L'enfant secret (1979)

User Rating:

8.4/10   

Director:

Philippe Garrel

Writer:

Philippe Garrel (writer)

Release Date:

2 December 1982 (France)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Four chapters based on the birth of a 'secret child', or a film, with chapter titles: "La séction Césarienne"...

Plot Keywords:

Independent Film

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Anne Wiazemsky	...	Elie
Henri de Maublanc	...	Jean-Baptiste
Xuan Lindenmeyer	...	Swann, Elie's child
Cécile Le Bailly	...	Chloé
Elli Medeiros	...	The whore
Philippe Garrel	...	Psychiatric patient
Christian Aaron Boulogne	...	Boy (as Ari Päffgen)
Benoît Ferreux
Eliane Roy	...	Jean-Baptiste's mother
Bambou
Edwige	...	La prostituée (as Edwige Gruss)

Runtime:

92 min

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Quotes:

Élie: His father is an actor. I went to see him on the set of a film shortly after giving birth, and he said he would recognize the child, but he never did, and I never saw him again.

Movie Connections:

Featured in "Cinéma, de notre temps: Philippe Garrel - Portrait d'un artiste" (1998)

How the mind sees

I got my first camera – a chunky Voightlander - when I was 18. I used to develop and print roles of black and white film all night long in the garden shed. It took a while to get it right and so this small but significant section of life is depicted in washed out, contrastless photos that speak of something vague and ungraspable - the present as something already past - and more subtly, of failure and despair.

Garrel must have been onto this effect – I've never seen it used before – for that's exactly what we have here. The blurry, washed-out images are amazingly effective in conjuring up the gentle emotions of almost-ordinary moments. It's like picking random moments from a particular epoch of your life from ancient tapes, and watching thinking "God yes, that's how it was", when even the pattern that a lamp made on the wall, or the ordinary creak of a door in a seedy room brings it all back.

There's little coherent narrative or dialogue. A brooding, intense fellow is making a film – at times he sees things as if through the camera lens; his girlfriend has a fond attraction to a friend's child; he lapses into drug-induced derangement (stark, wordless hospital scenes of electric shock treatment); she loses her mother and lapses into drugs herself. Clearly these are autobiographical moments from Garrel's life and might be worthless but for the style with which they are represented.

We hear there is only one print of this in the world – in Garrel's possession, and it is rarely shown. It was, however, released for a while on DVD in Japan and I was lucky enough to come across one of those (no English subtitles). It's a special experience that is worth watching and rewatching as you go along, just as you often have to stop and re-read lines of poetry.

This is the vacuity of the past put on film; certain experiences that were so intensely real at the time that they became fictional even in the living of them, and, now remote, can only be grasped in underexposed, badly developed memories.