Lessons from a translator of dreams: Deceased Artiste Jean-Claude Carrière

The screenwriters who get the most attention are those who end up directing their own scripts. Those who remain screenwriters are subjects of curiosity: why did he never become a director? Was she too scared to make that jump? Jean-Claude Carrière seemed scared of nothing. He did direct a few films (four shorts), but he felt comfortable staying in the screenwriting role for his six-decade career in film.

And he was a superb screenwriter. He may have also acted, written plays and telefilms, authored many novels and works of non-fiction (including a collaboration with Umberto Eco about their bibliophilia; a print “dialogue” with Eco and Stephen Jay Gould on science, spirituality, and the apocalypse; and “The Power of Buddhism” with the Dalai Lama!), but he was first and foremost one of the greatest European screenwriters of the last half of the 20th century. He was prolific, with well over 100 scripting credits, but he created a consistent enough universe in his screenplays that, when he didn’t work with a strong director (or when he worked with a strong director operating at half-strength), he was indeed the true “auteur” of the film.

Dapper till the end.

One consistent element of his work was a “dreamy” quality that extended from his work with filmmakers whose tales were rooted in dream imagery to his more “normal,” strictly linear screenplays — what is Return of Martin Guerre (1982) if not an enlightened guessing game as to whether the protagonist is a liar or not? Thus, a more “mainstream” film like The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and a weird allegorical tale like Ferreri’s 1972 film Liza (where Catherine Deneuve becomes Marcello’s “dog” — Ferreri never tired of allegories about sexism) share a common tone.

The most incredible thing about Carrière’s screenplays is that, while returning to common themes like the “dreamy” tone, he worked in several different countries, writing in different languages, and playing “to” the cultures in which the works were set. Thus, he collaborated with French, Spanish, English, American, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Polish directors.

And, if that wasn’t a strong enough testimonial to his talent, the laundry list of directors he worked with does comprise a fascinating cross-section of cinema in the last six decades. Thus, the list, spotlighting the “name” filmmakers he wrote scripts for — leaving out directors like Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, whom Carrière collaborated with a number of times but whose work has been little seen in the U.S. Here are just some of the people for whom Carrière supplied and “translated” dreams:

Etaix, Buñuel, Franco, Deray, Forman, Ferreri, Corneau, Brialy, Chereau, de Broca, Schlondorff, Peter Brook, Godard, Vigne (who helmed Martin Guerre), Saura, Wajda, Oshima, Philip Kaufman, Marker, Rappeneau, Hector Babenco, Wayne Wang, Isabella Rossellini, Julian Schnabel, and Philippe Garrel

Don Luis and Jean-Claude

Carrière’s output was such that he worked with different generations of certain filmmaking families, writing screenplays for both Philippe and Louis Garrel, as well as Don Luis Buñuel and his son Juan-Luis and his ex-daughter-in-law Joyce. At this moment in time, a few weeks after he died at 89, three more films scripted by Carrière are in post-production (including one directed by Garrel fils).

The body of work is thus so big that it would require months, if not years, to just find copies of all the films he scripted, never mind writing about them all. Thus, we are left to review and discuss certain particularly significant and odd works by Carrière that can be easily accessed on discs or Internet streams, leaving aside dozens and dozens of other films that are unknown commodities in the U.S.

*****

To further marvel at Carrière’s productivity, one need only read this blog entry about the paperback novels he wrote before he met Tati and Etaix, a series of adventures of the Frankenstein monster(!). 

Carrière’s first screenplay was a collaboration with the great French comedian/clown/filmmaker Pierre Etaix. “Rupture” (1961) was also directed by J-CC and is a delightful gag-ridden comedy short.

 

Carrière also directed “Happy Anniversary” (1962), Etaix’s second comedy short, and the film won an Oscar as Best Short Subject. It is yet another perfect example of how excellent gag-based comedy is indeed universal.

 

The breakthrough for Carrière was his first collaboration with Buñuel, Diary of a Chambermaid (1964). That is a fine film, but the next film the two made together, Belle de Jour (1967) is the first masterpiece that Carrière coscripted. Here’s the scene that introduces the always-game Pierre Clementi as a creepy client for Deneuve.

 

Tying this blog post in to the Funhouse TV show (info on how to watch is here), I will note that, as of this writing, I’m doing a two-part episode discussing, and showing scenes from, a rarer Carrière title that is barely known to Americans. The Wedding Ring (L’Alliance, 1970) is a brilliantly scripted film that defies categorization, as it is by turns an absurdist comedy, a character study, a thriller, a mystery, and ultimately an apocalyptic fantasy. 

The film is available online without English subs, but of more interest to those who want supplemental info is a short segment on the INA website that interviews Carrière (who scripted from his novel and stars), Anna Karina (who costars as his wife — the couple at different points believe their spouse is going to kill them), and director Christian de Chalonge. It can only be found on the INA site here, with no English subs. 

One of his most beloved “early” films (this after he’d been scripting for more than a decade) is The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), which was the second of a trio of Buñuel films co-scripted with Carrière that were fashioned as “journeys” through a sort of dreamscape that happened to look somewhat like the real world.

 

Both Buñuel and Carrière were noted atheists, and their films together were filled with glorious bits of blasphemy.

 

Carrière scripted one film for Funhouse fave (and interview subject) Marco Ferreri. Liza (1972, known as Love to Eternity on IMDB, where so much confusion is caused by altogether-briefly-used English titles for foreign films) is yet another of Ferreri’s allegories about sexism and feminism.

In the film, Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve end up on a distant island. The film’s most memorable scenes occur after Deneuve kills Mastroianni’s dog by mistake and takes its place, wearing a collar and fetching sticks. (This clip is a musical montage created by a fan.)

 

Another well-remembered vignette in a Buñuel-Carrière film is this lovely scene from The Phantom of Liberty (1974), set in an unusual haute-bourgeois household.

 

Carrière scripted three of the films that enshrined Gerard Depardieu as a “crossover star” in America: The Return of Martin Guerre, Danton, and Cyrano de Bergerac. All three feature excellent lead performances by Depardieu, but of the three, Danton (Andrzej Wajda, 1983) is the most intense and the most brilliant.

 

No artist is without his or her failures, and Carrière was a great artist. There are many of his films I haven’t seen, but I will vote for what has got to be one of the most disappointing, especially considering the talent involved. Max, Mon Amour (1986) finds Charlotte Rampling as a diplomat’s wife who falls in love with a simian (which is really just a guy in a monkey suit). 

The film was scripted by Carrière for the great Nagisa Oshima and has an excellent cast. It’s subversive for about the first half, and then it’s just very dippy — it feels like a live-action Disney movie that happens to contain an obsessive relationship between a woman and a monkey.

 

Most arthouse fans would consider Lena Olin’s turn in The Unbelievable Lightness of Being (1988) as one of the sexiest characters to have been scripted by Carrière (based, of course, on the novel by Milan Kundera). However, there is another extremely sexy female character, the Marquise de Merteuil, in Milos Forman’s Valmont (1989). 

The Forman film was forgotten in the shuffle, since it followed the 1988 adaptation of the same tale, Dangerous Liaisons, but Valmont is the superior version of the novel by Choderlos de Laclos. (And Annette Benning, in the scene found in the second half of this clip, is as sexy as Olin was, in her own way.)

 

*****

In the end, though, there is the word. Carrière was a writer who never yearned to become a director — although three of the four shorts he directed are excellent. He was content with the writer’s role and thus built up a veritable library’s worth of fairy tales, allegories, stark dramas, off-kilter comedies, period pieces with memorable characters, extended riffs on a theme, and most other categories you’d care to mention.

He also was an engaging panel member, lecturer, and interview subject. The two best video interviews with him online show how he could speak with authority on a number of topics, while also imparting valuable points on screenplay technique. (He cofounded and taught at La Fémis, the French film school.)

Starring in The Wedding Ring (1970)

The first “capsule” portrait, which barely scratches the surface of his career, is an episode of “The South Bank Show.” Here he mostly speaks about Buñuel and Peter Brook (with a smattering of Malle and Rappeneau), but he offers a wonderful, playful take on screenwriting, talking about the way that he and Buñuel would exercise the “muscle of imagination.” While writing a script, they would go their own way and each come up with a full story to tell the other over drinks before dinner.

He also urges screenwriters to be fearless: “Imagination is always thoughtless, innocent. That there is no crime in thinking about a crime…. There is a real obligation for a screenwriter, or any writer in the world, every day, as Buñuel would say, to kill his father, to rape his mother, to betray his country. He has to do it in his mind — if not, he deprives himself, or herself, of a huge territory of imagination.”

 

The best Internet legacy left by Carrière is a long interview with him posted by the Web of Stories YouTube channel. It’s an absolutely great interview with/monologue by Carrière, where he covers a broad range of topics, and even though he, again, only scratches the surface of his movie work — primarily discussing Tati, Etaix, Buñuel, Malle, Wajda, and Brook — he also offers some incredibly good advice to aspiring screenwriters and writers in general about trying to capture a character’s perspective. 

Buñuel and his admirers, with J-CC.

The interview is a long one that is broken into 80 (yes, you read that right) segments. Below are the twelve “best” segments (the whole thing is really worth watching) that show the breadth of Carrière’s experience and knowledge (and I haven’t included any segments from the earlier part of the talk, where he talks about his childhood, or the Brook section where he also discusses his experiences in India). As a result of the chopping-up of the interview, the best way to see the entire interview is this playlist of the whole thing, but I do indeed recommend these dozen segments, which give a flavor for the man’s brilliance. (NOTE: Turn on the Closed Captions for English subtitles.)

He discusses Tati, who hired him to write the movie tie-in novels (yes, there were Tati tie-in novels!) for Mr. Hulot's Holiday and My Uncle. Apparently M. Hulot respected the screenwriter's gift for observation:

 

He was always the go-to interview for discussions of Buñuel’s creative process:

 

An experiment he and Don Luis carried on, in which they pretended an haute bourgeois couple was watching their script conferences. They used these imaginary characters, “Henri and Georgette,” to comment on their own ideas:

 

Carrière’s discussions of faith, spirituality, atheism (he, like Buñuel, was a glorious non-believer), and the human mind are just wonderful. Here, “Belief Is Stronger Than Knowledge”:

 

He touches on many things in the interview and every so often gets around to the Big Questions, like “What Is Knowledge?”:

 

“Grasping the Absolute”:

 

He taught screenwriting at La Fémis and clearly was a wonderful teacher. His discussions of writing (and particularly matters of perspective) make for gloriously “pain-free” learning:

  

The short segment “How to Write a Screenplay” is one of the most popular bits of this interview, and deservedly so. He conveys a lot in a few minutes:

 

His reflections on the character of our hero, Uncle Jean, relating to the time that Godard was using La Femis facilities to edit his work:

 

Carrière was a game-player when it came to the mind. He liked discussing in interviews (and presumably in his classes and lectures) the little games he had hit upon to keep his brain sharp:

 

What sounds like a grim exercise was actually an aide-memoire for both Buñuel and Carrière:

 

And a final word about being receptive to ideas and endeavors:

 

Living in his dreams: Deceased Artiste Michel Piccoli

In America, A-list performers don’t often challenge themselves — the safest bet is the best bet for them. In Europe and the U.K., perhaps because more actors have a solid grounding in theater and are aware of the other arts in general, A-listers often take on the most peculiar roles or guest star in films that are doomed to fail at the box office, in order to test their skills and take on a more difficult role or work with an odder filmmaker. The late Michel Piccoli was a sublime example of this, as he chose  quality over quantity (read: a big paycheck) and was willing to be unlikeable (something American stars never want to do) if it meant working with a great director.

The list of filmmakers he worked for is a who’s who of European greats. When he worked in English, he either acted for a European director (as with Louis Malle on Atlantic City) or took a part to be directed by a legend — the best example being Alfred Hitchcock, for whom Piccoli worked in the underwhelming Topaz (1969).

Younger Michel (with
last name spelled wrong!)

I would like to focus in on the stranger titles that Piccoli appeared in, but first a short list of the Euro cine-gods and goddesses he worked for, who hailed from Greece (Angelopoulos), Poland (Skolimowski), and Portugal (de Oliviera). He also acted quite a bit for Italian directors — among them Bellochio, Bava, Nanni Moretti, and Marco Ferreri.

But he most often worked in French, for the crème de la crème of French cinema. The auteurs from his homeland that he worked with included: Renoir, Melville, Godard, Varda, Resnais, Demy, Chabrol, Malle, Rivette, Sautet, Lelouch, Claude Miller, Bonello, Blier, Jane Birkin, and Leos Carax.

A little “resume” for Piccoli (no English subs):

Throughout his career Piccoli was very willing to appear in unusual fare. After years of stardom in big-budget features directed by legendary directors he was still willing in the Eighties, Nineties, and even 2000s to play leads in lower-budgeted films made by new, young talents.

In 1986, he starred in Carax’s second feature, Mauvais Sang, where he plays a brutish hoodlum. Carax crafted the film as a kinetic crime picture in the manner of French New Wave, but he also included dialog-less moments that were surely inspired by silent cinema. More recently, Piccoli showed up in a small part in Carax’s amorphous oddball gem, Holy Motors (2012).

Going back to his “golden years,” we need to consult the two books he wrote. The first was an item called Dialogues égoïstes (1976), which contains “various writings, intimate diaries, souvenirs, and memories.” That book isn’t easily found, but his more recent memoir, composed as a series of inquisitive letters from his longtime friend, Giles Jacob (former president of the Cannes Film Festival), is available. In that book he discusses his life, career, and thoughts about acting in an informal but cogent fashion. (Actual correspondence between Jacob and Piccoli is found in the back of the book — Michel’s handwriting is florid and barely readable.)

The Piccoli-Jacob “letters” book is called J'ai vécu dans mes rêves ("I lived in my dreams," Grasset, 2015). In it he does provide some wonderful anecdotes about the directors he was most impressed by. The first one, of course was the master-director whom he became a regular collaborator with — none other than the peerless Don Luis Bunuel. Piccoli acted in six of his films and incarnated the perfect bourgeois for him, looking elegant while often evincing darker undertones.

A famous scene from Belle de Jour (sans English subs, but you don’t need them):

To give a semblance of what it was like working with Bunuel, he provides us with some of the odd on-set badinage he used to have with Don Luis. Hence his account of this discussion. (He doesn’t identify which picture they were making, but includes it among his memories of Death in the Garden.)

One day, I asked him how his wife was. He told me that she was well, and that she had a lover. Is he kidding? I began to laugh and asked him if he knew the lover. “Yeah, it’s a priest.” I laughed more. He told me to stop laughing, that this situation could happen to me. A few days later I asked him how his wife’s lover was doing. “It’s over,” he told me. “My wife is dead.” [pp. 64-65, translations are mine — a few are looser than others]

From Death in the Garden (1956):

A much less fruitful collaboration was his work with Hitchcock on Topaz. He formed a bond with the director — as he seemed to with most of the mega-talented artists he worked with (except for Philippe Noiret, whom he admired but describes as being solitary on the film sets they shared, and Yves Montand, whom he apparently was not fond of at all). Topaz was indeed a dud, but it allowed Piccoli to see that Hitchcock preferred the actors to not ask him “contextualizing” questions about their work:

I went to see Hitchcock, who described the scene to me. I looked at him and asked him [in English], “OK, yes, but what is the big meaning?” He laughed and said to me [again, in English], “Your motivation is money.” I then laughed. “You won’t explain my character to me?” “Not a chance,” he responded. “You actors, you earn enough money. You even want me to explain your character! Do you think I explained characters to James Stewart? Thank god he never asked that question….” [pp. 66-67]

Jean-Luc Godard, currently the world’s greatest living filmmaker (without question), used him three times. Most viewers are familiar with Piccoli’s lead role in Le Mepris (aka “Contempt,” 1963), but are not aware of his starring role in the gorgeous Passion (1982), and his terrific role as a straight man for Godard in the filmmaker’s salute to the 100th anniversary of the cinema, 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema (1995).

The last-mentioned was part of the TV series “Century of Cinema,” produced by the BFI and Miramax. Since Miramax had absolutely no interest in letting the films other than the Scorsese epic doc be widely seen by the public, they played briefly in theaters and museums and then disappeared in America – no VHS or DVD release ever. Which is a shame, as Piccoli and Godard function as a sort of deadpan comedy team in this video essay.

MP and JLG.

Piccoli has the status of the “president” of “France’s Century of Cinema,” and so Uncle Jean feels it necessary to pose many questions to him about the history of cinema — and basically how it’s been forgotten by the average Frenchman. Piccoli argues that this history should indeed be celebrated. But, Godard, counters, it’s not actually the centennial of the public showing of the first film that is being celebrated, but instead the first time that someone *paid* to see a film. The short feature is well worth seeing, and not only because Godard takes a verbal swipe at everyone’s favorite “appropriator” of other artists’ ideas, Quentin Tarantino.

In Rêves Piccoli offers his detailed memories of Le Mepris. He notes that he, Bardot, and Fritz Lang all loved doing the film. For his part, Jack Palance was annoyed – which, Piccoli notes, worked very well for his performance.

In the book Piccoli offers lovely little mini-portraits of Godard, Lang, and BB (whom he says possessed “innocence and spontaneity...” and “a formidable energy”). He maintains that, even at this early stage in the game, Godard “had a great authority about him.”

He sometimes gives actors the feeling that they have to fend for themselves. As if there is nothing to do but just do it, without furnishing them with hours of lengthy explanation — the kind of explanations we’re used to from most directors.” [p. 74]

During the shoot, which was “both very pleasant and very serious” Piccoli had “some of the most beautiful moments that I have ever lived through with my director and my fellow performers.” He also, true to form, had at least one memorably colorful conversation with Uncle Jean:

...Godard asked me what I was going do over the weekend, and I told him I was going to stay in Italy and would no doubt visit Pompei. Knowing that I had a woman waiting for me in Paris, he asked me “You prefer dead cities to living women?” [p. 70]

From Godard, a director whose works are poetic but which can usually be deciphered, his discussion of his directors moves on in the book to that master of bizarre allegory, Marco Ferreri. (Whom I interviewed for the Funhouse in 1996, in his only American TV interview.)

“For me, Marco Ferreri has been one of the most important directors and also a very good friend…. He can be contemptible if he thinks you’ve wasted his time, and he’s not wrong. With him, you have to go! ‘We should do it now —What? —What we have to do!’ [pp. 76-77]

He calls Ferreri’s minimalist masterwork Dillinger Is Dead (1969) both “a beautiful film, stunning….” and “a crazy film that one can’t explain….” It also boasts a wonderful score with ample vocalese.

He also discusses the dynamic between the four actors who were the leads of Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973) – Mastroianni, Noiret, Tognazzi, and he – and also veers off into a discussion of the auteur theory.

I was the marionette de Ferreri…. You’re mistaken, Gilles, when you say that film is based on the actor’s art. No, it’s not the actor’s art, it’s that of the auteur, of the director. It’s their art that is most important. I am not alone on the screen because I’m with the director. It’s Ferreri that we see….

Piccoli and Ferreri.

If I get it right, it’s because I have a passion for my metier, for this singular work, and most of all for the director who has offered me the “musical score” for which he has invented this whole miraculous game. I do invent something, but I am certainly not the author or the coauthor. Even if I could think that I succeeded admirably, was I really the one who succeeded? Isn’t it first and foremost the director I’m working for, and whose genius can be seen immediately? [pp. 78-79]

Piccoli’s memorable death scene in La Grande Bouffe:

It’s most pleasing that Piccoli highlights perhaps his strangest film not in the “cinema” chapter but instead in the one on acting. Themroc (1973), directed and written by Claude Faraldo, is a remarkably singular film that one couldn’t *ever* imagine an American actor starring in. (Well, perhaps Nick Nolte in his prime… but, even there, he’d have probably wanted the character to have some dialogue.)

A perfect “Sixties movie” (since the Sixties lasted well into the Seventies), Themroc is a study in personal revolution. The fearless M. Piccoli plays the lead character, a grunting, yelling worker (the whole film is in a made-up language that has a little — but not much — to do with French) who goes mad one day. He is fired from his job, so he goes home, sleeps with his sister, bricks up the door to his room, bashes a hole in the wall leading out to a courtyard, tosses furniture out the newfound hole, repels the cops (even roasting and eating one), and then has a mindblowing orgy (which includes the great Patrick Dewaere in one of his first “adult” roles as an undercover cop).

The film is a brazen act of provocation that defies laws of logic, language, and linearity. It’s truly rebellious and not a little nuts, and is proud to be so. Piccoli rhapsodizes about it, again, in the chapter on acting in Rêves :

… a unique, wordless film that I love a lot, a strange film, strongly anarchic and at the same time heavy and serious, very honest, mocking and elegant at the same time. It’s strange and sad that a filmmaker as unique as Claude Faraldo remains so little known. He had a great authority, a passion for creativity, and a lot of nerve. I love watching Themroc, I have a great passion for that film. [p. 105]

The whole film is currently "tucked away" online. [To watch this video, click the words "Watch on Odnoklassniki."]

J'ai vécu dans mes rêves is quite a moving little tome – it’s not a solid autobiography but, as its conversational structure indicates, it’s intended to sound like two friends speaking to each other. When Piccoli compares himself to a “pen that’s run out of ink” in the final pages, one can only think of the great late-career films he made. These included I’m Going Home (2001) by de Oliviera, We Have a Pope (2011) by Moretti, and the exquisite You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (2012) by Resnais.

Resnais made several “farewell” movies, but of the bunch, Nothin’ is clearly the best. In it, a group of actors (who use their own names and are essentially playing themselves) gather at the home of their dead director for a memorial service where his final video message to them will be shown. The guests are comprised of two sets of performers, who did two different productions of Eurydice with the director, in two different eras.

In You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (2013),
at the age of 88.

The director asks them to watch a recording of a young theater troupe performing Eurydice and suddenly the lines between the different productions blur, and the actors are both reliving the play and their own past relationships with each other. It’s a masterful final work (which, naturally enough, given Resnais’ boundless energy, was followed by another final work, Life of Riley).

It’s also quite naturally the place to end any tribute to M. Piccoli, since it features him as the “elder statesman” but also as part of an ensemble. And, as distinguished as he became and as distinct as his starring roles were (in films like Rivette's beautiful and timeless La Belle Noiseuse), he always seemed to blend most beautifully into ensemble pieces. One thinks of his memorable moments in The Young Girls of Rochefort, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and La Grande Bouffe, among many others.