by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Roland Barthes didn’t like Le Beau Serge. No use arguing with a dead man, but you can argue with his ideas. Barthes was a reader and not a viewer. A reader always imagines the author’s voice; he sees something monstrous and imagines that it has to be the product of a monstrous mind and not his own reaction. Barthes believed he was critiquing a film, but what he was critiquing was the author he imagined. His criticism of the imagined Chabrol is valid; Barthes was right, but the idea was wrong. When he criticizes the characters of the film, he thinks of them in terms of literary characterizations and signs, and not as the many other things movie characters are: actors, performances, images, real people. He was right, for instance,  to attack the simplistic characterization of the country folk; what he ignores is that the people of Sardent play themselves. Le Beau Serge is so hard to see in the US that Barthes’ attack on the movie is probably as well known at this point as the film itself — something we’ve all learned to hate without seeing, like that tracking shot in Kapò. Doc Films had the audacity to show us the truth about The Struggle before Kino gave it a reputable DVD. A year later, the first week of their summer program includes Le Beau Serge.

Barthes saw the Chabrol film and read in it the director’s right-wing tendencies. But the politics of a filmmaker are second to the politics of the image. The thing that makes movies dangerous is that they are inherently radical. The most conservative idea takes on a radicalism when it informs a movie. I won’t argue Clint Eastwood’s politics, but there aren’t many American directors working right now who are as radical. The history of cinema shows us that the most reactionary films were mostly made by people who believed themselves to be forward-thinking, while the modern was largely invented by late Victorians, right-wingers, monarchists and anti-communists. Forty years later, we know that the real Chabrol is a lot more complicated (and more left-wing) than Barthes’ imagined one. But it’s not Chabrol’s politics that I want to write about, it’s the movie itself.

Francois (Jean-Claude Brialy) arrives home for the winter; just off the bus, he spots Serge (Gérard Blain), as shabby as Francois is prim. Brialy with the leather gloves, mannequin hair and rolled-up magazine, Blain ambling away with a half-smoked cigarette and two days’ worth of beard. “What happened to Serge?” Francois asks, “he used to be such a terrific guy.” He’s filled in on the details: who’s dead, who’s alive, and how Serge got married and abandoned his studies after he knocked up a local girl. It’s the sort of town where the streets are empty but there’s always someone in the bar.

Interpreted “psychologically,” Le Beau Serge’s images are jarring. We’re shown Francois’s Serge, Serge’s Francois, sometimes even Chabrol’s Blain or Brialy, but never at the same time. So we have Francois’ cool and disheveled image of his old friend, and we have Serge’s recognition of Francois as he is roused from a drunken stupor, first as a pale hand that enters the frame and finally as a half-angelic face. But we’re also given Serge as a handsome, needy mess, and Francois as the distant dandy. We are given the chance to see them as monsters, as ordinary people, as faces abstracted by street lights.

Barthes complained that movies undermined themselves because they gave us too much. Too many conflicts, too many mixed signals. He liked films for what they could show their audiences, not for what they gave their audiences the opportunity to see or feel. But the beauty of Le Beau Serge is in the way it interrupts an “important” tracking shot so that the camera can catch a group of children running across the street. In the way that every image of the dance hall scene gives us pathos, from the old man stamping forearms to mark that people have paid the price of admission to the confrontation between Brialy and Blain in the light of the windows. In the sensation each of us imagines as Brialy rubs a handful of snow in Blain’s face at the end. The Beau Serge I’ve seen and the one Barthes wrote about are different films because we’re different people. Therein lies its greatness.

Le Beau Serge will be playing Wednesday, June 24th as part of the summer program at Doc Films at the University of Chicago. It will screen August 7th at Cinematheque Ontatio.