L'enfant secret

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.

This is one of the most singular, beautiful and harrowing films I have seen in my life. The impression it makes on the viewer is intensified by the fact that the film practically doesn't exist. It was released for a short time on DVD in Japan, but besides that it hasn't been on the market anywhere. The only print in the world belongs to the director, and he only lends it out to select museums and theatres. He was kind enough to let the MoMA screen it as a part of their series honoring films that have won the Prix Jean VIgo in the past. The two principle actors are both beautiful and disquieting. They become pictures for Garrel to arrange in his aesthetically perfect frames. The film explores the infection involved in love. The relationship dies because it is claustrophobic, but its claustrophobic only because of its intensity. The psychology of the film is fraught with the influence of drugs, forcing the characters to ask themselves how much they're willing to pay in order to have some beauty in their lives. Watching the movie was a similar experience for me. It's a somewhat unhealthy story, and I knew that the more I enjoyed the film, the more bitterly I would regret never being able to see it again. If it is somehow within your means, do anything you can in order to see this film. And then suck it up and try to remember it the best you can.

It is never to late to enroll in the Philippe Garrel school, a SIFF screening of his under-seen juvenilia THE SECRET SON, made when he was 31, premiered in 1979 but only officially released in 1982, this Black-and-White curio stars Godard muse Anne Wiazemsky as a single mother Elie, who strikes a relationship with Jean-Bapiste (de Maublanc), a young filmmaker.

The story is played out in four chapters: Caesarian Section, The Last Warrior, The Serpent's Closed Circle and Unfairy Forests, and nominally, the titular son refers to Swann (Lundenmeyer), Elie's illegitimate son with an actor, who refuses to initiate his parental role, and has long been out of the picture. Tentative interactions take place in intimate surroundings (mostly indoors), but incoherency is pervading every nook and cranny here, Garrel offers no access to the pair's inner states on top of their laconic wording and enigmatic, brooding miens, preponderantly set on automatic pilot.

Garrel punctuates the film's desultory narrative and experimental complexion with static, protracted long takes, perversely resist a viewer's wonted habit, to a frequently wearing effect. That said, THE SECRET SON visualizes a disarming and poetic rhythm with its vintage, grained quality, and a deceptively veiled insouciance, through many a loosely-connected plot, may it be Jean-Bapiste's electric shock therapy, Elie's drug addiction or bereavement, a moody deconstruction of our species' ever-uncomprehending psychology.

It must be an acquired taste to savor Garrel's free-associative, intelligent, yet beguilingly evasive modus operandi, and THE SECRET SON might be less an apposite open sesame than a piquant amuse-gueule, but at the end of the day, Faton Cahen's euphonious piano cadenza alone is worth audience's while.