La Passion Beatrice
Just watched
a vastly underrated French film called “La Passion Beatrice.” I had one regret,
which is that I couldn’t get decent subtitling. What I got was some leftover
1990s tech that left me guessing on every frame.
Great acting
and great directing but you won’t be able to recover from the eighteen-year-old
Julie Delpy’s performance as the daughter of a squire and landowner in the 14th
Century France. She’s beautiful in both
fleshly and spiritual ways.
I wanted to
press pause just to admire her in certain scenes. She says much more in her facial expressions
than a person could say with words.
This was
early in Delpy’s career. She later moved to Hollywood where the real money is
but her face (visage?) and halting performance reminds me of the cherubs on the
Sistine Chapel. That innocence,
freshness, and devotion to God becomes sullied by her father, who returns home
from war a broken, cynical, and sadistic man.
“Sullied” is perhaps too delicate a word
but why am I being squeamish? This film
is not squeamish though American critics would rather it was. Plain fact is he raped his daughter in one scene, and presumably
wanted to rape Beatrice some more.
The film has
a kind of brutal realism that serves as a good antidote to the American flight
to fantasy and sanitized romanticism. As
an offshoot of its intellectual properties, I couldn’t help but think of Celine
and his ‘blackening’ literary style.
Critics have
found this too real a picture of rural life during the Hundred Years War. American audiences want the sanitized version
of nobility. This film’s not a fork and spoon historical drama. People ate with their hands and fingers, were
unkempt and bedraggled, were hungry, ate weird stuff, and ignored the disabled,
including a rather touching four-year-old boy who doesn’t speak and has no
parents.
For all of
the ugliness, the cinematography is wondrous. When Francois and his men mount
their horses and go raiding, the filming is like the very best American western
scene of the same type—thundering horses trampling everything beneath them,
with mounted demons in the saddles.
The castle owned
by nobleman Francois de Cortemare is dirty, dank, and has people sleeping on
the floor in dark corners.
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