البـــــوابـــة
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Graduate
First...
Maurice Pialat's Graduate First...
is an incisive portrait of small town life for a group of young friends
waiting to take the bac, the test that's necessary to get a
degree and, in theory at least, greater job opportunities. In practice,
this last ritual of youth seems like a formality, increasingly
meaningless in an atmosphere where there are few jobs, few real
opportunities, for these kids who have no idea what comes next. As
usual, Pialat's offhand realism gives the impression of real intimacy
with these characters; the cast is large, but each of these young people
comes across as complex and vibrant, each coping in his or her own way
with the frightening onset of supposed maturity, the end of youth marked
by a portentous test, after which no one's quite sure what to do next.
Élisabeth
(Sabine Haudepin) is well-known for going around with all the guys, but
she finally settles down when she meets Philippe (Philippe Marlaud),
who becomes her first "real" boyfriend. Bernard (Bernard Tronczak) is
similarly promiscuous; he loves all the girls and sleeps with all of
them, never quite letting go even after he's broken up with them.
There's also Bernard's best friend Patrick (Patrick Lepcynski), who's
always trying to smooth things over for his friend, and who's never
quite able to get a girl of his own, and Patrick's sister Valérie
(Valérie Chassigneux), who wants to be a model. There's also Agnès
(Agnès Makowiak), one of Bernard's former girlfriends who clearly still
loves him, and who he still feels real affection for, even though she's
marrying Rocky (Patrick Playez) instead. It's the kind of circle of
friends where everyone has slept with everyone and remains friends
afterward. Pialat's observational style, lingering around the edges of
these friendships and love affairs and loose groupings, captures the
uncertainty of youth, the sense that these young people are making
decisions that will affect the rest of their lives, and yet they have no
real guidance, no real idea of how to proceed.
Couples break up
and reform, the girls move from guy to guy, and at times the whole
group seems like one big amorphous pile — literally in a scene where
they rent out a hotel room to smoke joints, and they all lie on the
beds, tangled up together, a few couples forming within the general
crush of bodies but mostly just existing as a group of friends, all
intimate with each other. Pialat captures snatches of the individual
stories playing out here — Élisabeth's uncertainty about whether she
wants the safe, comfortable existence the likable Philippe offers her; a
café owner's (Christian Bouillette) lecherous pursuit of the young
girls; Agnès' unhappiness in her marriage and longing for the
perpetually unfaithful Bernard; Patrick's desire to move to Paris to be
on his own; Philippe's jealousy of Élisabeth's semi-innocent flirtations
with other men — and moves deftly from one story to the next within
this milieu. The kids have the example of their parents to look to, none
of whom seem too happy, or too unhappy either, but the younger
generation isn't sure they want this preordained path to maturity. They
see in front of them only boring jobs and boring marriages, even if they
do pass the bac and get their degrees.
Pialat is a
profound chronicler of working class life. These struggles, these
uncertainties, seem real and potent. There is no exaggeration, no
melodrama, only the quiet realization that life, which seems so
limitless and fun as a child, is somewhat tougher and sadder once one
progresses into adulthood. No wonder these kids — and they still seem
like kids, all so young and fresh-faced — want to prolong their
immaturity as long as possible. Love is exciting, of course, and Pialat
captures beautifully the fresh wonder of love, the breathless exchanges
of kisses, the wonder of being close to another person. He also
captures, with equal candor, the way such exchanges quickly become
routine, the way these young people are constantly searching for
something new once the spark dies down. There is nothing sadder than the
way Pialat subtly, without any explicit words, depicts the settling of
Élisabeth and Philippe's initially fervent relationship into something
much calmer and tamer. They love each other, and she's proud that he's
the first guy she's ever wanted to take home to meet her parents — but
then she seems to be annoyed by the fact that her mother (Annick Alane)
takes so completely to Philippe, who's eager to please and begins doing
chores around the house. Élisabeth wanted Philippe to be accepted but
didn't want to feel like her mother preferred him to her own daughter,
treating him as though he was Élisabeth's brother rather than her
boyfriend. It's a paradox that Pialat never makes explicit but portrays
entirely through the subtlety of the way Élisabeth looks at Philippe,
initially with desire but soon enough with a kind of subdued affection,
occasionally tinged with annoyance. 
Despite the sadness of many of these stories,
Pialat's sense of humor is apparent throughout, and there's charm and
joy in these characters as well as trepidation and insecurity. They like
to have fun, and Pialat's camera has fun watching them, whether it's
the two girls taking turns sliding down a banister in the background of
one shot, or the nearly sexual enthusiasm with which Agnès devours a
pastry, or the clamor of conversation and joking that takes over the
soundtrack whenever the whole crowd gets together. The character of the
aging café owner is another rich vein of humor, as his out-of-touch
attempts to fit in with the younger crowd only make him seem so awkward
and strange. At one point, he picks up two girls and buys them lunch,
and is nonplussed when the whole group of friends joins them without
even asking, and he's more or less forced into paying for the whole
table. While the girls dance, he watches anxiously, eyeing their asses
as they shake and shimmy, and his eyes are all but popping from his head
with cartoonish excitement. When he joins in, comically trying to be
hip and dance along, it's even funnier. Later, he goes shopping and
trails along behind a middle-aged woman with a prodigious rear in tight
jeans, and again he's hypnotized, so much so that he grabs a woman in a
wheelchair to push along instead of his shopping cart. It's the kind of
broad humor that occasionally bursts out of the naturalistic surface of
Pialat's film, surprising in its willfully goofy comedy.
One also
gets the sense of Pialat winking at his characters in the scene where
Bernard seduces a sweet churchgoing girl (Frédérique Cerbonnet) and is
thrilled when she takes off her sensible clothes to reveal a one-piece
with a tiger's face stretched across her torso. It couldn't be a more
on-the-nose metaphor: the girl who's sweet and innocent on the exterior
but a tiger in the bedroom, the girl who's demure when Bernard meets her
on the beach but asks him if he only fucks young girls as soon as she
gets him back to her place. Pialat trains his camera for a moment on the
girl's torso with the tiger's face snarling, its eyes on her breasts,
its teeth bared on her hips, threatening to devour her mate. There's
something pure and joyous about this moment, about this slightly absurd
touch: it's whimsical and sexy and silly all at once.
Pialat's
very first feature, L'enfance nue, had been about a young boy
being passed from foster home to foster home, all too aware of how
limited his life was. Graduate First..., with its title's
ellipses referring obliquely to Yasujiro Ozu's early films about youth
life, seems like a sequel to Pialat's debut, capturing these young
people slightly later in life than the protagonist of L'enfance nue,
but every bit as uncertain about what comes next. It's a question that
Pialat answered many times over in his other films, of course. What
comes next? Betrayal and disaffection (Police). Cyclical
infidelity and romantic questing (Loulou). Mortality (The
Mouth Agape). For the characters of Graduate First...,
perched on the cusp of adulthood, it seems like everything that comes
next is sad and disappointing, the end of the playfulness and freedom
they'd enjoyed in youth. Still, Pialat leaves hope alive by the end of
the film, the dim possibility that at least some of these characters can
prolong their happiness, can find something beyond adolescence worth
celebrating.
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