Luc Moullet: Agent Provocateur of the New Wave
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And the range of his interests is still impressive: a recent list of favorites includes two silent films by Cecil B. De Mille, a short by Jean-Luc Godard, Rose Troche’s Go Fish, Raul Ruiz’s The Blind Owl, Catherine Breillat’s Tapage Nocturne, and King Vidor’s Ruby Gentry.
He began making films in the 60s–flaunting his lack of technique and low budgets like a neoprimitive in Brigitte and Brigitte (1966), The Smugglers (1967), A Girl Is a Gun (1971), and Anatomy of a Relationship (1975) and implicitly mocking the glitz of the Hollywood films he wrote about. The title heroines of Brigitte and Brigitte, who hail from separate mountain villages, become roommates in Paris (one of them drops out of English studies at the Sorbonne, just as Moullet did). Their kind of country smarts are important in his films, and mountains are even more so, outclassing Paris as places to roam and pontificate. The plots, insofar as they exist, barely matter. In A Girl Is a Gun–the English-dubbed version of his crazed, erotic Une Aventure de Billy le Kid, with references to Sergio Leone, Anthony Mann, Duel in the Sun, and Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or–the vistas are so breathtaking and the colors so gorgeous they make his meager budget irrelevant. (As an indication of how he’s survived commercially, he sold the rights to this deconstructive bit of dadaism to 40 small countries–presumably on the basis that it was a western starring Jean-Pierre Leaud–though he couldn’t find a French distributor.)
The retrospective includes fewer of these later films, and I especially regret the absence of Les Sieges de l’Alcazar, his hilarious 1989 account of a 1956 flirtation between Parisian film critics from rival magazines during a Vittorio Cottafavi retrospective, as well as two shorts from the 90s, one a passionate defense of slag heaps, the other a documentary about Des Moines. I also wouldn’t have minded another chance to see his powerful noncomic documentary Origins of a Meal (1978), which marks the end of his first period, or his exhaustive 1981 documentary about teaching himself to swim. Still, the six features and two shorts being shown here offer a lot. And the polemical force of these strange comedies is especially relevant now, when the low cost of digital cinema is challenging the studios’ oppressive blockbuster mentality.
Anatomy of a Relationship
