Comme Une Image (Look At Me)

A LOOK AT COMME UNE IMAGE'S JAOUI AND BACRI

Comme Une Image is your second feature as a director Agnès. What was it like for you tackling your second film?

Agnes Jaoui: My first experience made me pay more attention to certain things. But cinema is that bizarre art where you prepare thousands of things for months, but where suddenly, it's the moment that counts - knowing how to capture things at the right moment, sometimes filming the actor without them knowing. As an actress, I've worked on small-budget films where one has the 'luxury' of being more spontaneous which sometimes leads to wonderful things. I didn't want to deprive myself of that.

Have you seen a change in the way Agnes Jaoui directs, in contrast to The Taste of Others?

Jean Pierre Bacri: I've seen somebody who knows much more what they want, someone more self-sufficient.

What was the starting point for the script?

A.J.: A father/daughter relationship, and also having a father with a girlfriend your age. That's something I've experienced and seen and that we've wanted to deal with for a long time in the theatre. We also wanted to talk about power, even if we'd already begun exploring this theme a little in Kitchen with Apartment. But power from the point of view of those who tolerate it, not from the bully's point of view. Not a day goes by when I'm not astonished to see how people accept how others speak to them, treat them, squash them and mock them, when if they rebelled against it they wouldn't risk being sent to prison or finding themselves up against a firing squad. I'm not talking about resistance during wartime. I'm stunned by this lack of resistance. In thinking about it, I realised that obviously, if one hasn't succeeded in saying 'no' to one's father, there is little chance that one would be able to say 'no' to one's boss, one's manager or to an equal either. In the end, the two themes work well together.

The singing and the music seem to be quite important in the film… Bacri and Jaoui in Cannes

A.J.: I've been performing music since the age of 17. I love it and one of my dreams has been to share that love. I started feeling passionately about music the first time I went to an academy for singers. Music is so beautiful when it's live. I began in the theatre when I was 15 and I quickly saw that there was an extraordinarily violent injustice in terms of one's physique. When I was 16, I already felt old because Sophie Marceau who had just done La Boum was a star at 13. There was a completely crazy, monstrous, illogical connection with time. You could be a star at 17, and then nothing at 22... It was ridiculous. In music, it's kind of the opposite. You can't begin working your voice until you're 16 or 17 and the more you work, the better your voice, until you're 60. But I have just learned that even at the Opera school, they don't take girls who are too fat. But it's not your shape that's important; it's your work.

That independence of the voice is a kind of 'up yours' to the tyranny of the image...

A.J.: Yes, exactly. Well, for I for one found it enormously appeasing. I began singing because I was wasting away in theatre classes, and I felt I wasn't learning anything. At least with music, I was learning something. But I don't think I would have had the rigour you need to become a professional singer. It's sport - you can't drink nor smoke... Last summer, we did some small concerts here and there and I wanted them to be in the film. One of the biggest challenges in the film was trying to recreate the emotion one feels when one listens to live music. There was a lot of discussion with Jean-Pierre Duret, the sound engineer, and Daniel Deshays who did the recordings. I didn't want too clean a sound and definitely didn't want to clean up the imperfections because we are, for the most part, amateurs and it's these imperfections that move me. We decided it had to be live sound as much as possible. Everyone really sang, apart from Marilou Berry

There is a great deal of fluidity in Comme Une Image. Do you think your love for singing has influenced your directing?

A.J.: I'd like to think so in any case! The difficulty was having to select the pieces of music before the shoot because most of them were in. I made up a CD and I'd read the script with the music on. But it's not the same; I had to use my imagination. I knew from the start where I wanted the music, but in the first edit there was much too much… The beautiful thing about classical music is that you never get tired of it. Cosi Fan Tutte for example has been used a great deal - it's an extremely cinematographic tune. I wanted to call the film that. In fact, in Italy, the film will be called Cosi Fan Tutti: Everyone Does It. It truly is the excuse for bad behaviour.

J.P.B.: At one time, we also wanted to call the film The Right Reasons. One always has a good reason for compromising, justifying oneself by talking about necessity. Someone bullied by their boss will tell you they have a family to feed and they must work and they have to accept it. Lolita gives the excuse that Etienne is her father. Vincent accepts being Etienne's flunkey because Etienne did him a favour 25 years before. Everyone always has a good reason for being a vassal. But at the same time, there are many people who say no way and leave their job, even if they do have a family to feed. It's a question of dignity and character.

A.J.: Most people need bosses, kings, gods or fathers, people who tell them what they should and shouldn't do.

J.P.B.: Power is something vacant. It's a place taken by people who are interested in it. Like the place of vassals in the past. A king doesn't exist without the court around him. Otherwise he is a king exposed.

A.J.: Bosses are also there for us to hate, and to blame. All that rather than being adult and assuming one's responsibilities - it's true but it's hard.

In his own way, Sebastien, Lolita's boyfriend, represents this form of resistance...

J.P.B.: Yes, Sebastien is the most free character, in terms of the power based relationships that link these individuals.

Why did you choose to set Comme Une Image in the world of publishing?

J.P.B.: It's a simple reason - we were looking for a place where power could be exercised but avoiding the one we know best. So we shifted the cinema milieu into the world of publishing, but Etienne could have been a great architect or some high-powered boss, it doesn't really make any difference. We know people's relationships function the same everywhere. There is always a little bit of power to take somewhere, and people always behave the same way.

Lolita is twenty. Is this the first time you have dealt with such a young character?

A.J.: We were getting fed up with people always asking us why there are never any young people in our films. And as we wanted to deal with the father/daughter relationship, it worked out quite well. It also allowed us to tackle more head-on the power of the image and different ways of behaving than in our previous films. Lolita is at an age where one is looking for one's self, and all the more so because she's not a size 10. It's violent at any age but more so at 20. The tyranny of beauty is totally permitted today. We are not allowed to be racist - and quite right too - but being racist about body shape doesn't seem to bother anyone. You just have to look at all those images devoted to the cult of youth and beauty - well, a certain kind of beauty that is more and more limited. Everything we compare ourselves to makes unhappiness but there, it's worse than anything else. There are anorexic girls, girls who are dying - this is serious. Even the more intelligent ones become crazy and stupid when they talk about weight and physique. I know hardly anyone who is normal on this subject.

On the masculine side, there is the model incarnated by Robert Mitchum, the virile cowboy from the Westerns that Sebastien watches on television while waiting for Lolita...

A.J.: Another possible title for the film was Girls' Tears And Boys' Anger. Lolita carries the weight of beauty on her shoulders - she ought to correspond to a well-gauged physical model. Boys are more relaxed about that side of things but they always owe it to themselves to be virile.

J.P.B.: It's no less traumatic! The burden is just as heavy to bear.

The scene at the end where Lolita sings is a kind of crisis point. Suddenly everybody manages to be together...

A.J.: Yes, apart from the father! It's stronger than anything - he can't dedicate himself to anyone other than himself. After those panoramic shots of the harmonious faces of the audience, absorbed in the show, we end up on Etienne's absent and annoyed face. I have to say that that moment always makes me want to cry. Etienne can't even give that tiny bit of attention to his daughter. When we were writing, we had some problems with this character. We had several different models in our heads and there were some who were so odious... but the other danger was making him too nice, all the more so considering we knew it was Jean-Pierre who was going to play the part. We were very afraid that the audience might think he was a great guy, while really he's someone appalling. So we had to find the right balance.

In that final singing scene, there is the belief that when people are absorbed by their art, when they are in their place, they are inevitably beautiful...

A.J.: Yes, when they are at their job. That's what I wanted to film. In fact, another possible title was In Their Place. All the characters in the film are looking for their place, just a small one, particularly Lolita.

Comme une Image (Look at Me)
Agnès Jaoui / France / 2004 / 110 min

After just two films as a writer-director, Agnès Jaoui must be considered one of the major creative forces in contemporary French cinema. Beginning as an actress, appearing in a string of mostly undistinguished films (Le Faucon, Hôtel de France, L'Amoureuse), she began writing screenplays in the early 1990s. The career shift is easy to understand - acting in a Jacques Doillon movie would be enough to drive anyone toward self-sufficiency - but few reckoned with her facility for dialogue and character. Together with her husband (and regular collaborator) Jean-Pierre Bacri, she helped Alain Resnais construct his elaborate, two-part tribute to Alan Ayckbourn, Smoking/No Smoking, in 1993. They could not displace Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi, Resnais' regular actors, from that production, but in Cédric Klapisch's Un Air de Famille, made three years later, they co-starred as well as wrote, and their subsequent course was set. Almost at once, their screen personas were in place: Jaoui kindly, engaging, very slightly neurotic, Bacri sour, curmudgeonly and self-absorbed. It's dangerous, perhaps, to speculate on whether this is merely an extension of their actual, real-life characters, however the sight of Bacri at this year's Cannes closing ceremony - unshaven, smoking a cigarette, looking as if he'd much rather be in a bar somewhere - rather confirmed one's suspicions.

Here, as in her directorial debut, Le Goût des Autres, he is the centre - a fixed point, around which the rest of the ensemble orbits. He plays Étienne: a famous novelist, monstrously egotistical and blithely indifferent to the unhappiness of his daughter Lolita, a gifted but insecure aspiring soprano, who craves her father's approval - but would settle for his attention. As played by Marilou Berry (the daughter of actress-director Josiane Balasko, starring elsewhere at this year's festival in Guillaume Nicloux's Hanging Offense), she is a soft, wounded presence, whose apparent docility conceals a deep undercurrent of loathing, both for herself and for a world which (she understands) judges her solely on her appearance. A heavy, sulky-looking girl, she bitterly resents the injustice that her intensely poetic soul is not matched by a ravishing, desirable exterior. To add insult to injury, it seems that every person she meets wants to know her solely as means of getting to her famous father. She's merely a shortcut, never a destination.

In both her films as director, Jaoui's theme is constant: how art might enter the lives of even the most insecure, the most selfish, the least deserving of people, and transform them completely. She's smart about the divisions of taste and education that have replaced traditional class divides in cities like Paris, and bracingly disenchanted with the very bourgeoisie to which she belongs (and who, ironically, form the overwhelming majority of her audience). Above all, though, she has an admirable - and very French - sense of understatement: every scene here, every incident, is of use; there is nothing wasted or superfluous. Our understanding of these characters grows with the accretion of detail, and such is the precision of the structure that subtle, elegant ironies abound - not least the fact that Lolita, a singer, routinely goes unheard by those she loves. Worldly and articulate, the film won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes, and no one (including the writers, one suspects) was in the least bit surprised. It is a work of consummate skill, great humanity, and quiet but formidable intelligence. A rare, good thing.

Few films about the literary life ring true. One that does is Look at Me (Comme une image), directed by Agnès Jaoui, co-scripted by Jaoui and her husband, Jean-Pierre Bacri, and starring them both. Their first movie collaboration, Le Goût des autres, contrasted the world of business and the theatre through the story of a business tycoon who becomes obsessed with an actress.

This new one centres on a successful Parisian novelist and publisher, Etienne Cassard (Bacri), and his circle. Cassard is a monster - rude, selfish, self-centred and entirely plausible. Because of his high reputation as a writer and his power as a publisher, virtually everyone accepts his rudeness, endures his insults without complaint, laughs at his witty putdowns, plays up to his arrogance and seeks his approbation. About the only person who answers him back is the five-year-old daughter he has with his young, constantly patronised second wife.
Cassard is an acute study in the way men of high intelligence and artistic sensibility can be insensitive and cruel in the conduct of their daily lives. Bacri makes him a fascinating character, but never an endearing one.

Look at Me is an ensemble piece, deftly creating a milieu and a social circle. But running through it are two principal relationships. The first is between Cassard and the rising novelist, Pierre Miller (Laurent Grévill), and is a professional relationship concerned with social advancement. The second one is between Cassard and Lolita (Marilou Berry), the 20-year-old daughter from his first marriage, and this one is personal and about her need for love.

Pierre is emerging from the doldrums, bitter about being supported by his wife, Sylvia (Agnès Jaoui), a music teacher whose pupils include Lolita, and discontented with his elderly editor at a minor publishing house. He is eager to transfer to Cassard's company and will do almost anything to impress him, including eating the rabbit served at Cassard's country retreat.

As his career is opening up (and he can again, as he says, list his occupation as 'writer' instead of 'kept man'), he begins to cut himself off from less profitable assignments like the text he's writing for a friend's book of photographs. He also persuades himself that it's all right to appear on an appallingly vulgar TV chat show to promote the new novel which, like the film, is called Comme une image.
Lolita is pretty but overweight, lacking in self-esteem, desperate for her father's affection and seeking his respect for her singing. But Cassard ignores her, makes jokes about her weight and has no understanding of what she does. He'll pay for a big party after the concert she and the choir she works with give at a country church, but he walks out while she's singing. Not because, as we think, he's feeling unwell, but because he wants to jot down some ideas that will end his writer's block. There's a bitter running gag about him not bothering to hear a cassette she's made for him.

Lolita believes that people are only interested in her as a means of meeting her father and, indeed, she has been used in just this way by Pierre's wife, Sylvia. There's a striking scene - troubling because we laugh guiltily - in which Sylvia becomes an altogether more responsive teacher when she discovers who Lolita's father is. Sylvia is otherwise a highly sympathetic character and is part of the intriguing aspect of the movie that suggests that music in its purity stands apart from the shallow world of appearances that judges and rejects Lolita because of her unfashionable physique.

Look at Me is a subtle, unforced film, both funny and affecting. It is deeply moral but not judgmental, and avoids (except in the hilarious moment we're shown of the TV show Pierre appears on) the temptation to satirise. The prize Jaoui and Bacri shared at Cannes for their screenplay was well-deserved. There isn't a false note, and one of the funniest lines gains from not being followed up. Someone asks Cassard's long-suffering, slightly dotty right-hand man, Vincent, if he was in publishing some 20-odd years ago when they met and his life was turned around. 'No, I was in terrorism,' Vincent replies without batting an eyelid.

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