subvert the dominant power dynamic that surrounds them. Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os are not really about how their protagonists suffer their disabilities, and they are certainly not about being cured of them. Instead, these films offer refreshing narratives about discovering new ways to access pleasure and empowerment through the ways in which their bodies differ from the norm. In Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os, both protagonists gradually discover new limits and abilities of their bodies. In the following section, we will explore the linkage between amputation and sexual agency in De rouille et d’os. But here we examine how, in Sur mes lèvres, we see an example of disability as ability: of hearing impairment leading to acquisition of lip-​reading (and, to a lesser extent, French Sign Language) as a tool and a code that open up the world to Carla. As the film’s crime plot unfolds, she discovers an unexpected form of social power in her lip-​reading skills. This not only provides her with access to sensitive information that allows her to control the heist and brings her subsequent economic enrichment, but, more importantly to her, it renders her invaluable to Paul –​whose primary motivation is money –​and thus prolongs her contact with him. This is an example of how, in Audiard’s films, knowledge of otherwise marginalised languages –​and the ability to wield them strategically –​is a path to social empowerment, a power device that opens up access to new resources and possibilities (King, 2017). Quand Carla ferme ses prothèses auditives, elle n’entend plus rien et le spectateur non plus. Depuis l’avènement du parlant, faire entendre le silence est devenu un privilège du cinéma

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qu’Audiard assimile brillamment pour traduire le point de vue de son héroïne. En même temps, la faculté de Carla de lire sur les lèvres en fait la dépositaire d’un savoir qu’elle va apprendre à monnayer. (Rouyer, 2001: 28)28

In Audiard’s films, people often see, hear and move for others, and the lines between bodies are blurred, the sensory experiences of one reaching into the bodies of others. In Un prophète, Malik’s eyes and ears become César’s, the latter even laying this out explicitly when he recruits Malik as a spy, saying in Corsican, ‘You will be my eyes and ears.’ In De rouille et d’os, Stéphanie’s gestures become the orca’s, and Ali’s fighting body becomes a release for her own. In Sur mes lèvres Carla’s eyes and ears blend with our own as we see and hear exactly what she does. In Regarde les hommes tomber, as Johnny sits with his blind neighbour in front of her television set and describes everything he sees on the screen, he becomes her eyes (see Figure 2.1). Just as these films cannot really be described as cinéma du corps, they do not correspond exactly to Linda Williams’s body genres, either. They are violent (sometimes shockingly so), but they are not horror. Their characters are driven by psychosexual desires and engage in illicit, even transgressive sexual acts, but these films are not pornography. And although De rouille et d’os contains melodramatic elements, and several other films, including Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters, feature tragic passages, they also transcend the standard parameters of the melodrama to encompass other generic qualities such as those of the romance, the Bildungsroman and the film noir. Yet their unique melding of character sensation and viewer perception

28 ‘When Carla turns off her hearing aid, she no longer hears anything, and neither does the viewer. Since the advent of the talkies, hearing silence has become a privilege in cinema, which Audiard integrates brilliantly in order to translate his heroine’s point of view. At the same time, Carla’s ability to read lips renders her the custodian of knowledge upon which she will learn to capitalise.’

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is persistent and strikingly emblematic. This empathic portrayal of sensation, this subjective rendering of sensory experience, deepens Audiard’s connection with low-​brow genre and popular affect as understood in Williams’s tradition. But it also lays bare the distinction between different bodies. It allows us to experience the contrast between able-​ bodied experience and physical disability. More broadly, it evokes, reimagines and transgresses the line between the experience of one body, and that of another.

Amputation: De rouille et d’os Close up and in flashes, this film is full of tiny, intimate gestures… The intimacy of the gestures is much like the breath of the child that moves from one moment to the next: It encloses us in the world of the film, so that we too might live in it. (Hastie, 2013: 53)

In a sun-​drenched city on the Côte d’Azur, in front of hundreds of spectators, a marine park platform breaks over an orca pool and one of the trainers is catapulted into the water. When Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) is recovered from the jaws of the orca, both her legs must be amputated above the knee. Following the loss of her limbs, livelihood, relationship and home, she must rebuild her sense of self. In a flashback scene, a brutish, taciturn man, Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), hitchhikes and rides a train with his five-​year-​old son, scavenging for food scraps, as they travel to the same city in which Stéphanie lives, to stay with Ali’s sister until they get back on their feet. Working a series of precarious jobs that rely on his muscles, from club bouncer to underground boxer, Ali struggles to keep himself and his child above the poverty line. One night, a few months before her accident, he helps the intoxicated Stéphanie when she is punched to the ground outside a night club, dropping her home and leaving her his phone number. Months later, he

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receives a surprise call from the traumatised woman, who is desperate for human connection during her recovery. In stops and starts, the two embark on a relationship that shifts confusingly among friendship, sex, co-​ parenting, romance and business partnership. De rouille et d’os traces the relationship between two uprooted and unmoored figures whose professional, sexual and romantic lives are intertwined with their exploration of the physical self, and of what it means to live in, identify with and use their own bodies. While De rouille et d’os is not an adaptation in the traditional sense, the film is inspired by two otherwise unconnected short stories from Canadian author Craig Davidson’s 2005 anthology Rust and Bone. The first story, the titular ‘Rust and Bone’ (Davidson, 2005: 1–​21), provides the roots of the character of Ali, in the figure of a socially isolated boxer whose loving but inexperienced paternalistic care of a five-​year-​old boy (his estranged son Sam in the film, his nephew in the short story) culminates in the boy’s falling through a frozen lake and the destruction of the boxer’s hands as he punches through the ice to save him. The second, ‘Rocket Ride’ (Davidson, 2005: 69–​100), presents an approximate version of what will become Stéphanie in the film. Yet in ‘Rocket Ride’, the ill-​fated orca trainer is not a French woman but a Canadian man, Ben, who loses one rather than two legs in an orca accident at a Niagara Falls water park. The significance of this gender shift becomes apparent when reading Davidson’s collection, in which traditional masculine physicality and virility dominate almost every story.29 The short story and film share the themes of trauma and the rupture of

29 Davidson’s Rust and Bone (2005) protagonists are all traditionally masculine men with dangerously physical jobs, from an illicit dogfighter (‘A mean utility’, pp. 43–​68) to a sex-​addicted porn actor (‘Friction’, pp. 127–​55), the boxer of ‘Rust and Bone’ and the orca trainer of ‘Rocket Ride’. By comparison with these germane source characters, the sensitive and stereotypically feminine dimensions of Stéphanie’s character are radically different.

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(especially sexual) identity following amputation, yet the film is earnest and melodramatic where the short story is bitter and ironic. The melding of two literary texts into one filmic one, retaining a faithfulness to character arc and atmosphere while transplanting the story to entirely new environs, is emblematic of Audiard’s adaptation process. The shift from Canadian man in ‘Rocket Ride’ to French woman in De rouille et d’os recalls the shift from 1970s New Yorker to 2000s Parisian in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, for example, while the inspiration from multiple texts also occurs in Dheepan, ranging from Sam Peckinpah’s (1971) film Straw Dogs to Montesquieu’s (1721) novel Lettres persanes. Yet despite the many differences separating the anthology Rust and Bone from the film De rouille et d’os, the two texts share a fundamental link in their first and final moments, as the film’s closing lines are a loose translation of the book’s opening ones. In these passages, the boxers (Eddie in the short story, Ali in the film) describe the frailty of the bones in the human hand, each man having broken his at numerous points during his boxing career and especially when punching through the ice to save his child. In the film, these words are spoken in voiceover by Ali, accompanying visuals of him celebrating a boxing win with fans, Stéphanie and Sam, and layered with the bittersweet Bon Iver song ‘Wash’ (2011). The hand serves here as a powerful motif for understanding the phantom wounds of trauma, how violence maps on the body and the thin line that separates human from animal.30 The short story opens: Twenty-​seven bones make up the human hand. Lunate and capitate and navicular, scaphoid and triquetrum, the tiny horn-​shaped pisiforms of the outer wrist. Though differing in shape and density each is smoothly aligned and flush-​fitted, lashed by a meshwork of ligatures running under the skin. All 30 Refer to pp. 139–41 in Chapter 3 for an analysis of Audiard’s use of animals as a powerful motif in each of his films since Un prophète (and especially in Les Frères Sisters).

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vertebrates share a similar set of bones, and all bones grow out of the same tissue: a bird’s wing, a whale’s dorsal fin, a gecko’s pad, your own hand. Some primates got more –​gorilla’s got thirty-​two, five in each thumb. Humans, twenty-​seven. Bust an arm or a leg and the knitting bone’s sealed in a wrap of calcium so it’s stronger than before. Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right. Fracture a tarsus and the hairline’s there to stay –​looks like a crack in granite under the x-​ray. Crush a metacarpal and that’s that: bone splinters not driven into soft tissue are eaten by enzymes; powder sifts to the bloodstream. Look at a prizefighter’s hands: knucks busted flat against the heavy bag or some pug’s face and skin split on crossing diagonals, a ridge of scarred X’s. (Davidson, 2005: 1–​2)

And the film closes: Il y a vingt-​sept os dans la main de l’homme. Certains singes en ont plus. Le gorille en a trente-​deux, cinq dans chaque pouce. Pour l’homme, c’est vingt-​sept. Tu te casses un bras, tu te casses une jambe, au bout d’un moment l’os sera enveloppé de calcium et sera soudé. A l’arrivée, il sera même plus solide qu’avant. Mais si tu te casses un os de la main tu peux être sûr que ça se remettra jamais complètement. Avant chaque combat t’y penseras, à chaque coup que tu donneras t’y penseras. Tu feras attention. Mais à un moment, la douleur reviendra. Comme des aiguilles. Comme du verre cassé. (Ali in De rouille et d’os, 01:54:19–​01:55:06)31

De rouille et d’os is Audiard’s most commercially successful film, eclipsing his other films’ box office takings with 31 ‘There are twenty-​seven bones in the human hand. Some primates have more. The gorilla has thirty-​ two, five in each thumb. For humans, it’s twenty-​seven. If you break an arm or a leg, after a while the bone is wrapped in calcium and knitted together. Overall, it’ll be even stronger than before. But if you break a bone in your hand you can be sure it’ll never heal completely. Before every fight you’ll think about it, with every punch you throw you’ll think about it. You’ll be careful. But one day, the pain will come back. Like needles. Like broken glass.’

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1.84 million domestic sales (compared with Un prophète’s 1.3 million, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté’s 931,000 and an average of 492,000 each for the remaining five; see Appendix 3, pp. 166–71). It also translated well to the international market, earning USD 2.1 million, second only to Les Frères Sisters’ USD 3.1 million, an unsurprising success given the latter’s English-​language dialogue and Hollywood cast. Part of the film’s popularity may be due to its star dimension. Although Audiard has always worked with major rising and established actors in the French scene, Cotillard brings a transnational profile that is more aligned with that of a Hollywood star than those of mainstay Audiard leads such as Mathieu Kassovitz or the previously unknown Tahar Rahim. Cotillard’s performance greatly contributed to De rouille et d’os’s success on the awards circuit, as well. Cotillard was nominated for Best Actress at the Césars and won the Best Actress award at the Globes de Cristal for the role, along with prestigious international nominations for Best Actress at the Golden Globes (in the Drama Film category), BAFTAs and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards (the only nomination at SAG for an Audiard film).32 The film also fared well among French critics, who described it as mastering ‘une sombre beauté’ (Nuttens, 2012: 8),33 and as being ‘du mélo revisité, assumé, sublimé’ (Libiot, 2012)34 and ‘l’œuvre la plus attachante et la plus troublante de Jacques 32 On the heels of Cotillard’s foray into Hollywood film with Inception (Nolan, 2010) and Midnight in Paris (Allen, 2011), Guillaume Loison (2014) wrote in Le nouvel observateur (23 October 2014) of the American reception of her performance in De rouille et d’os, ‘Sa nomination aux Golden Globes pour “De Rouille et d’os” le confirme: malgré ses bons états de services hollywoodien, l’Amérique semble la préférer en bonne Française’ (‘Her Golden Globes nomination for Rust and Bone confirms that despite her good Hollywood record, America seems to prefer her in French mode’). 33 ‘a dark beauty’. 34 ‘melodrama revisited, reclaimed, exalted’.

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Audiard’ (Chèze, 2012).35 It earned four Césars (plus five other nominations) and was nominated for the Prix Louis Delluc, Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes and BAFTAs and nine awards at Cannes, losing the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke’s (2012) Amour. In fact, as we will explore in Chapter 3, Audiard’s Palme d’Or win for Dheepan in 2015 is often referenced by reviewers as a form of compensation for three previous unsuccessful nominations: Un héros très discret in 1996, Un prophète in 2009 and De rouille et d’os in 2012, the latter two often being described in reviews as particularly deserving of the award. If De rouille et d’os is Audiard’s most popular and accessible film, it is also his most conventional, taking few risks with genre or audience expectations and providing a relatively traditional happy ending in which family tragedy is averted and the romantic couple is reunited. The film includes far less irony than, for example, the cynical Un héros très discret or the darkly comic Les Frères Sisters. In fact, De rouille et d’os has been widely critiqued for its more melodramatic sequences, namely the unlikely rescue scene through the ice, from which the fragile Sam emerges unscathed after several long minutes submerged in the freezing water. Philip Kemp wrote teasingly in Sight and Sound, ‘It sounds like the plot of a silent melodrama probably starring Lon Chaney, and there are certainly moments in Jacques Audiard’s latest film where melodramatic contrivance is anything but skirted’ (Kemp, 2012: 103). René Prédal, in Jeune cinéma, while praising other parts of the film, is also critical of this climax: ‘Certes, l’ultime rebondissement –​le gosse tombant dans un trou de glace –​est de trop’36 (Prédal, 2012: 12). However, in Film Quarterly Colin MacCabe

35 ‘the most endearing and unsettling work from Jacques Audiard’. 36 ‘To be sure, the final twist –​the kid falling through a hole in the ice –​ is too much.’

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critiqued the scene while admitting that the film’s emotional maturity allows it to pull the melodrama off: ‘The film climaxes with a rescue scene right out of Hollywood’s cliché book but, once again, Audiard manages to invigorate the cliché with the most frightening life’ (MacCabe, 2012: 9). Indeed, while De rouille et d’os may follow a more traditional narrative arc than the rest of Audiard’s films, it is far from lacking in inventiveness or powerful effect. For picking up several of the strands left behind by Sur mes lèvres, De rouille et d’os offers a complex study of the entanglement of trauma, gender, disability, sexuality and the body. De rouille et d’os inscribes traumatic loss on the female body, yet this move, which itself opens up to a doubly charged eroticisation of the disabled and of Cotillard’s star body, is not presented as the sole, or even central, site of bodily suffering in the film. Whilst the radical and hypervisible loss of Stéphanie’s legs provides a hypnotic visual focus for spectators, the narrative drive foregrounds her regaining of agency and mobility over loss as also located in the corporeal. De rouille et d’os offers counterpoints which prevent an uneasy fixation on the female disabled body as site of both loss and fetishised object of the spectatorial gaze. (Dobson, 2016: 221)

This section traces the ways De rouille et d’os explores emotional and physical trauma through bodily movement and sensory perception, in ways that veer towards exploitation but ultimately foreground empowerment. Physical transgression is at the heart of the film and its protagonists’ evolution: the blurring of lines between different bodies, the connection between the gaze of one and the form of another, and the fine (and sometimes overlapping) line between suffering and emancipation. This blurring of lines is evoked in the cinematographic focus on bodily touch throughout the film. Shots linger on characters caressing skin, clashing limbs, scraping flesh. In Figure 1.5, Stéphanie’s removal of her prosthetic stockings, the nylon rolling down her skin beneath a feathery touch,

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Figure 1.5  Stéphanie removes her stockings, De rouille et d’os, 01:07:55

becomes like a meditative embrace. Key to this haptic cinema is not only the hand but the eye. Prior to her accident, Stéphanie gains satisfaction from feeling strangers’ eyes on her body; after it, she gains strength from watching Ali box. Separated from one another by a thick pane of glass across which sound and touch are impossible, Stéphanie and the orca connect in a mirrored choreography made possible by the whale’s practised eye. Ali’s sleepy gaze on Stéphanie’s breasts as she dries off from a swim, her flesh blurry in the foreground and the focus sharpened on his stare, is even more intimate than when he first touches her in an explicitly sexual context. Indeed, Ali communes most often through touch, though despite his promiscuity he is better versed in violence than intimacy: he disciplines Sam by slapping him, he saves him by destroying his own hands, and boxing is a means not merely of earning money but of expressing himself and his frustrations through brutal, physical touch. As its title suggests, De rouille et d’os is all skin, blood, rust, flesh, ice, mud, faeces, sweat, bones: the clashing of bodies, both human and animal, with violent natural forces. It is a cinema of intimacy not simply in the fact that characters constantly touch one another, but in the camera’s closeness, intensity and refusal to look away from the details of physical contact, be it in the brutality of the whale’s jaws on

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Stéphanie’s flesh or the tenderness of Ali’s grasp as he carries her to the toilet. After his fights, Ali’s body is smeared with dirt and blood, the traces of punches and scratches mapped on his flesh. And all we see of the orca attack is disoriented close-​ups of body parts, too near to make sense of: snippets of tail, glimpses of dorsal fin, flashes of jaws yawning towards the camera as though to reach us through the screen. In some senses, this intimate cinema of the body is abject: the blood of the fights; the smell of Stéphanie’s unopened room (‘c’est moi qui pue, je crois’37); the filth of the chicken coop smeared over Sam, who only seems happy when playing with animals. This creates a visceral, corporeal, carnal cinema of, in and about the body, ‘une tonalité exclusivement physique baignant dans la chair, le sexe, la sueur et le sang’ (Prédal, 2012: 12).38 In these ways, links could again be traced between De rouille et d’os and le cinéma du corps, ‘whose basic agenda is an onscreen interrogation of physicality in brutally intimate terms’ (Palmer, 2011: 57). The film even includes a narrative focus and cinematographic fetishisation of the injured leg that link it to a cornerstone of le cinéma du corps, Marina de Van’s (2002) self-​harm study Dans ma peau: ‘In My Skin has its origins in an accident that de Van had as an eight-​year-​old, when a car ran over her right leg. The limb was left horrifically wounded, the rough edge of a snapped bone protruding through its flesh and skin’ (Palmer, 2011: 81). Yet despite the striking parallels between Dans ma peau and De rouille et d’os in their focus on traumatic leg injuries and the female protagonists’ fraught process of learning to live with their new bodies, De rouille et d’os differs markedly from the horror-​adjacent, disturbing affect of le cinéma du corps. For this is a delicate, graceful cinema, of subtle movements that eventually lead to purification and renewal. It is not insignificant that it is in the water that Stéphanie rediscovers her body, 37 ‘I think I’m what smells.’ 38 ‘an exclusively physical tone steeped in flesh, sex, sweat and blood’.

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the pleasure and freedom she has always gained from moving through water, and finding a new way of moving and being in her changed physical form. Les images épurées de Stéphane Fontaine [sont] un ballet saisissant des éléments (l’eau des bassins et de la mer que l’hiver transforme en glace; la terre et le sang des combats) et des corps (les pieds, les jambes, les poings et les nuques, tels que vus par l’œil neuf de Stéphanie ou une caméra dans le vif de l’action). (Gendron, 2013: 3)39

However, it is important not to describe Stéphanie’s body as the only central body in De rouille et d’os, for the film also displays an almost indulgent interest in Ali’s physicality. It could even be said that the camera sexualises Ali’s body –​all glistening torso and muscled arms –​more than it does Stéphanie’s. We are also led to read Ali’s emotional life less through his face and words, and more through his body: unable to healthily express himself, it is through his actions (from boxing to sex) that he reveals his true frustrations and desires. Julia Dobson notices how much the camera seems drawn to his body for this reason: ‘Ali’s emotional inarticulacy is complemented by a visual focus on his explosive physicality’ (Dobson, 2016: 218). De rouille et d’os focuses equally on Stéphanie and Ali’s bodies in movement. However, while new forms of movement are at the heart of Stéphanie’s renewal (learning how to swim, dance and walk as a double amputee), it is not only her own body’s actions that drive her healing. For Stéphanie, desire and release are realised not only through acting, but through looking. As Ali’s boxing becomes a more important part of the plot, he begins bringing Stéphanie to his matches. Stéphanie is clearly

39 ‘Stéphane Fontaine’s refined images [are] a gripping ballet of elements (the water of the pools and the sea turned to ice by the winter; the earth and the blood of the fights) and of bodies (feet, legs, fists and necks, as seen through Stéphanie’s eyes or a camera in the heart of the action).’

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exhilarated by Ali’s physical performance, her alarmed but unbroken gaze filmed in profile for long moments. But at first Ali keeps her in the car, her gaze filtered by the window, her body kept physically separate from the fighting and the rowdy, exclusively male crowd. Then in one pivotal scene, when Ali is pinned to the ground, the camera conveying his frustrated perspective as he nears defeat, we see Stéphanie’s prosthetic legs emerge from the car. She strides over to the rink and, wordlessly, her face solemn and unmoving, she stares fixedly at Ali (Figure 1.6). Fuelled by her unbroken gaze, Ali steels himself and finds the reserves to fight back against his opponent, winning the match against the odds in an explosive display of force. This voyeurism is not only an erotic act or a pleasurable substitution of movement for Stéphanie, but a source of mutual strength for the two. The pleasure of watching is new to Stéphanie, who once gained satisfaction only from being watched. We have already seen this at multiple points early in the film, before her accident. When they first meet, Ali accuses Stéphanie of cheating on her boyfriend, arguing that she wouldn’t have dressed like a ‘pute’40 at the night club unless she wanted to take a man home. What Ali doesn’t understand (and what Stéphanie doesn’t explain

Figure 1.6  Stéphanie watches Ali box, De rouille et d’os, 01:21:16 40 ‘whore’.

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until much later) is that she dresses provocatively not because she wants to find a sexual partner, but because being watched without the promise of physical touch is what most excites her. In her home, Ali notices that all Stéphanie’s photos on the fridge are of her, in action in the water. In the following scenes, which culminate in the accident, Stéphanie is constantly on display. Not only does the film camera follow her closely throughout her orca routine, but so does the Marine World camera, projecting her image onto a screen for hundreds of spectators, a projection Stéphanie clearly enjoys. The linking of desire and being the object of the gaze, a link she considers forever ruptured by her accident, comes to the fore in a conversation Stéphanie has with Ali, about her sex life before the accident: ‘J’aimais bien qu’on me regarde. J’aimais bien sentir que je séduisais. J’aimais bien sentir que je les excitais. Mais après, ça m’ennuyait, en fait’ (01:05:40–​59).41 With the amputation of her legs, Stéphanie ceases to be the object of the desiring gaze of strangers, a loss she cannot overcome (at least initially). Yet in a subversion of traditional narratives that link disability with desexualisation, Stéphanie’s amputation and subsequent involvement with Ali trigger a process of sexual discovery, shifting her from the passive object of the gaze to the agent of it, for whom desire is enacted through looking rather than being looked at. This process differs markedly from the other example of amputation in Audiard’s work, Charlie’s loss of his right hand in Les Frères Sisters. On the surface, Stéphanie and Charlie’s amputations share important similarities: each loses their limbs in a traumatic occupational accident, which not only renders them unable to continue their work but threatens their sense of self, particularly their sexual or gender identity. Yet despite a similar period of depression following the amputation, Charlie

41 ‘I liked being watched. I liked feeling that I was seductive. I liked feeling that I turned them on. But afterwards, I got bored.’

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and Stéphanie’s experiences of their new bodies are divergent. Charlie not only loses his livelihood, but his confidence, personality and position as alpha male in the brothers’ dynamic, prompting the once-​dominated Eli to step into Charlie’s shoes. The film suggests there may be a path to redemption for the murderous Charlie through this fundamental change, and the story ends too early for us to see whether he will recover a sense of self. Yet amputation is nonetheless a source of emasculation and a profound loss of power for Charlie, who asks his brother in an aggrieved monotone, before Eli must kill another man to save them, ‘I lost the hand I work with, you’ll be on your own on this. Are you ashamed of me?’ (01:45:56–​01:46:12). By contrast, amputation becomes a gateway to sexual agency and emotional intimacy for Stéphanie, who eventually seizes the opportunity to reclaim control of her changed body.42 Unlike Charlie’s stump, which hangs unused by his side, Stéphanie experiments with new forms of movement to test the capacities of her residual limbs: swimming, dancing, household chores, sex and eventually walking with prostheses (an option that would of course be unavailable in any sophisticated form to the nineteenth-​century Charlie). In a subversion of Mulvey’s (1975) archetypal castrated woman of patriarchal screen culture, Stéphanie’s stumps, without the reference points of knees and feet, assume an ambiguous appearance, almost phallic in their unrecognisability. Stéphanie does not attempt to hide this. Instead, when she begins to accept her new body, she has her thighs tattooed ‘GAUCHE’ and ‘DROITE’ (‘LEFT’ and ‘RIGHT’), a macabre yet playful act that, rather than conveying bitterness or defeat, allows Stéphanie to reclaim her limbs as both functional and distinct. It would be reasonable to read Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os as problematic for their combination of sex, disability and female leads, particularly by comparison with

42 See Michel (2012).

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the rest of Audiard’s able-​bodied and less sexualised male protagonists. Yet these films also connect disability with both physical ability and sexual agency. Of course, Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os are guilty of perpetuating how, to quote Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ‘Femininity and disability are inextricably entangled in patriarchal culture’ (1997: 27). However, they are also progressive in their representation of the sexually empowered disabled body. This is a far cry from the historical trope of what Aristotelis Nikolaidis calls ‘the discriminatory perception of people with disabilities as asexual, sexually inadequate or impotent’ (2013: 760), also criticised by scholars such as Garland Thomson and Tobi Evans (2021). Indeed, Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os’s female characters are far more active and self-​possessed than, for example, the reductively objectified Aline or the passively voiceless Miao Lin in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté. Instead, these heroines find emotional fulfilment, sexual actualisation and self-​determination not just despite their disabilities, but because of them. This radically counters much preceding cinema depicting disability, in which the disabled figure is so often either sexually unfulfilled or desexualised completely: This ‘absence’ of sexuality is part of the disabled people’s displacement as subjects and their concomitant fetishisation as objects in the context of the medical tragedy model. Rust and Bone constitutes a departure from this stereotype in the field of representation, which is nonetheless conditioned by its depiction of gendered and disabled identities. (Nikolaidis, 2013: 760)

All Audiard characters live in a patriarchal society, but Carla and Stéphanie are distanced from the toxic masculinity that guides, for example, Tom in De battre, Marx in Regarde, and Charlie in Les Frères Sisters. In Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os, Audiard ‘challenges prejudices and deconstructs norms

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about the perception of disabilities’ (Kitchen, 2016: 232), problematising the sexualisation of the female body in ways that oscillate between objectification and empowerment. On the one hand, these female protagonists occupy a uniquely victimised position in Audiard’s oeuvre because of their physical handicaps and subsequent social marginalisation. But on the other, they occupy a privileged position outside the binary rigidity of heteronormative gender roles, in which they can be both disabled and sexual, active and passive, displaying both stereotypically feminine-​and masculine-​coded characteristics. Border-​crossing is enacted in the occupation of hybrid spaces by these women, whose mobilisation of their own bodies allows them to dismantle social, physical and emotional walls. Here, the body and embodied experience is ever at the forefront of aesthetics and narrative, the site of oppression and liberation, loss and discovery, vulnerability and power.

References Allen, W. (2011), Midnight in Paris, Barcelona, Mediapro. Améris, J. P. (2014), Marie Heurtin, Paris, Escazal Films. Anderson, W. (2014), The Grand Budapest Hotel, Los Angeles, Fox Searchlight Pictures. Atkinson, R. (2014), ‘La Famille Bélier Is Yet Another Cinematic Insult to the Deaf Community’, Guardian, 20 December, available at www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2014/​dec/​19/​la-​ familie-​belier-​insult-​deaf-​community (accessed 2 April 2019). Beugnet, M. (2007), Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Bordun, T. (2017), Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema: Film Theory at the Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Breillat, C. (1999), Romance, Paris, Flach Film. Burdeau, E. (2005), ‘De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté’, Cahiers du cinéma, 599 (March), 42–​3.

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Callis, L. (2016), ‘Lip Reading Is No Simple Task’, Huffington Post, 23 March, available at www.huffpost.com/​entry/​lip-​reading-​is-​ no-​simple-​task_​b_​9526300 (accessed 2 April 2019). Canby, V. (1978), ‘Fingers is Strictly from Desperation’, The New York Times, 19 March, Section D, 19, available at www. nytimes.com/​1978/​03/​19/​archives/​film-​view-​fingers-​is-​strictly-​ from-​desperation-​film-​view-​fingers.html (accessed 27 April 2020). Chèze, T. (2012), ‘De rouille et d’os, l’émotion à l’état pur’, L’Express, 15 May, available at www.lexpress.fr/​culture/​cinema/​ de-​rouille-​et-​d-​os_​1114422.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Davidson, C. (2005), Rust and Bone, London, Pan Macmillan. De Van, M. (2002), Dans ma peau (In My Skin), Paris, Lazennec. Del Toro, G. (2017), The Shape of Water, Los Angeles, Double Dare You. Denis, C. (2001), Trouble Every Day, Paris, Arte France Cinéma. Dobson, J. (2016), ‘Special Affects: Reconfiguring Melodrama in De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone), Audiard, 2012’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 215–​28. Dumont, B. (2003), Twentynine Palms, Paris, 3B Productions. Evans, T. (2021), Violent Fantasies: Masculinity, Abjection, and Violence in the Martinverse, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press. Falcon, R. (2002). ‘Hear No Evil. Film of the Month: Read My Lips’, Sight and Sound, 12:6, 34–​5. Ferrari, J.-​C. (2005), ‘De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté: Accepteras-​tu un homme aussi haletant contre toi?’ Positif, 529 (March), 19–​20. Garland Thomson, R. (1997), Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York, Columbia University Press. Gendron, N. (2013), ‘Avec l’énergie du désespoir/​De rouille et d’os de Jacques Audiard, France–​ Belgique, 2012, 120 min.’, Ciné-​ Bulles, 31:1, 2–​7. Godard, J. L. (1967), Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know about Her), Paris, Argos Films. Haneke, M. (2001), Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages (Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys), Paris, Arte France Cinéma. Haneke, M. (2012), Amour, Paris, Les Films du Losange. Hastie, A. (2013), ‘Rust and Bone’, Film Quarterly, 66:3, 53–​7. Honoré, C. (2004), Ma mère, Paris, Gemini Films.

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Hwang, D. (2011), Silenced (Do-​ga-​ni), Seoul, Sangeori Pictures. Kemp, P. (2012), ‘Rust and Bone’, Sight and Sound, 22:11, 103–​4. King, G. (2017), Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Kitchen, R. (2016), ‘The Disabled Body and Disability in the Cinema of Jacques Audiard’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 229–​47. Krasinski, J. (2018), A Quiet Place, Los Angeles, Paramount Pictures. Krasinski, J. (2020), A Quiet Place Part II, Los Angeles, Paramount Pictures. Kubrick, S. (1971), A Clockwork Orange, Los Angeles, Warner Bros. Lartigau, E. (2014), La Famille Bélier (The Bélier Family), Paris, Jerico. Libiot, E. (2012), ‘De rouille et d’os, viscéral et pulsionnel’, L’Express, 17 May, available at www.lexpress.fr/​culture/​cinema/​ festival-​de-​cannes-​de-​rouille-​et-​d-​os-​de-​jacques-​audiard-​critique_​ 1114708.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Lindop, S. (2015), Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-​Noir Cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Loison, G. (2014), ‘Marion Cotillard, prophète en son pays’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 December, available at www.nouvelobs. com/​cinema/​20121213.CIN5954/​marion-​cotillard-​prophete-​en-​ son-​pays.html (accessed 1 April 2019). MacCabe, C. (2012), ‘A Sentimental Education’, Film Quarterly, 66:1, 9–​11. Malausa, V. (2001), ‘Sur mes lèvres’, Cahiers du cinéma, 561 (October), 91. Michel, U. (2012), ‘Après De rouille et d’os, l’amputation comme moteur de cinéma’, Slate France, 19 May, available at www.slate. fr/​story/​56309/​rouille-​os-​amputation-​moteur-​cinema (accessed 2 April 2019). Mirandette, M. C. (2003), ‘Sur mes lèvres de Jacques Audiard’, Ciné-​Bulles, 21:1, 56–​7. Montesquieu (1721), Lettres persanes, Cologne, Pierre Marteau. Morrey, D. (2016), ‘The Rough and the Smooth: Narrative, Character and Performance in Fingers (1978) and De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté/​The Beat that My Heart Skipped (2005)’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 190–​204.

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Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16:3, 6–​18. Nikolaidis, A. (2013), ‘(En)Gendering Disability in Film’, Feminist Media Studies, 13:4, 759–​64. Noé, G. (2002), Irréversible (Irreversible), Paris, 120 Films. Nolan, C. (2010), Inception, Los Angeles, Warner Bros. Nuttens, J.-​D. (2012), ‘De rouille et d’os’, Positif, 616 (June), 7–​8. Palmer, T. (2011), Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press. Peckinpah, S. (1971), Straw Dogs, Los Angeles, ABC Pictures. Prédal, R. (2012), ‘Cannes à Paris: De rouille et d’os’, Jeune cinéma, July, 12–​13. Quandt, J. (2004), ‘Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’, Artforum, February, available at www.artforum. com/​print/​200402/​flesh-​blood-​sex-​and-​violence-​in-​recent-​french-​ cinema-​6199 (accessed 2 April 2019). Ribeton, T. (2018), ‘Les Frères Sisters: Où sont les femmes?’, Les Inrockuptibles, 14 September, available at www.lesinrocks.com/​ cinema/​films-​a-​l-​affiche/​les-​freres-​sisters/​30/​09/​19 (accessed 30 September 2019). Roberts, A. (2020), ‘Why is “Irreversible” still shocking 15 years later?’, Film Daily, 27 January, available at www.filmdaily.co/​ obsessions/​irreversible-​shocking-​15-​years-​later/​ (accessed 27 January 2020). Rouyer, P. (2001), ‘Sur mes lèvres: A l’écoute’, Positif, 488 (October), 27–​8. Rouyer, P., and C. Vassé (2005), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: Et si tuer quelqu’un au cinéma, c’était difficile?’, Positif, 529 (March), 21–​5. Saville, M. (2007), Noise, Melbourne, Retro Active Films. Sciamma, C. (2019), Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Paris, Lilies Films. Sellier, G. (2016), ‘De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (Audiard, 2005): La masculinité comme souffrance’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 205–​14. Slaboshpytskyi, M. (2014), The Tribe (Plemya), Kiev, Ukrainian State Film Agency. Tarantino, Q. (1992), Reservoir Dogs, Los Angeles, Live Entertainment.

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Toback, J. (1978), Fingers, Los Angeles, Brut Productions. Varda, A. (1962), Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7), Paris, Ciné Tamaris. Varda, A. and J. R. (2017), Visages Villages (Faces Places), Paris, Ciné Tamaris. Walton, S. (2016), Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. Williams, L. (1991), ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, in Film Genre Reader II, ed B. K. Grant, Austin, University of Texas Press, pp. 140–​57. Wright, E. (2017), Baby Driver, Los Angeles, TriStar Pictures. Yamada, N. (2016), A Silent Voice: The Movie (Koe no katachi), Fukushima, ABC Animation.

2

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Society: cultural barriers Regarde les hommes tomber, Un prophète and Un héros très discret

Audiard’s films are populated by lovers and outsiders; the structure and content of the narratives are centred on shifting and ambiguous dynamics of solitude and solidarity; the inescapable burden of the allotment of the social role and identity here offset by the ultimate empowerment of central characters to reinvent themselves and escape such constraints. (Dobson, 2011: 38)

Whether set in a prison or an office, in the 2010s or the 1940s, in Paris or Oregon City, each of Audiard’s films explores the dark underbelly of society, and the fractious relationship between violent control and social order. As we will see in Chapter 3, his most recent works have been increasingly interested in social contexts beyond French borders. Yet Audiard’s first six feature films –​as well as his short films, music videos and other scripts –​are particularly concerned with the violent, masculine and discriminatory dimensions of contemporary French society. In his first three films, this society is a resolutely white one: though they are socially marginalised in one way or another, the protagonists of Regarde les hommes tomber (1994), Un héros très discret (1996) and Sur mes lèvres (2001) are all Gallic, native French speakers who were born and live in metropolitan France, mainly Paris. These films establish many of the characteristic motifs and themes that define Audiard’s oeuvre: an oppressed yet enterprising underdog protagonist;

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toxic masculinities and hostile social environments; language used as a tool for exerting power and control; and restrictive socioeconomic and class barriers that characters struggle, but usually manage, to surmount. However, from De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (2005) onwards, and especially in Un prophète (2009), Jacques Audiard’s France becomes multilingual, transcultural, and fundamentally shaped by the impacts of globalisation and the legacies of colonialism. This chapter explores the vision of metropolitan French society that emerges from Audiard’s corpus, with a specific focus on three films in which social structures are a guiding theme: 1994’s Regarde les hommes tomber, 2009’s Un prophète and 1996’s Un héros très discret. At first glance, this may seem an unusual combination of case studies. These are not chronological releases, they are not all set in the same time period or socioeconomic environment and they are far from Audiard’s only films set in France. There are also important differences between the profiles of his first two films, which received comparatively modest distribution and critical attention, and his prison opus, which catapulted Audiard to major domestic and international renown. This chapter places his most modest works alongside his most awarded film, his most ‘Gallic’ pictures of French society alongside his most culturally diverse and multilingual portrait of France. However, we cannot chart a complete map of Audiard’s France without reading these films together. Regarde les hommes tomber introduces many of the themes, narrative conventions and cinematographic motifs that will come to define Audiard’s work. Arriving halfway through Audiard’s oeuvre as a whole, Un prophète expands these to encompass a more diverse picture of society, one that dominates his later work. By contrast, Un héros très discret draws out a central thread that ties all Audiard’s films together: how national cultures are constructed, reinforced and perpetuated by stories we tell ourselves about the society in which we live. Throughout, I use the terms ‘society’/​ ‘soci(et)al’/​ ‘socioeconomic’ and

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‘culture’/​‘cultural’ to analyse the representation of modern France we find in these films. Of course, there are important differences between society and culture, especially in Un prophète, in which the social fabric comprises distinct ethnic groups whose religions, languages and national origins contribute to constructing a sense of cultural identity. However, the two are inextricably linked and must be read together. Audiard’s characters exist within a web of socioeconomic constraints, cultural forces and power relations that operate in conjunction to create their social environment. Thus, this chapter will examine society and culture in connection to social power in order to understand the particular slice of French society in which each of these three films plays out. In her analysis of the characteristic motifs that Audiard’s oeuvre comprises, Isabelle Vanderschelden writes of an ‘artistic signature’ that can be traced throughout his films: Audiard’s screenplays tend to combine motifs of violence and masculinity that are familiar within American genre cinema, but that are not necessarily as credible in a French context. In Audiard’s plots, these genre influences are blended with more realist representations of the world, including identity issues, power relations and coming-​of-​age/​life-​experience processes. (Vanderschelden 2016: 252)

Most characteristically, Vanderschelden explains how ‘Audiard tends to structure his plots around a protagonist who goes through a learning process’ (255). In almost every film, we see an initially oppressed protagonist rise through the ranks by undertaking some formative learning process, from Carla in Sur mes lèvres to Albert in Un héros très discret to, most strikingly, Malik in Un prophète. But many other motifs recur throughout this corpus, as well. First, we are often confronted with immoral or amoral protagonists (Johnny, Malik, Dheepan, Albert, Eli) whose violent actions, while often committed under duress or against corrupt others, undermine their claim to heroism and cast them as flawed antiheroes, or

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even villains. Second, Audiard’s male protagonists (Johnny, Tom, Malik, Charlie) are often drawn into pseudo-​familial relationships with substitutive father figures, who also act as thinly veiled erotic targets and/​or oppressive, violent threats. Third, protagonists often overcome their disadvantage, be it physical disability (Carla), imprisonment (Malik), cultural disenfranchisement (Dheepan) or social exclusion (Albert), through a mastery of language and an acquisition of new codes that they use to negotiate themselves a superior social position. Fourth, these films combine traits of low-​brow, traditionally masculine genres, often stereotypically associated with US cinema (the prison film, the Western) with typical elements of French auteur film, subverting stereotypes of ‘art’ cinema and destabilising audience expectations. And of course, each text is defined by a multiplicity of dividing lines that characters strive to cross: by language barriers they teach themselves to surmount, by physical barriers (national borders, prison walls) they find ways to breach, by cultural and legal rules they dare to transgress. Finally, almost all these films are adaptations of wildly different source texts, from a range of countries, eras, media and languages: Regarde establishes a pattern that continues in Audiard’s films to date in that, despite his background and experience in screenwriting, he has chosen to adapt existing texts and, in the case of his latest film (De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté), other films. Such decisions and working practice can be seen to mirror the central tensions between filiation and (re)invention that permeate his work. (Dobson, 2011: 40)

There are many other threads to be drawn from Audiard’s oeuvre, such as the pairing of female protagonists with sexualisation and disability, or the cinematographic foregrounding of sensory perception, as explored in Chapter 1. However, this chapter focuses on the above characteristics and their manifestations in the three films most closely linked to the theme of modern, metropolitan France.

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Perhaps more so than any other director working today, Jacques Audiard’s cinema speaks to the various ways in which the socially oppressed can experience twenty-​ first-​ century French society as rigid and hostile. As François Massonnat states, ‘Audiard’s films show characters who always stand on the margins, who are misfits in a brutal society for one reason or another’ (2018: 111). Indeed, in interviews Audiard himself has attested to his aim of representing often-​ neglected identities, from the working class to migrants, former convicts and disabled people.1 The bleakness of these films’ visions of multicultural France, the dubious moral compasses of their protagonists and the violent masculinity that dominates their narratives have not escaped criticism, and this chapter also interrogates the stereotypes that these films sometimes perpetuate about poverty, cultural difference, social discrimination and crime. Nonetheless, these films are radical in their representation of marginalised characters who are not without hope, but who mobilise language, culture and identity to shift the power dynamics of an otherwise rigidly hierarchical society. Audiard’s early films have received little attention when compared with his more widely distributed, higher-​budget later works. Yet to understand Audiard’s vision of French society, to trace the development of his signature motifs, generic hybridity and idiosyncratic style, we need to return to the beginning of his directorial career, to the 1994 film Regarde les hommes tomber.

Sociosexual subversions: Regarde les hommes tomber By the side of a highway outside Paris, in the oppressive grey of dusk, a childlike young man appears, as if from nowhere, next to a middle-​aged hitchhiker and refuses to leave. 1 See, for example, interviews with Audiard in Alion (2015), Baumann and Rouyer (2009), Debruge (2010), Jauffret (2015), Romney (2016), and Rouyer and Tobin (2015).

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From this moment on the young man, Johnny (aka Freddy (Mathieu Kassovitz)), becomes obsessed with the older one, Marx (Jean-​Louis Trintignant), who reluctantly falls into a pseudo-​paternal role as the two men hitchhike, swindle and trespass their way across urban France. Despite Marx’s gruff resentment of him, Johnny –​who appears to have a behavioural and possibly developmental disorder, with a stunted understanding of social norms and the concepts of right and wrong –​worships his adoptive partner to the point of attempting suicide when the latter attempts to leave him behind. As Marx’s gambling addiction spirals out of control and he accrues debt to loan sharks that he cannot repay, he recruits the guileless Johnny to his operation of forcefully collecting for the mob from other debtors, eventually exploiting the younger man’s lack of moral boundaries and graduating him to the more lucrative role of assassin. A short time in the future, by the side of a residential Paris street, a downtrodden, middle-​ aged salesman, Simon (Jean Yanne), waits in his car as his best friend Mickey, a dashing detective, enters a building and is shot. As the young police officer lies in a coma, the enraged Simon embarks on a mission to find the pair of criminals who committed the assault. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the viewer, the culprits are Johnny and Marx. Thus the central trio is formed for which the film’s American source novel, Teri White’s (1982) thriller Triangle, is named. As the non-​ linear plot unfolds, we discover how these two mismatched-​yet-​devoted pairs of men came to find themselves at the scene of the shooting, and the narrative culminates in a bloody act of vengeance and a final, ambiguous union, as Simon shoots Marx and takes Johnny under his own wing. Released in 1994, following a productive first career writing the scripts for fifteen other films, serving as assistant editor on five and assistant sound-​mixer on another (see Filmography, pp. 173–9), Regarde les hommes tomber was Audiard’s directorial debut. The film differs from the source novel in many ways. While the cast and central plot points surrounding the

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shooting are mostly the same, the film transplants the story from 1980s San Francisco to 1990s Paris. In the novel, Mac (i.e. Marx) and Johnny know each other from the Vietnam War, when the older man found the younger immobilised at the scene of a massacre, providing a clearer explanation for their co-​dependent bonding. The novel’s Johnny suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder after committing wartime atrocities, a trauma he replays in his quick recourse to violence. By contrast, the film is more ambiguous in its construction of Marx and Johnny’s relationship and Johnny’s character: the latter appears wordlessly by Marx’s side and the bond is forged without any shared experience.2 The film introduces further ambiguity in the roles played by Simon and his partner. In the novel, Simon is a professional detective and Mickey his professional partner, who is killed. In the film, Simon’s motivations for investigating the shooting are less clear-​cut: he is not a detective but a salesman; Mickey is not his law enforcement partner but his friend and possibly lover, or at least object of desire; and the latter is not killed but placed in that suspended state between the polarities of life and death, a coma. Thus while in many ways a faithful adaptation, Regarde not only shifts the story to a French context, but infuses it with a soon-​ to-​ become-​ distinctive murky ambiguity, in which the lines between good and bad, the professional and the personal,

2 Marx and Johnny’s relationship recalls the bond between Jean Gabin’s Jean and the dog in Marcel Carné’s (1938) Le Quai des brumes. Like Johnny, Quai’s dog appears out of nowhere as Jean is hitchhiking, and just as Marx tries to shoo Johnny away with his cane, Jean tries to rid himself of the dog by throwing rocks at it. Yet both Johnny and the dog are undeterred, and follow their new friend (or perhaps owner) around devotedly for the duration of the films. Given Regarde’s clear awareness of its genre heritage and dialogue with the conventions of classic French film noir, it is difficult to ignore the fact that Audiard’s film also includes two stray dogs. I thank Thibaut Schilt for bringing this striking parallel to my attention.

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opposite-​sex and same-​sex attraction, and even life and death, are blurred. Regarde les hommes tomber received a limited distribution in France, with only 218,831 box office entries. Critical reception was positive, though reviews often focused on Audiard’s transition from screenwriting to directing (Rouyer, 1994, Vachaud, 1994) and on his familial credentials as Michel Audiard’s son (Bouquet, 1994). However, though it was made on an equivalent budget of only €3 million, Regarde was an ambitious project for its size, casting the well-​established star Jean-​Louis Trintignant in the role of Marx, and an upcoming one, Mathieu Kassovitz, as Johnny (one year before the release of La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995)). For a debut film, Regarde fared well at the 1995 Césars, winning for Best Debut, Best Male Breakout Performance for Kassovitz and Best Editing, and earning a nomination for Best Original Screenplay or Adaptation. Though modest in scope and budget by comparison with Audiard’s later work, this ninety-​minute film nonetheless establishes many of the signature elements of Audiard’s oeuvre, rendering it a key text for understanding the development of what would become a varied but recognisable style. Perhaps the most prominent trait for which Regarde les hommes tomber has been studied is its subversion of B movie connotations and genre norms in its reworking of the classical polar, or crime thriller genre. On the surface, the film contains most of the ingredients of a standard polar or perhaps film noir: an antihero on a quest to solve a crime (Simon), a hardened villain from the criminal underworld (Marx), a victim of callous violence (Mickey), the piecing-​together of the crime story, with frequent flashbacks and a non-​linear plot, an almost entirely male cast, a noir-​like hardboiled style, landscapes of rain and shadow, and passages of gritty violence. In these ways, Regarde les hommes tomber traces a lineage not only with many of Jacques Audiard’s previous thriller scripts (for example, for Edouard Niermans’s (1987)

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Poussière d’ange and Elisabeth Rappeneau’s (1988) Fréquence meurtre), but with the iconic screenwriting work of his father, Michel. Yet while the film is certainly informed by Audiard’s background, there are distinct differences between the heritage of 1950s and 1960s French polars and the more hybrid, unconventional genre play at work in Regarde les hommes tomber. For one, the film’s only law enforcement officer is also its tragic (and silent) victim, its detective is an unglamorous salesman and its figure fatale is a guileless man with a complete lack of seductive or calculating qualities. Its characters are hapless, its aesthetics unpolished, its dialogue direct and lacking in suave turns of phrase. Chris Darke draws out this tightrope that Regarde walks between paying homage to the classical genre and reinventing it: Adapted from the novel Triangle by Teri White, See How They Fall is a contemporary French film noir whose Frenchness is crucial. There exists a well-​loved tradition of French noir that, in films such as Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi [1954], incorporates a fascination with the group dynamics of its male characters, often incarnated by such actors as Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura; Audiard’s own father, Michel, was one of the key French noir screenwriters in the 50s. With its focus on the masculine world of petty crooks and killers, See How They Fall is an askance take on these traditions but also Audiard fils’ personal meditation on his father’s legacy. Audiard succeeds because he’s taken risks with the genre in every respect. (Darke, 1997: 62)

The film’s deliberate failure to deliver a conventional pair of slick gangsters is made manifest in its dialogue. The repartees of typical polars were rendered iconic by Audiard père, who achieved enduring cult status with his distinctive language made famous in gangster classics such as Les Tontons flingueurs (Lautner, 1963). Yet Marx and Johnny are worlds away from gangster cool. For example, when Marx is training Johnny to behave menacingly as a debt collector, the two men enter a man’s home and order him to pay the mob under

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threat of violence. However, much to the grizzled Marx’s dismay, Johnny cannot play the part. He is immediately distracted by the man’s young son, with whom he starts to play while reciting the polite words ‘Il faut payer maintenant, s’il vous plaît, Monsieur’ (‘You have to pay now, please, Sir’) with a smile. This guileless line recalls Audiard’s enigmatic comments on film language: ‘J’ai horreur du langage naturel dans les films. J’aime que ça parle étrange’ (Vachaud, 1994: 36).3 Though Johnny’s request is at first humorous, and at second pathetic, on closer inspection, the fact that he gleefully holds the man’s child on his shoulders while uttering it reveals not only Johnny’s childlike experience of the world around him,4 but the deeply disturbing menace he poses as someone for whom violence carries no moral weight or emotional attachment, and for whom the distinction between violent crime and child’s play is unclear. Thus the film’s status as a polar is further complicated by its infusion with conventions from other genres. While it may be primarily described as a crime thriller, it also contains characteristics of a road movie, a psychological drama, and a confused hybrid of family drama and queer romance. As Julia Dobson summarises, ‘The film employs the generic conventions of the road movie and the polar to establish audience expectations which are not met’ (Dobson, 2011: 42). We see this generic intermingling in many later examples: the Bildungsroman/​prison drama in Un prophète, the film noir/​ social romance in Sur mes lèvres, the Western/​coming of age/​ buddy comedy in Les Frères Sisters, the polar/​family drama/​ musical romance in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté. From 3 ‘I hate natural language in films. I like it to sound strange.’ 4 This strange naivety is a quality evident in many of Mathieu Kassovitz’s performances, including in his own debut feature, Métisse (Kassovitz, 1993); in Audiard’s Un héros très discret; and even in his role as the love interest, Nino, in Jean-​Pierre Jeunet’s (2001) Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain.

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the beginning of his directorial career, Audiard has shown a marked interest in film genres typically associated with popular culture and American B movie heritage: the film noir, the prison film, the melodrama, the Western. Frequently, and despite his extensive experience in writing original screenplays, he draws inspiration directly from American pulp literature, beginning with White’s Triangle for Regarde. He explains his penchant for ‘low-​brow’ genre, and –​perhaps surprisingly –​vampire horror in particular, in Positif: ‘Je suis très sensible à la littérature gothique, Dracula de Bram Stoker ou l’admirable livre d’Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire, m’ont fait une grande impression’ (Vachaud, 1994: 37).5 In fact, Audiard is perhaps best known in France for the way in which he is perceived to ‘elevate’ the B movie to the level of cinéma d’art et d’essai, creating films from pulp elements that invariably feature in elite film festivals and prestigious awards. This elevation narrative, of course, comes with all the class associations that have always been attached to B genres typically associated with female or working-​ class audiences, and Audiard’s pedigree auteur training and reputation certainly contribute to his ability to circulate between so-​called ‘trash’ genres and ‘arthouse’ circuits. Yet it is nonetheless true that Audiard’s films combine formulaic motifs with elegant form; pulpy source texts with delicately layered scripts; schlocky passages of violence with poignant moments of intimacy; well-​worn character tropes with expert, nuanced performances. Though it has been little acknowledged, this elegance also extends to Regarde les hommes tomber’s framing by cinematographer Gérard Sterin, namely the ways in which the film plays expressively with light. By contrast with the intense,

5 ‘I am very affected by Gothic literature; Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Anne Rice’s admirable book Interview with the Vampire have made a great impression on me.’

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almost blinding brightness of later films such as De rouille et d’os and Les Frères Sisters, like Sur mes lèvres and De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté the visuals of Regarde les hommes tomber are extremely dark. The colour palette is all greys, blacks and muted blues. Johnny and Marx are often filmed in shadow. They appear in dark grey by the side of the road as they hitchhike at dusk. They confer around tables and on the floor of dimly lit interiors, where more often than not they are squatters or trespassers. Simon also conducts his business in cramped apartments, cars and hospital rooms in which he is often lit weakly from behind. Many shots are illuminated only by fleeting, peripheral light: the headlights of cars; the spotlights of crime scene photographers; the fluorescent downlights of a hospital corridor or bathroom mirror; the cool, moth-​encrusted bulb of a flood lamp. These flashes of light in the darkness prefigure the composition of a black screen with a circle of colour that we see in Audiard’s iconic keyhole shots (see Figure 0.1 from Un prophète and Figure 1.1 from Sur mes lèvres). Scenes are often set at in-​between times of day when natural light is weak and cold: the last moments of twilight that flatten figures into silhouettes, the sunless grey of the early dawn, the overcast bleakness of a cloudy winter’s afternoon. There is a beauty in this sparse, referred light, which often plunges the characters into a chiaroscuro composition (see Figure 2.1, lit only by the referred glow of a television set, as Johnny describes the visuals on television for his blind neighbour, Madame Rajenski.) And these dark, drained tones reflect those of the story, in the gloom of the plot, the loneliness and moral failings of the characters and the broader pessimism that permeates the film’s picture of society. However, the challenge to filmic conventions in Regarde les hommes tomber is perhaps most obvious in its portrayal of interpersonal relationships. The film depicts a progressive degradation of traditional familial and social structures as the characters are drawn into intense relationships that are never explicitly defined, but that shift back and forth

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Figure 2.1  Johnny and Mme Rajenski ‘watch’ television, Regarde les hommes tomber, 00:44:26

between the pseudo-​familial and the psycho-​sexual. Desire is misarticulated and unacknowledged, violence is callous and dispassionate. The two often intertwine to disastrous effect: ‘The film is full of moments of horrifically displaced male affection’ (Darke, 1997: 62). Homoerotic attraction is never consummated onscreen, but bubbles beneath the surface in Simon’s attachment to Mickey; (possibly) Johnny’s obsession with Marx; the final union between Simon and Johnny; and the secondary scenes, such as the one between Simon and a sex worker (which, to the sex worker’s surprise and discomfort, involves no physical touch, but simply questions about how the latter maintains intimacy with his partner despite the challenges of his profession). Notwithstanding the intensity of these ambiguous relationships being the driving force of the narrative, the tenuous social fabric that holds these characters together is nonetheless dependent on fragile, heteronormative constructs of sexual identity that prevent these desires from being voiced. In fact, Marx and Johnny’s relationship appears on the brink of collapse after Johnny transgresses a social

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taboo in the middle of a particularly cold night. Waking Marx in his balaclava and sleeping bag, Johnny asks him ‘Je peux me mettre à côté de toi? Je peux dormir à côté de toi, là?’.6 The question is childish, as though uttered to a parent after a nightmare. But the homophobic Marx responds to this invasion of personal boundaries with shock and violence, grabbing Johnny by the ear and hissing ‘Putain, jamais plus, t’entends, jamais plus tu me réveilles comme ça, hein? T’entends? Non mais c’est pas vrai, mais qu’est-​ce que c’est que ce mec? Mais qui est-​ ce que tu te crois, t’es pédé ou quoi?’ (00:16:18–​ 00:16:28).7 In Regarde les hommes tomber, families exist only in deteriorating or substituted forms: Simon dreams of his neglected wife betraying him while he pays male sex workers to describe their intimate relationships, while Marx and Johnny’s closest approximation to a family is the relationship they forge with one another. As Julia Dobson explains, ‘The generic frames that Audiard privileges (thriller, heist, rites-​of-​passage film) are often those that foreground homo-​ social hierarchies of masculine filiation’ (Dobson, 2016: 188). Indeed, Regarde prefigures many other Audiard portraits of families in fragmentation. The ambiguous attachment to baleful patriarchal figures presages the Malik–​César relationship in Un prophète and the Charlie–​Commodore dynamic in Les Frères Sisters. The deceased mother haunts De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, the deceased father Les Frères Sisters and Un héros très discret. The improvised family unit, strangers banding together to survive the hostility of modern French society, reappears as the narrative fulcrum of Dheepan. The powerful connection between two men whose relationship shifts between professional collaboration, pseudo-​ familial attachment and an ambiguous affection can also be found in 6 ‘Can I lie next to you? Can I sleep next to you?’ 7 ‘Fuck, never again, you hear, never again will you wake me up like that, OK? You hear? This is unbelievable, who is this guy? Who do you think you are, are you a fag or something?’

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Hermann and John’s relationship in Les Frères Sisters. The death of one patriarch and the adoption of his family by a new one describes how Simon takes Johnny in after Marx’s death, but also how Malik steps into his deceased friend Ryad’s shoes at the end of Un prophète, taking on the care of his widow and child. And the vulnerable, isolated only child whose parents are nowhere to be seen and who turns to the criminal underworld for community and affection describes not only Johnny, but also Carla in Sur mes lèvres and Malik in Un prophète. These characters are shaped by dysfunctional relationships of many kinds, but especially by failed paternal–​ filial ties that Audiard has described as ‘la paternité qui a du mal à se réaliser’ (Rouyer and Tobin, 2012: 9).8 This fractured portrayal of family life is heightened by the dominant theme of homelessness, which is again introduced in Regarde les hommes tomber, as Marx and Johnny sleep rough in a series of abandoned spaces, before reappearing in many guises in later films. Un héros très discret’s Albert finds himself homeless after running away to reinvent himself. Dheepan’s protagonists flee civil war in Sri Lanka to seek asylum in France, and though they are housed in a banlieue apartment, before long they must uproot themselves again to escape further violence. Les Frères Sisters’s Charlie and Eli are eternal nomads who often sleep by their campfire as their work takes them across the land. De rouille et d’os’s Ali and Sam hitchhike across France to stay on their respective sister and aunt’s couch. Sur mes lèvres’s Paul secretly sleeps in the janitorial closet at his new workplace. De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté’s Tom evicts squatters and destroys homes for profit. And in Un prophète, the characters must make a home of their prison cells. In all these spaces, displacement is unending, childhood homes are lost or traumatic, and belonging is a fantasy that can only be realised through violent bonds.

8 ‘paternity that struggles to fulfil itself’.

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However, perhaps the most iconic element of Regarde les hommes tomber that will come to define Audiard’s cinema is that of the central transgressive figure: a remarkably marginalised-​yet-​mobile outcast of unexpected talents, who disrupts the social order through their aptitude for crossing lines others cannot or will not cross. This character lacks a concrete background or a clear identity, emerging –​literally, in Johnny’s case –​as if from nowhere. They are nomadic, friendless, homeless, penniless. They are often sexually unfulfilled or undeveloped (despite his strong attachments to other men, Johnny is a virgin with a marked disgust for, and disinterest in, sex). They are pigeonholed and underestimated by society for their minority traits, which they turn to their advantage: ethnic identity, poverty, gender, language, disability. They display a disturbing aptitude for violence, which they commit more or less willingly in order to survive, adapt and advance (while Marx struggles to commit the killing that the mob orders him to carry out, Johnny steps in, saying with a blank expression ‘ça me dérange pas de le faire’).9 These central figures exhibit a remarkable ability to exist both within and beyond traditional social constructs, moving between groups, bridging cultural divides and breaking taboos in ways that expose the fragility of the hierarchical French social system. This archetypal figure who breaches seemingly insurmountable barriers, be they social, cultural, physical and/​or linguistic, appears first in the figure of Johnny, but recurs throughout Audiard’s body of work. Yet nowhere is this enterprising, border-​crossing figure more apparent than in the following film, in which the motif of cultural barriers, while still contained within the French nation, is extended to encompass areas of French society that are absent from Audiard’s earlier features.

9 ‘I don’t mind doing it.’

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Multicultural France: Un prophète

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Un prophète, c’est l’apprentissage comme outil de survie.10 (Audiard in Libiot (2009))

On the outskirts of Paris, a nineteen-​year-​old man is processed into a bleak, concrete prison compound for a six-​year term for assaulting a police officer, a crime he denies. Friendless, guileless and unprepared for the sectarian violence that rules inside, Malik (Tahar Rahim) finds himself forcefully initiated into the prison’s ruling gang, a Corsican branch of the mafia, which exploits his lack of affiliation to the rival Arab group to force him to kill an Arab informant. Kept in the group’s orbit thanks to his usefulness, but excluded from their inner ranks because of his ethnic difference, Malik is both protected and subjugated by the Corsican gang, led by the menacing, omniscient patriarch, César (Niels Arestrup). Yet as Malik observes his oppressors from the position of a servant, he gradually learns not only how organised crime units operate, but also how to speak the minoritarian language they use to exclude him and conduct their secret dealings. His initial step up from subjugation is to reveal his Corsican language skills to César, who promotes and recruits his protégé to the role of a right-​ hand man and spy, the leader’s ‘eyes and ears’ among his enemies and friends alike. Yet as Malik’s prison sentence evolves into a modern and macabre Bildungsroman, he not only learns French literacy, the Corsican language, mafia norms, murder methods, torture techniques, and the intricate system of drug distribution as it is conducted within and beyond prison walls. As the only character conversant in the three operative languages of the prison, especially the Arabic and Corsican only spoken by certain members of the prison’s society, he also comes to understand the potential for control presented by language 10 ‘Un prophète is about learning as a survival tool.’

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and strategic use of multilingualism, code-​switching, translation and lies (King, 2014). As he gradually builds a rival network, first among the prison’s other outsiders (the Roma Jordi (Reda Kateb) and teacher Ryad (Adel Bencherif)) and then among the previously hostile Arab faction of the prison, Malik begins to turn the tables on César and to take over the vast power structure that surrounds him. By the time he orchestrates a plan to exterminate the Corsican network and turn César’s Italian bosses against him, Malik has transformed into a crime lord in his own right, sacrificing his moral integrity for what he has always lacked: wealth, power and community. Un prophète was a great success on the awards circuit and at the box office alike, selling 1.3 million tickets in France and earning USD 17.9 million globally. Although it lost the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke’s (2009) Das weiβe Band (The White Ribbon) at Cannes in 2009, it won the Grand Prix and received a further nine nominations at the festival. It received both the BAFTA Best Non-​ anglophone Film and the Prix Louis Delluc, and on the American circuit was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. In fact, Un prophète is not only Audiard’s most highly awarded film, but the third most successful film of all time at the Césars, with nine wins and thirteen nominations. These wins included the prestigious trio of Best French Film of the Year, Best Director and Best Actor for Rahim (importantly, there are no female roles in the film that would have been eligible for Best Actress), but also Best Supporting Actor (Arestrup), Best Male Breakout Performance (Rahim), Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Editing and Best Original Screenplay, as well as a further four nominations at the 2010 ceremony. The film also launched the career of actor Tahar Rahim, whose portrayal of Malik El Djebena has been described as ‘a mesmerising centre to the film’ (Romney, 2009), ‘un vrai

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choc’ (Baurez, 2009)11 and ‘une belle découverte’ (Morain, 2009).12 Rahim’s only acting roles prior to Un prophète were in Cyril Mennegun’s short docufilm Tahar l’étudiant (2005), an unnamed part in A l’intérieur (Bustillo and Maury, 2007) and a small role in the television series La Commune (Triboit, 2007). For his performance as Malik, Rahim won the Best European Actor Prize and the Best Actor Lumières Prize in 2009, and in 2010 became the first actor ever to receive both the Best Actor and the Best Male Breakout Performance Césars. In fact, Rahim’s double win led the César committee to revise the rules to prevent actors being eligible to win two awards for the same performance. After Un prophète Rahim quickly became a famous leading actor, starring in French films such as Les Hommes libres (Ferroukhi, 2011), A perdre la raison (Lafosse, 2012) and Le Passé (Farhadi, 2013), with supporting roles in blockbusters such as Samba (Nakache and Toledano, 2014) and even the Hollywood film The Eagle (MacDonald, 2011). When Ciné+ Premier rescreened Un prophète on French television in January 2020, Le Nouvel Observateur entitled their review article ‘Un prophète, le film qui révéla Tahar Rahim’ (Schaller, 2020).13 Though Rahim is the most striking example of a breakout success from an Audiard film, he is one of several upcoming or even unknown actors cast as Audiard protagonists. These include the young French Mathieu Kassovitz and the Sri Lankan newcomer Jesuthasan Antonythasan, whose eponymous role in Dheepan was his first French role and only his second acting experience after Leena Manimekalai’s (2011) Indian film Sengadal.14 11 ‘a real shock’. 12 ‘a wonderful discovery’. 13 ‘A Prophet, the film that unveiled Tahar Rahim’. 14 The Audiard roles of Matthias Schoenaerts and Romain Duris were also formative to their early acting careers, although each was more established at the time of De rouille et d’os and De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté respectively than Kassovitz, Rahim and Antonythasan had been when Regarde les hommes tomber, Un prophète and Dheepan were made.

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Casting is far from the only similarity between Un prophète and Audiard’s other films. The film features an almost entirely male cast, with the only (fleeting) female roles being for voiceless sex workers or passive mothers confined to the domestic space and accorded very little or no dialogue. Its core character pairing is that of two mutually resentful but intensely connected men, who are drawn into a pseudo-​familial relationship as their joint criminal activities become increasingly violent and destructive. (However, Audiard himself has challenged the idea that César and Malik share a ‘father–​son-​like’ relationship (despite Niels Arestrup playing both roles, with a similar balefulness), arguing instead that while the film shares much in common with De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, he sees their dynamic as being closer to that between master and slave (Baumann and Rouyer, 2009: 21)). In the vein of Sur mes lèvres and Dheepan, Un prophète is a bold critique of the hostility of a contemporary (racist, capitalist) French society. The film is also a key example of Audiard’s characteristic blending of high-​ brow filmmaking, associated with the ‘artistic’, with the conventions of B movie genres, walking what Isabelle Vanderschelden calls ‘the borderline between the auteur and the popular in the context of French cinema’ (Vanderschelden, 2009: 255). Indeed, it is aligned with Regarde les hommes tomber, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, De rouille et d’os and Les Frères Sisters in its interactions with stereotypically American frames of intertextuality and genre. Granted, Les Frères Sisters, with its American setting, mostly American cast, US co-​partners and play on the Western genre, is Audiard’s most obviously ‘American’ film. Yet while Un prophète is clearly informed by the French traditions of banlieue and polar cinemas, it is perhaps more deeply imbricated in an anglophone heritage of genre cinema centred on the mob and the prison. As Dayna Oscherwitz explains,

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Jacques Audiard Un prophète positions itself as an object or commodity in the exchange economy of transnational cinema. It does this both by evoking the cosmopolitan heritage of classic noir, and by blending it into the hybrid pastiche aesthetics of what Andrew Spicer has termed ‘postmodern noir’, a category that includes the films of American directors Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino and British director Danny Boyle [Spicer, 2002: 199–​ 202]. In fact, certain elements of Un prophète, most notably the explicit and over-​determined representations of violence and the redemptive quality of that violence, evoke the films of these directors, particularly Goodfellas [Scorsese, 1990], Shallow Grave [Boyle, 1994] and Pulp Fiction [Tarantino, 1994]. (Oscherwitz, 2015: 267)

Multiple reviews of Un prophète have described the prison as a ‘microcosm’ of French society (García-​Mainar, 2016; Wilson, 2010; Leader, 2010). The prison does indeed serve as a world unto itself, a society in miniature with its own complex economy, social organisation, rules, rewards and systems of control. However, it is important to clarify that the prison does not operate exactly as a ‘reflection’ of French society, not least because it is entirely male. For all the systemic reasons that lead to racist patterns of imprisonment, the prison population is more ethnically diverse than the average French population,15 with –​ironically –​more potential positions of power held by non-​white characters than would be emblematic of the broader French social structure, from which it is separated by the very real and restrictive (if not impenetrable) border of the prison wall. Yet while this mini-​world is far from a representative portrayal of broader life for Franco-​ Maghrebin people in France (indeed, no single film could offer one), the film not only represents the violence of xenophobia that persists in contemporary French society, but provides a 15 See Irving Jackson (2010) for an in-​depth analysis of the links between socioeconomic disparity, racism and overrepresentation of various ethnic minorities in the French criminal justice system.

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radical vision of the ways in which cultural difference can be mobilised, even weaponised, to subvert the dominant power relations that oppress cultural, linguistic and ethnic others in postcolonial France. In its reworking of genre conventions, its plot hinging on the ascent of an underdog and its foregrounding of misplaced, perverted paternal–​filial relations, in several ways Un prophète follows the paths trodden by earlier Audiard films. Yet while Sur mes lèvres was about translingual communication, and De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté introduced racial difference to Audiard’s oeuvre for the first time, Un prophète places the multicultural and multilingual nature of postcolonial France at its very heart. Malik is the first Audiard protagonist who is not of solely white French origins (Linh Dan Pham’s role in De battre being a secondary one). Importantly, Malik is French, born in France, but he is subject to constant racist treatment because of his Arab heritage. For Malik himself, his ethnic, linguistic or religious origins are not a defining element of his identity. He was mostly raised in the correctional and foster systems rather than with his biological family; does not remember whether he learned to speak French or Arabic first; and does not observe Islam or request to be lodged in le bloc b, the Muslim section of the prison, like so many of the other inmates of similar descent. Indeed, it is essential to recognise the differences between the Arabic language, which exists in many different varieties; Arab cultures; the North African region; and the Islamic religion, which may be elements of a person’s identity in any combination, but which are far from synonymous. Yet they are frequently rolled into one in the assumptions that other characters make about Malik in Un prophète. He will learn to use these assumptions, however, to his advantage. As Rajko Radovic writes of Malik in Film International, ‘Cross-​roads are in his blood, he was born undecided, at the edge of the cut’ (2010: 15). In fact, Audiard also cited Rahim’s lack of star status as a boon for his performance: ‘Working with him was remarkable, liberating

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he has no past as an actor, no image. There is nothing to fight against –​he is just there’ (Vincendeau, 2009: 20). Rahim himself echoed this sentiment: ‘Like Malik, I was a blank page’ (In Rohter, 2010). Yet despite his lack of personal attachment to Maghrebin heritage or indeed any distinct culture, in the view of almost all the film’s characters (including his friends), Malik is not so much French as he is Arab. He is constantly judged for his cultural background: the Corsican mobsters refer to him with racist slurs; the Arab prisoners view him as a traitor for working for the Corsicans; guards and prisoners of all descriptions see in his initial friendlessness, lack of cultural affiliation and youth a vulnerability to be exploited. However, what sets Un prophète apart from so many pessimistic films about racism in France is not merely the fact that it features a protagonist whose identity is shaped by cultural diversity, but that it is this very diversity that becomes the key to Malik’s survival –​and success. For throughout the vast learning curve that will be his six-​year prison sentence, Malik acquires not only a suite of little-​valued skills, but an understanding of how to use these skills strategically to subvert the power dynamics that once oppressed him. This is foreshadowed early in the film, when Malik enters the cell of his fellow prisoner, Reyeb. The latter believes Malik has come to see him because Reyeb had earlier offered him drugs in exchange for sex. In reality, Malik is being forced by the Corsicans, under threat of death, to murder Reyeb, to prevent him standing as a witness against them in court. But before Malik attacks Reyeb, the more worldly man advises the younger one on how to make the most of his time in prison. His poignant advice is to educate himself: ‘L’idée, c’est de sortir un petit peu moins con qu’on est entré’ (00:25:30).16 This is remarkably fitting, for the most iconic characteristic of Un prophète and Audiard’s oeuvre at large is its structure of a violent-​ yet-​ thoughtful 16 ‘The idea is to come out a little bit less stupid than when you went in.’

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Bildungsroman, an overarching narrative shaped by the central figure’s personal evolution from oppressed to empowered. At the heart of this evolution, under myriad guises, is the process of learning. From his first days in the prison, Malik experiences a learning curve. This begins with the official, sanctioned training provided by the prison: first, industrial sewing, and second, far more importantly, French literacy (for he enters the prison illiterate). It is in these literacy classes that Malik meets his friend, future business partner and ultimately ‘brother’, Ryad (Adel Bencherif), whose wife and child Malik will take responsibility for at the end of the film, after Ryad dies of cancer and Malik is released from prison. But the prison’s training modules are only the beginning of the skills Malik acquires during his sentence. One of the Corsicans teaches him the extremely risky method of murdering an inmate with a razor blade concealed inside his mouth while pretending to offer fellatio. The social outlier Jordi, a heroin user with a vast network of contacts outside the prison, walks Malik through a novel plan for setting up a heroin distribution chain through the prison. But perhaps the most valuable skills are the ones that Malik teaches himself: manipulation, control and especially language. I have written about the role of multilingualism and language learning in Un prophète in detail in my first book, Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema (King, 2017). This includes analysis of a number of key scenes in which Malik deploys his knowledge of either minority language, such as when he employs Arabic as a hiding place to conspire against the Corsicans (King, 2017: 90–​ 2) or when he learns to use Corsican as a means of observing, infiltrating and rendering himself invaluable to the exclusive and powerful group (pp. 106–​9).17 As a result, I will avoid going into too 17 See also Appendix 4 in this volume, p. 172, for details on all of Audiard’s multilingual films and transnational coproductions.

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much detail on the specific examples of code-​switching by Malik here. However, in order to understand Un prophète’s mapping of social, cultural and ethnic boundaries, it is important to recognise the value the film places on multilingualism, its portrayal of code-​switching as a form of social mobility, and its progressive depiction of historically marginalised minority languages as valuable and important in French society. In Un prophète, language learning offers a means to eavesdrop, blackmail and access new groups. Language competency operates as a legitimation of identity and a badge of cultural belonging. Code-​switching allows speakers to include certain people and exclude others, to control the flow of knowledge and to juggle the power relations between different actors. For Malik in particular, whose own cultural and linguistic identity has been fluid and indistinct from the outset, code-​switching is an act of border-​crossing, language is a tool, and ‘identity’ –​as it is reductively understood in relation to simplified ethnic categories –​is a costume to be taken on and off depending on the part to be played.

Figure 2.2  Malik teaches himself Corsican, Un prophète, 00:37:42

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Ultimately, for Malik the prison sentence is a process of education, a learning curve during which he equips himself not only with a suite of unexpected skills, but with the acuity to use them to advance his socioeconomic position. Malik comes to understand that language, violence and culture can be transformed into social power, and that learning is a subversive act. This is an iconic trait for Audiard, who has admitted his penchant for the learning curve as narrative arc. When discussing De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, he reflected: Intervieweur:  Par rapport au film de Toback [Fingers], vous avez ajouté un thème qui se retrouve dans tous vos films: l’apprentissage. Audiard:  Oui, j’aime bien voir cet apprentissage. L’histoire n’est intéressante que si le héros souffre. Plus le chemin est dur, plus je suis intéressé … Je crois vraiment à cette vision du monde. Je suis un éternel étudiant. (Rouyer and Vassé, 2005: 22)18 Little by little, Malik negotiates himself from a position at the bottom of the social hierarchy to a position of unrivalled power within the prison (and eventually the outside world), declining the expectations of mainstream French society at every turn. In mainstream French society, Corsican is a minority language of little cultural currency. For Malik, it is a skill to be acquired to dismantle the structure that oppresses him from within. The Arabic language is frequently maligned and discouraged in France. For Malik, it becomes a hiding place in order to conspire against and manipulate his enemies, and an entry pass to forge new relationships with the prison’s Arab group. The Roma population is one of the most socioeconomically and 18 Interviewer: ‘Compared to Toback’s film [Fingers], you added a theme that can be found in all your films: learning’. Audiard:  ‘Yes, I like to see this learning. The story is only interesting if the hero suffers. The harder the road, the more interested I am … I really believe in this vision of the world. I’m an eternal student’.

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culturally disenfranchised communities in Europe. For Malik, a friendship with the Roma inmate Jordi opens up new opportunities for immense socioeconomic advancement. Muslim groups are often discriminated against or, as in the infamous case of the voile (headscarf), excluded from participation in French public institutions. For Malik, the strong bond between the outside Muslim community and the prison’s Muslim population presents opportunities for him and Ryad to forge connections within and beyond the prison walls. And in almost all contexts, imprisonment is considered the antithesis of freedom, status and socioeconomic advancement. For Malik, prison is where he acquires the skills, capital and power to create his own empire. This of course creates a problematics of representation, for Malik’s social ascent is also a narrative of moral corruption. He enters the prison a comparatively innocent man (whether or not he is guilty of his initial offence) and exits a hardened crime lord (albeit a less brutal one than César). Confoundingly, Audiard has said of his film, ‘The objective was to create a character who goes through a learning process and becomes a hero’ (Libiot, 2009). Yet this terminology is odd, for Malik could not reasonably be described as a hero in the traditional, moral sense. He is far more cunning and enterprising than Johnny, Carla or Tom. At certain moments he even seems to gain pleasure from violence: perhaps the most disturbing moment in the film is not Malik’s sloppy first murder of the informant Reyeb, nor even any of the moments of oppression and torture he suffers at César’s hands, but the scene in which he single-​handedly ambushes a mafia chief’s car, assassinates his guards and kidnaps the leader. It is at this moment that we see Malik has fundamentally changed, for as he lies on the floor of the van, shielding himself from gunfire using the bodies of the men he has just killed, the camera shifts to slow motion as a beatific smile spreads across his face. But while Malik should not escape judgement for his actions (and should absolutely not be accepted as the norm of a Franco-​ Maghrebin man in France), he is ultimately the product of the violent social system that forces him to transform in extreme

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ways in order to survive. In understanding Malik’s evolution, morality is almost beside the point. In this sense, Audiard’s explanation to The New York Times is more resonant than his earlier comments on heroism: We wanted to make an anti-​Scarface … In his film De Palma never proposes that we feel empathy for the character of Tony Montana. As a result the question of good and bad is no longer relevant. I wanted a character who is more ambiguous, so that I can relate to him. The key question is: When do I feel empathy for him, and when do I feel a certain unease or discomfort? (Rohter, 2010)19

Un prophète is troubling in its picture of violence and crime as the sole means of socioeconomic mobility for the racial, cultural or social underdog. But the film also offers a radical reimagining of the dynamic between dominant French and minority others. The film’s world envisions language, violence and culture as interconnected tools that can be mobilised to shift the power relations in society. Malik’s story is one of cultural subversion, socioeconomic advancement and linguistic empowerment that largely excludes the majority ethnic culture of the French society outside the prison walls. It is also one of manipulation: lies, treachery and subterfuge. This leads us to the final case study in this chapter: Un héros très discret.

Untelling myths: Un héros très discret [Les films de Jacques Audiard racontent] chaque fois … une histoire captivante où la violence et le mensonge se transforment en sorties de secours, en chances de survie. (Gendron, 2012: 2)20

19 Quote originally cited in English. 20 ‘Each [of Jacques Audiard’s films tells] a captivating story in which violence and lies transform into means of escape, into opportunities for survival.’

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In a quiet village in northern France, in the lead-​up to the Second World War, Albert Dehousse (played in his younger days by Mathieu Kassovitz and his older ones by Jean-​Louis Trintignant) lives a life of isolation with his controlling mother and fantasises about being a hero like his late father. In reality, Albert’s father died not in battle, but from alcoholism. Yet rather than discouraging the young Albert, the fictitious story his mother has spun about his deceased father to save face inspires him, and he resolves to become a hero not through the accomplishment of heroic actions, but through his ability to invent them. The Second World War passes Albert by, but for a night during which he and his mother reluctantly shelter villagers in their basement during a bombing, when he meets his future wife, Yvette (Sandrine Kiberlain). During the war, he does not even notice that Yvette’s family have been secretly contributing in their own small ways to the Resistance movement. But following the Liberation in 1944, the ignorant Albert learns about the French Resistance for practically the first time, and runs away to Paris to reinvent himself as a member of their ranks. By memorising all the information he can gather about the Resistance, polishing his acting skills and insinuating himself into groups of former fighters, Albert gradually builds himself a false reputation not only as a hero of the movement, but as one of Jewish heritage. Audiard’s second feature film, Un héros très discret, garnered a similar reception to his first, with a modest domestic distribution drawing 583,886 box office entries. While it did not win any of the six Césars for which it was nominated, Un héros did earn Audiard his first win at Cannes, the Prix du Scénario (plus five other nominations, including for the Grand Prix and the Palme d’Or). On the surface, the film could be seen as an outlier in Audiard’s oeuvre, the only one not set entirely in the present day (until, of course, the release of Les Frères Sisters twenty-​two years later). However, the film is not as distanced from contemporary French society as it may seem. Though Albert rubs shoulders with legitimate

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historical figures of the Second World War in France, and negotiates himself a military position in the recovery period of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Un héros très discret is not really about the war at all. Instead, it is about the exaggerated mythologising of French Resistance to the Occupation that dominated French cultural history after the war and regained popularity in the 1990s, after a period of turning away from dominant national narratives in post-​1968 France. Through a genre hybrid that subverts the narrative conventions of cinema, Un héros très discret exposes the notorious trend of underestimation and overestimation (termed ‘la mode rétro’ in cinema)21 that has shaped the memorialisation of France’s role in the war at multiple points since the end of the Occupation: underestimation of French complicity and participation in the French Holocaust, and overestimation of the impact and scope of the French Resistance. Ultimately, the film is less about the story of the Resistance than the stories we like to tell ourselves about the glory of the nation, a phenomenon that remains strikingly prevalent, particularly in the France of the 1990s into which the film was released. Un héros très discret presents a central character whose post-​ war reinvention as a Resistance hero is explicitly emblematic of the national reinvention of résistancialisme (the retrospective Gaullist construction of the image of a France united in resistance to the Nazi occupation), a historical revisionism promoted by successive governments which remained officially unchallenged for many decades. (Dobson, 2011: 45)

Un héros très discret does not contest that the Nazi Occupation of France from 1940 to 1944 was resisted by a network of citizens and others, and led by the future French president, General Charles de Gaulle, from his position of exile in London. However, contrary to popular perception of the Resistance as a widespread movement that defined the 21 See, for example, Greene (1999).

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French position and ‘spirit’ under the Occupation, in reality only between 2 and 3 per cent of French citizens participated in the Resistance during the war. The film’s source text was released three years before Jacques Chirac’s historic speech of 16 July 1995, on the fifty-​third anniversary of the Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver, during which French police rounded up over 13,000 Jewish people, detaining them in the city’s ill-​ equipped velodrome and transit camps before sending them on to extermination camps. Chirac’s speech recognised for the first time not only French complicity, but active French participation, in the Nazi Holocaust. In Un héros très discret Albert Dehousse is not a Nazi, and his one act of physical violence, the assassination of French deserters rediscovered in Germany several years after the war, is the tipping point that causes him to turn himself in to French authorities as a fraud. But in falsely casting himself as a Jewish Resistance hero, Albert exploits and benefits from what Kathryn Lauten calls frankly ‘the lie of France as a war resister’ (1999: 58), a widespread will not only to suppress French war crimes, but to exaggerate the reach of the French Resistance movement for his own personal gain. Ultimately, Albert’s ruse is made possible by the wilful misremembering that allowed for the heroic recasting of France’s role in the war –​and indeed in much modern, and especially colonial, history, not least in Algeria. Though it is set in the 1940s, Un héros critiques how contemporary France is founded on this widespread hero myth, and in this sense, the film ‘is addressed to present-​day hauntings of the French’ (Lauten, 1999: 68). As a consequence, it is perhaps Audiard’s most scathing denunciation of French society and the revisionism that has shaped so much of the contemporary vision of the Republic. By comparison with looser adaptations such as De rouille et d’os and Dheepan, or film-​to-​film transpositions such as De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Un héros très discret is a more traditional novel-​to-​film adaptation. Drawn from Jean-​ François Deniau’s (1989) novel of the same name, the film

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version maintains the source text’s general plot, characters, setting and era. As a result, it may seem a strange choice to discuss the question of Audiard and adaptation in depth here, given the more unusual examples of intertextual translation to be found throughout his work. For example, De rouille et d’os constructs its France-​based plot about a man and woman in a relationship from two Canadian-​based short stories about two men who do not know each other. Dheepan adapts a 1721 novel about two wealthy Persian men travelling for pleasure to the story of a penniless man, woman and girl seeking asylum from Sri Lanka in the twenty-​first century. De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté transposes the subject matter from an American man in 1970s New York to a French man in twenty-​ first-​century Paris. By contrast, Un héros’s classical adaptation from novel to film, without any major structural changes to the narrative, appears far less inventive than the unique adaptation style for which Audiard is better known. And yet, Audiard’s version of Un héros très discret uses the transition to the film medium to explore and heighten the story’s central concerns in ways the novel cannot. Within the frame of the novel’s plot, setting and characters, the film creates something new. Audiard has said : ‘Les “adaptateurs” se croient toujours obligés de suivre certaines contraintes lorsqu’ils adaptent un roman et à plus forte raison quand ils transposent un univers étranger chez nous. C’est un questionnement inutile. Le vrai questionnement est de savoir ce que va être capable d’absorber le cinéma’ (Vachaud, 1994: 36).22 In the transposition from novel to film, Un héros très discret allows the new medium to express the text’s core theme in audiovisual terms: the construction of ‘truth’ through diverse media, and the perpetuation of it through storytelling. 22 ‘ “Adaptors” believe they’re always obliged to follow certain rules when they adapt a novel, and even more so when they transpose a foreign universe into ours. It’s a pointless concern. The real concern is to know what cinema will be capable of absorbing.’

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Like an actor, Albert (like many other Audiard protagonists) uses memorisation, carefully written dialogue and rehearsal to perform a convincing character. Like a documentarian, he gathers textual and visual ‘evidence’ (maps, photographs, archives, witness statements) to legitimise his verbal claims. Like a cinematographer or an editor, he selects angles and images that will present him in a heroic light, and erases those that will not. All of Audiard’s works are intertextual, self-​referential, entangled in a web of generic narratives and related texts. Yet Un héros très discret may be Audiard’s most ‘meta’ film. For its many manipulations of sound and image combine to reveal the inherent mendacity of cinema, to undermine the claim to truth made by genres such as documentary film, and, by extension, to expose the mythic nature of the widely accepted motif of Resistant heroism that has coloured the French postwar national cultural narrative. We never see Un héros très discret’s ‘self-​made hero’ (to quote the film’s English title) act heroically, because he never actually does. In his ‘real life’, Albert is almost entirely lacking in courage and compassion. He displays little emotion and often seems at a loss for (his own) words. He does have two important talents, however: memory and capacity for imitation. From the film’s earliest scenes, he is seen observing others (for example, other children playing tennis) and then consulting the definition of that activity (‘tennis’) in the dictionary. He cannot play tennis well himself (which we will see later in the film), but he can rote-​learn all there is to know about the sport and discuss it as though he is a talented player. Alongside memorising an uncanny amount of information, Albert also spends much of his childhood and early adulthood reciting dialogue he has heard elsewhere, constructing a script for himself to perform in society. The only moments when Albert’s voice and face come alive are when he is lying, and especially when telling another’s story as though it is his own. When he begins a relationship with Yvette, he transcribes chapters from a novel by hand and

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recites them to her enraptured family as though it is his own unpublished manuscript. This is not so much to seduce Yvette (like Kassovitz’s character in Regarde, he is mostly uninterested in sex) but to impress the entire family with his creativity and intelligence. This is played for humour in some scenes, such as when Yvette’s relative Ernst trains Albert in the family trade of door-​to-​door sales by having him mime knocking on a door and entering the room with a salesman’s smile, over and over again. But the pattern becomes more pathological when Albert begins eavesdropping on Resistants and acting their words out to himself in the mirror before performing them back to others, to construct his hero persona. This, of course, is another meta-​cinematic trope, as Albert rehearses his dialogue for conversations with other characters much as the actor Mathieu Kassovitz would have recited the same lines for his role. Indeed, the motif of practised dialogue recurs throughout Audiard’s work, as many of his characters teach themselves how to behave a certain way in society by practising ‘natural’ speech to themselves. For example, as she teaches herself to behave more seductively, Sur mes lèvres’s Carla practises playful comments and sultry smiles to herself at home. When she must pretend to be the mob leader Marchand’s mistress to manipulate his wife, she uses a combination of these practised lines and comments that she has heard others make to play her role (for example, repeating her friend Annie’s dramatic comment about her new sexual relationship, ‘Je savais même pas que ça pouvait exister’).23 When teaching himself the Corsican language and training himself to behave like the Corsican gang members around him, Un prophète’s Malik also rehearses his lines. Using a pocket Corsican dictionary, he constructs his script from phrases in the book, alongside expressions he remembers the Corsicans using around him, including the racist insults (‘Arab shit’)

23 ‘I didn’t even know that it could exist.’

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that they use so frequently to refer to him. This dialogue rehearsal, which recurs so frequently in Audiard’s films, unveils the inherent performativity not only of film actors, but of all participants in a society that relies so heavily on a cultural script. This interplay between authenticity and imitation extends to the film’s generic and cinematographic framing, for it performs a series of self-​referential shifts between different narrative styles and different genres with varying connotations of ‘truth-​ telling’, to heighten further the audiovisual construction of myth. The film shifts between three distinct time periods and generic frames. The first, filmed in colour, set in the 1930s and 1940s and accompanied by a third-​person voiceover, follows Albert as he grows up, runs away to Paris and fashions himself into his war-​ hero alter ego, and is presented in a traditional narrative film style. The second, set in the 1990s when Un héros très discret was released, is styled as a serious documentary dedicated to the so-​called story of the Resistance hero, Albert Dehousse. This mockumentary features a range of talking heads, with former Resistants and others who claim (or perhaps believe) they knew Dehousse as a war hero, identified by the documentary convention of onscreen text and intercut with black-​and-​white photographs and footage supposedly telling the story of Dehousse’s Resistance work. Finally, the intersecting diegetic and mockumentary passages are accompanied by a third narrative layer: a limited number of scenes with 1990s-​ era Albert Dehousse (Trintignant), speaking directly to the viewer and confessing the truth of his invented identity. And additionally, the three primary generic frames –​narrative, mockumentary, confessional –​are occasionally interspersed with footage of a contemporary orchestra diegetically performing the score that then becomes the non-​diegetic accompaniment to the young Albert’s narrative. The orchestra and confession segments complement the less self-​referential ones throughout, further underlining the ‘composed’ nature of the story at all levels.

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However, these passages are most impactful when read alongside the mockumentary passages. For example, directly after a 1940s scene in which Albert successfully convinces a group of Resistants that they had met him in London during the war, two 1990s talking heads follow. The first, whose title card reads ‘PIERRE-​JEAN de VAINCOURT, ancien résistant, engagé F.F.L. (Forces françaises libres)’,24 is clearly suspicious of Albert’s story: ‘Ecoutez, s’il avait été à Londres, je l’aurais forcément rencontré. Et puis même, si je l’avais pas rencontré, c’est pas difficile à vérifier, on n’était quand-​même pas si nombreux.’25 But the camera passes immediately to another talking head with the exact same qualifications, ‘JEAN BERTIN, ancien résistant, engagé F.F.L.’, who claims assuredly: ‘Je l’ai croisé à Londres, ça devait être fin ’42 ou début ’43. Il travaillait à la formation avec Nervoix. Après, je l’ai perdu de vue. On m’a dit qu’il avait été parachuté sur la France.’26 In this layering of more or less authoritative voices, we see the fallibility of memory, or rather the collective desire to place ourselves within a broader heroic narrative, at play, and the erosion of truth and objectivity that ensues. At its heart, Un héros très discret is less of a war story than it is a critique of media and their claim to truth. From the moment that Albert learns his wife’s family has participated in small part in the Resistance, he begins to collect details of Resistance history, memorising dates, places and names just as he would memorise dictionary definitions as a child, and repeating heroic quotes in increasingly earnest and dramatic

24 ‘Pierre-​Jean de Vaincourt, former Resistant, FFF (Free French Forces) volunteer’. 25 ‘Listen, if he’d been in London, I would almost certainly have met him. And even then, if I hadn’t met him, it wouldn’t be difficult to check; there weren’t that many of us.’ 26 ‘I met him in London –​it must have been late ’42 or early ’43. He was training with Nervoix. We lost touch after that. I heard he’d been parachuted into France.’

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performances to himself. When he abandons his life in northern France and begins reinventing himself in earnest in Paris, Albert cuts and pastes information from newspapers, memoirs and archives to construct his persona, combining his fictional identity with enough factual backstory to convince people not just that he was a Resistant, but sometimes even that they had met him during the war. In his otherwise empty apartment he amasses a convoluted patchwork of photographs, texts and clippings that he assembles on his wall and memorises, an externalised map of his invented identity. But the media patchwork does not end with Albert’s research. In order to perform his ruse successfully, he must not only consume historical media, but produce it. Albert understands the power of media and the powerful presumed connection between image and truth. Once he has invented his backstory by immersing himself in ‘real’ evidence of the Resistance, he goes about constructing his own photographic ‘evidence’ of his assumed identity by inserting

Figure 2.3  Albert poses with soldier in real time, Un héros très discret, 00:52:16

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himself into reunions of former Resistants. At the trial for a prominent Nazi, Albert ensures he is photographed shaking hands with the judge. At another more festive reunion, Albert spies a lower-​ranked soldier who would not have known him during the war. He approaches the man in his suit and tie and offers to pose for a photo, as though doing him a favour. The man is thrilled to have the opportunity to pose with someone he believes is a superior officer, and smiles widely as he shakes Albert’s hand for the camera. This scene begins to unfold in colour, at the moment the photograph is captured (Figure 2.3). It then reappears in another form 15 seconds later, as Albert’s landlord views the black-​and-​white photograph of the two ‘soldiers’ onscreen in the cinema, during the newsreel that was commonly shown before feature films until the mid-​1950s (Figure 2.4). Albert has already begun telling his landlord stories about his Resistant life, but it is this image that confirms his mysterious new tenant’s claims in his mind. From this moment on, the landlord will treat Albert

Figure 2.4  Albert poses with soldier in newsreel, Un héros très discret, 00:52:31

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with the reverence (and rent forgiveness) that he craves. In the transition from in-​person meeting to visual document, Albert’s identity is validated and solidified. Through the legitimation of the image, he becomes what he purports to be in the landlord’s eyes. Thus the film uses the interplay between photography and cinema to show the danger of trusting in the image. As Lauten writes, ‘Un héros très discret uses the very means of creating this long-​standing French National History to expose the process of such a construction’ (1999: 62). In so doing, Audiard provides a powerful meta-​narrative, revealing the potential for manipulation inherent not only in narratives of war and the media (especially the documentary genre) that support them, but in cinema itself. Jacques Audiard’s cinema is dominated by profound critiques of French society. His films tell stories of vulnerable, marginalised outsiders abandoned by the socioeconomic system; of France’s dark underbelly of organised crime and societal oppression; of social fracture that expresses itself as xenophobia, ableism, homophobia and misogyny. Un prophète condemns not only the prison system and the politics of mass incarceration, but the irony and racism of the monistic Republican model. Dheepan begins as a critique of the dysfunctional and arbitrary immigration system, but is ultimately a denunciation of the subsidised housing project and the ghettoisation of the Parisian suburbs. Sur mes lèvres reveals the isolation and disenfranchisement of vulnerable groups (the working class, disabled people, former convicts) neglected by the system, who turn to crime not just for financial advancement, but for interpersonal connection. De rouille et d’os demonstrates not only the everyday torment of poverty and ableism, but the cruelty of animal imprisonment, framing the orca attack less as violence committed by a monster, and more as a tragic situation of double exploitation and suffering. And in addition to his feature-​film work, Audiard has contributed to two short films about homelessness in

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France,27 and directed a music video about deafness and the rise of the Far Right in French politics.28 However, Un héros très discret deplores something particularly specific to French society. As Lauten explains, ‘The film shows that memory and forgetting work together’ (1999: 62) to create the mythic dimension of the Republican narrative that was created with the Revolution, revitalised with the Resistance and remobilised in the decade of Héros’s release (particularly in relation to post-​beur-​generation identity politics). Through the story of Albert Dehousse, whose hero narrative is co-​constructed by ‘witnesses’ who also benefit by perpetuating it, the film troubles the national discourse of France as a humanistic and heroic society committed above all to les droits de l’homme (human rights). Instead, it unmasks the irony of the Resistance myth and recasts the French role in the war as, like Albert’s, both dominated and duplicitous. Indeed, when Albert finally confesses, the French authorities choose not to announce his ruse to avoid the subsequent embarrassment for having believed it. Thus Albert is imprisoned for two years not for treason, but for his lesser crime of bigamy. Directly after this revelation, the film closes on a series of ten talking heads,29 shown swiftly one after the other commenting on Albert Dehousse’s contribution to history (e.g. ‘Monsieur Albert Dehousse a beaucoup fait pour l’indépendance des Etats africains’30) as the dramatic string music swells to a crescendo. But seconds before this closing

27 Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers et al. (1997, 2010). 28 Jacques Audiard and Henri-​Jean Debon for Noir Désir, ‘Comme elle vient’ (1997). 29 One of these talking heads, onscreen for only a split second, is Jacques Audiard himself (though his dialogue is drowned out by the accompanying violin music). 30 ‘M. Albert Dehousse did a lot for the independence of African States.’

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passage, the older Albert himself addresses the camera in close-​ up. He begins by telling a wise and measured story about the lessons he has learned from life, referring to himself and the viewer as ‘de braves types, comme notre genre’.31 Then, switching to a sarcastic tone, he grins at someone off camera –​perhaps Audiard –​and asks teasingly ‘Qu’est-​ce que vous en pensez, mon vieux, ça vous a plu?’.32 And then, directly into the camera, ‘Vous trouvez que j’ai l’air naturel?’.33 A biting tutorial in media literacy, Un héros très discret shows us how cinema and culture can mobilise the authority of the image and the fallibility of memory to tell lies, and how easy and dangerous it can be to believe them. Each of Jacques Audiard’s films unfolds in a hostile social context that is informed by –​but is not simply reflective of –​ various dimensions of the broader society within which it is made. More directly, many of his films critique and even condemn elements of contemporary French society and cultural discourse that can be seen as inequitable, discriminatory or hypocritical. Regarde les hommes tomber, Un prophète and Un héros très discret are very different films, yet each zeroes in on the cultural diversity inherent within metropolitan French society –​from cultures of sexual and socioeconomic difference in the first, to linguistic and ethnic diversity in the second, to broad cultural mythologies and narratives in the third. The protagonists of these films live in a France in which cultural, socioeconomic, sexual and linguistic differences are the target of violence, oppression and even shame. Yet these films are not hopelessly bleak, for their marginalised protagonists invariably learn to master language, violence and cultural identity to affect a process of social mobility. Jacques Audiard’s metaphoric society may resemble something of a steep and slippery ladder, but it is nonetheless a ladder that can be climbed.

31 ‘brave sorts, like ourselves’. 32 ‘What do you think, my friend, did you like that?’ 33 ‘Do I seem natural to you?’

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References Alion, Y. (2015), ‘Entretien Jacques Audiard: Dheepan’, L’Avant-​ scène cinéma, 20 September, available at www.avantscenecinema. com/​entretien-​jacques-​audiard-​dheepan/​ (accessed 1 April 2019). Baumann, F. and P. Rouyer (2009), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: Il fallait que les murs bougent’, Positif, 583 (September), 17–​21. Baurez, T. (2009), ‘La critique d’Un prophète: Audiard tape fort, très fort!’, L’Express, 17 May, available at www.lexpress.fr/​culture/​ cinema/​la-​critique-​d-​un-​prophete-​audiard-​tape-​fort-​tres-​fort_​ 761142.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Becker, J. (1954), Touchez pas au grisbi (Grisbi), Del Duca Films. Bouquet, S. (1994), ‘Le principe de ruine: Regarde les hommes tomber’, Cahiers du cinéma, 483 (September), 65–​6. Boyle, D. (1994), Shallow Grave, London, Channel Four Films. Bustillo, A., and J. Maury (2007), A l’intérieur (Inside), Paris, La Fabrique de Films. Carné, M. (1938), Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows), Paris, Ciné-​Alliance. Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers et al. (1997), Nous les sans-​ papiers de France, Paris, Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers. Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers et al. (2010), On bosse ici! On vit ici! On reste ici! Paris, Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers. Darke, C. (1997), ‘See How They Fall/​Regarde les hommes tomber’, Sight and Sound, 7:6, 62. Debruge, P. (2010). ‘Audiard Ready for Next Challenge’, Variety, 8 February, available at www.variety.com/​2010/​film/​features/​ audiard-​ready-​for-​next-​challenge-​1118014893/​ (accessed 1 April 2019). Deniau, J.-​ F. (1989), Un héros très discret, Paris, Editions Olivier Orban. Dobson, J. (2011), ‘Jacques Audiard: Contesting Filiations’, in Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, ed. K. Ince, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Dobson, J. (2016), ‘Jacques Audiard: Twenty-​First Century Auteur’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 187–​9.

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Farhadi, A. (2013), Le Passé (The Past), Paris, Memento Films Production. Ferroukhi, I. (2011), Les Hommes libres (Free Men), Paris, Pyramide Productions. García-​Mainar, L. M. (2016), The Introspective Realist Crime Film, London, Palgrave Macmillan. Gendron, N. (2013), ‘Avec l’énergie du désespoir/​De rouille et d’os de Jacques Audiard, France–​ Belgique, 2012, 120 min.’, Ciné-​ Bulles, 31:1, 2–​7. Greene, N. (1999), Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Post-​ War French Cinema, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Das weiβe Band –​Eine Haneke, M. (2009), The White Ribbon/​ deutsche Kindergeschichte, Berlin, X Filme Creative Pool. Irving Jackson, P. (2010), ‘Race, Crime and Criminal Justice in France’, in Race, Crime and Criminal Justice, ed. A. Kalunta-​ Crumpton, London, Palgrave Macmillan. Jauffret, M. (2015), ‘Jacques Audiard: “Présenter en grand les migrants, ces invisibles, est un acte politique” ’, L’Humanité, 26 August, available at www.humanite.fr/​jacques-​audiard-​presenter-​ en-​ g rand-​ l es-​ m igrants-​ c es-​ i nvisibles-​ e st-​ u n-​ a cte- ​ p olitique-​ 582219 (accessed 1 April 2019). Jeunet, J.-​P. (2001), Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie), Paris, Claudie Ossard Productions. Kassovitz, M. (1993), Métisse (Café au lait), Paris, Canal+. Kassovitz, M. (1995), La Haine (Hate), Paris, Canal+. King, G. (2014), ‘The Power of the Treacherous Interpreter: Multilingualism in Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète’, Linguistica antverpiensia, 13, 78–​92. King, G. (2017), Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Lafosse, J. (2012), A perdre la raison (Our Children), Liège, Versus Production. Lauten, K. M. (1999), ‘ “Dusting off” Dehousse: Un héros très discret (Audiard, 1996)’, in French Cinema in the 1990s: Continuity and Difference, ed. P. Powrie, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 58–​68. Lautner, G. (1963), Les Tontons flingueurs (Monsieur Gangster), Gaumont.

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Leader, M. (2010), ‘A Prophet review’, 20 January, Den of Geek, available at www.denofgeek.com/​movies/​a-​prophet-​review/​ (accessed 2 April 2019). Libiot, E. (2009), ‘Jacques Audiard: “Un film, c’est une réponse à une question” ’, L’Express, 17 August, available at www.lexpress. fr/​culture/​cinema/​jacques-​audiard-​un-​film-​c-​est-​une-​reponse-​a-​ une-​question_​780744.html (accessed 1 April 2019). MacDonald, K. (2011), The Eagle, Los Angeles, Focus Features. Manimekalai, L. (2011), Sengadal, Dhanuskodi, Tholl Paavai Theatres. Massonnat, F. (2018), ‘ “Jean-​ Pierre, c’est moi”: Polyglossia and blurred identities in the films of Jacques Audiard’, Contemporary French Civilization, 43:1, 109–​24. Mennegun, C. (2005), Tahar l’étudiant, Paris, Zadig Productions. Montesquieu (1721), Lettres persanes, Cologne, Pierre Marteau. Morain, J. B. (2009), ‘Un Prophète de Jacques Audiard, ou le retour du mâle’, Les Inrockuptibles, 28 August, available at www. lesinrocks.com/​2009/​08/​28/​actualite/​un-​prophete-​de-​jacques-​ audiard-​ou-​le-​retour-​du-​male-​1137969/​ (accessed 1 April 2019). Nakache, O., and E. Toledano (2014), Samba, Paris, Quad Productions. Niermans, E. (1987), Poussière d’ange (Killing Time), Paris, Président Films. Oscherwitz, D. (2015), ‘Monnet changes everything? Capitalism, currency and crisis in Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète (2009)’, Studies in French Cinema, 15:3, 258–​74. Radovic, R. (2010), ‘A Bandit Apart’, Film International, 8:3, 14–​20. Rappeneau, E. (1988), Fréquence meurtre (Frequent Death), Paris, Acteurs Auteurs Associés. Rohter, L. (2010), ‘The Godfather Speaks French’, The New York Times, 19 February, available at www.nytimes.com/​2010/​02/​21/​ movies/​21prophet.html (accessed 2 April 2019). Romney, J. (2009), ‘A Prophet (Un Prophète)’, Screen Daily, 21 May, available at www.screendaily.com/​a-​prophet-​un-​prophete/​ 5001221.article (accessed 2 April 2019). Romney, J. (2016), ‘Jacques Audiard: “I wanted to give migrants a name, a shape … a violence of their own” ’, Guardian, available at www.theguardian.com/​film/​2016/​apr/​03/​jacques-​audiard-​ interview-​dheepan-​prophet-​rust-​done-​director (accessed 2 April 2019).

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Rouyer, P. (1994), ‘Regarde les hommes tomber’, Positif, 401–​2 (July–​August), 77. Rouyer, P., and Y. Tobin (2012), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: Qu’est-​ ce que le discours amoureux aujourd’hui’, Positif, 616 (June), 9–​14. Rouyer, P., and Y. Tobin (2015), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: A la hauteur des personnages, pas plus haut’, Positif, 655 (September), 9–​13. Rouyer, P., and C. Vassé (2005), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: Et si tuer quelqu’un au cinéma, c’était difficile?’, Positif, 529 (March), 21–​5. Schaller, N. (2020), ‘Un prophète, le film qui révéla Tahar Rahim’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 January, available at www.nouvelobs. com/​ce-​soir-​a-​la-​tv/​20200125.OBS23946/​un-​prophete-​le-​film-​ qui-​revela-​tahar-​rahim.html (accessed 25 January 2020). Scorsese, M. (1990), Goodfellas, Los Angeles, Warner Bros. Spicer, A. (2002), Film Noir, New York, Longman/​Pearson. Tarantino, Q. (1994), Pulp Fiction, Los Angeles, Miramax. Triboit, P. (2007), La Commune, Paris, Canal+. Vachaud, L. (1994), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: Du côté du cinéma’, Positif, 403 (September), 36–​40. Vanderschelden, I. (2009), ‘The “Cinéma du milieu” Is Falling Down: New Challenges for Auteur and Independent French Cinema in the 2000s’, Studies in French Cinema, 9:3, 243–​57. Vanderschelden, I. (2016), ‘Screenwriting the Euro-​Noir Thriller: The Subtext of Jacques Audiard’s Artistic Signature’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 248–​61. Vincendeau, G. (2009), ‘Within a Closed World’, Sight and Sound, 19:11, 20. White, T. (1982), Triangle, New York, Ace Books. Wilson, B. (2010), ‘Film Review: A Prophet (Un Prophète)’, Trespass Magazine, 10 February, available at www.trespassmag.com/​film-​ review-​a-​prophet-​un-​prophete/​ (accessed 2 April 2019).

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Globe: national borders Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters

Jacques Audiard a toujours aimé aborder la tension entre la marge et la norme, l’exclusion et le désir d’appartenance. Avec Dheepan, il va plus loin que jamais dans cette recherche en s’intéressant à des personnages qui sont aussi étrangers que possible à la France.  (Nuttens, 2015: 7)1

At the Festival International du Film de Cannes in May 2015, Jacques Audiard received the Palme d’Or for his seventh feature film, Dheepan. In his acceptance speech, he playfully thanked Austrian director Michael Haneke for not making a film that year (Audiard had been considered a favourite on two previous occasions, for Un prophète in 2009 and De rouille et d’os in 2012, but had lost to Haneke both times, for Das weiβe Band (The White Ribbon (Haneke, 2009)) and Amour (Haneke, 2012) respectively.) Responses to the win were mixed. There was a general consensus that Audiard had long deserved recognition in Cannes’s top category for his work. Yet by comparison with films such as De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, De rouille et d’os and especially Un prophète, many felt that Dheepan was not Audiard’s most 1 ‘Jacques Audiard has always enjoyed broaching the tension between margin and norm, exclusion and desire to belong. With Dheepan, he goes further down this road than ever before by taking an interest in characters who are as foreign as possible to France.’

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deserving film. Jacques Mandelbaum wrote in Le Monde, ‘La récompense cannoise n’a sans doute pas distingué le meilleur moment de sa filmographie’ (Mandelbaum, 2015).2 Peter Bradshaw explained in the Guardian, ‘The Cannes jury caught everyone by surprise last summer by giving the Palme d’Or to Dheepan; it looked like more of a career tribute to Audiard, more or less confirming him as the Jean-​Pierre Melville of his day, the prince of French cinema’ (Bradshaw, 2016). Numerous critics found fault with the film’s uneven pace, its brutal representation of the Parisian banlieue, the excessive violence of its third act, the jarring shift in tone of its fairytale coda (Malausa, 2015; Vincendeau, 2016). Audiard’s broader reputation as an auteur was not called into question, but for many, Dheepan fell short in comparison with his preceding films. Olivier de Bruyn summed up the film’s reception and the significance of the ‘unexpected’ Palme d’Or: Malgré les réserves mineures que peut susciter ce retour en terrain connu (parfois emphatique) et un épilogue discutable (l’Angleterre serait-​elle à ce point un havre de paix pour les damnés de la terre?), Dheepan impose sa puissance thématique et formelle hors norme et confirme la place éminente de Jacques Audiard dans le cinéma français. (De Bruyn, 2015: 81)3

In these debates, despite the film’s obvious connections with Audiard’s previous work, Dheepan was set apart from his earlier films. When his eighth feature, Les Frères Sisters, was released in 2018, the narrative of the rupture with what Audiard had done before continued. Reviews were generally more favourable to the later film, which fared well at 2 ‘The Cannes award surely doesn’t highlight the finest moment in his filmography.’ 3 ‘Despite the minor reservations that this return to (sometimes emphatically) familiar territory could evoke, and despite a questionable epilogue (is England now a safe haven for the wretched of the earth?), Dheepan imposes its unusual thematic and formal power and confirms Jacques Audiard’s eminent place in French cinema.’

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the Césars (including a win for Best Director), but Les Frères Sisters did not make anywhere near the same mark on the international circuit. In several circles, Les Frères Sisters was met with confusion. By comparison with Audiard’s well-​ established suite of crime thrillers mostly set in contemporary Paris, the film did indeed feel like a rupture in genre, theme, style and setting. Though in many ways very different from one another, Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters appeared to represent a joint departure from the nationally bounded –​if multicultural and multilingual –​cinema of Audiard’s earlier career, and a new transnational chapter in his oeuvre. The notion of ‘French cinema’ as an inseparable product of ‘France’ is a powerful one, connected as much with the practical realities of French film production as with the influence of the cultural imaginary. And in many ways, Jacques Audiard as a filmmaker and his cinema as a body of work are particularly strongly connected with traditional ideas of French national cinema. Audiard is widely accepted by the most important French institutions. His films regularly receive CNC funding through the Avance sur recettes scheme, which provides seed funding for new projects sourced from national box office takings. Each of his films has been nominated in several categories at the Césars (a total of sixty-​nine nominations), with most winning in several categories (thirty-​one wins in total, including five in the two most prestigious categories: three for Best Director (De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Un prophète and Les Frères Sisters) and two for Best Film (De battre and Un prophète); see Appendix 3 (pp. 166–71) for details). Indeed, not only is Un prophète the third most awarded film of all time at the Césars, but Jacques Audiard is the most awarded individual, with ten wins in total across the categories of Best Director, Best Film, Best First Film and Best Screenplay. He has received both the Prix Louis Delluc (De battre, Un prophète) and the Prix Jacques Deray (De battre), two smaller but nonetheless prestigious prizes open to French films. Likewise, his films have received thirty-​five nominations at Cannes, with wins in the

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prestigious Grand Prix (Un prophète) and Prix du scénario (Un héros très discret) categories, as well as the coveted Palme d’Or (Dheepan). (Of course, Cannes is an international film festival, yet its location on the Côte d’Azur and its reputation as a haven for independent and arthouse filmmaking (by contrast with anglophone awards ceremonies such as the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, and more so than rival festivals such as Berlin, Toronto and Venice) both feed into and build upon the popular image of an artistic, cinephilic France.) The majority of Audiard’s films are primarily French productions, with all but Les Frères Sisters featuring French settings, dialogue and actors. All his films since De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté have been produced (either solely or in co-​production) with the Paris-​based Why Not Productions. Audiard’s films also occupy an important position in French film criticism. Each of his films is routinely reviewed in national newspapers including Le Monde, Le Nouvel Observateur, Libération, Le Figaro, and major online film publications such as Télérama, Première and Les Inrockuptibles. Finally, his cinema is the frequent object of study in French film revues such as Cahiers du cinéma, Positif, 24 images and Ciné-​Bulles (though of the two most mythic revues, Positif has been far kinder to his work than Cahiers). Audiard is also a prominent member of the French (and particularly Parisian) cinephilic community, evidenced by his long-​term working relationships with French crew members, stars, publications, production companies and film groups, as outlined in the introduction (pp. 10–15). But perhaps most importantly for this book in particular is the fact that Audiard’s films are very often about France. His first three films in particular, Regarde les hommes tomber, Un héros très discret and Sur mes lèvres, which were all produced in France, are set in Paris and have monolingual French dialogue, represent hostility, stratification and deception as rife in urban French society. Un héros très discret in particular exposes myths of nationhood and undoes the narratives

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that emerged in post-​Second World War France around the Resistance and French civic fraternity. De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Regarde les hommes tomber, Un prophète and Sur mes lèvres expose the class divides, ableism, power relations and economic pressures that drive social marginalisation and criminality in the Paris of the turn of the twenty-​ first century. Un prophète and Dheepan, which shift between central Parisian and banlieue spaces, explore the experience of first-​generation immigrants and second-​or third-​generation French people of migrant backgrounds, as they navigate a contemporary France in which racism and discrimination have far from disappeared. For all these reasons, Jacques Audiard is often defined as a quintessentially ‘French’ director, operating within a national system that he both arises from and contributes to, and a culture that he attempts to represent. The central French elements of Audiard’s cinema should not be underestimated, and the influence of the national filmmaking system on his films and identity should not be neglected. And yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to fit Audiard’s cinema neatly, solely or even primarily into the frame of national French cinema. Since 2005, his films have featured dialogue, cast, crew, co-​production partners, source texts, filming locations and funding sources of diverse origins, to such an extent that the label of ‘French film’ becomes difficult to apply unironically to a film such as Les Frères Sisters. Whether they depict urban France or rural America, in their transnationality, multilinguality and perpetual border-​ crossing, Audiard’s films cannot be contained within the limits of the national frame. Since the turn of the twenty-​first century, the scholarly framework of national cinemas, once such a given for French cinema studies in particular (Hjort and MacKenzie, 2000; Higson, 1989, 2000) has been progressively eroded to make way for transnational perspectives. Transnational cinema encompasses diverse filmmaking traditions across the world that represent and are produced in spaces both within, across

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and beyond traditional borders. During Jacques Audiard’s directorial career, protectionist production policies and dominant narratives about French national cinema have increasingly given way to transnational filmmaking practices, flourishing co-​ production agreements, government-​ funded grants for multilingual and multinational projects, and the rise of transnational cinema studies as a scholarly field. In their foundational 2006 text Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden posit the transnational as a lens through which to analyse the growing corpus of films whose interaction with space, place and identity both draws upon and extends beyond the limits of the national frame. For Ezra and Rowden, ‘in its simplest guise, the transnational can be understood as the global forces that link people or institutions across nations’ (Ezra and Terry, 2006: 1). They elaborate in the introduction: Key to transnationalism is the recognition of the decline of national sovereignty as a regulatory force in global coexistence. The impossibility of assigning a fixed national identity to much cinema reflects the dissolution of any stable connection between a film’s place of production and/​or setting and the nationality of its makers and performers … The concept of transnationalism enables us to better understand the changing ways in which the contemporary world is being imagined by an increasing number of filmmakers across genres as a global system rather than as a collection of more or less autonomous nations. (1)

Audiard’s cinema, like transnational cinema more broadly, is both inward-​and outlook-​looking, both culturally situated and unmoored from monolithic conceptions of Frenchness. As I have argued elsewhere, Audiard’s oeuvre is both ‘French’ in the most traditional senses, and transnational in the most radical ones: it is decentred, multicultural, translingual (King, 2018), unanchored (King, 2016). Indeed, perhaps the most useful term for describing Audiard’s cinema is a newer one

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coined by Bill Marshall in 2012 and born of the debates surrounding the 2007 Littérature-​monde manifesto (Barbery et al., 2007; Le Bris, Rouaud and Almassy, 2007): cinéma-​ monde. This term situates film in a francophone linguistic and historical context, without drawing on a rigid definition of national cinema boundaries. Marshall’s term is an inclusive one that rejects hierarchical and conflicting categorisations of a central metropolitan ‘France’ vs a peripheral ‘Francophonie’. Instead, cinéma-​monde ‘dramatically focuses attention on four elements: borders, movement, language, and lateral connections’ (Marshall, 2012: 42) and promotes a non-​ Eurocentric approach to cinema, asking ‘What might happen if a decentred view of Francophone Cinema were to emerge? [And] to what extent … can so-​ called “French national cinema” be “francophonised”, or made minoritarian, by this approach?’ (35). Thus cinéma-​monde is at once informed by the Francosphere as a critical frame, and transnational in its scope. Though based for the most part in the Parisian banlieue, Dheepan is also set in Sri Lanka and the UK, with Sri Lankan protagonists and half of its dialogue in Tamil. Conversely, Les Frères Sisters, a co-​production with Belgium, Romania, Spain and the USA, is set entirely in the American Wild West, with an anglophone cast including Hollywood stars and monolingual dialogue in English. And yet both Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters have been widely accepted as ‘French’ by the institutions that regulate French film nationality. These films would appear to pose a conundrum for definitions of French cinema, or even to undermine the label entirely. Yet this chapter argues that despite their surface differences, Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters do not actually represent a rupture in Audiard’s oeuvre at all. For these films are radical evidence of a border-​crossing impulse that has been at the heart of Audiard’s cinema since the outset. The chapter expands the scope of Audiard’s barrier-​breaking cinema out from the intimate (Body) and the social (Society) to examine grander

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questions of movement across geocultural borders (Globe). In their portrayal of characters of varied cultural origins who make diverse journeys across transnational space, Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters allow us to ask profound questions about nation, culture and identity that have defined Audiard’s cinema since the earliest stages of his career. As these two most recent films show, Audiard can reasonably be considered both a transnational filmmaker, constantly crossing national borders to create films in multilingual, multinational, globalised contexts, and a classical French auteur, working and recognised within the bounds of French national cinema. With these shifting concepts of national cinemas, transnational cinemas and the more inclusive francophone concept of cinéma-​monde in mind, this chapter uses its analysis of the transcultural, border-​crossing Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters to locate Audiard as a figure occupying a paradoxical space equally at the centre of the French national filmmaking space, on its margins, and somewhere far beyond it.

The eternal border space: Dheepan I wanted to give migrants a name, a shape … a violence of their own. (Audiard in Romney (2016))

Out of an inky darkness, blue and red lights flash on and off. Distant and blurry, bobbing in the blackness, they could be the lights of a distant boat. This, perhaps, is what the viewer presumes, as in the preceding scene we have watched our protagonists step off the Sri Lankan shore and onto a boat carrying undocumented migrants to India. These could be the lights of a border-​police vehicle, the migrant boat itself viewed from afar, or the first signs of the approaching shore. This, after all, is an illicit journey undertaken in the dead of night. But as the lights bob closer, the colours begin to take on an unexpected and discombobulating shape, those of oversized

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novelty bows. As the objects emerge from the darkness, we realise these bows are being worn on the heads of those unregulated souvenir vendors, so frequently undocumented migrants with few alternatives for work, who hawk their wares near tourist sites around Paris. One of these is our protagonist, Dheepan, whose face materialises in the foreground, framed by his blue flashing bow, the film’s title appearing in silence over his grave expression. Thus our protagonist’s perilous journey across the world occurs in a split second, in the shift from one nighttime scene to another (Figure 3.1). The dimly lit boat on the Sri Lankan shore and the gaudy toys on the Paris streets are worlds apart; in a matter of seconds we have travelled from war zone to tourist zone on the other side of the globe. This jump folds space and time, as flashing lights transport us in a moment from one continent to another, leaving us disoriented and transplanted into the heart of the French nation. Yet these two scenes have more than the visual in common: each follows undocumented migrants in a dangerous nighttime venture, committing a desperate, so-​called illegal act to survive on the margins. Indeed, in the following scene, as Dheepan shows a plastic, bubble-​blowing clown fish to street-​side diners, one of his fellow vendors notices police running towards them. The men take off on

Figure 3.1  Flashing lights, Dheepan, 00:06:40

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foot, dropping balls and gadgets in their panic, leaping the fence of a park and hiding in the bushes as the police stalk by. In this moment, we understand that in Dheepan, space, time and territory collapse in on themselves. For the film’s migrant characters, the border is at once everywhere and nowhere, and it is constantly policed. Set in the later years of the Sri Lankan civil war, in the 2010s, Dheepan tells the tale of three strangers –​a man, a woman and a girl –​who pose as a deceased family whose passports the man has bought, to escape Sri Lanka and seek asylum in France. In reality, beyond the facts that the man was a notorious high-​ranking Tiger fighter and that all three have lost their entire family, we know very little about the past lives of these characters, whom we will know only by their assumed names, Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan), Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby). The film follows this improvised family unit as they attempt to create a new life in Le Pré, a bleak habitation à loyer modéré (HLM), or low-​income housing project, outside Paris. The new family makes strides to integrate into this new world: Dheepan takes on a job as his building’s gardien, cleaning and handling the residents’ mail; Illayaal attends school, where she makes friends and learns French quicker than her new parents; and Yalini takes on a part-​time job cooking and cleaning for the invalid father of a powerful local drug dealer, Brahim (Vincent Rottiers). But as the protagonists begin to make social, linguistic and economic advances in the HLM, and as they slowly learn to view one another as family (an even more difficult task), their temporary peace is shattered. Brahim’s exit from prison disrupts the local gang system and the family are caught in the crossfire as the cité descends into gunshots, turf wars and murder. Ultimately, Dheepan will need to return to his abandoned warrior role to save his new family, who will then escape to sanctuary in England.

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Though few would suspect it just from viewing the film, Dheepan is based loosely on Montesquieu’s (1721) Lettres persanes, an enlightenment novel in which two wealthy Persian men leave their families behind to travel to France and learn about European society. The novel and film share the vague narrative arc of ‘eastern’ migrants in metropolitan France whose attempts to integrate despite their outsider status expose the particularities and ironies of French society as viewed from a foreign perspective. But the original tale is barely recognisable beyond these links. In fact, in its story of a family man who attempts to settle in a foreign village and must meet his new adversaries with violence to protect his wife, Dheepan has more in common with the other text Audiard had in mind while writing the film, Sam Peckinpah’s (1971) Straw Dogs (Jauffret, 2015). Lettres persanes (Persians in Paris in the 1720s), Straw Dogs (an American and a Briton in England in the 1970s) and Dheepan (Sri Lankans in the Paris banlieue in the 2000s) share almost nothing in common in terms of setting, character origins, style or era. Yet all three culminate in a catastrophic penultimate act in which the patriarch’s wife is threatened and his home destroyed, stirring him to righteous violence against the threat of other men. Indeed, the most famous line from Straw Dogs, uttered by Dustin Hoffman’s protagonist, David, is particularly resonant for Dheepan: ‘This is where I live. This is me. I will not allow violence against this house.’ In its focus on marginalised, multilingual figures struggling to carve out a place in the Hexagon, its substitutive family relations, and its critique of discrimination and violence in contemporary French society, Dheepan has much in common with earlier Audiard films. And like the rest of Audiard’s oeuvre, the film received a range of critical praise. Télérama described it as ‘un tour de force tout en douceur’ (2015),4 4 ‘a tour de force rendered gently’.

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Première as ‘une fable douloureuse et puissante’ (Arrighi de Casanova, 2015)5 and Le Nouvel Observateur as a film ‘qui est bien plus qu’un drame social et qui a toute la force cinématographique dont sait faire preuve le réalisateur … Jacques Audiard est à son meilleur’ (Faisant, 2015).6 Though it fared far less well with the French box office than Audiard’s previous film (548,616 entries, compared to De rouille et d’os’s 1.8 million), and though it won no Césars, it was nonetheless nominated for nine awards at the 2016 ceremony, including Best French Film of the Year and Best Director, plus the BAFTA Best Non-​Anglophone Film. But Dheepan’s greatest success was at Cannes, where it was nominated in eight categories, receiving the highest award of the Palme d’Or. And in part, it is perhaps because it was the film that finally earned Audiard the coveted Palme, raising it on a pedestal as the director’s finest and inviting judgement accordingly, that the film has also received the most critical ire of any of his films. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the film was perceived to suffer from a number of faults in terms of stylistic inconsistencies, shifts in pace and its implausible coda –​so different from the violent penultimate act that precedes it –​in which the trio find themselves happy and secure in a dreamlike suburban London sequence, replete with a young baby to signify their status as a true family and their ability to start anew. However, one of the most problematic questions around the film was the authenticity of its representation of Tamil migrants. Most takes on the film see Dheepan as a story about immigration, about immigrants, and especially about the experience of Tamil migrants leaving Sri Lanka. But this is not an entirely accurate description of the film’s central concerns, 5 ‘a distressing and powerful fable’. 6 ‘that is far more than a social drama and that has all the cinematographic force that the director knows how to display … Jacques Audiard is at his best.’

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at least of the project’s original roots. Audiard did not start from a place of curiosity about the Tamil language and culture or the effects of the Sri Lankan civil war on its citizens. Instead, Audiard started sketching out the characters based on the fact that they would be immigrants, specifically ones who did not speak French, so that they would encounter a language barrier in France. Thus, his initial aim was not for Dheepan’s protagonists to be Tamil, but for them to be foreign. He explained: Intervieweur:  Ce n’est pas la première fois que vous dirigez dans une langue qui n’est pas la vôtre … Audiard:  Ca ne me pose aucun problème. Sur la question des intonations, de la justesse de la voix, [pour Les Frères Sisters] j’avais auprès de moi une assistante qui avait la pratique des différents accents américains. Sur Dheepan, j’avais déjà quelqu’un qui me garantissait le sens et l’intention, c’était plus compliqué avec une langue dont je ne comprenais strictement rien. Mais je pouvais toujours demander à mes acteurs de parler plus bas ou de positionner autrement leur voix. S’ils forçaient, je le sentais tout de suite. (Rouyer and Tobin, 2018: 11)7 This is not to say that Dheepan lacks cultural authenticity entirely: the actors are indeed native Tamil speakers (though Kalieaswari Srinivasan is from India and Claudine

7 Interviewer:  ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve directed in a language that isn’t your own …’ Audiard: ‘That isn’t a problem for me at all. On the question of intonations, vocal accuracy, [for The Sisters Brothers] I had an assistant with me who was familiar with various American accents. For Dheepan, I already had someone who assured me on meaning and intention; it was more complicated with a language I didn’t understand at all. But I could always ask my actors to speak more quietly or to position their voice differently. If they were forcing it, I could tell right away’.

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Vinasithamby is from France, and the film’s main Arab character is played by a white actor [Rottiers]). As mentioned in the above quote, Audiard also employed a native Tamil-​ speaking consultant to advise on the script and filming process. Yet though Audiard confessed he had ‘no idea’ how Tamil viewers would receive the film, revealing that, despite the large proportion of Tamil dialogue, the film is not really intended for a Tamil audience, he did witness some laughing at inappropriate moments during one screening: ‘There was a large Tamil presence when the film screened at the Toronto film festival, and people were cracking up over certain lines. He’s still not sure why’ (Romney, 2016). The aspecificity of Audiard’s choice of Tamil protagonists also extends to his representation of Sri Lankan territory. Though the film begins in Sri Lanka, and sequences of a Sri Lankan elephant appear at several seemingly random moments throughout the film, Dheepan’s rendering of Sri Lankan culture and space is notably vague. There is very little plot in the Sri Lanka passages, beyond Yalini’s selecting the orphaned Illayaal to be her ‘daughter’ almost at random. This scene plays out mostly in frenzied close-​up as we follow Yalini with a hand-​held camera through a crowded, sandy camp. There are no wide shots to situate Yalini and Illayaal in space and orient the viewer. There is not even a moment to take a breath and catch our bearings –​only movement, disorientation and anonymity. There is barely a second in which the young woman and girl make eye contact with one another, let alone look into the camera. Once Yalini has found Illayaal, we watch them leave the camp, the woman holding the confused girl by the wrist, from a camera angle fixed not on their faces, but on their stomachs. They could be anybody. The unmoored, unrecognisable rendering of space and movement described at the start of this section, in which the darkness of the shore at night blends into the blue and red lights of an unknown place, follows soon after. In her first-​ person review of the film for Film Quarterly, Amelie Hastie

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writes of the elephant sequences, and of the sense of detachment from recognisable space and time that they evoke: It is with this moment that I lose all sense of time: I enter a state of the duration of the present. Leaves and branches bow softly in the wind until a creature appears pushing them aside. Here is the trunk of an elephant, its face, its ears. Even in extreme close-​up, this beast is unmistakable. The sight of it touches me, penetrates me. In this instant, I believe I could remain in this state forever; in a mutual act of witnessing, this giant beast and I lock eyes, barely blinking. (Hastie, 2016: 101)

The anonymity of space then extends to the characters themselves: they do not truly know each other, we do not truly know them, and they will traverse the entire film under false identities. From the outset, then, these figures are a blank slate not only to us, but to one another. The other Sri Lanka-​set shots reflect this even more than the disorienting crowd scene. Filmed in close-​up once again, we see two other images in Sri Lanka. The first is of Dheepan, standing silent and alone, as he watches bodies (presumably those of relatives, friends or fellow soldiers) burn on a bonfire. Later, when the family is in France, a haunting image of an elephant peering through leaves will appear on the screen. In both cases, the camera positions itself once again in close-​up, the frame filled with the figure surrounded by an anonymous natural substance: the elephant surrounded by leaves, Dheepan surrounded by flames. Each sequence is shot in a shimmery light, with blurred edges and an oneiric tone, as though the figure floats through nature, space and time. (This same dreamlike sheen returns, albeit in a more whimsical guise, in the final sequence set in London, in which the film’s happy ending is drenched in sun.) These shots are beautiful and meditative, but they are also transcendent of time, disconnected from earthly space. By contrast with Le Pré, which we see the characters approach on foot in a wide shot filmed from a bird’s-​eye view, the Sri Lankan space is vaguely exotic, unmapped, detached from the mapped

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spatial reality of the French banlieue. The contrast between the ethereal exotic spaces of the country they have left behind and the specific, navigable French space in which they have arrived is evident throughout. But perhaps even more widespread than the criticism of the film’s Tamil authenticity is that of its bleak representation of the French banlieue. In Dheepan, the banlieue is dilapidated, bullet-​ riddled and seemingly abandoned by law enforcement. Its domestic spaces become drug dens, its well-​meaning neighbours (of which Marc Zinga’s welcoming Youssouf is the finest example) are eclipsed by its hostile ones. The film’s dangerous image of the banlieue is exaggerated; in one scene, as Yalini and Dheepan peer through the frame of their kitchen window onto gangsters celebrating Brahim’s prison release with gunshots, Yalini remarks in Tamil ‘It’s like being at the cinema.’ Camille Bui even starts her favourable review of Dheepan by acknowledging the critical ones published in her own magazine that had preceded it: ‘On a reproché dans ces pages à Jacques Audiard de donner à voir la banlieue comme un territoire en guerre civile, de succomber au schématisme et à la stylisation, et de faire de “problèmes de société” un décor fantasmé pour un film de genre à l’américaine’ (Bui, 2015: 80).8 The film was shot in Poissy-​La Coudraie, 25 km northeast of Paris, which residents have described as ‘beaucoup dégradé’ but ‘très calme’ (Marlier, 2015).9 Importantly, Audiard has dismissed the suggestion that his portrayal of the banlieue is or should be based in reality, saying in L’Humanité, ‘La banlieue, je m’en sers comme d’un décor. C’est tout’ (Jauffret, 2015).10 But for several reviewers and scholars (Salmon, 2016; 8 ‘In these pages, we have reproached Jacques Audiard for showing the banlieue as a territory in civil war, for succumbing to schematism and stylisation, and for turning “societal problems” into a fantasy setting to make an American-​style genre film.’ 9 ‘very run-​down’ but ‘very quiet’. 10 ‘I use the banlieue as a setting. That’s all.’

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Malausa, 2015; Chevalier, 2016), the linking of banlieue violence and non-​white communities, which we first saw in Un prophète but which is more broadly generalised in Dheepan, is dangerous: La banlieue est finalement nettoyée au karcher, ou, plutôt purifiée par le feu, actualisant le projet énoncé par Sarkozy en 2005. Dheepan sera pour cette raison l’objet d’indignation de la part des critiques. La représentation irresponsable et simpliste (sans nuance politique, religieuse, sexuelle) légalise le seul recours à la violence. (Chevalier, 2016: 416)11

These criticisms are valid and important takes on the film, and on Audiard’s cinema more broadly. However, without neglecting the significance of these concerns, in this section I wish to tease out some of the more original and complex elements of the film that have been lost in the focus on these issues. The decision to film all of the protagonists’ dialogue amongst themselves (and therefore a considerable proportion of the film’s dialogue in total) in Tamil is a major and even political one that diversifies and decentres the French peri-​urban and domestic space. And yet the aspecificity of the characters’ cultural background, the almost random choice of Tamil migrants over those of any other non-​francophone origin and the reviews undermining the film’s attempt to render Tamil dialogue authentically, suggest that ultimately Dheepan is not for Tamil audiences, but for French ones. And Dheepan is not really about migrants from Sri Lanka, but about migrants in France. More specifically, the film’s ultimate focus is exposing French myths: myths about France as a nation, about the French language, about Frenchness. 11 ‘The banlieue is ultimately pressure-​washed, or rather, purified by fire, updating the project announced by Sarkozy in 2005. For this reason, Dheepan will be the object of indignation among critics. The simplistic and irresponsible representation (without sexual, religious or political nuance) sanctions the resort to violence.’

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An important myth about contemporary France that Dheepan undermines is that of the nation (or the European continent) as fortress. For rather than a sealed nation state that can be externally fortified and internally controlled, the France we see in Dheepan is a fundamentally porous, scattered and hybrid space. In this film, French territory is not so much surrounded by hard borders, as it is an eternal borderland in itself. We never see Dheepan, Yalini and Illayaal cross the French border. We do not see them arrive, except on the Réseau Express Régional (RER) train from Paris, and we don’t even see them leave. The first time we see the three of them in France, they are already in Paris, in the immigration office where their request for asylum is granted (see the opening of the introduction of King (2017: 1–​2) for an analysis of the multilingualism of this key scene). The vast majority of the time, we are with them in the Parisian banlieue, which has always been a peripheral, transcultural space, but which is geographically located within the centre of the Hexagon. And yet, for the entirety of the film, France is represented as a border space. This culminates in the scene in which Dheepan, fed up with the gang’s violence encroaching on the peaceful domestic space of his family and neighbours, fills a wheelbarrow with chalk powder and draws a ‘border’ between the gang’s building and his own (Figure 3.2). Dheepan has survived so far by drawing uncrossable lines: between past and present, between violent warrior and peaceful gardien, between his true identity and his assumed one. Here he draws a line between the gangsters’ territory and that of the HLM’s law-​abiding residents, as a means of protecting the latter. When they behold the gardien’s line, the gangsters are furious. Tensions quickly escalate, and Yalini soon finds herself trapped in Brahim’s apartment and threatened with a gun. In response, the ultimate line must be crossed: Dheepan must revert back to his buried warrior persona, and when he must kill several people to save Yalini, they and Illayaal must once

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Figure 3.2  Dheepan’s improvised border, Dheepan, 01:23:02

again flee across national borders, this time to the UK. From Dheepan’s attempt to impose a border on the banlieue space, only violence can arise. For this is not how space operates in Dheepan; it cannot be neatly delineated. Instead, territory is fluid, space is collapsed, borders are traversed and attempts to carve up the earth result in chaos. The vast majority of the film is set in Le Pré. Yet Dheepan is a film without a centre. In contrast to the French filmmaking tradition of le cinéma de banlieue, which invariably features migrant characters who have travelled from their country of origin to settle in France, Dheepan’s characters have found themselves in France almost at random, and they will not remain there. Accordingly, though they all strive to learn French (with varying success) they cannot –​and indeed, do not need to –​perfect it, for it only serves a passing importance in their lives. I have described this phenomenon as the pays and langue de passage, which ‘describes the experience of learning and speaking a Western European language for moving figures whose international journey is not yet complete at the time when the film is set’ (King, 2018: 42). The pays de passage is not a final destination but an in-​between space, the langue de passage not a permanently valuable lingua franca but a language that is picked up and put down, on the broader journey from one territory to another, via others.

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This phenomenon, increasingly present in French films about migration, decentres metropolitan France from the position it has historically played in such films: from a nuclear position as ontological centre, ‘a destination all such migrants inevitably wish to reach’ (King, 2018: 41), to an ephemeral space to be traversed in pursuit of an end point located somewhere else. This decentring is foreshadowed in the geographic and cultural positioning of the banlieue in relation to the French cultural centre. On a map, Le Pré is located in the centre of the Hexagon, easily accessed by train from Paris. But Ginette Vincendeau explains how, like so many banlieue-​based films before it, Dheepan positions the cité space on a physical and metaphorical periphery: ‘Le Pré is on the edge of vast fields but, rather than promoting closeness to nature, the location simply enhances the sense of isolation; the unfolding scenes on the estate will confirm this sense of living apart from the mainstream of French society’ (Vincendeau, 2016: 60). Thus in Dheepan space is collapsed, one space is elided with another, one time is haunted by another: just as the bobbing boat in Sri Lanka blends into the red and blue lights in France, just as the elephant sequences blend into the banlieue sequences, as the HLM becomes increasingly controlled by rival gangs and gunshots begin to ring out across the courtyard, the place of refuge the protagonists have sought in France blends into the war zone they have left behind. This collapsed space is a layered contact zone defined by the constant crossing of cultural, physical and linguistic boundaries. The characters occupy a precarious bridging position, eternally perched on the borderline between territories that threaten to collapse in on themselves. All three characters occupy this bridging position, though the fine line between cultural worlds is most obvious in Illayaal’s case. Illayaal occupies a culturally hybrid position between her home life with Sri Lankan ‘parents’ and public life as a student in the French school system, a role that gives her greater access than Dheepan and Yalini to the

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French language and mainstream French cultural norms. As a result of her schooling and her aptitude for language, she also takes on the mediating role of interpreter for Dheepan and Yalini. Illayaal’s role as linguistic bridge confers great responsibility, but also affirms her relative assimilation. It keeps Dheepan and Yalini, however, on the outside, both in how they are empowered to act within their new society and how they are seen by ‘insider’ members of it. This is an example of what Mireille Rosello describes as the representation of ‘immigrants’ children as “mediators” between “us” and “them” (rather than, for example, as part of “us”), [whereby] the parents will continue to be seen as newcomers’ (Rosello, 2001: 91). However, Illayaal is not the only one who occupies a liminal position on the border between multiple identities, spaces and cultures. Dheepan finds himself in constant negotiation between war and peace, past and present, gardien and soldier. And Yalini, through the job she takes on caring for the father of the gang’s leader, constantly walks the line between integrated and isolated, public and private, protected and endangered. Throughout all this, the improvised family unit is slowly attempting to cross over into a real family, suspended on a bridge between their former lives, country, language and identities, and the next. In Dheepan, we learn in a dozen different ways that it is impossible to draw a line between one state and another. Sri Lanka haunts the film as though in a dream; the UK looms as a fantasy in the harsh reality of the French setting. Elephants emerge onscreen following images of suburban Paris. Banlieue turf wars force the protagonists to duck for cover from gunshots, something they learned to do in their former lives in a war zone. The protagonist spends most of the film shedding his original identity, rejecting calls to participate in the Tiger cause from France, only gazing upon the one photograph he has of his original family in private, at night, behind a gold foil frame with a window he has constructed to

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protect it, throwing himself into his new role as a caretaker (until, of course, he snaps and returns in a moment to his formidable warrior self). The film exposes the impossibility of the myth of Fortress Europe, closed off from the influence of the rest of the globalised world: it exposes the fallibility of hard borders, the permeability of space and time, the fallacy of xenophobic narratives about sealing off the national spaces from unwanted immigrants, and the violence within. Tim Bergfelder has written about how traditional forms of ‘European art’ or auteur cinema have failed to respond to the multicultural evolution of so many European cultures in the age of postcolonial globalisation: In its most extreme form, European art cinema can be seen to support a cultural and ethnic ‘fortress Europe’, and as such has become the target for postcolonial critique. A particularly acute problem for the traditional concept of European art cinema has become how contemporary Europe’s multicultural diversity within and across national boundaries can be represented through a framework which is so strongly rooted in Western aesthetic traditions and cultural norms. (Bergfelder, 2005: 317)

And yet despite its criticisms, films such as Dheepan appear to offer a response to these changes, an opening up of the traditional nation state that re-​envisions borders, movement and culture in more dynamic, complex and responsive ways. As Will Higbee writes of contemporary transcultural cinema of this kind, At a moment in time when the very idea of Europe as geopolitical entity, ideological project, cultural identity, liberal democracy, and common market is being simultaneously defended and redefined, protected and rejected, European cinema has emerged as one of the crucial sites of cultural and political engagement and a sphere in which concerns about immigration, neoliberal globalization, and national and transnational identity formation are expressed, imagined, and contested. (Higbee, 2014: 28)

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This blending, overlapping, elision and erasure of the lines between different territories paints a powerful picture of the contemporary French space. Thus, Dheepan is not without its faults and responsibilities, for which it has been rightly held to account. Yet the film also provides a nuanced picture of a contemporary France in which migration occurs in myriad directions; borders are erased, enacted and redrawn; and the distance between spaces is bridged, collapsed and even effaced.

New territory: Les Frères Sisters Through the hills and newly built towns of 1850s Oregon, the brutal contract killers Charlie and Eli Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly) pursue an enigmatic gold miner, Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed). Though the pensive and reluctant Eli is the older brother, the pair’s true leader is the brutish Charlie, whose violent and alcoholic tendencies mirror those of the father he killed in adolescence. Their target, Warm, has created a chemical solution that causes the gold concealed in a river bed to glow, and the formidable millionaire known only as the Commodore has hired dapper scout John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) to locate Warm, and the Sisters brothers to kill him –​after having extracted the formula by torture. However, Morris and the Sisters brothers have not accounted for Warm’s charismatic, trusting nature, and when they each finally encounter him they are quickly turned to his cause, abandoning the menacing Commodore to build themselves an honest, simpler life. Audiard’s latest film, Les Frères Sisters, or The Sisters Brothers, has many elements in common with Dheepan. The script is in a language Audiard does not speak, the principal actors are not of French origin and the narrative revolves around the protagonists’ constant movement across foreign

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territories, dodging violent threats in pursuit of a better life. Both feature touching –​if unlikely –​happy endings as the protagonists find the possibility of a peaceful family home that has long felt out of reach. But while Sisters has much in common with Audiard’s previous film, upon closer inspection it is perhaps more germane to his first. For Regarde les hommes tomber and Les Frères Sisters are both defined by hybrid genre, frustrated encounters and ambiguous male relationships. Much like the central relationships in Regarde, the relationship between Hermann and John in Sisters is only vocalised as that of friends and business partners, but their deep connection, protectiveness and affection hint at a romantic bond. Much like Marx, who for Johnny oscillates between the murky roles of father, friend, partner and possibly lover, at various points throughout Sisters Charlie acts as Eli’s boss, child (following the amputation of Charlie’s hand), partner and even paternal figure. And in echoes of Johnny’s sexual ambiguity in Regarde, Sisters includes Audiard’s first gender-​ambiguous character, Mayfield, the powerful mayor of an eponymous town through which the brothers pass. In the source novel by Patrick DeWitt (2011) Mayfield is a cis-​gender man, but in the film the menacing rival is played as feminine-​ presenting by trans actress Rebecca Root. Unsurprisingly, given her status and renown in the patriarchal Wild West, the Sisters brothers expect Mayfield to be male, and when she first introduces herself, Charlie tauntingly responds ‘Ah, the man himself’. A lenient reading would see Charlie’s words as an ironic comment on the brothers’ initial expectations; a less generous one would see it as transphobic misgendering. However, the film itself avoids specifying Mayfield’s gender identity, as Root herself has reflected: ‘I played her as cis, actually’ … But director Jacques Audiard, she said, was never quite so clear. ‘They never really identified Mayfield as being trans. I kind of wanted to pin them down a little bit, but they were a bit sketchy on it. In the end I thought,

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I’m just going to trust them … They never said it’s important that this woman is trans. They wanted that ambiguity.’ (Rich, 2018 (bold in original))

The film’s characters find themselves in a constant state of ambiguity, occupying a hazy space among fixed categories of identities, relationships and power relations. Even the film’s quaint focus on the characters learning to take care of their physical hygiene (Eli buying an exotic gadget called a ‘tooth brush’, the brothers cutting each other’s hair and revelling in the flushing toilet at an expensive hotel) shows the brothers to be in a process of personal evolution, while the film’s historic setting is evocative of a moment of immense social and industrial change –​and colonial and environmental destruction. Yet despite these many forms of ambiguity, Les Frères Sisters’s defining characteristic is the portrayal of evolving masculine relationships that oscillate between loving and violent, protective and destructive. This is of course embodied in the two central pairings (Charlie/​Eli and Hermann/​John), but perhaps most poetically expressed in the characters’ relationships with their natural environment, and especially with animals. One of the most tender and simultaneously most abusive relationships in the film is that between Eli and his horse, Tub. Early in the film, Tub is attacked by a bear while Eli is recovering from a severe reaction after swallowing a tarantula in his sleep. The intersection of these multiple creatures in the Oregon wilderness results in the deaths of all three animals, as Charlie hacks the bear to death, the spider dies in Eli’s stomach and Tub slowly succumbs to his injuries over the course of the film. Though Eli has long been frustrated with Tub for his lack of speed and agility, he feels grief and remorse for endangering and being unable to save him. One of the most disturbing sequences involves the brothers galloping across grassland, the camera shaky and blurred as Eli gazes down at the suffering Tub with concern, all the while whipping the animal to continue the painful journey (Figure 3.3). Many

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Figure 3.3  Tub and Eli, human–​animal relationships, Les Frères Sisters, 00:35:24

more animals will die as a result of the Sisters brothers’ pursuit of their fortune, not least a river full of fish and beavers poisoned by Hermann’s divining solution, which Charlie refuses to use in moderation. The devastation of the river and its ecosystem at the hands of the miners is a visual summary of the violent conquest at the heart of the film –​and indeed the project of western expansion at large –​and a condemnation of society (albeit not French society in this case) on a par with that seen in Un héros très discret or Un prophète. Les Frères Sisters is perhaps the most obvious Audiard example of human beings forcing animals into servitude in ways that both inflict and invite violence. However, while very few reviewers and no other scholars have yet studied the theme of human–​animal relations in Audiard’s work, it is a guiding theme in many of his films. De rouille et d’os reveals the danger of keeping orcas confined, and shows the destruction that can be wrought when the thin barrier between the natural and captive environments is broken. After the characters arrive in France, Dheepan includes no further scenes in Sri Lanka, except for two oneiric close-​up sequences of an enormous Indian elephant, emerging slowly from the jungle. These shots of a creature known for both its stillness and its capacity for explosive violence convey not only the natural beauty of

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the protagonists’ home country, but the oscillation between war and peace at the heart of the film. Even Un prophète and De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, both of which are mostly set in indoor urban environments, feature key scenes linking animals with violence. In Un prophète, when Malik is being threatened by some adversaries as they drive him down a highway, he experiences a vision and accurately predicts that the car will hit a crossing deer, the collision ending in violent death for the deer and a dangerous accident for the men. This leads his rival to ask him the question after which the film is presumably named, ‘T’es un prophète ou quoi?’.12 And in De battre, Tom and his colleagues release rats into an apartment building, weaponising the creatures to bring down its value falsely. In each of these examples, as in broader patriarchal society, animals are victimised by humans, suffering violence in the service of economic advancement. Yet this victimisation is not without retaliation, for these animals respond –​albeit uncalculatedly –​with real violence that is turned back on the films’ human characters. In this way, the animals of Audiard’s films share much in common with his archetypal protagonist: a marginalised underdog who mobilises the resources at their disposal in ways that shift the power differential between themselves and their oppressors. As these motifs and relationships affirm, Les Frères Sisters begins as a conventional Western. Yet as Charlie and Eli criss-​ cross the territories of Oregon and California on horseback, leaving death and destruction in their wake and growing ever closer to their elusive targets, we come to realise that Les Frères Sisters is not really an American Western at all. The Wild West setting, costumes, language and décor are historically accurate. The references to the history of the gold rush and the colonial politic of Manifest Destiny are faithful.

12 ‘Are you a prophet or something?’

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The screen is dominated by sweeping vistas, gun-​toting men, painted saloon women, camp fires, horses and dusty wooden towns: all the typical aesthetic characteristics of a classic Western. But as Charlie and Eli struggle to overcome their shared childhood trauma, John and Hermann embark on a socialist quest, and each of the protagonists realises the possibility of a new, non-​violent way of living, the film evolves into a more nuanced, tender and even comic drama, interspersed with moments of potential homosexual love, idyllic idealism, brotherly tenderness and poignant tragedy, ‘aussi féerique que terrifiant’ (Morice, 2018).13 By its penultimate act, Les Frères Sisters has less in common with Clint Eastwood and John Ford than it does with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Jean-​Philippe Tessé sums up this shift in Cahiers du cinéma: Lorsque les Sisters rejoignent le duo, l’affrontement attendu tourne à l’initiation et le film surprend: les brutes découvrent être, l’amitié, la conversation les pieds dans l’eau, le bien-​ l’hygiène, le repos dans une nature hospitalière, formant avec eux un quatuor masculin presque homo-​érotique. Ce long et assez beau passage ‘Blissfully Yours’ est conclu par une scène vraiment rêveuse, que la réalité rustre, l’innocente bêtise des cowboys, interrompt tragiquement. (Tessé, 2018: 61)14

As we have already seen in multiple earlier films, this is a signature trait of Jacques Audiard’s: to take an established B movie genre so often associated with American cinema, and to turn

13 ‘as enchanting as it is terrifying’. 14 ‘When the Sisters rejoin the duo, the expected confrontation turns into an introduction and the film surprises us: the brutes discover friendship, conversations with their feet in the water, wellbeing, hygiene, rest in welcoming nature, forming with them an almost homoerotic masculine quartet. This long and rather beautiful ‘Blissfully Yours’ sequence concludes with a truly dreamlike scene, which harsh reality, the innocent foolishness of cowboys, tragically interrupts.’

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it on its head. He does this with the crime thriller in Regarde les hommes tomber (alongside a complex play with the French heritage of the polar and the film noir, of course), the prison film in Un prophète and the gangster film in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté. Whether this penchant for subverting low-​ brow genres typically associated with Hollywood is simply an authorial marker of Audiard’s, or a characteristically French tendency in the tradition of the Nouvelle Vague, is up for debate. If, to quote Lauren Berlant, genre is a ‘cluster of promises’ (2011: 20), then Audiard refuses to keep his promises. Marcos Uzal shows how Audiard’s subversion of Western clichés distances the film from the classical genre: Audiard [retourne] les clichés comme on avance des hypothèses, déclinant des situations peu communes dans un western, y faisant faire à ses personnages ce qu’on y montre rarement: lire, écrire, philosopher, parler de politique mais aussi serrer dans leurs bras une femme ou un frère, se laver les dents, tirer une chasse d’eau … c’est avec la brutalité et le virilisme de son propre cinéma qu’il semble prendre une distance amusée [du genre].15 (Uzal, 2018)

Les Frères Sisters is certainly not without precedents. Of course, the Western, so stereotypically ‘American’ in the Hollywood psyche, has been at least partly ‘Italian’ for many decades, in the tradition of the spaghetti Western and the definitive contribution of Italian crew members such as director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone. And there is a well-​established contemporary trend of French and other non-​anglophone directors making films entirely or mostly in 15 ‘Audiard [subverts] clichés like one proposes theories, portraying unusual situations for a Western, having his characters do what is rarely shown in them: reading, writing, philosophising, talking politics, but also holding a woman or a brother in their arms, brushing their teeth, flushing a toilet … it’s with the brutality and virility we know from his cinema that he seems to take an amused step back [from the genre].’

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English, either in or outside the USA, and of casting Hollywood stars in the main role. For example, in French director Claire Denis’s (2018) High Life, set in outer space and with dialogue only in English, Robert Pattinson stars alongside Juliette Binoche. Chris Evans stars in Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s (2013) Snowpiercer.16 French director Olivier Assayas cast Kristen Stewart twice in a row, in the Switzerland-​set Clouds of Sils Maria, also with Binoche (Assayas, 2014), and in the Paris-​set Personal Shopper (Assayas, 2016). And though Québécois director Denis Villeneuve’s contemporary films have multilingual dialogue, their main characters are native English speakers played by Hollywood stars: Emily Blunt in Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015), Amy Adams in Arrival (Villeneuve, 2016), Ryan Gosling in Bladerunner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) and Timothée Chalamet in Dune (Villeneuve, 2021 (forthcoming at the time of writing)).17 Thus Les Frères Sisters is not an unprecedented outlier: it is part of a transnational, predominantly English-​ language corpus from a range of critically acclaimed non-​anglophone directors with similar profiles to Audiard (two of whom are also covered in this book series: Assayas (Sutton, 2011) and Denis (Beugnet, 2004)). Yet despite this history of transcultural connections, it appears that what makes Les Frères Sisters such a compelling film, and such a critical success, also appears to be what made it such a commercial flop: it isn’t what it looks like. It ‘looks’ like a Western, but that frame ultimately proves insufficient to understand the complex narrative shifts and relationships

16 Any discussion of Snowpiercer’s transnationality should also recognise the important roles held by Kang Ho Song and Ko Asung, who speak only Korean in the film. There is also some secondary dialogue in Czech, French, German and Japanese, and the film’s French graphic novel source text, Le Transperceneige, is francophone Belgian (Lob and Rochette, 1982). 17 See Anon. (2017).

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at its heart. It ‘looks’ like a Hollywood film, but such a label does not hold up to scrutiny, either, in terms of its production conditions, the conventions of auteur theory or even the film’s domestic and international promotion. Or rather, it is each of these things and their opposites at once, a confounding mix of French and American, big-​budget and independent, nationally bounded and internationally formed. Michael Phillips describes this paradoxical cultural positioning as both enticing and confounding: The material comes from a book by Canadian novelist Patrick DeWitt, and the film version marks the English-​language debut of French director Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet,” “Dheepan”). He filmed this loping yarn, set in 1851 Oregon and California, against the landscapes of Romania and Spain. Quite deliberately it all feels a little off-​kilter. Nobody quite knows where they’re going in ‘The Sisters Brothers’, or how they’ll react to threats and enticements along the way. (Phillips, 2018)

For the most part, this cultural hybridity is not particularly visible on the film’s surface; aesthetically and linguistically, it appears to be entirely ‘American’. Yet there are some visual clues to the film’s diverse cultural origins, the first of which appears onscreen in its opening credits. Over a luxuriant 40-​ second time span, against a black screen, nineteen co-​ production partners appear one-​by-​one, as if to emphasise the sheer multitude of contributors to the project. No French or francophone actors appear in any speaking roles in Les Frères Sisters (though most of the silent extras are French). No French is spoken, no reference is made to France or to the French Empire in North America, no scenes were filmed in France or any French-​speaking territory, and the source text was not originally published in French. Of course, the majority of the crew, notably its famed director, is French. But this credit sequence is the only time the film’s ‘Frenchness’ is explicitly displayed onscreen, and its French co-​production partners still share the screen with American studios such as

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Annapurna Pictures (the first to appear, and John C. Reilly’s initial production contact), and even Romanian, Belgian and Spanish partners. Yet Les Frères Sisters went on to win four Césars in 2019: Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Sound and Best Production Design, and to be nominated for five others, including Best French Film of the Year. It was also awarded Best Film, Best Director and Best Cinematography at the 2019 Lumières de la presse étrangère awards, for which only French and francophone films are eligible. However, the film’s categorisation as ‘French’ was not universal. At the 2019 Festival de Deauville, the film was awarded the prize for Best American Film. The cultural mixity of Les Frères Sisters is both heightened and confused by the film’s complex interactions with the myth of the auteur. Unsurprisingly, much of the film’s promotion and reception in the anglophone context focused on its all-​ star cast. However, it was not only in France or on the international festival circuit that Audiard’s role was also featured prominently. In one official English-​language trailer for the film, at 01:12 a black screen appears with the words ‘FROM ACCLAIMED DIRECTOR JACQUES AUDIARD’,18 whereas the actors’ names appear far later, at 02:10, each for a split second and directly one after the other. Another features the words ‘WINNER; JACQUES AUDIARD BEST DIRECTOR; VENICE FILM FESTIVAL’ with the actor names appearing on the one screen in the closing moments. And in the primary French trailer, in the opening seconds the screen is filled with Audiard’s name (and no descriptor) in the first few seconds, as the first primary piece of information conveyed about the film (Figure 3.4). Indeed, in France, it appeared important to the

18 Though he is not described as ‘FRENCH DIRECTOR’, and therefore not exoticised as such, anglophone viewers would presumably be able to identify him as French or at least francophone from his name, especially the stereotypically French ‘Jacques’.

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Figure 3.4  ‘Jacques Audiard’: the opening of the French trailer for Les Frères Sisters

film’s critical reputation and commercial success to promote its ‘Frenchness’, despite its apparent ‘Americanness’. The fact that the only major prize for which the film received a César was Best Director (and the only other major nomination was Best French Film of the Year) is telling; it did not receive any nominations in the acting categories. And yet, to call Audiard the auteur, or at least the sole auteur, of Les Frères Sisters would be doing a disservice to a crucial figure in the film’s creation. John C. Reilly will be recognised by most as the actor playing the film’s main character, Eli Sisters. The role is in many ways a departure from the comedic parts for which he is most famous (perhaps most obviously Step Brothers (McKay, 2008)), although he has taken on more arthouse-​oriented roles, such as in Lynne Ramsay’s (2011) We Need to Talk about Kevin. (Interestingly, Audiard was an executive producer of Ramsay’s (2017) You Were Never Really Here, starring Sisters’s other lead actor, Joaquin Phoenix). Reilly’s portrayal of Eli Sisters has been roundly praised, the Los Angeles Times describing it as ‘a performance of rich, understated soulfulness’ (Chang, 2018). However, Reilly’s role in the film extends far beyond his performance. It

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was Reilly’s wife and producing partner, Alison Dickey, who first read DeWitt’s novel, passing it on to Reilly, for whom the adaptation, with him in the role of Eli, became a passion project that would take seven years to realise. Dickey and Reilly purchased the film rights soon after the novel’s publication and began seeking a director, approaching Jacques Audiard at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012, where he was screening De rouille et d’os. Audiard has admitted that he would not have made the film on his own: ‘Si j’avais trouvé le roman de Patrick DeWitt chez mon libraire, il m’aurait enthousiasmé, mais jamais l’idée ne me serait venue de l’adapter. C’est John C. Reilly qui est venu me chercher’ (Rouyer and Tobin, 2018: 10).19 The two clashed when Audiard was initially reluctant to cast Reilly in the role of Eli, though he soon changed his mind and has acknowledged the importance of the project to each of them: ‘Le personnage d’Eli l’intéressait. Je crois qu’il voulait changer de place dans ses emplois. C’est sans doute pour cela qu’il est allé chercher un Européen. Il a pu percevoir mon envie, à moi aussi, de changer d’emploi’ (Rouyer and Tobin, 2018: 11).20 There is a long tradition, especially before and during the Second World War, of French directors travelling to Hollywood to work within the studio system, including Jean Renoir, René Clair and Julien Duvivier. These directors were often subjected to studio requirements in ways they were not in France, and while several found their filmmaking revived and inspired for future work by their time in the USA, they were often viewed –​and sometimes came to view themselves –​as directors under studio control rather than auteurs in the classical French sense (McCann, 2017). This was not the 19 ‘If I had found Patrick DeWitt’s novel at my local bookshop, it would have interested me, but I would never have had the idea to adapt it. It was John C. Reilly who came looking for me.’ 20 ‘The character of Eli interested him. I think he wanted to switch up his role. That’s surely why he went looking for a European. He could sense my desire to switch up my own role, as well.’

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case with Les Frères Sisters: though the stars are Hollywood actors, the script is in English, the film is set in the USA and Annapurna Pictures is a primary co-​production partner, but the film is not a Hollywood product in any traditional production sense. Unlike with many Hollywood studio arrangements, no scenes were shot in Los Angeles or even the USA, Audiard maintained the final word on the script, and the film was produced in the same way as his previous projects: in collaboration with a long-​time writing partner (in this case Thomas Bidegain, who also co-​wrote the scripts to Un prophète, De rouille et d’os and Dheepan) and adapting a source text (in this case DeWitt’s novel). Audiard’s usual production company, Why Not Productions, is an important co-​production partner, and while the cast is entirely new, many of Audiard’s usual collaborators are part of the crew, including Bidegain, editor Juliette Welfling and composer Alexandre Desplat. In fact, Audiard has confirmed the importance of maintaining authorial control in the face of Hollywood norms, in particular by filming in Europe: Intervieweur:  Un Français avec des acteurs américains sur un sujet américain, avez-​ vous senti le besoin de vous ‘protéger’? Audiard:  Oui, c’est aussi pour cela que nous avons tourné en Europe. Pour ne pas être écrasé par la machine, la régie très couteuse, les règles syndicales [de Hollywood].21 (Rouyer and Tobin, 2018: 12) The studio apparatus of Hollywood does not exert its influence over Les Frères Sisters in any way, because Audiard only agreed to accept the project if he could ensure it would 21 Interviewer: ‘A Frenchman with American actors on an American story, did you feel the need to ‘protect’ yourself’? Audiard:  ‘Yes, that’s why we filmed in Europe. To not be crushed by the machine, the expensive management, the union rules [of Hollywood]’.

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not. And yet, if an auteur is the creative driver of a film, it would be reductive not to acknowledge Reilly’s claim to the role. If Les Frères Sisters has one auteur, it also has at least two, and possibly three, for Audiard and Reilly’s influence must also be read alongside DeWitt’s, the initial author of the story from which the film is adapted. It is ultimately more helpful to think of Les Frères Sisters not as belonging to one auteur or to the other, and certainly not to view Audiard as a Hollywood hack or to discount him as the author of his film. Instead, it serves as further evidence of Audiard’s long-​ established collaborative approach to filmmaking, one that proves particularly fruitful and sustainable both within the conventional parameters of French cinema, and in the more hybrid environs of transnational cinema in its various forms. Each of Jacques Audiard’s films prompts us to ask questions about what it means to be the author of a French film, and what it means to make a film within the boundaries of genre, culture or nation. Les Frères Sisters is an example of what Laura Marks describes as ‘intercultural cinema’, which ‘by definition operates at the intersections of two or more cultural regimes of knowledge’ (Marks, 2000: 24). It highlights the difficulty of assigning a single cultural or national identity to film, of how ‘a nationally specific and stable meaning is often highly difficult to determine at the level of production itself’ (Bergfelder, 2005: 326). For some, Les Frères Sisters is a French film. For others, it is an American one. For me, it is an illuminating example of what Ezra and Rowden call ‘the dissolution of any stable connection between a film’s place of production and/​or setting and the nationality of its makers and performers’ (2006: 1). This approach allows us to analyse the francophone and transnational dimensions of the film not separately, but in concert. It allows us to orient Audiard’s most anglophone text within its majority French production context, acknowledging its American elements without discounting the protectionist and auteurist traditions of the French cinematic context in which it was produced, and in which Audiard and his crew were

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raised and trained. Cinéma-​monde allows us to process how films continue to be produced, distributed, consumed and judged within the frameworks of national cinemas, but also to conclude that such frames are insufficient fully to understand these films and how they operate in the world. Many have viewed Les Frères Sisters as a rupture in Audiard’s filmmaking career, an anglophone outlier with little connection to the rest of his more ‘French’ corpus. And yet I argue that Les Frères Sisters is emblematic of Audiard’s career as a whole, revealing the shifting position he has long occupied across national and transnational spaces, and the ways in which his films cross cultural, social, linguistic and geographic borders to challenge the conventions of French cinema. In his review of the film for Positif, Jean-​Dominique Nuttens proposes that while a surface reading of Les Frères Sisters may suggest a departure from Audiard’s earlier work, the film’s play on the Western genre actually reveals deeper links with his more stereotypically ‘French’ films: Jusqu’à présent, Jacques Audiard avait toujours situé ses films dans la réalité contemporaine,22 mettant le plus souvent en scène des personnages en marge, ne parvenant à trouver la paix –​et l’amour –​qu’après avoir purgé la violence qu’ils portaient en eux. Ainsi résumée, toute son œuvre n’était-​ elle pas déjà construite sur le modèle du western? Quoi qu’il en soit, toutes les obsessions du cinéaste se retrouvent ici. (Nuttens, 2018: 7)23

Ultimately, Les Frères Sisters cannot be neatly defined as American or even French. Instead the film appears to defy 22 This is not entirely true –​consider the 1940s majority setting of Un héros très discret. 23 ‘Until now, Jacques Audiard had always set his films in contemporary reality, most often filming characters at the margins, failing to find peace –​and love –​until they’ve purged the violence they carry within them. Thus summarised, hasn’t his entire body of work already been built on the model of the Western? Whatever the case may be, all the filmmaker’s obsessions can be found here.’

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categorisation and transcend the limits of the national frame. Thus, approaching films such as Les Frères Sisters as transnational, as cinéma-​monde, connected in one or more ways to the Francosphere but detached from any fixed or singular national identity, enables us to cast a broader critical gaze over the concept of national cinemas in the contemporary age, without losing sight of the cultural contexts from which film arises. With its American characters; its French crew; its American and British cast; its French, American, Belgian, Spanish and Romanian production partners; its Canadian source text; its English dialogue; and its awards in the seemingly incompatible categories of Best French Film and Best American Film, Les Frères Sisters is a fundamentally hybrid, layered and ever-​ shifting text. More than any other Audiard film, Les Frères Sisters seems to throw the principles of this book series into question. It critiques both the notion of the ‘French film’ and that of the ‘French director’, especially as the latter pertains to ideas of the film auteur. And yet this film should not be understood as a departure from Audiard’s more ‘French’ work. Instead, Les Frères Sisters is a continuation of what Audiard has been doing since the very beginning of his career: playing with French cinema, playing with international influences, playing with the so-​ called boundaries between high-​ brow arthouse cinema and low-​brow genre cinema, and playing with the figure of the director as (sole) author of a film. On the surface, Les Frères Sisters looks like an outlier from Audiard’s body of work. Viewed more closely, we discover that instead, the film is a summary of it. Audiard is undoubtedly a French film director. But his films are not only French films. Les Frères Sisters may have been judged ‘French’ by the national film system, yet its severance of any connection to French territory, language, people or stories stretches the definition of ‘French cinema’ to its very limit. By comparison, Dheepan’s French characteristics are more evident: a majority French setting, French filming locations, French background characters, a

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significant amount of French-​language dialogue. Yet with the film’s majority dialogue in Tamil, protagonists of South Asian origins and narrative trajectory that extends beyond French borders in multiple directions, Dheepan decentres the monistic French space from within. In so doing, these films tread a path forged by earlier Audiard films, from the multilingual dialogue of De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté to the casting of a non-​white, previously unknown, translingual protagonist in Un prophète, and even to the undermining of national myths in Un héros très discret. For Audiard, France has always been a transcultural space, and Frenchness has always been a contested notion. Like Dheepan trying and failing to draw a line between distinct territories in the French banlieue, Audiard shows us how culture lives not within demarcated lines, but across them.

References Anon. (2017), ‘Audiard, Assayas, Zlotowski … les réalisateurs français américanisent leurs castings’, Télérama, 16 February, available at www.telerama.fr/​cinema/​audiard-​assayas-​zlotowski-​ les-​realisateurs-​francais-​americanisent-​leurs-​castings,154246.php (accessed 1 April 2019). Arrighi de Casanova, V. (2015), ‘Dheepan est une fable douloureuse et puissante’, Première, 26 August, available at www.premiere. fr/​Cinema/​News-​Cinema/​Dheepan-​est-​une-​fable-​douloureuse-​et-​ puissante (accessed 1 April 2019). Assayas, O. (2014), Clouds of Sils Maria (Sils Maria), Paris, CG Cinéma. Assayas, O. (2016), Personal Shopper, Paris, CG Cinéma. Barbery, M., T. Ben Jelloun, A. Borer et al. (2007), ‘Pour une “littérature-​monde” en français’, Le Monde, 15 March, available at www.lemonde.fr/​livres/​article/​2007/​03/​15/​des-​ecrivains-​ plaident-​ p our-​ u n- ​ r oman- ​ e n- ​ f rancais- ​ o uvert-​ s ur-​ l e-​ m onde_​ 883572_​3260.html (accessed 4 March 2020). Bergfelder, T. (2005), ‘National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies’, Media, Culture & Society, 27:3, 315–​31.

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Berlant, L. (2011), Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Beugnet, M. (2004), Claire Denis, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Bong, J. H. (2013), Snowpiercer, Seoul, Moho Films. Bradshaw, P. (2016), ‘Dheepan Review: A Crime Drama Packed with Epiphanic Grandeur’, Guardian, 7 April, available at www. theguardian.com/ ​ f ilm/ ​ 2 016/ ​ a pr/ ​ 0 7/ ​ d heepan- ​ r eview-​ j acques-​ audiard-​palme-​d-​or (accessed 1 April 2019). Bui, C. (2015), ‘Fables périphériques’, Cahiers du cinéma, 722 (May), 80–​4. Chang, J. (2018), ‘Review: John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix Play “The Sisters Brothers” in a Soulful, Stirring, Comic Western’, Los Angeles Times, 20 September, available at www.latimes. com/​entertainment/​movies/​la-​et-​mn-​the-​sisters-​brothers-​review-​ 20180920-​story.html (accessed 30 September 2019). Chevalier, K. (2016), ‘Le cinéma français face à la violence: Du New French Extremism à une violence intériorisée’, Modern & Contemporary France, 24:4, 411–​25. De Bruyn, O. (2015), ‘Dheepan’, Positif, 653–​4 (July–​August), 81. Denis, C. (2018), High Life, Paris, Alcatraz Films. DeWitt, P. (2011), The Sisters Brothers, New York, HarperCollins. Ezra, E., and T. Rowden (eds) (2006), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, New York, Routledge. Faisant, R. (2015), ‘Dheepan: Un film intense et sensible. Jacques Audiard est à son meilleur’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 31 August, available at www.leplus.nouvelobs.com/​contribution/​1413522-​ dheepan-​un-​film-​intense-​et-​sensible-​jacques-​audiard-​est-​a-​son-​ meilleur.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Das weiβe Band –​eine Haneke, M. (2009), The White Ribbon/​ deutsche Kindergeschichte, Berlin, X Filme Creative Pool. Haneke, M. (2012), Amour, Paris, Les Films du Losange. Hastie, A. (2016), ‘  “I Know That Dog”: Witnessing Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan’, Film Quarterly, 70:1, 100–​6. Higbee, W. (2014), ‘Hope and Indignation in Fortress Europe: Immigration and Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary French Cinema’, SubStance, 43:1, 26–​43. Higson, A. (1989), ‘The Concept of National Cinema’, Screen, 30:4, 36–​47.

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Globe: national borders

155

Higson, A. (2000), ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’, in Cinema and Nation, ed. M. Hjort and S. Mackenzie, New York, Routledge, pp. 63–​74. Hjort, M., and S. MacKenzie (eds) (2000), Cinema and Nation, New York, Routledge. Jauffret, M. (2015), ‘Jacques Audiard: “Présenter en grand les migrants, ces invisibles, est un acte politique” ’, L’Humanité, 26 August, available at www.humanite.fr/​jacques-​audiard-​presenter-​ en-​ g rand-​ l es-​ m igrants-​ c es-​ i nvisibles-​ e st-​ u n-​ a cte- ​ p olitique-​ 582219 (accessed 1 April 2019). King, G. (2016), ‘Langues désancrées: Le rôle du français dans London River ’, in Genre, Text and Language: Mélanges Anne Freadman, ed. T. Do, V. Duché and A. Rizzi, Paris, Librairies Garnier, pp. 317–​26. King, G. (2017), Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema, Manchester, Manchester University Press. King, G. (2018), ‘Contemporary French Cinema and the Langue de passage: From Dheepan to Welcome’, French Cultural Studies, 29:1, 39–​48. Le Bris, M., J. Rouaud and E. Almassy (2007), Pour une littérature-​ monde, Paris, Gallimard. Lob, J., and J. M. Rochette (1982), Le Transperceneige, Brussels, Casterman. Malausa, V. (2015), ‘Dheepan de Jacques Audiard: Arrogant et stupide. Un film politiquement infect’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 August, available at www.leplus.nouvelobs.com/​contribution/​ 1413275-​dheepan-​de-​jacques-​audiard-​arrogant-​et-​stupide-​un-​ film-​politiquement-​infect.html (accessed 2 April 2019). Mandelbaum, J. (2015), ‘Dheepan: Parcours d’exilés rassemblés par l’infortune’, Le Monde, 25 August, available at www.lemonde. fr/​ c inema/​ a rticle/​ 2 015/​ 0 8/​ 2 5/​ d heepan-​ p arcours- ​ d - ​ e xiles-​ rassembles-​par-​l-​infortune_​4735911_​3476.html?xtmc=jacques_​ audiard&xtcr=80 (accessed 2 April 2019). Marlier, F. (2015), ‘Comment Audiard a transformé une cité paisible en zone de guerre pour “Dheepan” ’, Les Inrockuptibles, 28 www.lesinrocks.com/​2015/​08/​28/​actualite/​actualite/​ August, comment-​audiard-​a-​transforme-​une-​cite-​paisible-​en-​zone-​de-​ guerre-​pour-​dheepan/​ (accessed 2 April 2019).

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  Jacques Audiard

Marks, L. (2000), The Skin of the Film, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. monde? Towards a Concept of Marshall, B. (2012), ‘Cinéma-​ Francophone Cinema’, Francosphères, 1:1, 35–​51. McCann, B. (2017), Julien Duvivier, Manchester, Manchester University Press. McKay, A. (2008), Step Brothers, Columbia Pictures. Montesquieu (1721), Lettres persanes, Cologne, Pierre Marteau. Morice, J. (2018), ‘Les Frères Sisters, un western aussi féerique que terrifiant’, Télérama, 19 September, available at www.telerama. fr/ ​ c inema/​ l es-​ f reres- ​ s isters,- ​ u n- ​ w estern- ​ a ussi- ​ f eerique- ​ q ue-​ terrifiant,n5812288.php 30/​09/​19 (accessed 30 September 2019). Nuttens, J. D. (2015), ‘Dheepan: Cette famille, c’est vous’, Positif, 655 (September), 7–​8. Nuttens, J. D. (2018), ‘Les Frères Sisters: Western des origines’, Positif, 691 (September), 7–​8. Peckinpah, S. (1971), Straw Dogs, Los Angeles, ABC Pictures. Phillips, M. (2018), ‘The Sisters Brothers Review: The Old West Gets a New Twist’, Chicago Tribune, 24 September, available www.chicagotribune.com/​entertainment/​movies/​sc-​mov-​ at sisters-​brothers-​rev-​0924-​story.html 30/​ 09/​ 19 (accessed 30 September 2019). Ramsay, L. (2011), We Need to Talk about Kevin, London, BBC Films. Ramsay, L. (2017), You Were Never Really Here, Paris, Why Not Productions. Rich, K. (2018), ‘Trans Actress Rebecca Root Is Changing History in The Sisters Brothers –​or maybe just revealing it’, Vanity Fair, 26 September, available at www.vanityfair.com/​hollywood/​2018/​09/​ rebecca-​root-​the-​sisters-​brothers (accessed 30 September 2019). Romney, J. (2016), ‘Jacques Audiard: “I wanted to give migrants a name, a shape … a violence of their own” ’, Guardian, available at www.theguardian.com/​film/​2016/​apr/​03/​jacques-​audiard-​ interview-​dheepan-​prophet-​rust-​done-​director (accessed 2 April 2019). Rosello, M. (2001), Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

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157

Rouyer, P., and Y. Tobin (2018), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: Un conte dans le style southern gothic’, Positif, 691 (September), 10–​14. Rouyer, P., and C. Vassé (2005), ‘Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: Et si tuer quelqu’un au cinéma, c’était difficile?’, Positif, 529 (March), 21–​5. Salmon, C. (2016), ‘Why Dheepan’s Take on Immigration Isn’t Helpful’, Guardian, 20 April, available at www.theguardian. com/​film/​filmblog/​2016/​apr/​20/​dheepan-​immigration-​depiction-​ selective-​jacques-​audiard-​multiracial-​france (accessed 1 April 2019). Sutton, P. (2011), ‘Olivier Assayas and the Cinema of Catastrophe’, in Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, ed. K. Ince, Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp. 17–​37. Tessé, J. P. (2018), ‘Les Frères Sisters’, Cahiers du cinéma, 748 (October), 60–​1. Uzal, M. (2018), ‘Les Frères Sisters: A l’ouest, du nouveau pour Audiard’, Libération, 18 September, available at www.next. liberation.fr/​cinema/​2018/​09/​18/​les-​freres-​sisters-​a-​l-​ouest-​du-​ nouveau-​pour-​audiard_​1679604 (accessed 30 September 2019). Villeneuve, D. (2015), Sicario, Los Angeles, Lionsgate. Villeneuve, D. (2016), Arrival, New York, FilmNation Entertainment. Villeneuve, D. (2017), Bladerunner 2049, Los Angeles, Alcon Entertainment. Villeneuve, D. (2021), Dune, Los Angeles, Legendary Entertainment. Vincendeau, G. (2016), ‘Dheepan’, Sight and Sound, 26:5, 60–​1.

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Conclusion This world … it’s an abomination. (Hermann Kermit Warm, Les Frères Sisters)

One hour into Les Frères Sisters, the two pairs of protagonists, Charlie and Eli Sisters and John Morris and Hermann Kermit Warm, cross paths after weeks of pursuing one another across the Pacific Northwest. When the Sisters brothers finally locate Morris and Warm in the Oregon wilderness, in a camp set up to mine the river using Hermann’s divining solution, the miners are expecting to have to fight their would-​be killers. But at this crucial narrative turning point, the film declines the Western convention of violent encounter, and sets off in an entirely new direction. For the brothers are quickly convinced, like John before them, to abandon their baleful employer and to join in trying to make their fortunes on the river. Though it may be thousands of miles from any other Audiard setting, the dreamy 30-​minute sequence that follows contains most of the defining characteristics of the director’s cinema. As the four men build a dam to test their solution, the genre shifts to a delicate blend of drama, Bildungsroman and brotherly coming-​of-​age story. The gentle natural light of the forest, the light-​handed CGI of the glistening gold and the chiaroscuro drama of faces illuminated around a camp fire capture the pared-​back beauty of simple, undecorated spaces. Against this backdrop, the characters begin to consider many of the questions essential to other Audiard films. They engage in philosophical and personal conversations about identity (‘I

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Conclusion

159

am looking at you, Charlie Sisters, do you want me to tell you what I see?’), manhood, self-​determination and morality. Through these conversations, each man is surprised to learn how much he has been shaped and changed by the bonds in his life: brotherhood, friendship, filiation, even kinship with animals (of his horse, Tub, Eli remarks ‘I didn’t expect [his death] to affect me this much’). In true Audiard form, violence, trauma and bodily mutilation await the characters at the close of this restorative sequence. When the greedy and impatient Charlie overturns the solution into the river, he will burn off his own hand and condemn Hermann and John to a gruesome death by chemical burn. But before this rupture, in a (momentarily) peaceful corner of the wilderness the men interrogate their place in a patriarchal society, a place they are beginning to realise they have the capacity to change. They attempt to untangle their guilt and confusion about their own familial and societal roles, and to understand their ambiguous relationships with one another and with other men they have known. And when Eli questions Charlie on how they will deal with the vengeful patriarch they have abandoned, who will inevitably pursue them for vengeance and who will eventually need to be killed, he asks him a question that could well have been posed to Malik in Un prophète, Simon in Regarde les hommes tomber or Tom in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté: ‘And after that? [What are you going to do?] Are you going to take his place?’. At its heart, Audiard’s cinema is defined by border-​crossing in myriad forms: by the building of physical and symbolic walls, and the process of climbing –​or dismantling –​them. Audiard’s protagonists transgress geographic borders, physical limitations, social norms and class lines. Simultaneously violent yet intimate, dark yet hopeful, French yet ‘foreign’, grounded in an established film tradition and continually shrugging it off, these films are both informed by the heritage of French national cinemas and transcendent of it. From

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160

  Jacques Audiard

1994’s Regarde les hommes tomber to 2018’s Les Frères Sisters, from his first film production work in the 1970s to the television episodes in production at the time of writing, Audiard’s cinema is defined by a central paradox. For perhaps more than any other filmmaker working in the French space today, Jacques Audiard is both the ideal subject to complement a book series named French Film Directors, and the ideal one to challenge it. Audiard is at once an archetypal French film director and one who tests the definitions of each of these terms. He is of French nationality, but he operates in an increasingly transnational and multilingual space, and often in co-​production with other countries. He is the creator of eight feature films, but his filmography can only be fully understood when it includes his video clips, music films and especially his scripts, written for other directors in collaboration with other writers and adapted from diverse source texts. He is a director, frequently referred to as an auteur, but he is also an editor, writer and producer who did not assume the mantle of director until relatively late in his career. Thus, a study of how Audiard both conforms to and departs from these two once readily accepted notions is a particularly apt analysis to undertake within this series. Audiard and his films perpetually test the bounds between metropolitan French centre and cinematic, geographic and sociocultural fringe, depicting figures who use their professional, linguistic, creative, physical and cultural competencies to rework the dynamics of space in French contexts, and beyond them. Only time will tell how much further he will stretch these definitions in his future work. Located somewhere between the arthouse and the B movie, the French and the transnational, the feminist and the patriarchal, the familiar and the innovative, Jacques Audiard’s characters and films reflect his own eternally shifting position, at once within and beyond the imaginary of French cinema.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

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Career timeline

Year

Role

Film

2018 Direction and screenwriting

Les Frères Sisters

2017 Production

You Were Never Really Here (dir. Lynne Ramsay) 120 battements par minute (dir. Robin Campillo)

2015 Direction, screenwriting and production

Dheepan

2012 Direction, screenwriting and production

De rouille et d’os

2011 Direction

Raphaël live vu par Jacques Audiard

2009 Direction and screenwriting

Un prophète

Production

Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante (dir. Claude Miller, Nathan Miller)

2005 Direction and screenwriting

De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté

2001 Direction and screenwriting

Sur mes lèvres

1999 Screenwriting

Vénus beauté (institut) (dir. Tonie Marshall)

1998 Direction and screenwriting

Norme française

1996 Cast

Grossesse nerveuse, Les mercredis de la vie (dir. Denis Rabaglia)

Direction and screenwriting 1994 Direction and screenwriting

Un héros très discret Regarde les hommes tomber

Career timeline

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Year

163

Role

Film

Screenwriting

Grosse fatigue (dir. Michel Blanc)

1992 Screenwriting

Confessions d’un Barjo (dir. Jerome Boivin)

1991 Cast

Les enfants de la plage (dir. Williams Crépin)

Screenwriting

Loin des yeux (dir. Bruno Bayen)

1990 Cast

Baby Blood (dir. Alain Robak)

1989 Screenwriting

Australia (dir. Jean-​Jacques Andrien) Baxter (dir. Bruno Bayen)

1988 Screenwriting

Fréquence meurtre (dir. Elisabeth Rappeneau) Saxo (dir. Ariel Zeitoun)

1987 Screenwriting

Poussière d’ange (dir. Edouard Niermans)

1985 Screenwriting

Sac de nœuds (dir. Josiane Balasko)

1984 Screenwriting

Réveillon chez Bob (dir. Denys Garnier-​Deferre) L’Ennemi public no. 2 (episode, Série noire, dir. Edouard Niermans)

1983 Screenwriting

Mortelle randonnée (dir. Claude Miller)

1981 Screenwriting

Le Professionnel (dir. Georges Lautner)

1979 Sound mixing

Clair de femme (dir. Costa-​Gavras) (continued)

Appendix 1

164

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Year

Role

Film

1978 Editing

Judith Therpauve (dir. Patrice Chéreau)

1978 Editing

Le Dernier Amant romantique (dir. Just Jaeckin)

1977 Editing

Le Passé simple (dir. Michel Drach) René la canne (dir. Francis Girod)

1976 Editing

The Tenant (dir. Roman Polanski)

1974 Screenwriting

Bons baisers … à lundi (dir. Michel Audiard)

Appendix 2

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Frequent collaborators

Collaborators

Collaborations

Role

Related Césars

Juliette Welfling

8

Editing

4

Alexandre Desplat

7

Music

2

Thomas Bidegain

4

Screenplay

2

Stéphane Fontaine

3

Cinematography

2

Brigitte Taillandier

3

Sound

—​

Pascal Villard

3

Sound

1

Alain Le Henry

3

Screenplay

—​

Niels Arestrup

2

Cast

2

Tonino Benacquista

2

Screenplay

2

Valérie Deloof

2

Sound

1

Emmanuelle Devos

2

Cast

1

Mathieu Kassovitz

2

Cast

1

Jean-​Louis Trintignant

2

Cast

—​

Data gathered from www.imdb.com and www.allocine.fr. Listed by order of freqency of collaborations

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Critical and commercial reception, feature films

Film

Year

French box office (entry numbers)

Global takings (USD)

Regarde les hommes tomber

1994

218,831

N/​A

Un héros très 1996 discret

583,886

N/​A

Césars Awarded

Cannes Nominated

Awarded

Nominated

Meilleure Meilleur scénario première œuvre1 original ou Meilleur jeune adaptation4 espoir masculin (Kassovitz)2 Meilleur montage3 Meilleur réalisateur5 Meilleur acteur dans Prix du un second rôle scénario9 (Dupontel)6 Meilleure actrice dans un second rôle (Kiberlain)7 Meilleur scénario original ou adaptation Meilleure musique originale8 Meilleur montage

Palme d’Or Grand Prix Prix du Jury10 Prix de la mise en scène11 Prix du Jury Œcuménique12 Prix Spécial du Jury13

Other recognition Awarded

Nominated

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389,355

De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté

931,079

2005

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Sur mes lèvres 2001

$5,393,526

Meilleure actrice (Devos)14 Meilleur scénario original ou adaptation Meilleur son15

Meilleur film français de l’année16 Meilleur réalisateur Meilleur acteur (Cassel)17 Meilleure musique originale Meilleure photographie18 Meilleur montage

$11,757,109

Meilleur acteur Meilleur film (Duris) français de Meilleur son l’année Meilleur réalisateur Meilleur acteur dans un second rôle (Arestrup) Meilleur jeune espoir féminin (Pham)19 Meilleure musique originale Meilleure photographie Meilleur montage Meilleure adaptation20

(continued)

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Un prophète

Year

2009

French box office (entry numbers)

Global takings (USD)

1,304,259

$17,874,044

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Film

Césars Awarded Meilleur film français de l’année Meilleur réalisateur Meilleur acteur (Rahim) Meilleur acteur dans un second rôle (Arestrup) Meilleur jeune espoir masculin (Rahim) Meilleure photographie Meilleurs décors21 Meilleur montage Meilleur scénario original22

Cannes Nominated

Awarded

Meilleur jeune espoir masculin Grand Prix (Bencherif) Meilleure musique originale Meilleur son Meilleurs costumes23

Nominated

Other recognition Awarded

Nominated

Academy Palme d’Or BAFTA: Best Award: Best Prix du Jury Non-​ Foreign Prix de la mise en Language Anglophone scène Film Film Prix du Jury Prix Louis Golden Œcuménique Delluc Globes: Prix de la Best Foreign Jeunesse24 Prix François Language Chalais Film Prix de l’Education nationale Prix FIPRESCI-​ Mention spéciale Anti-​Prix du Jury Œcuménique Prix exceptionnel du Jury

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2012

1,841,965

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De rouille et d’os

$25,807,712

Meilleur jeune espoir masculin (Schoenaerts) Meilleur montage Meilleure adaptation Meilleure musique originale

Meilleur film français de l’année Meilleur réalisateur Meilleure actrice Meilleure photographie Meilleur son

Palme d’Or Grand Prix Prix du Jury Prix de la mise en scène Prix du scénario Prix du Jury Œcuménique Prix de la Jeunesse Prix François Chalais Prix FIPRESCI-​ Compétition officielle

BAFTA: Best Actress (Cotillard) BAFTA: Best Non-​ Anglophone Film SAG Awards: Best Actress (Cotillard) Golden Globes: Best Actress in a Drama (Cotillard) Golden Globes: Best Foreign Language Film Prix Louis Delluc

(continued)

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Film

Year

French box office (entry numbers)

Global takings (USD) $5,562,575

2015

548,616

The Sisters Brothers

2018

724,139

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Dheepan

$13,143,056

Césars Awarded

Cannes Nominated

Awarded

Meilleur film français de l’année Palme d’Or Meilleur réalisateur Meilleur acteur (Jesuthasan) Meilleur acteur dans un second rôle (Rottiers) Meilleure photographie Meilleur son Meilleurs décors Meilleur montage Meilleur scénario original Meilleur réalisateur Meilleure photographie Meilleur son Meilleurs décors

Nominated Prix du scénario Grand Prix Prix du Jury Prix de la mise en scène Prix FIPRESCI-​ Compétition officielle Queer Palm-​ Mention spéciale Prix François Chalais

Meilleur film français de l’année Meilleure musique originale Meilleurs costumes Meilleur montage Meilleure adaptation

Other recognition Awarded

Nominated BAFTA Best Non-​ Anglophone Film

Toronto FIPRESCI-​ Prix de la Critique Internationale Venice Golden Lion Venice Special Jury Prize

Data gathered by the author by cross-​referencing allocine.fr, imdb.com and boxofficemojo.com (via pro.imdb.com) 1 ‘Best Debut’ (changed to ‘Meilleure première oeuvre de fiction’ (‘Best Debut in Fiction’) in 1999 and ‘Meilleur premier film’ (‘Best First Film’), its current title, in 2005). All César award translations sourced from www.academie-​cinema.org/​en/​palmares-​2/​ (accessed 28 April 2020). 2 ‘Best Male Newcomer’ (i.e. best breakthrough male performance).

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3 ‘Best Film Editing’. 4 ‘Best Writing’ (originally ‘Meilleur scénario, dialogues ou adaptation’; changed to ‘Meilleur scénario original ou adaptation’ in 1982; discontinued in 2005 and split into the current titles, ‘Meilleure adaptation’ (‘Best Adapted Screenplay’) and (Meilleur scénario original’ (‘Best Original Screenplay’)). 5 ‘Best Director’ (changed to ‘Meilleure réalisation’ (‘Best Directing’) in 2016 to avoid the gender distinction of the male ‘réalisateur’). 6 ‘Best Actor in a Supporting Role’. 7 ‘Best Actress in a Supporting Role’. 8 ‘Best Original Score’. 9 ‘Best Screenplay’. All Festival de Cannes award translations sourced from www.festival-​cannes.com/​en/​festival/​actualites/​photos/​all-​the-​ 72nd-​festival-​de-​cannes-awards (accessed 28 April 2020). The two main prizes at Cannes, the Palme d’Or and Grand Prix, as well as the ‘Un Certain Regard’ prize, are not translated into English. 10 ‘Jury Prize’. 11 ‘Best Director Prize’. 12 ‘Jury Prize Ex-​æquo’. 13 ‘Special Jury Prize’. 14 ‘Best Actress’. 15 ‘Best Sound’. 16 ‘Best Film’ (literally ‘Best French Film of the Year’; originally ‘Meilleur film de l’année’ (‘Best Film of the Year’); changed to ‘Meilleur Film’ (‘Best Film’) in 1988 and ‘Meilleur film français de l’année’, its current title, distinguishing it clearly from ‘Meilleur film étranger’ (‘Best Foreign Film’), in 2003). Since 2016, it has no longer been possible for a film to win both Best Film and Best Director. 17 ‘Best Actor’. 18 Best Cinematography’. 19 ‘Best Female Newcomer’ (i.e. best breakthrough female performance). 20 ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ (see n. 4 above for history of award category.). 21 ‘Best Production Design’. 22 ‘Best Original Screenplay’ (see n. 4 above for history of award category.) 23 ‘Best Costume Design’. 24 ‘Youth Prize’ (not awarded since 2013).

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Appendix 4 Languages and co-​production countries, feature films

Film

Year

Languages

(Co-​)production Countries

Regarde les 1994 French hommes tomber

France

Un héros très discret

1996 French

France

Sur mes lèvres

2001 French, French Sign Language

France

De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté

2005 English, French, Mandarin, Russian, Vietnamese

France

Un prophète

2009 Arabic, Corsican, French

France, Italy

De rouille et d’os

2012 English, French

Belgium, France, Singapore

Dheepan

2015 English, French, Tamil

France

The Sisters Brothers

2018 English

Belgium, France, Romania, Spain, USA

Data gathered from www.imdb.com. Languages and countries in alphabetical order.

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Filmography

As director Regarde les hommes tomber (See How They Fall) (1994), 90 min., col. Production company: Bloody Mary Productions, Centre Européen Cinématographique Rhône-​Alpes, France 3 Cinéma Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Alain Le Henry Photography: Gérard Sterin Sound: Monique Dartonne Music: Alexandre Desplat Editing: Juliette Welfling Principal actors: Jean-​Louis Trintignant (Marx), Jean Yanne (Simon), Mathieu Kassovitz (Johnny), Bulle Ogier (Louise), Christine Pascal (Sandrine), Yvon Back (Mickey) Un héros très discret (A Self-​Made Hero) (1996), 107 min., col. Production company: Alicéléo, Cofimage 7, Lumière, Studio Images 2 Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Alain Le Henry Photography: Jean-​Marc Fabre Sound: Jean-​Pierre Duret, Nicolas Naegelen Music: Alexandre Desplat Editing: Juliette Welfling Principal actors: Mathieu Kassovitz (Albert, young adult), Anouk Grinberg (Servane), Sandrine Kiberlain (Yvette), Jean-​ Louis Trintignant (Albert, older), Albert Dupontel (Dionnet)

174

Filmography

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‘La Nuit je mens’ (1997), Alain Bashung music video, 5 min., col. Screenplay: Alain Bashung, Jean Fauque Music: Alain Bashung Principal actors: Alain Bashung (self) Norme française (1998), short, 8 min., col. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard Sur mes lèvres (Read My Lips) (2001), 115 min., col. Production company: Canal+, CNC Cinématographie, Ciné B, France 2 Cinéma, Pathé Image Production, Sédif Productions Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista Photography: Mathieu Vadepied Sound: Marc-​Antoine Beldent, Gael Nicolas, Pascal Villard Music: Alexandre Desplat Editing: Juliette Welfling Principal actors: Emmanuelle Devos (Carla), Vincent Cassel (Paul), Olivier Gourmet (Marchand), Olivier Perrier (Masson), Olivia Bonamy (Annie), Bernard Alane (Morel) De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (The Beat My Heart Skipped) (2005), 108 min., col. Production company: Why Not Productions, Sédif Productions, France 3 Cinéma, Cofimage 15, Canal+, CinéCinéma, Région Ile-​de-​France Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista Photography: Stéphane Fontaine Sound: Brigitte Taillandier, Pascal Villard Music: Alexandre Desplat Editing: Juliette Welfling Principal actors: Romain Duris (Tom), Niels Arestrup (Robert), Jonathan Zaccaï (Fabrice), Gilles Cohen (Sami), Linh Dan Pham (Miao Lin), Aure Atika (Aline), Emmanuelle Devos (Chris) Un prophète (A Prophet) (2009), 155 min., col. Production company: Why Not Productions, Chic Films, Page 114, France 2 Cinéma, Union Générale

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Filmography

175

Cinématographique, BIM Distribuzione, Celluloid Dreams, France 2, Canal+, CinéCinéma, Région Ile-​de-​France, Conseil Régional de Provence-​Alpes Côte d’Azur, CNC, Sofica UGC 1, Sofica Soficinéma 4, Soficinéma 5, Neon Productions Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri, Nicolas Peufaillit Photography: Stéphane Fontaine Sound: Stephane Rabeau, Brigitte Taillandier, Francis Wargnier Music: Alexandre Desplat Editing: Juliette Welfling Principal actors: Tahar Rahim (Malik), Niels Arestrup (César), Adel Bencherif (Ryad), Reda Kateb (Jordi), Hichem Yacobi (Reyeb), Jean-​Philippe Ricci (Vettori) Raphaël live vu par Jacques Audiard (2011), album film, 52 min., col. Production company: Parlophone Music France Photography: François Goetghebeur, Benjamin Louet Editing: Lionel Delebarre Music and principal actors: Raphaël Haroche, Toby Dammit, Elsa Fourlon, Yan Péchin, Julien Schultheis, Alain Verderosa De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone) (2012), 120 min., col. Production company: Why Not Productions, Page 114, France 2 Cinéma, Les Films du Fleuve, Radio Télévision Belge Francophone, Lumière, Lunanime, Canal+, Ciné+, France Télévisions, Centre du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel de la Fédération Wallonie-​ Bruxelles, VOO, Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds, Région Provence-​Alpes-​Côte d’Azur, Département des Alpes-​Maritimes, Casa Kafka Pictures, Festive Films, Neon Productions Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain Photography: Stéphane Fontaine Sound: Brigitte Taillandier, Pascal Villard Music: Alexandre Desplat Editing: Juliette Welfling Principal actors: Marion Cotillard (Stéphanie), Matthias Schoenaerts (Alain), Armand Verdure (Sam), Céline Sallette (Louise), Corinne Masiero (Anna)

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176

Filmography

Dheepan (2015), 115 min., col. Production company: Why Not Productions, Page 114, France 2 Cinéma, Canal+, Ciné+, France Télévisions, Région Ile-​ de-​France, Cinémage 9, A Plus Image 5, Palatine Etoile 12, Indéfilms 3, La Banque Postale Image 8, Cofinova 11, SofiTVciné 2, Soficinéma 11 Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré Photography: Eponine Momenceau Sound: Nicolas Dambroise, Valérie Deloof Music: Nicolas Jaar Editing: Juliette Welfling Principal actors: Jesuthasan Antonythasan (Dheepan), Kalieaswari Srinivasan (Yalini), Claudine Vinasithamby (Illayaal), Vincent Rottiers (Brahim), Faouzi Bensaïdi (Monsieur Habib), Marc Zinga (Youssouf) Les Frères Sisters (The Sisters Brothers) (2018), 122 min., col. Production company: Why Not Productions, Page 114, Annapurna Pictures, France 2 Cinéma, France 3 Cinéma, Union Générale Cinématographique, KNM, Michael De Luca Productions, Top Drawer Entertainment, Apache Films, Mobra Films, Les Films du Fleuve, Canal+, OCS, France Télévisions, Atresmedia Cine, Movistar+, Wallimage, Casa Kafka Pictures, Meñakoz Films Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain Photography: Benoît Debie Sound: Hortense Bailly, Valérie Deloof Music: Alexandre Desplat Editing: Juliette Welfling Principal actors: John C. Reilly (Eli), Joaquin Phoenix (Charlie), Jake Gyllenhaal (John), Riz Ahmed (Hermann Kermit), Rebecca Root (Mayfield)

As co-​director ‘Comme elle vient’ (1997), Noir désir music video, 3 min., col. Directors: Jacques Audiard, Henri-​Jean Debon

Filmography

177

Screenplay: Bertrand Cantat, Henri-​Jean Debon Music: Noir désir

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Nous, les sans-​papiers de France (1997), short with Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers and 200 co-​directors On bosse ici! On vit ici! On reste ici! (2010), short with Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​ papiers and 320 co-​directors

As screenwriter Bons baisers … à lundi (Kisses till Monday) (1974), dir. Michel Audiard Le Professionnel (The Professional) (1981), dir. Georges Lautner Mortelle randonnée (Deadly Circuit) (1983), dir. Claude Miller L’Ennemi public n˚ 2 (Public Enemy no. 2) (1984), Série noire television series, season 1, episode 1, dir. Edouard Niermans Réveillon chez Bob (1984), dir. Denys Granier-​Deferre La Cage aux Folles III: ‘Elles’ se marient (La Cage aux Folles 3: The Wedding) (1985), dir. Georges Lautner Sac de nœuds (All Mixed Up) (1985), dir. Josiane Balasko Poussière d’ange (Killing Time) (1987), dir. Edouard Niermans Fréquence meurtre (Frequent Death) (1988), dir. Elisabeth Rappeneau Saxo (1988), dir. Ariel Zeitoun Australia (1989), dir. Jean-​Jacques Andrien Baxter (1989), dir. Jérôme Boivin Swing Troubadour (1991), dir. Bruno Bayen Barjo (1992), dir. Jérôme Boivin Grosse fatigue (Dead Tired) (1994), dir. Michel Blanc Regarde les hommes tomber (See How They Fall) (1994), dir. Jacques Audiard Un héros très discret (A Self-​Made Hero) (1996), dir. Jacques Audiard

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Filmography

Norme française (1998), dir. Jacques Audiard Vénus beauté (institut) (Venus Beauty Institute) (1999), dir. Tonie Marshall Sur mes lèvres (Read My Lips) (2001), dir. Jacques Audiard De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (The Beat My Heart Skipped) (2005), dir. Jacques Audiard Un prophète (A Prophet) (2009), dir. Jacques Audiard De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone) (2012), dir. Jacques Audiard Dheepan (2015), dir. Jacques Audiard Les Frères Sisters (The Sisters Brothers) (2018), dir. Jacques Audiard

As assistant editor Le Locataire (The Tenant) (1976), dir. Roman Polanski René la canne (Rene the Cane) (1977), dir. Francis Girod Le Passé simple (Replay) (1977), dir. Michel Drach Le Dernier Amant romantique (The Last Romantic Lover) (1978), dir. Just Jaeckin Judith Therpauve (1978), dir. Patrice Chéreau

As assistant sound mixer Clair de femme (Womanlight) (1979), dir. Costa-​Gavras

As producer/​co-​producer/​executive producer Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante (I’m Glad My Mother Is Alive) (2009), dir. Claude and Nathan Miller De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone) (2012), dir. Jacques Audiard Dheepan (2015), dir. Jacques Audiard 120 battements par minute (BPM) (2017), dir. Robin Campillo You Were Never Really Here (2017), dir. Lynne Ramsay

Filmography

179

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As cast Baby Blood (as ‘Decapitated Jogger’) (1990), dir. Alain Robak Les Enfants de la plage (as ‘Professor #1’) (1991), dir. Williams Crépin Grossesse nerveuse (as ‘The Antique Dealer’) (1996), Les Mercredis de la vie television series, season 2, episode 1, dir. Denis Rabaglia

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Select bibliography

The current volume is the first book about Jacques Audiard. The following is a selection of the existing journal articles and book chapters published on Audiard and his films. Upon the release of each of his films, Audiard has also given a number of thoughtful interviews, the most frequent and thorough being with Positif in French and the Guardian in English; see the reference list at the end of each chapter for details. In 2016, Julia Dobson edited a special edition of the journal Studies in French Cinema (now known as French Screen Studies), Jacques Audiard: Twenty-​ First Century Auteur, including articles in the following order (the description following each article is the author’s own): Dobson, J. (2016), ‘Jacques Audiard: Twenty-​First Century Auteur’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 187–​9. A concise presentation of Audiard and his cinema as introduction to the volume. Morrey, D. (2016), ‘The Rough and the Smooth: Narrative, Character and Performance in Fingers (1978) and De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté/​The Beat that My Heart Skipped (2005)’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 190–​204. An adaptation study of De battre and its source text, Fingers, focusing on Duris and Keitel’s performances as ‘smooth’ and ‘rough’ respectively. Sellier, G. (2016), ‘De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (Audiard, 2005): La masculinité comme souffrance’, Studies in French 14. The volume’s second article on De Cinema, 16:3, 205–​

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181

battre, but approached from a gender studies perspective, analysing the film’s themes of masculinity, violence and misogyny alongside its reception as film noir d’auteur. Dobson, J. (2016), ‘Special Affects: Reconfiguring Melodrama in De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone), Audiard, 2012’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 215–​28. An important study of genre in Audiard, concentrating on the ‘hybridisation’ of melodrama in De rouille et d’os. Kitchen, R. (2016), ‘The Disabled Body and Disability in the Cinema of Jacques Audiard’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 229–​ 47. An illuminating study on the representation of the disabled body in Audiard, focusing logically on De rouille et d’os and Sur mes lèvres. Vanderschelden, I. (2016), ‘Screenwriting the Euro-​ Noir Thriller: The Subtext of Jacques Audiard’s Artistic Signature’, Studies in French Cinema, 16:3, 248–​61. The only publication primarily about Audiard’s non-​directing roles, an analysis of Audiard as screenwriter and collaborator with an auteurist ‘artistic signature’. Dobson, J. (2011), ‘Jacques Audiard: Contesting Filiations’, in Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, ed. K. Ince, Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp. 38–​58. The most broad-​ranging study of Audiard at the time of its publication; analyses Audiard’s work up to De battre through the motifs of patriarchy and filiation. Forbes, J. (1999), ‘Politicians and Performers: Un héros très discret’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 36:1, 125–​35. Explores Un héros très discret as part of a broader argument around politics and performance. King, G. (2014), ‘The Power of the Treacherous Interpreter: Multilingualism in Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète’, Linguistica antverpiensia, 13, 78–​92. Studies Un prophète within a translation frame to understand Malik’s use of multilingualism as a form of treachery and manipulation. King, G. (2017), ‘Urban Margins: Un prophète and Dheepan’, in Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema, Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp. 84–​118. In a book on contemporary multilingual French cinema,

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studies Un prophète and Dheepan as evidence of a broader multilingual film trend. King, G. (2018), ‘Contemporary French Cinema and the Langue de passage: From Dheepan to Welcome’, French Cultural Studies, 29:1, 39–​48. Analyses the temporary and imperfect use of French by Dheepan’s Tamil characters to develop the concept of the langue de passage. Lauten, K. M. (1999), ‘ “Dusting off” Dehousse: Un héros très discret (Audiard, 1996)’, in French Cinema in the 1990s: Continuity and Difference, ed. P. Powrie, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 58–​68. Analyses Un héros très discret’s approach to national and collective memory. MacDonald, M. (2013), ‘Humanism at the Limit and Post-​ Restante in the Colony: The Prison of the Postcolonial Nation in Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophète (2009)’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 15:3/​4, 561–​80. Reads Un prophète’s prison environment as a representation of the limits of ‘postcolonial humanism’. Massonnat, F. (2018), ‘ “Jean-​ Pierre, c’est moi”: Polyglossia and Blurred Identities in the Films of Jacques Audiard’, Contemporary French Civilization, 43:1, 109–​24. A useful study of language and identity in Audiard’s films, focusing on Un prophète and Dheepan. Met, P. (2006), ‘Oedipal Mayhem: Rituals of Masculinity and Filiation in Jacques Audiard’s Regarde les hommes tomber’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 43:1, 94–​102. The only article concentrating on Audiard’s first film, reading Regarde les hommes tomber’s gender and sexual dynamics through an Oedipal lens. Oscherwitz, D. (2015), ‘Monnet Changes Everything? Capitalism, Currency and crisis in Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète (2009)’, Studies in French Cinema, 15:3, 258–​74. A study of money and economy as represented in Un prophète and Touchez pas au grisbi. An interesting combination of films that draws a connection between the two Audiards as writers, as Michel Audiard wrote both the sequels to Touchez.

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Index

Academy Awards 30, 87, 118 adaptation 8, 27, 28, 38, 52, 53, 73, 75–7, 78, 80, 100–2, 148, 150, 160 Ahmed, Riz 10, 137 animals 8, 23, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 76, 108, 128, 129, 134, 135, 139–41, 159 Arestrup, Niels 9, 27, 86, 87, 89 Assayas, Olivier 144 auteur(ism) 4, 5, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 73, 80, 89, 116, 122, 136, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 160 BAFTAs 28, 55, 56, 87, 126 Bencherif, Adel 87, 93 Berlin Film Festival 28, 118 Beugnet, Martine 15, 21, 25, 46, 47 cinema of sensation 25 Bidegain, Thomas 10, 149 bodies 1–2, 3, 5, 15, 20, 22, 24, 26, 35, 39, 48, 52, 57, 60, 139

amputation 25, 48, 49, 51, 53, 62, 63, 138 deafness 9, 22, 25, 37, 39, 43, 46 disability 15, 20, 25, 26, 38, 39, 41, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57, 62, 63, 64, 73, 81, 85, 108 sex 15, 22, 25, 26, 47, 52, 58, 62, 63, 103 touch 21, 25, 37, 58, 62, 82 borders 121, 124, 132, 133, 136 crossing 5, 15, 16, 65, 85, 94, 119, 121, 122, 123, 132, 134, 141, 159 geographic/​national 3, 16, 73, 121, 122, 136, 153, 159 symbolic 12, 15, 16, 20, 23, 25, 39, 50, 51, 57, 75, 76, 79, 83, 85, 132, 135, 151, 152, 160 box office 28, 38, 54, 77, 87, 98, 117, 126 Breillat, Catherine 26, 47

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184

Index

Cannes Film Festival 4, 11, 47, 56, 98, 118 Collectif 50/​50 4, 11 Palme d’Or 9, 56, 87, 98, 115–16, 118, 126 Cassel, Vincent 9, 38 Césars 4, 28, 30, 38, 55, 56, 77, 87, 88, 98, 117, 126, 146, 147 cinéma de banlieue 9, 89, 133, 134 cinéma du corps 15, 25, 26, 46, 47, 50, 59 cinéma du milieu 11, 15 cinéma-​monde 121, 122, 151, 152 cinematography 20, 36, 57, 59, 87, 96, 108, 129, 146 CGI 3, 158 close-​ups 3, 20, 21, 24, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41, 43, 59, 110, 128, 129, 140 colour palette 4, 39, 81 hands 1, 2, 21, 30, 34, 36 keyhole shots 1, 3, 34, 35, 40, 41, 81 lighting 3, 35, 80–1, 122, 129, 158 long takes 20, 24 sensory perception 3, 34, 35, 37, 42, 73 Club des 13 4, 11 CNC 4, 117 Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-​papiers 11, 108, 109 Cotillard, Marion 51, 55, 57

crime 1, 3, 9, 27, 38, 49, 74, 75, 77, 86, 87, 96, 97, 108, 119 Dans ma peau 59 Davidson, Craig 52, 54 De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté 7, 9, 10, 15, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26–37, 38, 43, 48, 53, 55, 64, 71, 73, 79, 81, 83, 84, 88, 89, 91, 95, 100, 101, 115, 117, 118, 119, 141, 143, 153, 159 De rouille et d’os 1, 3, 7, 10, 15, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 33, 39, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51–64, 81, 84, 88, 89, 100, 101, 108, 115, 126, 140, 148, 149 De Van, Marina 59 Denis, Claire 26, 47, 144 desire 33, 37, 39, 41, 47, 50, 60, 62, 77 ambiguous 9, 47, 76, 82, 83, 138 queer 9, 79, 82, 138, 142 Desplat, Alexandre 11, 30, 149 Devos, Emmanuelle 9, 37, 45 DeWitt, Patrick 138, 145, 148, 149, 150 Dheepan 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 22, 30, 33, 47, 48, 50, 53, 56, 72, 83, 84, 88, 89, 100, 101, 108, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122–37, 140, 145, 149, 152, 153

Index

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dialogue 5, 21, 30, 78–9, 80, 102–4, 119, 128, 131, 144 Dickey, Alison 148 Dumont, Bruno 26, 47 Duris, Romain 9, 27, 88 Famille Bélier, La 44, 45 family 3, 9, 81, 138, 159 Audiard, Michel 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 21 brotherhood 7, 10, 33, 63, 142, 159 mother (lost, absent) 7, 30, 31, 33, 83 paternal–​filial relationships 4, 6, 7, 32, 33, 37, 73, 75, 83, 84, 89, 159 substitutive 4, 6, 9, 29, 73, 75, 76, 82, 83, 84, 89, 93, 124, 125, 135, 138, 159 Ferran, Pascale 4, 11 film roles acting 8, 109 collaboration 5, 8, 10–12, 13, 14 directing 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 75, 77, 146, 160 editing 6, 8, 11, 12, 15, 75, 77, 87, 149, 160 producing 15, 147, 160 screenwriting 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 160 sound mixing 8, 15, 75 Fingers 27, 28, 29, 34, 95 France 3, 5, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 80, 84, 85, 87, 91,

185

92, 108, 118, 123, 124, 125, 129, 132, 134, 137, 145, 153 banlieue 9, 84, 108, 116, 119, 121, 124, 125, 130–1, 132, 133, 134, 135, 153 myths 99, 100, 102, 108, 109, 118, 132 national cinema 13, 15, 89, 116, 117–19, 120, 121, 122, 151, 152, 159, 161 Paris 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 27, 37, 70, 74, 75, 76, 86, 98, 101, 104, 106, 117, 118, 119, 123, 130, 132, 134, 144 society 3, 14, 16, 70, 71, 72, 74, 81, 83, 85, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 108, 109, 110, 118, 125 Frères Sisters, Les 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 16, 22, 30, 33, 46, 47, 48, 50, 53, 55, 56, 62, 64, 79, 81, 83, 84, 89, 98, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 127, 137–53, 158, 160 Garland Thomson, Rosemarie 15, 26, 64 gaze 21, 34, 38, 39–41, 57, 58, 60, 62 gender 4, 15, 25, 31, 52, 65 masculinity 4, 24, 27, 31, 33, 63, 64, 71, 74, 159 representation of women 4, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 49, 65, 89, 138

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186

Index

genre 4, 5, 6, 15, 16, 38, 39, 47, 56, 73, 77, 78, 79–80, 89, 91, 99, 104, 138, 152 Bildungsroman 9, 50, 79, 86, 93, 158 documentary 102, 104, 105, 108 drama 8, 9, 38, 44, 55, 79, 142, 158 film noir 5, 6, 9, 38, 39, 50, 76, 77, 79, 80, 143 horror 26, 46, 50, 80 melodrama 4, 46, 48, 50, 55, 56, 80 polar 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 38, 77, 78, 79, 89, 143 pornography 46, 50 prison film 4, 73, 79, 80, 143 romance 38, 50 thriller 38, 39, 77, 79, 117 Western 4, 73, 79, 80, 89, 143, 151, 158 Golden Globes 55, 56, 87, 118 Gyllenhaal, Jake 10, 137 Haneke, Michael 44, 56, 87, 115 Hollywood 10, 55, 57, 143, 144, 148, 149, 150 Honoré, Christophe 26 immigration 1, 9, 119, 122, 123, 125, 126, 131, 134, 135, 137 Jesuthasan, Antonythasan 88, 124

Kassovitz, Mathieu 8, 9, 55, 75, 77, 79, 88, 98, 103 language 9, 10, 21, 22, 37, 49, 71, 73, 121, 133, 137 Arabic 86, 91, 93, 95 barriers 22, 23, 24, 30, 37, 43, 49, 73, 127 Corsican 24, 50, 86, 93, 95, 103 English 10, 23, 27, 30, 38, 55, 121, 144, 145, 149, 152 French 23, 24, 27, 31, 91, 127, 131, 135, 145 French Sign Language 23, 41, 43, 44, 49 Italian 23, 27, 30, 31 learning 24, 86, 93, 110, 124 lip-​reading 9, 23, 24, 38, 39, 41, 43, 45, 49 Mandarin 23, 27, 34 multilingualism 3, 9, 16, 21, 43, 71, 86, 87, 91, 93–4, 119, 120, 144 Tamil 9, 121, 127, 128, 130, 131, 153 Vietnamese 27, 31 Lautner, Georges 5, 8, 78 Lettres persanes 28, 53, 101, 125 Marie Heurtin 44, 45 Marks, Laura 3, 26, 150 Miller, Claude 4, 11 Montesquieu 53, 125 Mulvey, Laura 41, 63 music 30–1, 37

Index

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diegetic 29, 30, 35, 36, 42, 43, 104 score 3, 30, 31, 35, 42, 104 videos 3, 15, 29, 30, 43–4, 70, 109, 160 national cinemas 4, 12, 13, 119, 121, 122, 151, 152 Noé, Gaspard 25, 47 Noir Désir 29, 43 Palmer, Tim 15, 25, 46, 47, 59 Peckinpah, Sam 53, 125 Pham, Linh Dan 9, 27, 91 Phoenix, Joaquin 10, 137, 147 power 2, 3, 9, 16, 24, 38, 39, 49, 57, 63, 64, 65, 71, 72, 87, 90, 93, 95, 96, 135 relations 4, 49, 72, 74, 89, 91, 92, 94, 97, 119, 139, 141 prison 1, 9, 70, 71, 73, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 108, 124, 130 Prix Jacques Deray 28, 117 Prix Louis Delluc 28, 56, 87, 117 Quandt, James 25, 46 New French Extremity 25, 46 Rahim, Tahar 9, 55, 86, 87, 88, 92 Raphaël 8, 30 Regarde les hommes tomber 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 16, 22, 28, 33, 50, 64, 70, 71, 74–85,

187

88, 89, 103, 110, 118, 119, 138, 143, 159, 160 Reilly, John C. 10, 137, 146, 147–8, 150 Root, Rebecca 138–9 Rottiers, Vincent 124, 128 Rust and Bone (collection) 28, 52, 53–4, 101 Schoenaerts, Matthias 51, 88 Second World War Resistance 1, 9, 22, 98–100, 102, 103, 104, 105–6, 109, 119 short films 11, 70, 108 Sisters Brothers, The (novel) 28, 138, 145, 148, 149, 150, 152 sound 4, 6, 29, 31, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 50, 58, 102 empathic 25, 41, 42, 46, 51 Sri Lankan civil war 1, 84, 123, 124, 127 Srinivasan, Kalieaswari 9, 124, 127 Sur mes lèvres 6, 7, 9, 15, 20, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 33, 34, 37–51, 57, 63, 64, 70, 72, 79, 81, 84, 89, 91, 103, 108, 118, 119 Tarantino, Quentin 35, 90 Toback, James 27, 29, 95 Toronto Film Festival 118, 128, 148 transnational cinemas 13, 90, 93, 120, 121, 122, 144, 146–7, 150, 151, 152, 160

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Index

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Triangle 75–7, 78, 80 Trintignant, Jean-​Louis 9, 75, 77, 98 Trouble Every Day 26, 47 Un héros très discret 7, 8, 9, 10, 16, 22, 28, 29, 30, 33, 56, 70, 71, 72, 79, 83, 84, 97–110, 118, 140, 151, 153 Un héros très discret (novel) 100, 101 Un prophète 1, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 16, 22, 23, 28, 30, 33, 34, 38, 43, 46, 47, 50, 53, 55, 56, 71, 72, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86–97, 103, 108, 110, 115, 117, 119, 131, 140, 141, 143, 149, 153, 159 underdog 3, 16, 39, 49, 70, 85, 91, 95, 97, 141

Venice Film Festival 118, 146 Vinasithamby, Claudine 9, 124, 128 violence 4, 9, 22, 25, 29, 32, 35, 36, 46, 47, 72, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 92, 93, 96, 97, 116, 124, 125, 131, 133, 136, 139, 140, 141, 158, 159 torture 22, 34, 35, 47, 86, 96, 137 trauma 3, 16, 24, 25, 52, 57, 59, 62, 76, 142, 159 Welfling, Juliette 11, 149 White, Teri 75, 78, 80 Williams, Linda 15, 26, 46, 47, 48, 50 body genres 25, 46, 48, 50 Yanne, Jean 9, 75