La Comédie-Française ou L’Amour Joué is a magnificent movie, one of my very favorites. It’s 223 minutes and I wish it was twice as long. And if I didn’t have something like seventeen Wisemans still to go, I’d be tempted to watch it again right away. It’s also a film where having just seen Ballet really helps to understand it, and it’s a chance to consider some interesting Wiseman questions. And it makes me glad that some things we’ve been looking at already are really good preparation for where we are now.
I want to start with one of those things that is said over and over again about Wiseman films: everybody seems obligated to remind us that his films have no narration and that we’re given no background information about either the people we’re seeing or why we’re watching what we’re watching. I think Variety put it as the “lack of the most rudimentary explanatory material“ and complained about some scene that a “little scrap of information” would have given it some meaning. This comes up so much, it needs addressing, and I’d say addressing in aggressive defense of Wiseman’s way of doing things, because it’s absolutely at the heart of why these films are what they are. La Comédie-Française is a good test case, as it’s got plays the average viewer wouldn’t recognize, many actors they might like identified, and lots of situations that would look very different if some of those scraps were present. So now’s the time to think about this a little bit.
First, when might additional information be supplied? A simple answer would be, whenever it’s essential to understanding what we’re watching. A second answer might be to tell us why it’s important to view what we’re being shown. Another might be just to give us the names and maybe something about the people we’re seeing - who’s important, what they’ve done before this, that sort of stuff. And how might we get all this? The traditional documentary way would be a voice-over narrator, an announcer or trusted voice of some sort guiding us through. Printed titles are another common documentary device. These days, we could maybe imagine some digital assistance, like the Amazon Prime Video X-Ray feature, which has you a click away from all sorts of additional information, or maybe something like a supplementary audio track along the lines of what dvd’s often provide. I think these are rather ludicrous notions for a Wiseman film, but if you feel necessary details are missing from his films, you’d have to come up with some means for delivering it.
Thinking you need this kind of stuff seriously misses the point of what Wiseman films are. They start with this essential constraint - that you are not going to be told why you’re watching what you’re watching, that it’s up to you to see what there is to extract from this process. Films don’t have to simplify or tell you there are additional things it might be nice to know. There’s always additional information it might be nice to know, no matter how much we know already. This is the case whenever something interesting is going on, and I think Wiseman allows you to say to yourself I’d like to find out more about this or think about how it connects to other things in this film. The so-called additional information poses the risk of limiting that process - telling us there’s one thing here that explains why we’re watching this and we should concentrate on that. This is also a complaint that only comes up with documentaries. When we see other demanding films, how about something like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, is there a call out there for a narrator? Complexity and ambiguity are somehow more acceptable in that context. Why non-fiction films must be any different isn’t too apparent.
It’s also generally ignored that there’s lots of expository stuff in Wiseman films - people being interviewed, talking with reporters, television snippets, lots of speeches and meetings, posters and signs - it’s a challenge the films rise to, how we learn what’s going on in any given situation. But the burden is on us at all times - watch and listen attentively. The other way makes us lazy and overly simplifies. The films are generously constructed to provide multiple meanings and different kinds of experiences, not to make just one kind of sense that could be further signposted. I think it’s also, as clearly with this film, reductive just to label them documentaries and think that therefor they only can serve certain informational purposes. They can be as entertaining and involving as any kind of film and be experienced for performance, humor, irony, anger, disappointment, confusion - the gamut of emotions and responses. Just don’t think of them as only informational documentaries. You’re missing out on a lot if you do. Maybe you won’t know somebody’s name or all that’s going on in some meeting. You’re getting a whole lot more instead.
Let’s start thinking about some things actually in La Comédie-Française, but that little tirade is necessary from time to time. Back in the day, theater was one of my undergraduate majors at Berkeley (I’m ready for Wiseman going there in about ten films), and on a summer college trip to Paris I did see one production there, of Moliere’s Tartuffe. It felt like what Wiseman shows - intense performance of the highest order. I’ve seen lots of Broadway theater and love it, and ushered for a couple of years in college at San Francisco’s Actors Conservatory Theater in order to see as many plays as I could, but there was definitely something unique about the Comédie-Française. It felt like you were seeing professionalism of a different order and seriousness. The occasional references in the film to it being like a religion for those involved in it ring true. As Wiseman’s film so clearly shows, the acting felt like part of a centuries-old tradition, and every line was being wrung for all it was worth. So being able to see that here is a treasured experience.
La Comédie-Française pairs well with its predecessor Ballet, and lots of what we talked about there still applies - just substitute actors for dancers and most of it’s pretty similar. Work, not just ordinary labor, but deep dedicated work, is seen at every turn - actors rehearsing long and difficult soliloquies in empty rehearsal halls, endless attention to makeup and costumes, responding to direction for the smallest of gestures. The creative process in both these films is on the order of religious dedication in Essene - these are two more Wiseman institutions of deep faith. Like Ballet, it's only halfway through the 223 minutes that we see a performance before an audience. The first half is rehearsals and preparations, and a little more behind-the-scenes stuff (yes, that Wiseman staple) than in Ballet. For a film of this length, it’s amazing how dense with meaning even the shortest of sequences is. To give one example among dozens, let’s just take a single minute or so scene, and I’ll suggest only a few of the things going on, and there’s probably plenty more that others could pick up on that I’ve missed. Let’s head to the cafeteria for lunch, where we get a close-up of a handwritten menu and see first a typically French attention to food, made more apparent by a woman in the kitchen carefully putting a blowtorch to some creme brulee. This is also the only place in the entire film where two black people are visible, both workers in the cafeteria. The most poignant little bit is when lunch is over and we see two young actors learning their lines together. We cut to a long shot to show they’re the only ones left in the cafeteria, and after the long shot, there’s an even more distant shot of them through a window, continuing to a work. So in a minute we get the French love of food, the customary Wiseman observation of minority workers in an otherwise entirely white world, and the dedication of young actors. These movies are dense, and it feels like every shot has been thought through, pared down from massive amounts of already well shot material.
The Wiseman love of process is evident here too, expressed in our returns to certain plays in progress, especially Marivaux’’s 1723 “La Double Inconstance,” in English called “Double Inconstancy” or “The Inconstant Lovers”. It’s the first work we see in rehearsal, and like Ballet, the presence of a director is evident, and basic blocking and simple gestures are under discussion. A few hours later in the film we will get a substantial finished section performed before an audience, and by then we will have seen costumes, makeup, wig and clothing fittings, set building, and lighting all worked on and contributing to the finished product. There’s also an extraordinary off-the-cuff lecture about Marivaux by the play’s director to a woman interviewing him in his office. His name, by the way, is Jean-Pierre Miquel, and in addition to directing the play, he’s also the Administrator of the Comédie-Française itself, which he was from 1993-2001. (He’s never mentioned by name, but see, if you want those details, they’re easily found.) What’s really interesting about his Marivaux ideas, besides how articulate he is, are the many notions of direct application to Wiseman - this is some serious self-reflexivity here. Let me give you a few, and you’ll see that Wiseman’s interest in what Miquel has to say about Marivaux must have struck responsive chords:
“The play deals with many things at once. It's a multi-layered play. There's a complexity in the way the characters behave that constantly plays on ambiguous meanings.”
“We don't know if the characters are motivated by feelings or by social influences. That's what makes the play so very rich and dense and so very ambiguous, because both of course go hand in hand.”
"The play is open to a wide range of interpretations."
“Marivaux doesn't deliver a message. He simply looks at his characters, he observes them. I think Marivaux is a lover of the human species . . . He entertains himself with our behavior. . . . He’s a great philosopher . . . not one who sermonizes, but whose gaze is descriptive, phenomenological.”
There’s no point in me repeating it all back, but do notice how Wisemanesque these observations are (even though I don’t think myself that Marivaux and Wiseman are all that similar). As in Model, Wiseman has found himself in another medium, his own way of working and thinking closely reflected. The woman Miquel is talking to (probably a journalist) even gets in a good standard Wiseman criticism: “So isn’t it just one big manipulation” which Miquel happily slaps down and argues against.
I think the most astonishing pieces of La Comédie-Française are the extended solo speeches offered by actors a number of times, mostly in rehearsals. Usually shot in long single takes (as was mentioned about the dances in Ballet too), the actors tackle difficult language and dramatic ideas requiring subtle interpretation, and we have to marvel at their abilities to pull these off. In rehearsals, we hear occasional stumbling, but know that perfection will be reached through this arduous process. And one can’t help but love a scene where two actors at makeup tables in front of mirrors, as they get their wigs and powder handled by assistants, go over their lines with each other from one scene in the play they’re about to perform in front of an audience. In another single take that goes on for maybe four full minutes, they catch a few rough spots and quickly work them out. As soon as it ends, one says to the other “Thanks, Jean”, in a priceless moment of artistic comradery. Like I said, I love this film.
The meetings over money are perhaps expected Wiseman moments, but what’s unexpected are the particularly French inflections these usually have. In the first of these, Miquel presides over a meeting that starts by reviewing last year’s budget, and there’s discussion about what support is being provided for retired actors, a subject the film (and I) will return to near the end. This leads to an impassioned plea by a workers’ representative that resonates beyond just actors: “Old people deserve free glasses and teeth. Phones too. It’s preposterous. . . . Those are three things the state must really see to. The problem concerns everyone. . . . It’s time to act, to cut out the red tape of harsh realities.” They talk about hiring a social worker, which makes one hope they’ve never seen Welfare if they think their problems can be solved in that manner. Another surprisingly interesting meeting about salary disputes and workers’ strikes leads Miquel to a reflection that sounds more theatrical than administrative, and also exceedingly French: “They want to see a decent figure on their pay slip. That's the bottom line. That's what it inevitably boils down to. in any trade, in any occupation. When you want to meet a wage demand, you don't raise wages, statistically, it looks bad, you don't raise the official payroll . . . you raise bonuses. The whole civil service operates on bonuses. It's amazing. Civil servants have countless bonuses." It should be noted as well is that an exceedingly French aspect of this meeting is the heavy smoking, cigarettes sometimes popping up right in front of the camera lens.
Given all the smoke, it’s surprising that many reach a ripe old age, and the film shows a serious concern for aging, especially in its last hour or so, where late career scenes are connected together. While there’s a bittersweet (dare I say French again) edge to this, there’s also an admiration for the lengthy careers these actors can amass. This also goes with regular demonstrations, as in Ballet, of artistic practice and traditions being passed on from the old to the young. In quick succession we get the retirement of an actor, done in the lobby of the theater, where he is celebrated by the company and seems most appreciative, "even if the last years were a little unhappy”, a suggestion of bumps in the road he’s not about to get into here. More upbeat perhaps is the scene which follows, of an older woman teacher and a young actor going over a script, saying to him “Stress each word, savor each word by pronouncing them in their en-tire-ty”, said so slowly the subtitles add those extra hyphens, going on to add “Dare to recite them. Don't neglect a single one. Respect every word. Every word has value." Like Ballet again, the older are passing on wisdom to the younger. And for not the only time in the movie, she takes two words from the script (“vous prouvez”, you prove) and says them several times, which she then has him repeat. What she’s preaching they all practice with incredible dedication. No method actors around here. It’s all study the script deeply and give it all you’ve got. And when you’re too old to perform it, pass on what’s been taught to you.
We could look at a last example of respect for the aged by returning also to where we started. a scene packed with information and of course no word of narration or captioning of details. Our introduction to the touching scene about to come is like something out of Renoir or Truffaut, three women and a man walking hand in hand along a dirt road somewhere other than Paris. They come upon a modest building with a sign that says “Artists Mutual Benefit Society”, one of those homes for aged actors mentioned at that meeting early in the film. Walking into the building, we get a shot on the wall with a newspaper story and a photo that’s headlined “Former Actress Turns 100”. Once inside, we see a roomful of what certainly look like retired actors and actresses. As the proceedings begin, there’s another old guy, who’s the mayor of Versailles, where the home is located, and he gives a speech in tribute to birthday girl, 100-year-old Suzette Nivette-Saillard. So who says we need a narrator? We’ve been given more than enough information to know exactly where we are and why. Most touching, and tying together a bunch of ideas from throughout the film, as final speeches in Wiseman films tend to do, a tribute is offered to her by Catherine Samie, a great actress who did a scene from Racine’s “Le Thebaide” earlier in the film (and who we’ll see again five Wisemans from now). She addresses Madame Saillard (I gave her full name in case you want to track her down on IMDB) but gets regularly interrupted by the wonderfully bubbly centenarian as they reminisce over parts going back forty years. They refer to a part each played at different points in their Comédie-Française careers, and also of when they were in a play together, one of them just starting out and the other older, and the kindness that was shown by her to young actors. “It was only natural” Madame Saillard interrupts, and Samie repeats that again. “It was like a religion for us” the elder woman says, voicing that Wiseman theme. She also mentions having served on the worker’s council, tying that bit of actor activism together with what we saw at the start of the film. Cutting outside, Wiseman shows us grave markers of other actors going back to the 17th Century, linking what we’ve just seen to a couple more hundred years that these traditions have been kept alive. We go back to the theater, and for the only time in the film, to the sound of audience applause, we see actors take a bow and watch a curtain coming down, a fitting conclusion to a deeply moving work.