Film/ The Man of My Life

"The Man of My Life", directed by Zabou Breitman September 2007


Imagine a rainy-day summer camp project where the youthful avatars of Eric Rohmer and Andrei Tarkovsky unite to create a cinematic divertissement with the theme, perhaps drawn out of a hat: The Universe- amusingly, also the name of the coffee bar at the local town square. Like the universe, or, more terrestrially, the late summer in which the film takes place, there is too much of everything in Zabou Breitman's new film, "The Man of My Life", co-written by Ms. Breitman with Agnes de Sacy (in French with English subtitles).

I can't help wondering how many horoscope saturated bloggers might be at this moment hashing out the exact trines and conjuncts in this over-bursting cosmos of an unabashedly romantic movie, a fable imbued with the sensibility and truth of children's stories. It is also chock-a-block with the endless detailing and imaginative coloring that is a specialty of stories by children. It is engaging and fun to follow each piece of the complex mosaic as it inscribes yet another dimension or reference into an already crowded tale, but this may have come at too high a price. One is reminded of the advice to the novice traveller: put your clothes and your money on the bed, then take away half the clothes and double the money; now you're ready to go. Half as much story and cleverness could have allowed for a greater emotional depth.

Set in a picture-perfect maison de vacance in the south of France, this little galaxy constellates in its pre-Copernican symmetry around Frederic, its beneficently rounded, loving and earthy center. Bernard Campan's Frederic is like a luminous, small Dutch still life of a ripe peach in a blue and white china bowl- the sheer joy of its simple deliberateness even the most die-hard downtown conceptualist could not resist. Lea Drucker is his beautiful lunar wife, Frederique, who has yet to find out the extent to which she is dependent upon predictability. Their three children are a tender, if calculated, array: the quiet, older saturnine daughter spends her vacation peering into a microscope; the middle son is a would-be magician in a skeleton printed T shirt, his sleight-of-hand changes the king of spades into the king of hearts; the youngest, Arthur, is the irrepressible and irresistible masked and caped trickster, constantly in motion, searching and heroic. Various family and friends fill out the night sky and daytime activities that shuffle along seemingly eternally.

But the happy couple is just past the cusp of youth and opposition appears like a small disproportionately influential asteroid in the form of Charles Berling's Hugo, the new, single, gay next-door neighbor. Hugo's sphere is icy mentation and azure imagination, constricted and un-forgiving, fearless and honest; he, too, is at an edge only slightly different from Frederic's.

Myriad flashbacks and surreal imagery weave their way into the domestic drama, as Frederic and Hugo become not so much friends, as neighboring influences- this is not a male bonding film. It goes without saying that if you are expecting to see the cinema verite aftermath of a Larchmont barbecue you are looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. The flashbacks mostly revolve around a long after dinner conversation a deux as they congenially battle out opposing views about love and life, stretching only slightly, for now, out of their respective caricatures.

As early morning air chills, Frederic has fetched sweaters for them both. The mental Hugo happily parries and thrusts in his erotically charged polemic against relationships. Like anyone who has paid a high price, he overvalues the narrow purchase he has on Eros; Frederic, by contrast, is so awash in Eros that it barely registers with him. In his bourgeois mechanical materiality, he is transfixed by the label sticking up from the back of the sweater that Hugo has just put on and, while carrying on the conversation- including a brief rendition of the 1930's cabaret song, Parlez de Moi, backlit with the golden rays of early morning- devises and executes a complex design both proper and inconspicuous to tuck the offending label back out of sight.

Frederic's unconscious flow of warmth and good nature has been diverted by the force of this newcomer, now running partner, and Frederique will suffer for it. The story turns retrograde with harsh doses of reality: limitation, infidelity, deceit, cruelty and AIDS. Hugo's mentioned but unseen daughter arrives on the scene. A beauteous treat that did not fall far from the tree, she is full of felt and clever accusation, and one previously unknown bit of information, trying to convince her father to visit, if not forgive, his own harsh, rejecting and rejected father who now lies, in hospital, dying.

Everything is set; all that can is madly breaking away from it's former form. Frederique howls into the night, the conventional container of their relationship can no longer be taken for granted, she is a powerless new moon, a sunken cave of darkness. Frederic, wounded by a simple sprained ankle, is no longer the center. Something has pulled him away and into a consciousness of a greater Sun-center, his world has expanded, but he must find his place within these new dimensions.

To fulfill this destiny he hobbles off into the night to find Hugo, messenger of the gift, if not its source, to give him the reciprocal token: a tender acknowledgement to a man all too accustomed to so much less. Hugo's still rampant harshness is overwhelmed by Frederic's simple generosity and he, too, is released from a predictable repetition. As stated earlier in the movie: magic is what happens when you're not looking, from the place you don't expect. It looks like chance to the viewer, but it is hard work to the creator of the illusion. And what about the stars? For millennia man has looked to the heavens trying to discern the clues to fulfill his fate and outwit chance.

There are few actually false notes in this film but the director did not do the substance of her story any service by having Hugo default into conventional sentimentality when his daughter demands to know why he loves her? His replies, she grippingly points out, are all matters of chance. Instead of agreeing with her, like it or not, he dissolves into hugs and confirmations that, yes, he loves her simply because she is his daughter. No doubt this reasoning makes good and possibly necessary box-office concessions, but isn't the rare beauty and terror of love, like grace, its pure freedom from reason and contingency?