Transience: Philippe Garrel's "Jealousy"
Transience: Philippe Garrel's "Jealousy"
The following piece was originally published by Grolsch Film Works in July 2014 and was no longer available online.
The cinema of Philippe Garrel has mostly revolved around a small set of elements: love, heartbreak, family, children, suicide. Among his films are devastating, despairing works, caught up in the turmoil of the emotional inner worlds they portray. With Jealousy, however, these elements realign in a new way, from the perspective of an aging man looking back on life with heightened maturity and wisdom. A simple story of shifting romances, in which Louis (played by Philippe’s son, Louis Garrel) leaves Clothilde (Rebecca Convenat), the Mother of his child for a new relationship with a struggling actress named Claudia (Anna Mouglalis), the film does not delve into the melodrama of the situation so much as it observes how each character, in their own ways, accepts change and continues living. It is a film that shows us loss, life’s source of pain, and regards it not with despair but with respect, and understanding. At one point or another each character in the film moves from one thing to another, from one love to the next, and Garrel subtly and beautifully captures how this passage is inevitable. It is a film of acceptance and quiet strength.
Another remarkable film in cinemas right now is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. In that film, the unique approach of shooting the project over 12 years makes for an unprecedented study of the passage of time. Linklater creates an incredible portrait of how time slips so quickly into the future. Garrel’s Jealousy is an equally if not more profound film about this, albeit an entirely different one. While Linklater uses elliptical jumps through a decade spanning story, Garrel is equally attuned to time’s movement—but from moment to moment, second to second, frame to frame. The present folds into the past so subtly and neatly we simply do not take account. One must be careful because a moment is so immediately a memory that things too easily get away. Garrel captures escaping moments, memories as soon as they register. Both Boyhood and Jealousy see life as precious, but Garrel locates this preciousness in the smallest gestures and feelings—glimpses of life being lived, felt, and becoming the past.
All of this centers around the child, Charlotte. Unlike a typical take on divorce, the little girl seems to adjust to life’s new arrangement quickly. She likes her Dad’s new girlfriend, she’s playful, happy, clever (something must be said of Olga Milshtein’s amazing, natural performance here)
The child connects everything in the film, as if the future and its hopes and possibilities accompany everyone, at their side, tugging on their coats, depending on their love and willingness to continue. The film begins with Clothilde crying—it seems 40 years on after Les hautes solitudes, Garrel is still studying faces in black and white, a testament to one of cinema’s most empathetic lenses—we don’t know the context at first, but then we take on Charlotte’s perspective, peering from a keyhole as her parents discuss separating. While the POV of the film shifts, it is this entryway to the film that frames it, and at the film’s closing, a seemingly arbitrary moment with Louis as he turns off a light (a moment where a reel actually comes to an end precedes it, the finality of a moment and the immediate beginning of another—perpetually succeeding chapters in a neverending story), we feel as though the future is always watching.
I’ve seen the film twice, and both times I emerged from it with my burden lightened, the film’s spirit having given me new power to face living, full, as it is, of pain, always moving forward clumsily, strangely, beautifully. The first time I saw it, I started watching it around 4:30am, the pitch black sky visible from a nearby window. When the film’s credits rolled, the sun had just begun to rise. I cannot think of a better film to begin in the dusk and to finish at the new dawn. A friend of mine told me a story once, about how she and her lover, who was to move away for a year across the world, embraced on their last night together in the street. When they began to hold each other in the dark, the road was illuminated by streetlights. When they finally, reluctantly let go, the morning had arrived, and the streetlights had retired. Garrel’s Jealousy is similar, I think, to this embrace: laced with sadness and love and change, lights exchanged for sun, love for loss—the ruthless transience of moments, each worthwhile and full of meaning if we look closely enough.