Nine ‘cinematic short stories’ make up L’Archipel des amours: nine free essays on an imposed subject. Love, exactly.
Lourdes, l'hiver (Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1981)
First, reasons for hope. Paul Vecchiali is not just one of the good French filmmakers working today. He is also the boss (passionate guru and traveling salesman) of ‘Diagonale’, a film production and distribution company. Diagonale is both more and less than a company: a stable that smells of cinema, a family that combines complicity, a state of mind, and a local color. Diagonale does not count among the ‘big predators’ of French cinema, but it is a very productive little wildcat. Vecchiali knows how to make his friends make films they were made to make. His flair is certain: the first films of Biette, Treilhou, and Guiguet attest to that.
Vecchiali, once a critic, no doubt has some ideas about the state of French cinema. Among those ideas: shooting constantly while avoiding the financial ruin business expenses can bring about, making small, very personal films, and creating, gradually, that rare and precious thing: a tone, or, even better: a filmic fabric. The idea that it is necessary to ‘knit’ interwoven works with favorite actors and a house crew. Diagonale thus extends a whole sector (now engulfed) of French cinema, with a midinette and acerbic vision (is that possible? yes, it is possible), fake stars, a dated novelistic quality, conventions of another era (the third). At the same time, we find very cheeky gambles in the realm of cinematographic language, a veritable experiment without a net. Language is turned ass-backward, its head upside down, but the actors and the stories find their way, between the ass and the head, at the level of the heart.
Vecchiali must keep his machine running and ensure that none of its cogs jam. Otherwise, the Diagonale stable will start to smell rancid. One way of maintaining the machine is the classic solution of ‘the anthology film’. Telling nine short stories around a ‘topic of choice’ (love stories, all love stories, nothing but love stories) is a way of turning your back on the NQF [nouvelle qualité française] and the César-ready establishment of French cinema, with its cumbersome prototypes and its costly hits. How can we not subscribe to the idea that cinema is capable of being a minor art, that it can sometimes adopt the form of entertainment?
Now, reasons for disenchantment. Why does L’Archipel des amours weigh a ton and why do its love stories leave us cold? Where does its nine-island-pileup effect come from? It is as though this cinema, by dint of its self-knowledge of being minor, minoritarian, minorizable, ended up knowing that it is so in a major way, which is to say too consciously and complacently. Nine whispers make a racket, and it is ultimately the defects of the Diagonale family that make themselves apparent. Nine individualists form a summer camp in which, being assured of the complacency of others, each of them retreats into a corner, bearing nothing but a gaze and mild jealousy.
That is why doing the accounts — to say who made it out better than the others — is secondary. It is the archipelago in its entirety that had trouble staying afloat. Nevertheless, we can point out that the Frot-Coutaz short is a real success, that Treilhou has a real cinematic breath (she had the advantage of not working with Georges Strouvé, the louche house cinematographer), and that there are some raging moments in the Davila film. Hugely disappointing are the offerings of the seeded players — Biette (anodyne) and Guiguet (lazy). A trailer in the form of a gut punch from Vecchiali. The rest don’t manage to go beyond the surface. What is most painful is that, with this self-portrait intended to be light, Diagonale has not succeeded in making a minor film. Instead, it has autophagied into a world so shrunken that it suddenly appears to us to be very small. Let us forget these islets and wait for the next wave.
Libération, 19–20 March 1983.