The Color of Lies

Rare is it that a translated title outdoes the original: director Claude Chabrol released this film as Au coeur du mensonge, "at the heart of the lie," which has a similar if more idiomatic flavor in French. More importantly, the English version suggests that more than one party may be lying, or, as is generally the case with liars, that deceit pervades every aspect of their existence.  We modern beasts like to smear the term "pathological liar" on the untrusted as if such a label weren't redundant. But lying really is a habit and not an exception. Throughout the annals of history, it has remained the easiest and laziest way for us to improve aspects of our lives and dreams.

 

The film is set in this coastal region of France famed for many things, including the shibboleths of the natives. Outsiders and settlers should plan on keeping those credentials for their entire stay. Such is the fate of  René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin), a crippled teacher of drawing, and his wife Vivienne (the always remarkable Sandrine Bonnaire), a nurse whose persistent good humor is as much a product of lifelong study as René's art. They are being watched by a newly promoted police inspector (Valeria Bruni–Tedeschi, soon to become the sister–in–law of this world leader), not only because they, like she, do not belong in this provincial community. A horrible crime (quickly featured in the opening minutes) has also been committed and René, who imparted to the young girl his knowledge of drawing once a week, just so happens to be the last person to have seen the victim alive. 

Regardless of these circumstances, it seems a bit ridiculous to suspect René at all; without his cane and the patience of his wife he would be little more than a wheelchaired invalid. Yet his soul, now almost completely resigned to its dreary end as a failed artist, has little room for mercy or pity, and the subject of its loathing could not be more perfectly represented than by Germain–Roland Desmot (Antoine de Caunes), an overhyped and talentless celebrity writer. Chabrol wisely does not grant us the mildest opportunity of sympathizing with Desmot, because Desmot is a caricature who deserves nothing but contempt. He is foul to his ex–wife on the phone, negligent of their child, arrogant and condescending to the locals, whom he sees as barely evolved past the shellfish they harvest, and lascivious towards the few pretty women in his vicinity. Worst of all, he stands for and believes in nothing except this degradation of the lives of others. Perhaps there is no Tolstoyan truth to be found among these simple folk, but Desmot (whose name is a homophone of "words") has nothing but lies to offer the world both in his books and speech.

Yes, Desmot is more involved than initially suspected, although this admission gives nothing away. What is more relevant are the immediate models for Chabrol's morality tale of the artist against the non–artist (a crystal–clear stratagem), and how unclear the morals in question actually are. There is another tale of, at once, supreme moral justice and moral ambiguity, and the antagonists in that story are an older man by the name of Chillingworth and a young priest called Dimmesdale. Vivienne makes a lovely Hester, both a sinner and readily sinned against and despised. And it is hard to live in truth if the only things people believe about you are all lies.

Blue

The hyphenated bond of Franco–Poles, from this composer to this extremely accomplished scientist to the late director of this film, is corroborated very surreptitiously by the two nations' most fundamental symbols: turn the Polish flag on its head, make it somewhat more squarish, and it will comprise two–thirds of the French tricolor.  That is not to say, of course, that Poland is two–thirds the country France is, although their populations and areas would suggest those figures are not far off; rather, there seems to be a strange nexus of creative energy hovering between the two states that has persisted throughout the course of modern European history.  France admires Poles for their resilience and intellectual activity in the face of ever–vacillating borders and governments, and Poland gazes with unenvying pride at the French and their ideals and freedoms.  And although the comely trilogy Trois couleurs, of which Blue is the first and most serious part, is a Polish product, this opening color is most definitely French.

French, despite the fact that the film's primary conceit is the creation of a symphony for all of Europe.  This was the task assigned to famed composer Patrice de Courcy, a noble name, who does all of Europe the disservice of getting himself into a fatal car accident at the beginning of the film (he dies, says an eyewitness who approaches the wreck, repeating the punchline of the joke that distracted him in the first place).  He also takes his seven–year–old daughter with him to the grave, leaving his wife and her mother Julie (a peaking Juliette Binoche) completely and utterly alone.  They have fabulous wealth and reputations, so she will not endure the banality of indigence; but her solitude could very well be the death of her.  So although she initially wishes the music destroyed, when a copy turns up she decides to make the most of her melancholy and finish the symphony.  A woman finishing the symphony of Europe!  Indeed, and no one seems to raise one woolly, traditionalist brow at this circumstance.  Things have definitely changed (and for the better).  

There are, as always crop up in these studies of the habits of lonely artists, complications.  Julie is according to most tastes radiantly attractive in mind and appearance, so she must have a doting admirer (Benoît Régent).  She must also find out something about her husband that she may have expected or wished to ignore during his lifetime (we will skip this section).  And finally she, like all interesting fictional characters, must not be quite what she appears to be.  These are the prerequisites for this type of allegory, the finest kind: that of the nature of art itself.  That Julie takes more than an acute interest in concealing the fact that she has anything to do with her husband’s work, and that such completion comes so naturally to her that she might have considered a career in the field herself had it not been for her child let us concatenate all the links that Kieślowski provides because they all fit quite nicely together.   

 

You will find, if you use the intergalactic weapon known as Google, that Kieślowski thought blue, apart from the obvious mood associations, was for Julie the color of emotional freedom in the spirit of the revolutionary liberté that spawned the flag.  She has lost her family and is now left with her (husband’s) unfinished business.  We will take the director at his word and add that since, to paraphrase this Franco–Irishman, the artistic spirit is inherently reductive, Julie is weirdly stripped (one of the supporting characters is, among other things, a stripper) of all shackles that might prevent her from achieving the unity of Europe in her music.  Sorry, I mean her husband’s music.  That music, by the way, is the work of Kieślowski’s fellow countryman Zbigniew Preisner, noted for his haunting accompaniment to this work of genius, as well as to just about every one of Kieślowski’s films up to the director’s death in 1996.  The soundtrack, which left me with a splendid impression when I first watched Blue in the mid–1990s, now sounds frantic and thunderous, a tad too unwieldy for its own good.  But who said writing for all of Europe was supposed to be easy?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

A long time ago, while still studying Czech, I decided to devote half my master’s thesis to this venerable Franco-Czech writer, an announcement met with sharp criticism from a few other burgeoning scholars, all of whom were women.  They could not quite believe that I, ostensibly an open–minded fellow if a bit carefree, was going to allot a considerable amount of time to such a “sexist.”  “I cannot stand him,” said one particularly disgusted student who happened to attend a few of my classes, “I simply cannot stand him.”  Her small, pretty nose twitched as she said this (the sign of true contempt), but she never explained why she found his oeuvre so intolerable.  Yet I understood why then, and the matter is even clearer to me now in re–examining his most famous novel.

Waves of politics and philosophy undulate through The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but at the core swims a young couple, Tomas and Tereza, who are trying to make sense of that most human condition of all, morality.  They are joined in their quest by two more main characters: Sabina, who is Tomas’s lover, and Franz, who is also Sabina’s lover.  The four live in awareness of one another, but perhaps not in acceptance, and each embodies, with his or her profession, one field of human knowledge.  Franz is a university professor and the most distant from the incredible ecstasy of art; he finds solace in politicized protests and sewn–on labels such as “dissident,” “immigrant,” and “radical change.”  Tomas is a physician and an inveterate rake, but his aesthetic sense perseveres through bouts of wanton behavior and even justifies his emotional immaturity in a German aphorism.  Tomas is clearly superior to Franz in every way, and the reader cannot but smirk when Franz feels burdened by his Philistine wife and bourgeois existence, while Tomas continues to enjoy whatever skirt he can crawl his way under.  Sabina and Tereza, meanwhile, are slabs from the same quarry.  They even pursue variants of the same vocation: Sabina is a painter and Tereza a professional photographer.  They are the pictures for Tomas’s captions, the film for his voiceover.  And both of them adore Tomas for his alleged strength and freedom of spirit, yet acknowledge that these traits only cloak a fear to commit, a fear to love completely and absolutely, and that most primal of male anxieties, the fear of giving up all the earth’s women to receive, in return, only one.  How can one woman possibly compensate for the plenitude of all the rest?  In a way, this is the novel’s essential question.  One may do well to substitute “life” or “soul” for “woman” and ask the question again.                

If all this seems vague and meandering, think of it as a symphony.  After all, that is how Kundera, the son of a well–known Czech musicologist, loves to characterize his works.  He himself once studied composition, and musical references, liner notes, and tidbits of musical history are scattered throughout his writings.  He is particularly fond of the granddaddy of bombast, and a famous quote from the musical genius is repeated throughout the novel.   The plot, if one may call it that, is furnished by the events of the Prague Spring and its aftermath.  The historical happenings are as meaningless for the characters as stage props.  They may stumble and injure themselves on them, even mortally, but nothing can ingress their substance, because the substance of each of them (except, arguably, that of Franz) is entirely outside of any plot or material life.  Someone at one point or another must have already dubbed The Unbearable Lightness of Being a “waltz of souls,” or something to that effect.  If no one has, then I will be happy to use that designation.

On the back cover of the first English version of the novel (translated by this renowned Slavist), one reviewer calls Kundera “an intellectual heavyweight,” which, in my humble opinion, he most certainly is.  But the philosophy in the novel is threadbare, and can be whittled down to the simple statement: if our decisions have no consequences because they repeat infinitely, are we freer or more enslaved?  The question is worth asking, and a topic for students of ethics.  But more important is whether one life, or soul, or woman (which, if she is loved completely and absolutely, can be a life or soul) can matter in the face of churning time.  These characters, called in some places “Kundera's quartet,” represent science, academe, art, and journalism (Tereza’s photographs inevitably chronicle the tumult of 1968), with Soviet tanks providing the military segment.  They become the polyphony of Czech society itself, although it doesn’t need to be Czechoslovakia or 1968  for us to get the idea.  Woven between and among things they could not possibly impact or control, they are both triumphant and trampled underfoot.  They both sublimate and disintegrate, and sometimes it is hard to predict exactly how the fates will turn given all the decisions that have to be made along the way.  A constant pendulum between light and heavy, which may explain the oxymoron of the novel’s title.
             
What then of Kundera the “sexist”?  If you are familiar with Kundera’s ten works of prose fiction, you know that he likely sides with the Don Juans of life, perhaps being one himself, although that needn’t concern us here.  It is women, however, that he sees differently.  He believes, or will have us believe, that women were more liberated before the sexual revolution because they retained their mystique.  Does anyone, he might ask, ever compose odes to a woman’s beauty any more?  Can love for a woman in Western society ever be separated from enjoying her womanhood without inducing mockery?  In a way, such discourse is an oversimplification, because the liberation of women over the last hundred years has to do with much more than sex.  But Kundera is steadfast in his portrayals of modern women: he sees them as equals, yet society certainly does not.  He gives them as much intelligence and fortitude as his male characters then watches them fail.  Whether this makes him a sadist, a sexist, or someone who yearns for the days when women and love could be safely placed above lascivious urges, is a matter of perspective.  Sabina and Tereza are the true heroes of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  They are braver and smarter than everyone else in the novel, but society expects less talent and more prudence on their part.  And so they fail.  And had they succeeded, they might have spared us a lot of nose–twitching.