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21 August
Looking for Hortense* (2012) is engaged with its characters, rather than driven by a plot, and Kristin Scott Thomas, for all that she is a striking woman as Iva, is not a primary player in this film (perhaps even less so than in In the House (201?) – towards the end, she is not on the screen, and we hear her activities narrated. It is not for me to know whether Damien has always been suspicious of her, and Iva always held back from her desires by duty, but, if we felt that we wanted to know, there is enough to guess by.
What emerges more slowly, shown unfolding in Damien’s attempts to speak to his father (Sébastien Hauer, an important judge) to ask him to bend the ear of an authority, is what intervenes, in him, between action and execution, what impedes**. The connection of the matter with Judge Hauer, which is indirect at his end, is tenuous at the other, and when the couple known to Iva and him have sex in their bathroom, she, unlike he, is able to pass it off as being in love (as well, probably, as a natural way of celebrating what they believe that he has achieved).
Jean-Pierre Bacri plays Damien beautifully well, and, whether in the apartment, about the streets of Paris, or giving his lecture course in two post-modern confections of architecture, always feels in place. Set him, however, in relation to his father and to the man whom he finally and momentarily gets to meet (expertly played by, respectively, Claude Rich and Philippe Duclos), and it is clear that the latter two are of a kind, and from a different mould from the sort of man who he is : when the former calmly says that he is self centred and apologizes for any way in which he may have hurt Damien, it costs him nothing any more than it does for him to be candid and amaze his son, over a hasty lunch, by his attitudes to sex***.
When, eventually, Damien challenges Sébastien, as a passenger on the vehicle of life, to get off and make way for others to get on, all that shocks the judge is the fact that a weapon has got through security, and he then straightforwardly rejects, as if it were the most natural suggestion in the world to be invited to consider, anyone else saying how and when he might choose to end his life. For those with a bent for Kafka’s writing, this sense of obstacles, of getting to the impossible appointment and then being distracted not to make use of the time, will be familiar : more on that here.
Only in relation to Iva does Damien seem to stand his ground, in a like manner to that of his father with him, by rejecting her manipulative analysis that what has happened between them is what he wants, or that what she wanted changes having to address what is. The teenager Noé (Marin Orcand Tourrès) creeps to the door and listens. There is nothing to say, but I have a sense that maybe he was not Iva’s child, but came from a previous relationship. (If IMDb can be trusted thus far, he has Damien’s surname.)
A dazed Sébastien seems energized by what happened, although clearly upset by it, and we go with him as he appears to find more of who he really is and what matters to him. Not for nothing, surely, has Zorica sought to put the French at their ease (and not attract attention) by calling herself Aurore, dawn, and Isabelle Carré has captured the essence of this vital, if naive, younger woman****.
Yes, she shares characteristics with that idealized type of woman who is suddenly there, but she has an ease of manner, a breadth of emotional intelligence, and her heart appears to be in the right place. Perpetually keeping us guessing, the film leaves us with a vision of leaves on a tree, transformed as if into a painting made with a Chinese brush, perhaps an image of evanescence such as Damien first strove to find in the sky as a boy…
End-notes
* The original French title, Cherchez Hortense, takes the form of an instruction (or command) (Find Hortense !), not a present participle. If, as I do, one goes into films blind, one was early wondering whether Iva’s actor Antoine was going to be the last person who saw her (and she was Hortense).
** IMDb tries to summarize in one sentence : A wife pressures her husband to solicit work papers from his civil servant father, but they are a couple, not married, and judges probably are civil servants in France, but one doubts that IMDb realizes.
*** Unconsciously or not, Damien later seems to set out to test his own attitudes (and risk missing a nine o’clock appointment into the bargain) by drunkenly placing himself near one of his father’s favourites.
**** Dare I say it (and risk detracting from my own thesis), but Carré has been put in a potentially perilously equivalent position to that in Romantics Anonymous (2010), a chocolate morsel so lacking in substance that my interest soon collapsed.
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge) If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
