Tonight I saw Les Bien-aimés (Beloved), the latest film by Christophe Honoré.
Once again, I think it's possible that I could be an Honoré character. These characters encircle each other, fall for each other, and relate to each other in disorderly ways. They take risks and get burned. Or they don’t take risks and get burned anyway. They seek connection with others, or seek to heighten connections already made. Often their closeness to others is overshadowed by attempts to get something more, or to find something new with someone who's not available to them. Tensions lie in the struggles between what's impossible and what's comfortable. Eruptions occur. These dramas come from small places; the simmering lava of internal crevices. And once again these characters and their dramas sneak up on me. They sing about love in the streets of Paris, which could generate the worst film ever. But no, because Honoré wields love songs in such a way that they entice and pierce. Every cliché is laced with a sour reality. Characters sing for clarity, lyrics repeat, a chorus returns again and again, and this is what we all experience. We sing ourselves into the scenarios we perform. We each have choruses to return to. We find ourselves in a song whose tensions rise and fall in familiar patterns. It's a comfortable tune, but not necessarily a happy one. I'm open to being enticed by this film because I'm terribly in love with these scenes, actors, characters, and songs. I love that it was two and half hours long. I could have sat for many more, choking back tears, holding my breath, feeling all-too-familiar sensations as I semi-consciously trawl through my own difficult relations, past and present.
In tonight’s film a father speaks to his adult daughter about courage. She says she’s never been cautious in love, and he says this is a good thing, that courage is important. He says it’s good to aim for the impossible. Doing so leads to a failure of sorts, but what's important is courageousness. This struck a chord with me. I've had some setbacks with my studies once again, and further fears of never completing. And maybe he's right. Maybe it's good to strive for things that might be impossible. Because courage matters more. Courage builds character and generates new experiences. Perhaps it also ensures that failing is never really about failure.
The friend I saw it with didn’t feel the same way about this film. He didn’t love the almost-melodrama, the tenderness, the central theme of finding and losing oneself through love. I was disappointed by this.
Earlier in the film one character sings to another that she doesn't need him to love her, but knows that she will love him forever. The song returns later and reminds me that this is what's going on here - the film is about how one's sense of self is generated through their relations to others, and this self is particularly intensified in relations of love. It's possible to have love without the other person loving you back, because while that person is there, you can still construct your self through this love. But when they're dead or gone forever, you lose your sense of self. It's pretty much what Barthes wrote about in A Lover's Discourse, about the image-repertoire as a projection that begins and ends not with the loved one, but the lover herself. Once the loved one is gone, the subject (the lover) becomes the absent one, and falls into crisis. Thus, we struggle to re-gain ourselves all the time, over and again, falling victim to a well-rehearsed chorus of loss.
