Explosions: Sound and Fury (1988)

Alain Philippon

Incipit

The film does not start with a shot of Bruno (Vincent Gasperitsch) arriving at the border of Paris and his suburb, but with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time, / Ere human statute purged the gentle weal’. The film does not end with the solitude of the teacher (Fabienne Babe) in the classroom, but with her in the process of reading a letter from Jean-Roger (François Négret), in which he asks for forgiveness. The film’s movement is very precisely traced in this trajectory from one piece of writing to another: Jean-Roger’s letter is the answer to Shakespeare’s text. Beyond the violence of the subject and the situations of Sound and Fury (De bruit et de fureur), that final message bears witness to a ‘gentle weal’: Jean-Claude Brisseau, humanist.

Realism/Oneirism

The basis of the film is documentary: it all exists, and Brisseau had no need for any research to ascertain the veracity of the facts and the truthfulness of the characters (see Stereotyping). But the appearances of the ‘Lady’ (Lisa Hérédia) are neither a soulful supplement designed to provide the film with a surplus or nobility that would escape its realism, nor the film’s weak point. It is not a case of realism on one side, oneirism on the other. Rather, we have a constant back-and-forth between these two registers. Reality is hallucinatory, and hallucinations provoke, within the fiction, reality-effects. First Apparition: dreamlike scene, the bird grazes Bruno. Next scene (realist): Bruno has the mark of this wound on his face. Final Apparition: the Lady gives Bruno a revolver, Bruno kills himself. Really.

Stereotyping

In the 1970s, filmmakers were drawn to the suburbs. They often fell back on stereotypes. What was the result? ‘Sociological posters’ (the term is Serge Daney’s), with characters who were ‘representative of the average person from the milieu from which they come’ (as Pascal Bonitzer and André Téchiné remarked). One film at the start of the ‘80s, one of the few of this kind to achieve any success, was actually called Douce enquête sur la violence (Sweet Inquest on Violence, Gérard Guérin, 1982). Inquest: the word carries connotations of the police. It depends upon a certain institutional-charitable sense. Brisseau is opposed to all of this. Stereotyping implies that characters, once invested with a few traits that define them and render them easily identifiable (thus greasing the identification process), will not change, move, shift. In Brisseau, they change from one end of the film to the other: Marcel (Bruno Cremer) goes from buffoonery (another Shakespearean trait) to true tragedy, Jean-Roger from the thuggish to the pathetic. For a long time, the school’s Principal (Antoine Fontaine) seems stereotyped (language, phrasing, attitude). However ... (See [Place of] The Spectator.)

Naturalism

Sure. Just like in Stroheim or Buñuel.

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1. Untranslatable rhyming pun: système scolaire, système solaire.

Taking Off

As we have seen, a bird is the principle go-between of realism and oneirism. This leitmotiv of the film is also transformed: finch (serenity, domesticity), falcon (aggressivity, escapes very swiftly: see the quick insert of the cage at the very beginning), owl perched on the hanged man’s shoulder (bird of wisdom). Superb variations on fall and flight are organised around the figure of the bird: Bruno’s ascension towards the roofs, Jean-Roger’s desire to shoot at passers-by from tower height, the threat from big brother Thierry (Thierry Helene) that he will throw himself out the window (obvious evocation by Brisseau of his first feature, La Vie comme ça [Life’s Like That, 1978]), the (very Vigo) scene of revolt on the school roof ... culminating in the totalising figure of the world map, with Bruno’s incomprehension of the Southern hemisphere (school system, solar system) (1), where he finally understands and says: ‘There’s the sky’ – but there is on the bottom. It is in this manner that the film is crisscrossed by a dialectic: every take-off answered by a fall, right to the very end, in Bruno’s words uttered just before his death and recounted in Jean-Roger’s letter: ‘I’m going up there (...) But I can’t carry my body: this body is just too heavy’. Because Brisseau has chosen – and this was not without risk – to show a child’s suicide as a positive act, he must therefore believe in the existence of transcendence. (At the end of Un jeu brutal [1983], the paranoid child-killer is touched by the Revelation – ‘My Lord, what have I done?’ – and his family reaches the mountain top.)

Redemption

In the ending we find out, via his letter, that Jean-Roger has been transformed. Brisseau clearly believes in a dual form of redemption: on the one hand sacred (on the order of Grace), on the other hand profane (on the order of culture). He believes in the ameliorating virtues of pedagogy (Bruno changes and discovers himself through his contact with the teacher, who is not merely a substitute for the absent mother, but the person through whom knowledge can be transmitted). Brisseau comes from this world, he knows it well, he has had this experience, and he drives the nail right in. He is right to do so. The very least one can say, judging by Bruno’s suicide, is that this redemption is not completely successful. But Sound and Fury is anything but an edifying film; it is a film underwritten by an undeniable humanist dimension, but that is not at all the same thing. In the magnificent key scene between Marcel and his favourite son, the father says: ‘There’s no God, no punishment, there’s nothing, my little one, nothing but that big black hole at the end (...) The only thing that matters is oneself: laws are made for fools’. The entire film holds itself, very precisely, between this passage and its contrary, unsaid but implicitly present: ‘There is God. The only thing that matters is other people. Laws exist, and are not made for idiots’. Brisseau’s power? To let us hear the sentence, and imagine its contrary.

2. For an account of the famous statements by Luc Moullet and Jean-Luc Godard to which Philippon here alludes, see William D. Routt, 'Poubelle, ma belle’, Rouge, no. 6 (2005).

(Place of) The Spectator

Starting from roughly its last third, the film is an unsettling succession of climaxes: every time we believe the violence has reached its peak, Brisseau gives it a further turn of the screw. Herein the absolute insanity of the finale, resolutely Shakespearean, a mix of the Western and ancient tragedy, in those flames that light up the world’s night. Look at the brawl between Marcel and the two guys who want to rape his daughter. The orientation of the mise en scène is utterly amazing: two parallel actions in the same scene (the brawl and the grandfather’s death), effects of extreme slowness (where normally, in a scene of this sort, there would be acceleration), emptied-out shots, astonishing work on depth-of-field, frame entries and exist of an unbelievable audacity. (Marcel takes the billhook, leaves frame right. Empty frame. Entry of Uncle frame left. Entry of Marcel from frame right, carrying the body of the attacker, billhook in the back.) In the materiality of the film, Brisseau constantly poses the question of complacency. How should he let the spectator witness violence – as he must – without letting him enjoy it? It goes this far: mise en scène is for him a matter of morality. (2) And he goes further still: after the scene I have described, he gives the spectator a dance between the teacher and Bruno – a moment of sweetness and respite. Except that he gives this spectacle to a spectator other than us: the school Principal, who takes it in as if he were at the cinema, obviously waiting for the moment when he could catch a paedophile teacher in flagrante delicto. (This is how the character escapes stereotyping: nothing previously could have led us to regard him as a pervert.) Beyond the fact that Brisseau seizes with acuity our avid gaze (ready to enjoy would could finally turn out to be reality, no longer suspect), he ultimately questions the place of the spectator as it has rarely ever been questioned.