Jacques Audiard

By Gemma King

Fragile yet powerful, macho yet transgressive, Jacques Audiard’s films portray disabled, marginalised or otherwise non-normative bodies in constant states of crisis and transformation. Jacques Audiard is the first book on the cinema of one of the most important French directors working today. It studies his screenwriting background, his collaborative practices and his use of genre motifs alongside his reputation as a celebrated French auteur. Using the motif of border-crossing – both physical and symbolic – the book explores how Audiard’s films construct and transcend boundaries of many forms. Focusing on the representation of the physical body, French society and broader transnational contexts, it reveals how Audiard’s cinema occupies a space both within and beyond the imaginary of French cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526133021

Book preview

Jacques Audiard

DIANA HOLMES AND ROBERT INGRAM series editors

DUDLEY ANDREW series consultant

Luc Besson SUSAN HAYWARD

Bertrand Blier SUE HARRIS

Catherine Breillat DOUGLAS KEESEY

Robert Bresson KEITH READER

Laurent Cantet MARTIN O’SHAUGHNESSY

Leos Carax GARIN DOWD AND FERGUS DALY

Marcel Carné JONATHAN DRISKELL

Claude Chabrol GUY AUSTIN

Henri-Georges Clouzot CHRISTOPHER LLOYD

Jean Cocteau JAMES S. WILLIAMS

Jacques Demy DARREN WALDRON

Claire Denis MARTINE BEUGNET

Marguerite Duras RENATE GÜNTHER

Julien Duvivier BEN MCCANN

Jean Epstein CHRISTOPHE WALL-ROMANA

Georges Franju KATE INCE

Philippe Garrel MICHAEL LEONARD

Jean-Luc Godard DOUGLAS MORREY

Robert Guédiguian JOSEPH MAI

Mathieu Kassovitz WILL HIGBEE

Diane Kurys CARRIE TARR

Patrice Leconte LISA DOWNING

Louis Malle HUGO FREY

Chris Marker SARAH COOPER

Georges Méliès ELIZABETH EZRA

Negotiating the auteur JULIA DOBSON

François Ozon ANDREW ASIBONG

Marcel Pagnol BRETT BOWLES

Maurice Pialat MARJA WAREHIME

Jean Renoir MARTIN O’SHAUGHNESSY

Alain Resnais EMMA WILSON

Jacques Rivette DOUGLAS MORREY AND ALISON SMITH

Alain Robbe-Grillet JOHN PHILLIPS

Eric Rohmer DEREK SCHILLING

Coline Serreau BRIGITTE ROLLET

Bertrand Tavernier LYNN ANTHONY HIGGINS

André Téchiné BILL MARSHALL

François Truffaut DIANA HOLMES AND ROBERT INGRAM

Agnès Varda ALISON SMITH

Jean Vigo MICHAEL TEMPLE

Jacques Audiard

Gemma King

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Gemma King 2021

The right of Gemma King to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3300 7 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Emmanuelle Devos in Sur mes lèvres © 2001 - SEDIF - PATHE FILMS - FRANCE 2 CINEMA and Jean Marie Leroy

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For Sam and Lumi

Contents

Figures

Series editors’ foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1Body: physical boundaries

De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Sur mes lèvres and De rouille et d’os

2Society: cultural barriers

Regarde les hommes tomber, Un prophète and Un héros très discret

3Globe: national borders

Dheepan and Les Frères Sisters

Conclusion

Appendix 1 Career timeline

Appendix 2 Frequent collaborators

Appendix 3 Critical and commercial reception, feature films

Appendix 4 Languages and co-production countries, feature films

Filmography

Select bibliography

Index

Figures

0.1Malik’s hands and face, the first shots of Un prophète, 00:00:51, 00:01:03

1.1Carla adjusts her hearing aid, Sur mes lèvres, 00:01:22

1.2Miao Lin communicates with gesture, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, 01:19:42

1.3Tom mimes Miao Lin’s performance with bloodied hands, De battre, 01:41:46

1.4Keyhole shot as Carla reads lips on a train, Sur mes lèvres, 00:50:19

1.5Stéphanie removes her stockings, De rouille et d’os, 01:07:55

1.6Stéphanie watches Ali box, De rouille et d’os, 01:21:16

2.1Johnny and Mme Rajenski ‘watch’ television, Regarde les hommes tomber, 00:44:26

2.2Malik teaches himself Corsican, Un prophète, 00:37:42

2.3Albert poses with soldier in real time, Un héros très discret, 00:52:16

2.4Albert poses with soldier in newsreel, Un héros très discret, 00:52:31

3.1Flashing lights, Dheepan, 00:06:40

3.2Dheepan’s improvised border, Dheepan, 01:23:02

3.3Tub and Eli, human–animal relationships, Les Frères Sisters, 00:35:24

3.4‘Jacques Audiard’: the opening of the French trailer for Les Frères Sisters

Series editors’ foreword

The aim of this series is to provide original, theoretically informed, properly analytical studies of the work of French film directors ranging from the already canonical to the lesser known and critically marginalised, and to do so in a style that is accessible for a wide readership ranging from students and film enthusiasts to specialist scholars. The first volumes were published in 1998. More than two decades later, only one of the three words of the series title remains uncontroversial: ‘film’, though even here the material form that this signifies has altered during the life of the series. ‘French’ raises complex questions about the meanings and boundaries of national identity, and about the relationship between national, transnational and ‘world’ cinema (cinéma-monde). ‘Directors’ evokes debates about auteurism, and the danger of reducing a thoroughly collective, team-based medium to the product of solitary inspiration. Throughout its many volumes, the series explores and challenges each of these underpinning concepts, reflecting on the nature of the medium itself, interrogating the meanings of ‘French’, seeing in the director one highly significant element in the multifaceted process of film production and reception.

The series’ essential aim, and its achievement so far, is to host studies of many of the most exciting and significant bodies of film produced in France since the origins of cinema. We intend these volumes to contribute to the promotion of the formal and informal study of French films, and to the pleasure of those who watch them.

Diana Holmes

Robert Ingram

Acknowledgements

Even a solo project is a collaborative effort. I am grateful to many people who helped bring this book into being.

To my editors, Matthew, Diana and Robert, for their expertise, professionalism and confidence.

To my readers and mentors, Natalie, Leslie B., Ben, Andrew, Michael, Leslie K. and Thibaut, for their advice, generosity and overall brilliance.

To my students, whose discussions of these films inspired and motivated me.

To my colleagues at the Australian National University, who supported me in many ways to do this research, and at Paris Sciences et Lettres, who gave me resources and community so I could write in Paris.

To my family, friends and partner, Sam, for their love, wisdom and willingness to stretch their tolerance for screen violence in order to watch these films with me.

And to Jacques Audiard, for meeting with me, and for making films that have beguiled me ever since I was a bright-eyed undergraduate who enrolled, on a whim, in a unit called ‘French Cinema: The New Wave and Beyond’.

Note on translations

Unless otherwise stated, all French quotes in this book have been translated into English by me.

Introduction

On a longtemps considéré Jacques Audiard comme le fils de Michel. Après Un prophète et De rouille et d’os, on se dit maintenant que Michel Audiard est le père de Jacques.

(Kaganski, 2012)¹

Fingers skitter across piano keys, spilling forth a frenzied melody. Hands curl into fists, rage turning the knuckles white as they pound into flesh. Fingertips reach up to an ear, delicately stroking a hearing aid to calibrate ambient noise. Hands run gently over skin, feeling the stumps where thighs once extended to knees, shins and feet. Small fingers gather into points to scoop up rice from a communal plate, before being prompted to contort around the unfamiliar implement of a spoon. Large hands grasp at another spoon, pressing it into the eyeball of an enemy in the confines of a prison cell. A father’s fists, usually encased in boxing gloves, are cold and naked as they pound at thick ice, the bones breaking as he reaches for his son in the water below. Out of the void of a black screen, a keyhole shot emerges, a dim circle of light revealing shaking fingers, then opening a little further to reveal a man’s face held in his cuffed hands.

Figure 0.1 Malik’s hands and face, the first shots of Un prophète , 00:00:51, 00:01:03

From a prison outside Paris to a war zone in Sri Lanka; from a marine park on the Côte d’Azur to the goldfields of the 1850s Pacific Northwest; from stories of the Second World War Resistance to asylum-seeking, boxing and the many faces of French organised crime, the cinema of contemporary French filmmaker Jacques Audiard revolves around the movement of bodies. Fragile yet powerful, dark yet hopeful, intimate yet lonely, each of his films dwells upon differently abled, marginalised or otherwise non-normative bodies in constant states of crisis and transformation. Central to this representation is the physical and symbolic power of hands, those profoundly cinematic body parts whose contortions, tremblings and applications of pressure express the characters’ inner turmoils in physical terms. To evoke the work of Laura Marks (2000), this is a ‘tactile cinema’ in which trauma, dislocation and shifts in identity are expressed through the body, and in which ‘extreme close-ups abound – of faces, hands, disembodied parts’ (Hastie, 2016: 102). From 1994’s Regarde les hommes tomber to 2018’s Les Frères Sisters, and beyond to his work in music videos and screenwriting, Audiard explores movement in all its manifestations. His films follow the passage of families and individuals across geographic borders; trace the gestures of body parts engaging in violent, creative and intimate acts; portray the inhibition of movement by societal and criminal justice structures; convey the experience of everyday space by different or damaged bodies; unveil the complex shifts and interplays of moving between languages, subgroups and cultural identities; and, perhaps above all, map the social ascent of the marginalised underdog.

Audiard’s cinema is extremely physical. It reveals the human body’s capacity for physical and intellectual prowess, its use of and submission to violent force and coercion, and its fragility. In terms of form, his films invariably include naked torsos, close-ups of body parts, legs, lips, hands and feet in particular, and slow-motion sequences of sensorial disorientation such as blurred vision and blackouts. (Kitchen, 2016: 230–1)

Produced both within and beyond metropolitan France, Audiard’s films vary wildly in terms of setting, era, genre and subject. Yet these films are linked together by a cluster of key themes for which Audiard has become increasingly well known in domestic and international contexts. Despite their differences, they all tell stories of oppression and marginalisation, but also of growth and power. They are filmed in shaky keyhole shots, dramatic chiaroscuro shadows contrasted against scenes drenched in natural light, light-handed CGI that blends into natural environments,² subjective scores that immerse us in characters’ sound worlds and pared-back colour palettes that reveal the beauty to be found in the bleakest of settings. They play with the traditional ‘ingredients’ of genre and its connections to gender representation and national cinemas – the French polar (crime/noir thriller), the American prison film, the frequently feminised melodrama, the Western – and yet they also modify the formula to create something new. They are resolutely and at times disturbingly masculine, their male characters constrained by heteronormative and toxic models of masculinity, their female ones usually sexualised and immobilised – with some important exceptions. More often than not, the characters of these films find themselves in substitutive and ambiguously defined masculine relationships, structured by displaced paternal–filial power relations and expressed less through affection than through a violence that betrays ill-concealed failings and fragilities. Geneviève Sellier writes of this dominant motif of troubled masculine bonds and identities: ‘On retrouve là l’opération à laquelle se livre tout le cinéma d’Audiard: faire percevoir des hommes violents comme des hommes fragiles, vulnérables’ (Sellier, 2016: 208).³

Raised in the inner circle of the Paris film world, his father being the famed cinematographer Michel Audiard, Jacques Audiard enjoys a widespread reputation as a stereotypically French director working within an established, auteurist cultural frame. Such an image is supported by his long-term success within institutions such as the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), the Festival International de Cannes and the Césars national French film awards, as well as his membership of groups such as the Cannes 50/50 gender equality initiative and the Club des 13, alongside fellow French directors Pascale Ferran and Claude Miller. Yet Audiard’s films are also frequently intersectional and even transgressive, often looking far beyond domestic frames of reference and crossing cultural, linguistic and national borders to explore hybrid and non-normative identities that challenge the norms of French cinema. Perhaps more than any other French filmmaker working today, Audiard traces the line between centre and periphery, France and beyond.

This is the first book-length study of the cinema of Jacques Audiard. Like Audiard’s cinema itself, it takes the border, both literal and figurative, and the body that crosses it as its central focus. This introduction covers some of the broader themes of Audiard’s border-crossing filmmaking, his oscillations between (and reworkings of) auteur and genre cinema, his collaborative working practices, his French heritage and international movements, before moving on to three analysis chapters: ‘Body’, ‘Society’ and ‘Globe’, which delve deeper into how this eternal border-crossing manifests in, and defines, his films themselves.

Beyond directing: influences, collaborations, engagements

In order to understand Jacques Audiard’s work as a French film director, it is necessary to step back and consider his films within the context of his upbringing and career as a whole. Audiard was born in Paris in 1954 to Marie-Christine Guibert and Michel Audiard. By the time of his birth, Audiard’s father was already building a reputation as a screenwriter, having written the scripts for twenty French films, including Henri Verneuil’s L’Ennemi public numéro 1 (1953) and André Hunebelle’s Massacre en dentelles (1952). He would become increasingly well known for his idiosyncratic dialogue, especially for polars and films noirs in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Gilles Grangier’s La Cave se rebiffe (1961), and Georges Lautner’s Les Tontons flingueurs (1963) and Les Barbouzes (1964). The younger Audiard studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne but it was through his father that Jacques secured his first film job, as an assistant writer on the latter’s final directorial project, Bons baisers… à lundi (Audiard, 1974). He then worked as an assistant editor on Roman Polanski’s (1976) thriller Le Locataire (better known under its English title The Tenant). This first independent job would foreshadow Audiard’s own future films in several respects: Le Locataire is set in Paris; focuses on a male protagonist’s psychological trauma and identity crises; and features subjective sound design that recalls the sound world of Sur mes lèvres, as explored in Chapter 1 (pp. 20–69).

It can be tempting to draw direct parallels between directors’ films and their personal lives, a temptation that can prove a reductive frame through which to analyse their work. However, it is difficult to discount the potential influence of several of Jacques Audiard’s experiences and relationships on his cinema. Of course, on a practical level, he owes at least his first couple of film jobs to his father’s connections. I am also not the first to link the elder Audiard’s work in mid-century polar/film noir screenwriting and his contribution to the establishment of some of the most iconic elements of 1950s French genre film, with the younger’s career-long reworking of these elements (Morice, 2018; Vanderschelden, 2016; Met, 2006). Jacques Audiard’s films feature the recurring motif of the son who must choose how or whether to inherit the (biological or substitutive) father’s professional role. They often feature a central master–apprentice dynamic, and follow the learning curve of the protégé who must ultimately decide the point at which he departs from the master’s path. Indeed, Jacques’s own comments in several interviews support the reasoning that his film career is at least in part shaped by this formative relationship (see, for example, Fornerod (2015)). As Stéphane Bouquet describes it, ‘[C’est] l’histoire d’un homme qui a dû se demander bien souvent, comment faire du cinéma quand on est le fils de quelqu’un, et qui répond, avec une belle audace, en se confrontant directement au cinéma de papa, en investissant l’espace du polar où officia son père … et en cherchant dans ce cadre, une légitimité’ (Bouquet, 1994: 65).⁴

In a similar vein, the dominant theme of familial loss – the mother in De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté; the father in Un héros très discret; the (near-loss of the) son in De rouille et d’os; the complete absence of biological family in Un prophète, Sur mes lèvres and Regarde les hommes tomber – also seems to point to the loss of Audiard’s only sibling, his elder brother François, who died in a car accident in 1975 at the age of twenty-six. In multiple Audiard narratives, only children lack the support of siblings, brothers assume the role of inadequate fathers and friends assume the role of missing brothers. It is not my intention to suggest that this death directly led to the motif of loss that marks Jacques Audiard’s films. However,