9

THE DEMY AFFAIR

It is not often that you see critics becoming politically militant and trying to mobilize public opinion. As regards Jacques Demy’s film Une Chambre en ville (A Room in Town), there have been no fewer than two full-page petitions in the newspapers signed by a group of critics who joined together to urge everyone to go en masse to see the film.¹ This is obviously a political symptom. One of the petitions came directly from the Left: the critics of the PCF [French Communist Party] and PS [Socialist Party] newspapers. The other was organized around the Cahiers du cinéma. That’s politically committed criticism all right.

But committed to what? In actual fact, Une Chambre en ville celebrates, at the very moment of their death, “le peuple de gauche” rallied around a dynamic, good-natured working class singing its demands before stolid CRS [riot control police] troops. The colorful effect is substantial: the film is based on a people representable in all its fullness, a nostalgia for the 1950s (it is about the Saint-Nazaire and Nantes strikes) that the critics, in their allegiance to Mitterrand, to May 10,² have sought to emphasize. This film reduces Gaullism to a mere parenthesis. It activates – and deactivates – the myth of the continuity between the workers’ movement of 1936 (or 1947) and the Left’s current legitimacy.

The verdict of the public, unmoved by the critics’ appeals, reflected, no doubt unconsciously, the futility of such a subject. The labor union movement, connected through its visible song to the leftwing parties (SFIO³ posters on the walls in the film), is actually a corpse that is only just able to lend its symbols to some outmoded fable. Film critics are the only ones who are still capable of imagining that such a thing could be a possible referent for a “great popular leftist film.” In their challenge to Belmondo and L’As des as our petition signers were defeated before they even began. The Right seems to be way ahead of the Left when it comes to promoting turkeys to a gullible public today.

Cutting across the film’s creaky workerism, the love story presents the ecumenical theme of a cross-class alliance in the guise of Surrealist mythology (the woman naked under her fur coat): the aristocratic bourgeoisie embraces the young proletarian. The only villain is the shopkeeper, the man of the PME-PMI:⁴ a cheerfully gruesome Michel Piccoli cuts his throat in his shop. Serves the people who elected Chirac right.

As compared with the stuttering factory girl in Godard’s Passion, the moral of Demy’s film, well suited to lifting the Left’s spirits, is that the proletariat doesn’t stutter; it sings. When we see the union representative (Where’s this guy from? A cautious Demy indicates neither the CGT⁵ nor the PCF) singing on the table in the café: “We didn’t get anything we asked for, we’ve been laid off, so come on, guys!”, the refrain is not so cheerful, however. Demy is unwittingly telling us that the approach, the politics, and the leaders have definitely got to be changed. It all has to be done over.

The Cahiers du cinéma has had to completely abandon its former high standards in order to endorse such a product. It is here that politics, as soon as it becomes parliamentarian, leads to a rush to abandon modern reason and the sense of the avant-garde.

Implicitly, of course, any symptom is of its times. Demy is after all combining the desire for a “social” representation and the infiltration of theatrical, or operatic, modes into cinema. This cross between the political as such and formal excess (or arbitrariness) is a problem of the times. Bonitzer⁶ pointed this out, noting with satisfaction the conjunction of a realism and a formalism, that of musical comedy.

The trouble, in this instance, is that the film’s politics is representation (yet politics’ real cannot be represented) and its formalism is as spiffy as can be because it’s backed by the good news: the Left is here!

The task is to establish in a void the limited subject matter of what it is that preserves the hypothesis and the trajectory of working-class force. The only thing appropriate for this is an art split between the sense of a lack and the utopia of the montage. Demy would have us believe that there is no crisis, either of the people or of cinema. This is what accounts for the critics signing petitions. But it is by inscribing, through formal transformation, the crisis of the people that the crisis of cinema will perhaps be assessed. This is the time when we need the Marxist art of the period of the crisis of Marxism. Forced to do everything when it is impossible to do so, Demy has only one solution, a Christian one: with the cathedral basically serving as its backdrop, the demonstration he depicts is a religious procession.

Where an ethics is attempting to define itself, Demy instead praises virtue. A belief like that is harmful, because it weakens the toughness required by confidence.

L’Imparnassien, May 1983