This Mortal Coil
True to the funeral that opens it, Les Destinées is
haunted by the specter of mortality. Far from being lugubrious,
however, the movie is at times thrillingly sensual, if not quite
consistently engrossing. French filmmaker Olivier Assayas's
newest feature ultimately can't bear the burden of its epic
scope and length. Ambition outstripping achievement, it's an
anomalous movie -- at once expansive and truncated, modern and
musty. It's not quite a folly, though it might be something
worse: a middling epic. To cop a Johnny Carson quip, it's two
worthwhile hours stretched out over three.
Decorous and stately, Les Destinées is unlike anything
Assayas has done before. He has built his reputation as a
festival favorite with contemporary, urban films of bracing
spontaneity. Les Destinées, by contrast, is detached and
choreographed. It's a sumptuous movie, possibly the most
gorgeous thing he's ever made, but it begs the question: do we
want Assayas making artful objects of contemplation?
Adapted from Jacques Chardonne's 1936 novel, Les Destinées
Sentimentales -- a much-loved text in its native land --
Assayas's movie charts three decades in the life of Jean Barnery
(Charles Berling), a priest in the provincial town of Barbazac
and scion to a wealthy porcelain magnate. Told in three
chapters, the movie opens as Jean's wife, Nathalie (Isabelle
Huppert), and daughter, Aline (played as a child by Joséphine
Firino-Martell, and later by Mia Hansen-Love), prepare to run
off at Jean's behest because of some unexplained
misunderstanding. Jean then meets the beautiful Pauline
(Emmanuelle Béart), the niece of a local cognac dealer. After
another abortive attempt at saving his marriage, Jean divorces
his wife, leaving her his entire fortune, and marries Pauline.
With his new wife, Jean leaves France for Switzerland, where the
two lead a simple, idyllic existence. Before long, their
picturesque sojourn comes to an end. Called upon by his family
to save their porcelain franchise, Jean and Pauline, now with a
son, move to Limoges. Jean becomes consumed by his mission to
save the family business, at the expense of his marriage. War
intrudes, as does a depression later on, and before he knows it,
Jean lies in bed, near death, left to ruminate on his life.
As its title suggests, the pall of inevitability hangs over
Les Destinées. The movie makes much of the Barnerys'
Protestantism, perhaps not least because of the religion's
determinist outlook. Tracing the vicissitudes of a man's life,
Assayas suggests that choice and free will pale beside the pull
of duty, destiny, and history. The movie is beautiful
throughout, but Jean's flight to the Swiss Alps is virtually
Edenic -- not incidentally, it's the one time in his life where
passion and impulse trump his fatalistic outlook.
Throughout, Les Destinées maintains a lightness of spirit
in spite of the potential pessimism of its subtext. With a
lifetime to cover, the movie manages to be both novelistic and
elliptical. At one point, we see a neglected Pauline begin an
affair with a younger man. A couple of scenes later, an aged
Jean and Pauline discuss the affair years after the fact. As the
narrative mimics the evanescence of a lifetime, the effect is
curious: Elusive and yet sweeping, the movie feels both hefty
and hollowed out.
The erratic narrative makes Assayas's efforts to inject a
political
agenda seem awkward. Like any good epic, Jean's personal drama
transpires
against the backdrop of History -- here including socialism, the
labor
movement, and the advance of globalism -- occasionally
represented by
unconvincing parlor room talk. Characters lecture one another on
the
rise of the working class or the inequities of the free market,
but these
harangues stick out as lazy exposition.
Some critics have read Jean's adventures as a porcelain maker of
impeccable taste as a metaphor for the director's own travails.
Beleaguered by the demands of the market, Jean struggles to
retain his artistic integrity. Still, the movie remains
admirably ambiguous as to his "heroic" status: If Jean is the
high-minded artist, then what are we to make of his neglect of
his workers? Indeed, the movie might almost be read (perversely)
as an elitist parable, in which egalitarianism and the restive
proletariat are presented as hindrances to the creation of true
and enduring art. Notwithstanding its occasional didacticism,
the movie refuses to be reductive, insisting on the complexities
immanent in human experience. Whether or not Assayas uses
ambiguity to mask his own muddled thinking is an open question,
but hardly a fatal flaw.
A devoted cineaste, Assayas also shows that he's a natural-born
filmmaker, creating with seeming ease images of supple beauty
and breathtaking lightness. (Working with cinematographer
extraordinaire Eric Gautier surely helps.) The film reflects a
battle of sensibilities, a French "tradition of quality" versus
Assayas's urgency and panache. Let's call it a draw. Working
within a familiar genre, Assayas's mise-en-scene is at times
uniquely expressive. An early highlight is a lavish ball where
the seed of Jean and Pauline's affair is planted. Unabashedly
quoting the climactic party in Luschino Visconti's The
Leopard (one of the most imitated sequences of all time),
Assayas shoots the glamorous event hand-held and in-your-face,
imparting a sense of immediacy into a sequence that other movies
have portrayed with graceful formality.
Would that his imprimatur were more apparent throughout the
movie. Pauline Kael, in a 1994 interview with Hal Aspen (The
New Yorker, 21 March 1994), dismissively called Martin
Scorsese's The Age of Innocence "Merchant-Ivory terrain."
I never agreed, but after seeing Les Destinées, I now now
where Kael was coming from. With Les Destinées, Assayas
has shown everyone that he can make a handsome, genteel period
piece. Cold Water and Irma Vep, two earlier
features, were vivid and volatile -- they left you with a buzz.
Impressive as Les Destinées is, I can't muster anything
more than mild admiration for it. "There is tranquillity in this
grandeur," Pauline tells Jean during their Alpine idyll. The
line could apply to the movie as well. If anything, Les
Destinées might be too placid. At three hours, the movie
succumbs to too many longueurs.
Which isn't to deny the movie its successes. The closing moments
of Les Destinées may have the hint of elegy, but
Assayas's fervor for life and youth keeps peeking through.
Les Destinées may open with a funeral, but it ends with a
kind of resurrection. Reminiscent of the quiet transcendence of
Wild Strawberries, the ending leaves Jean -- and us --
with the pleasant memory of better days rather than numbing
finality. The closing credits play over earlier scenes from the
movie, and it's a wonderful touch -- it plays like a moving
scrapbook of our protagonists' youth. Death awaits us all, but
Assayas, with a humanist's generosity, offers his characters the
greatest gift art can give: immortality.
— 25 April 2002
