Quelque part quelqu'un (1972)

Director:

Yannick Bellon

Release Date:

January 1979 (USA)

Cast

Loleh Bellon	...	Raphaële
Roland Dubillard	...	Vincent
Christine Tsingos	...	Christine
Hugues Quester	...	Emmanuel
Hélène Dieudonné	...	Germaine
Paul Villé	...	Albert
Hélène Bernardin	...	Anne
Jacques Alric
Didier Chereau
Etienne Dirand
Pierre Frag
Renée Gardès
Viviane Gosset
Victor Garrivier
Gérard Lorin

Also Known As:

Somewhere, Someone (USA)

Runtime:

USA:100 min

Country:

France | West Germany

Language:

French

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Film Contact

One of the great Parisian films ..

I suspect there were a few people who discovered this film's existence for the first time last week as a surprising single screen appearance by the late great Claude Lévi-Strauss. It's also one of the great Parisian films of all time, criminally under-distributed and under-appreciated although it is now available on DVD, in France, unsubtitled. From the credit sequence which scans across the windows and smoky walls of building after building around a handsome, but dilapidated, Haussmannian crossroads somewhere in the eastern part of the city,then enters one and rapidly explores its corridors, all to the sound of a profoundly disorientating, atonal (?) score, it's clear that whatever 'someone' the film is seeking will have to be found, somewhere in the dark labyrinth of this unpredictable, crumbling city.

In fact we soon discover that the city is not crumbling so much as being crumbled, and Bellon's principal protagonists - if such they can be called since she's interested in glancing at crossing lives rather than telling one couple's story - are both deeply implicated in its fate. She is an architect, apparently principled, apparently skillful, employed on the new building projects for which the old tenements are being blindly torn down, planning for a promised land where the Dirty Old Town once stood and faced with rabbit-hutch redesigns and fatally flawed materials delivered by the contractors and discovered when the buildings are halfway raised. He, presumably her ex, was once a financial journalist, probably an investigative reporter - he still has access to the Bourse - and aspirant writer, but now he's a floundering alcoholic sinking into the seedy margins from which She's no longer at all sure that she can pull him up, any more than she's sure she can design them away. The camera crosses that couple's path, follows them, together or apart, when they try to re-organise their thoughts by walking through the city, observes at other times an old couple whose whole world of fifty-years' marriage is about to be condemned and demolished, a shy middle-aged woman from the provinces seeking employment in this mystifying city as a hospital orderly, and a student in natural sciences who can't wait to leave Paris and his girlfriend, fond though he is of her, and go somewhere, anywhere, for an exciting exotic ethnographic field-trip. (This is where Lévi-Strauss appears, already a venerable professor, giving a class in social organisation among the Indians in Ecuador).

Lévi-Strauss famously began his most famous book with the line: 'Je hais les voyages et les voyageurs (I hate travel and travellers).' Bellon's film, in part, glosses that and reflects on it. Her Paris is grey and dank and deeply melancholy, even - or especially - when she passes the great post-card monuments around which people live their small and difficult lives, and its inhabitants seem profoundly disconnected from each other and from their surroundings. It's hard to blame the young man for dreaming of some more authentic, warmer, tropical renewal: and yet, in leaving he's cutting all ties with the only place and people he knows well, and between his lectures and the natural history museum he misses the genuine, subtle, sometimes desperate threads which do tie the city a little together, and which Bellon is dedicated to following. And if the film is not, to my mind, as despairing as the previous user-comment would have it, it's because it dedicates itself to ferreting out the dignity and importance and human feeling - often bitterly painful human feeling - in Paris' most battered and forgotten corners. It moves down the streets, it stops on passing faces. At the edge of a demolition site, it pauses on an elderly, but clearly able-bodied, tramp eating a sandwich, who looks straight at us and says 'Bon pour la casse. C'est un patron qui me l'a dit, j'suis bon pour la casse' ('Ready for the knacker's - a boss told me that, I'm ready for the knacker's). There is despair that such things can be said: but mixed with the assurance that they are not, or need not be, true, and must be questioned. It's difficult, it's sad, it proposes only that a hope OUGHT to be here, but it's full of bleak passion. YES YES without a doubt. And I should also mention the extraordinary sound-track, a brilliantly orchestrated combination of avant-garde musical sounds, whispers and murmurs: all provided for love by Georges Delerue who actually paid the musicians and studio he used out of his own pocket in order that this poverty-stricken film could exist. A great musician and a believer in cinema that matters.