Film: Back To Normandy
Year of production: 2007
UK Release date: 27th June 2011
Distributor: Artificial Eye
Certificate: 15
Running time: 113 mins
Director: Nicolas Philibert
Genre: Documentary
Format: DVD
Country of Production: France
Language: French
Review by: Gordon James Knox
Released as part of The Nicolas Philibert Collection. In 2002, Être Et Avoir, Nicolas Philibert’s documentary about a provincial infant school and its kindly schoolmaster, won the hearts of film lovers worldwide. In Back To Normandy, the director returns to rural France with a film-about-a film-about a 19th century court case that could not be more different.
More than thirty years ago, Philibert began his career as an assistant director on Moi, Pierre Rivière, Rene Allio’s 1976 film based on the 1835 memoir of a Normandy farmer’s son, Pierre Riviere, who wrote it in his prison cell while condemned to death for the brutal murder of his mother, sister and brother with a billhook.
Allio chose to shoot his film very close to the location where the murders occurred and cast farmers and other non-actors in the major roles. At the time, Philbert was tasked with finding locals to fill the parts, and for Back To Normandy, he tracks them down again to see how it changed their lives.
Interspersed with interviews with some of the original cast members are shots of key locations used in Moi, Pierre Rivière and other locations relating to the historical case itself. Back To Normandy is a cine-essay which (very gently) touches upon themes of history and modernity, community and society, and the art of filmmaking itself…
The full title of Allio’s film translates as “I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother…” This was the opening line of the killer’s jailhouse confession, the manuscript of which was rediscovered in the early 1970s by a team of scholars under the direction of the philosopher and intellectual historian Michel Foucault. Where some may have dismissed the tale as merely a footnote to an inexplicable crime, Foucalt argued that Rivière’s singular account (all the more remarkable for having been produced by a peasant with only basic schooling) revealed crucial insights into the development of modern judiciary and its relation to mental illness. As Rivière’s case was the first to use psychiatric testimony, it offered an unparalleled guide to the way medical scrutiny was being married to judicial control. Not only did the case appeal to Foucault’s longstanding interest in those power structures which underpin society, but it also posed a radical challenge to our ideas about the Enlightenment itself, since language and writing are usually considered the prerogative of the rational and law-abiding. In collaboration with Foucault, Allio dramatised the events in a brilliant and unsettling film, which received almost unanimous critical acclaim when it was first released and yet remains largely unseen by modern audiences.
Some of the ideas found in that film are revisited in Back To Normandy; but in a very indirect way. The first half of the film consists mainly of interviews with the amateur actors as they reminisce about their experience working on the film. What eventually becomes clear is that the filming of Moi, Pierre Rivière didn’t have that much of an impact on their lives at all. Most of them fondly remembered the film crew sweeping into the area and offering them a singular experience, but when the cameras left, life more or less returned to normal.
Jacqueline Millière, frighteningly believable as the tormenting Rivière matriarch, speaks of some initial wariness on the part of people who recognised her on the street shortly after the film’s original release, but that soon went away. The merry Borel family considers its patriarch’s thespian adventure a source of hilarity. Even the enigmatic Claude Hébert, who played Pierre to great acclaim and seemed destined for a glittering onscreen career, would go on to lead a life far removed from the world of cinema. Everyday life, though, went on, and the stories of heartbreak and quiet tragedy revealed in some of the interviews gives us a rare glimpse into the life beyond, no less dramatic for occurring away from the eye of the camera lens.
Tentatively, Philibert does begin to work in parallels and connections between his documentary and Moi, Pierre, as well as the era in which the story was set. In one particularly gruesome scene, we are shown how the slaughter of a pig is carried out in much the same way as it would have in the 19th century. Charles and Annie Lihou speak movingly of the impact of their daughter’s schizophrenia on the rest of the family. Annick Bisson — who, as a 16-year-old, played the luckier of the killer’s two sisters — now works with mentally handicapped adults. The Enlightenment idea of rational progress, the philosophical background to the Pierre Rivière case, is echoed in oblique references to the seemingly unstoppable march of modernity - shots of farm machinery, an organised protest against plans to turn a nearby area into a nuclear waste dump. Even the process of filmmaking isn’t immune – in one scene, we learn that the film-printing studio Allio set up is in financial difficulties and is set to cease production, a victim of the digital revolution. At times, a bittersweet sense of nostalgia emerges, as well as a kind of sadness for the way things change - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. In spite of Philibert’s highly objective and oblique approach (sometimes exasperatingly so), this is a deeply felt film.
Back To Normandy closes with a scene which reveals just how much personal import the film has for its director. Philibert’s father had been cast in a small role in Moi, Pierre Rivière, but sadly his scene never made the final cut. Thirty years later, Philibert has tracked down the cut print, sans audio, and it is with this footage the film closes. Presumably now departed, the old man addresses the camera in the role of a court official, and though we cannot hear the words he speaks, the image still contains the power to speak to us in some strange, indefinable way. The scene seems to acknowledges that film can only ever be an approximation of life, and though it can never wholly capture the complexities of living itself, it is capable of a poignancy in spite of, or perhaps precisely because, of its limitations. It’s an unexpectedly moving finale to a film which doesn’t always fully connect, but when it does Back To Normandy achieves a quite singular profundity.
Back To Normandy is a deeply personal film about an experience which was fundamental in forming Philibert’s artistic identity. Although it never suffers from artistic self-indulgence, it may be a little abstract for most tastes. Certainly a familiarity with Allio’s original film would seem to be a prerequisite for a full appreciation of this thoughtful and highly nuanced documentary. Watch Moi, Pierre Rivière first, and then consider giving this a go.
No comments:
Post a Comment