Sebastien Lifshitz's "Plein Sud" opens with the images of obstetric sonography; then we have the face of the movie's only girl, Lea, and a small exchange between her and the doctor informs us that the pregnancy was unwanted, and that she has bile.
Cut, with a bouncing rock guitar soundtrack, to Sam's stern face (who occupies the film as its main protagonist) watching Lea dancing to the music in a field; sunny yellow letters invade the screen and the film begins to roll.
Why the decision to cut Lea's face to Sam's face? What is the connection between the two the director refers to? Enter Mathieu, Lea's brother, with a camera, a gadget that intervenes in the first stages of the film. Is it that Mathieu stands for the director and his intrusiveness? For we soon learn the reason Sam takes this road trip is some serious stake, some settling of familial accounts since his mother wrote him a letter, telling him she was released from a mental institution, years after they had both witnessed Sam's father's suicide. That Sam is secretive we learn by Mathieu's nosy discovery of a gun in the trunk. From then on the film displays a spiraling of perhaps youthful but inconsistent and obnoxious behavior on the part of the trip's participants (there is also Jeremie, a boy who wants a lift, too), but mostly Lea. I mention obnoxious not so much on terms of behavior, as for the rather pervading humorless attitude of the film: we are shown a bunch of - misfits, perhaps? - armed with the usual amount of righteous bile one expects form a gutsy french film concerned with youth, whose fatal airs seethe with rancorous self-indulgence. Are they any good?
The late french theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote in his book "The Fatal Strategies", that if strategies, that is a way for things to escape meaning's dialectic, which bothered them, if strategies are not fatal, then they are fetal. This wordplay, that tries to subvert and radicalize any sense of passive psychology, is, I think, an exemplary sum and paradigm for that kind of french methodology, to put it that way. To cut also a long story short, is the area where the film proposes itself yet stays bafflingly resigned.
For it is somewhat obvious that this film is concerned with motherhood, albeit in an oblique way: Lea as a frustrated youth, madly caught in the web of motherhood, acting gratuitously toward her co-travelers, as if slightly cautionary in her tale, when contrasted to that other story of failed motherhood, that is with Sam's mother, but the contrast fails to illuminate any truth, as if content with the ambiguity of a lingering mood at the end.
Intersperse with that a jarringly pointless amorous interest between Mathieu and Sam: Lifshitz's flare for celebrating male beauty, is not celebratory here, but irrelevantly gratuitous. Also the persistence, if it is that, of memory giving us jots of Sam's traumatic childhood, cutting here and there, quasi-random as free association perhaps is, but devoid of any poignant dramatic effect: as if the film-maker wanted us to sort of witness a photo-album, taking us with respect (that is also respect towards seething repression) round a person's secret, safeguarding its enigma, away from easy, jolting and intrusive youthfulness, to which Sam's character remains largely apathetic, that's why when he abandons them the only reason this comes as a surprise is why this happens this late in the film. For there is no redeeming sense in the end, unless this comes from the lyrics: "keep my secret with you," the song advises us, but fails to address who "you" is, thus mistaking opaqueness for secrecy. "You" can be Sam, or us, but this is no delicate ambiguity; it lacks meaningful triangulation for a secret always involves three. As it is, any sense of the characters' pithiness, becomes exponentially hollow, and we fail to connect with Sam's journey. Is it that his father has taken his secret with him, and he now, at last, faces this and accepts what being a man is? Despite Yannick Renier's manliness, Sam's manhood is somehow, perhaps literally, edited.
It is a pity to witness Lifshitz's regression as a film-maker. His "Wild Side" was unpersuasive, coming after his poignant "Presque Rien": there, his sense of the elliptic was foregrounded in physicality, and physicality in a sense of working (class) consciousness, thus making the passions' inherent marginality resonate with us. If you want to see a film close to "Plein Sud"'s themes, check the exceptional sulfurous pastoral of "Donne-moi la main".
Cut, with a bouncing rock guitar soundtrack, to Sam's stern face (who occupies the film as its main protagonist) watching Lea dancing to the music in a field; sunny yellow letters invade the screen and the film begins to roll.
Why the decision to cut Lea's face to Sam's face? What is the connection between the two the director refers to? Enter Mathieu, Lea's brother, with a camera, a gadget that intervenes in the first stages of the film. Is it that Mathieu stands for the director and his intrusiveness? For we soon learn the reason Sam takes this road trip is some serious stake, some settling of familial accounts since his mother wrote him a letter, telling him she was released from a mental institution, years after they had both witnessed Sam's father's suicide. That Sam is secretive we learn by Mathieu's nosy discovery of a gun in the trunk. From then on the film displays a spiraling of perhaps youthful but inconsistent and obnoxious behavior on the part of the trip's participants (there is also Jeremie, a boy who wants a lift, too), but mostly Lea. I mention obnoxious not so much on terms of behavior, as for the rather pervading humorless attitude of the film: we are shown a bunch of - misfits, perhaps? - armed with the usual amount of righteous bile one expects form a gutsy french film concerned with youth, whose fatal airs seethe with rancorous self-indulgence. Are they any good?
The late french theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote in his book "The Fatal Strategies", that if strategies, that is a way for things to escape meaning's dialectic, which bothered them, if strategies are not fatal, then they are fetal. This wordplay, that tries to subvert and radicalize any sense of passive psychology, is, I think, an exemplary sum and paradigm for that kind of french methodology, to put it that way. To cut also a long story short, is the area where the film proposes itself yet stays bafflingly resigned.
For it is somewhat obvious that this film is concerned with motherhood, albeit in an oblique way: Lea as a frustrated youth, madly caught in the web of motherhood, acting gratuitously toward her co-travelers, as if slightly cautionary in her tale, when contrasted to that other story of failed motherhood, that is with Sam's mother, but the contrast fails to illuminate any truth, as if content with the ambiguity of a lingering mood at the end.
Intersperse with that a jarringly pointless amorous interest between Mathieu and Sam: Lifshitz's flare for celebrating male beauty, is not celebratory here, but irrelevantly gratuitous. Also the persistence, if it is that, of memory giving us jots of Sam's traumatic childhood, cutting here and there, quasi-random as free association perhaps is, but devoid of any poignant dramatic effect: as if the film-maker wanted us to sort of witness a photo-album, taking us with respect (that is also respect towards seething repression) round a person's secret, safeguarding its enigma, away from easy, jolting and intrusive youthfulness, to which Sam's character remains largely apathetic, that's why when he abandons them the only reason this comes as a surprise is why this happens this late in the film. For there is no redeeming sense in the end, unless this comes from the lyrics: "keep my secret with you," the song advises us, but fails to address who "you" is, thus mistaking opaqueness for secrecy. "You" can be Sam, or us, but this is no delicate ambiguity; it lacks meaningful triangulation for a secret always involves three. As it is, any sense of the characters' pithiness, becomes exponentially hollow, and we fail to connect with Sam's journey. Is it that his father has taken his secret with him, and he now, at last, faces this and accepts what being a man is? Despite Yannick Renier's manliness, Sam's manhood is somehow, perhaps literally, edited.
It is a pity to witness Lifshitz's regression as a film-maker. His "Wild Side" was unpersuasive, coming after his poignant "Presque Rien": there, his sense of the elliptic was foregrounded in physicality, and physicality in a sense of working (class) consciousness, thus making the passions' inherent marginality resonate with us. If you want to see a film close to "Plein Sud"'s themes, check the exceptional sulfurous pastoral of "Donne-moi la main".