Blogical Conclusion

THE WORTH OF WORDS

APR 25, 2009 – HER FINGERS TIGHTLY CLASPED, her eyes scouring the surroundings, the enchantingly gamine Adele (Vanessa Paradis) occupies the corner of a table, her person partly reflected on its gleaming surface. A gentle voice from an unseen source prods, “Go on, Adele. Tell us.” Who is this “us?” We do not know – not now, and not by the end of the film, though the occasional glimpse of neat rows of partially obscured viewers, seated in silence, suggests that this could be an interview being recorded for a television show. Adele begins, “Well, I’m…” The voice interrupts, “You’re twenty-two…” Adele offers a correction. “No, I will be in two months.” The voice enquires, “And you dropped out of school very young to start work.” Adele clarifies, “Yes, but not really to start work. I’d met someone I wanted to be with.”

“That’s why I dropped… I left home. I preferred to live with a boy, instead of my folks. So I grabbed the first available one. Opportunity, I mean.” The voice attempts a spot of psychoanalysis. “You needed to be free.” Adele’s reply, however, banishes this fanciful notion. “All I really wanted was to sleep with him. When I was a kid, I used to think life starts when you make love. Till then, you’re nothing. So I took off with the first willing guy, so we could be together and my life could start. The problem was, it wasn’t a very good start.” The voice is curious. “Didn’t you get along? Why wasn’t it a good start?” And for the first time, Adele lays out the leitmotif of her life. “It’s never good for me. Things go from bad to worse. I never pick the lucky number.”

“You know those curly, sticky flypapers? I’m like them. I pick up all the crud around. I’m like a vacuum cleaner, picking up all the dirt left behind. I never pick the lucky number. Everything I try goes wrong. Everything I touch turns sour. How do you explain that? You can’t explain bad luck. It’s like an ear for music. You have it or you don’t.” The voice asks what happened with the boy. Adele is confused. “Which one?” We don’t know this yet, but as the conversation will subsequently reveal, there has been a series of “boys” in Adele’s life. The voice patiently explains, “The first one. The one you took off with. Didn’t it go all the way?” Adele replies, “Sure it went all the way.” But the voice detects a false note in this confession. “But you were disappointed.”

Adele asserts, “Not at all… If I’d enjoyed it less, I might not be here now… Still, the first time wasn’t too comfortable.” The voice, a female voice, is filled with empathy. “Of course. It never is… Because you were both very young.” Once again, Adele’s reply banishes a fanciful notion. “No, we were in a gas station restroom… It’s not convenient, especially on a highway. I wanted to hitchhike. I had this fantasy that love stories always happened at the beach. But hitchhiking was a bad idea.” She returns to her leitmotif. “It’s not surprising, though. My ideas are almost always bad. It’s classic. I get carried away, I don’t think. If I hadn’t got picked up, I might’ve jumped in front of a truck.” The voice wants to know who picked her up. Adele won’t reveal his name, “since he’s married. A psychologist.”

“He diagnosed I was depressed and bent over backward to cure me. So far backward, I thought I was half pregnant. Luckily, it was only appendicitis.” The voice murmurs, “If you can call it lucky.” Adele says, “The anesthesiologist wasn’t my lucky break.” The voice asks, “You had trouble with the anesthesiologist?” Adele replies, “No, he was nice. He seemed so much in love, I’d have followed him to China. We got as far as Limoges. Funny, isn’t it, how people can seem madly in love when they’re not? It must be easy to fake. He said I went to his head like Cointreau. I guess he got tired of Cointreau, so he went to make a phone call.” The voice enquires, “Phone who?” Adele shrugs, “I never found out. He never came back.”

“The restaurant had a back door, which I didn’t know, so I waited for him till closing time. The manager lived upstairs. His room smelled greasy. But he had soft, gentle hands. Hands are tricky. They can make you believe anything. That’s how I got my first job, as a hostess at his place.” The voice asks what a hostess does. Adele responds, “At first, she welcomes people and smiles at everyone… but you know how smiles give people ideas and Limoges is so full of lonely men. You can’t imagine! The judge said it has the most depressed people in France.” The voice is intrigued by this new “boy” in Adele’s life. “Which judge?” Adele replies, “He comforted me when they closed the place because of the hostesses.”

“Not that he comforted me for long. Not even 15 minutes. In a hotel room with no pillows, TV or curtains. But he wasn’t that bad. When he saw I was crying, he gave me his hankie. Then he left. Maybe it’s all I deserve… Some people are born to be happy. I get conned every day of my life. I believe every promise I hear. I’ve never achieved anything. I’ve never been useful or precious to anyone, or happy, or even really unhappy… I’ve never had anything except bad luck.” Sensing yet another melancholy variation on the leitmotif of Adele’s life, the voice wraps up. “How do you see your future, Adele?” The question takes Adele by surprise. “I don’t know. When I was little, all I wanted to do was grow up. As fast as I could. But I can’t see the point of it all. Not anymore.”

“I see my future like a waiting room in a big train station, with benches and drafts. Outside, hordes of people run by without seeing me. They’re all in a rush, taking trains and cabs… They have somewhere to go, someone to meet… And I sit there, waiting.” The voice asks, “Waiting for what, Adele?” Adele pauses. Then, raising her tearstained eyes, she concludes, “For something to happen to me.” The next second, she’s elsewhere, transformed into the titular character, at the edge of a bridge and about to hurl herself into the murky depths below – but not before she’s contemptuously tossed aside one of the apparently inviolable commandments of modern cinema. Through the preceding stretch of conversation that spanned about nine unbroken minutes, with mostly just a talking head at the centre of the frame, it’s been all telling, no showing.

Adele has just reminded us – even those of us who needed no reminding – that despite what rabid proponents of the visual-only aesthetic may proclaim, dialogue is never ever a problem. Even if those whorls of words had led to little more than a glimpse into Adele’s head, the delicate beauty in the revelations is its own reward. But, more pertinently, if we didn’t already know about the married psychologist and the cad of an anesthesiologist and the nominally sympathetic judge, how could we be adequately prepared for the moment when Adele meets, at that bridge, the next “boy” in her life, the middle-aged knife-thrower named Gabor (Daniel Auteuil)? How would we have a context for the man she’s just met if she hadn’t already referenced all the men she’d met thus far – especially since, henceforth, this maddeningly elliptical film will only show, with very little telling?

La Fille sur le Pont (1999, French; aka Girl on the Bridge). Directed by Patrice Leconte. Starring Daniel Auteuil, Vanessa Paradis, Frédéric Pfluger.

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