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Y A TELLEMENT DE PAYS POUR ALLER

(There’s So Many Countries To Go To) Jean Bigiaoui, Claude Hagège, Jacques Sansoulh¹

– I –

The Jews in the Arabs’ place

The Jews, who parted from the Arabs when they left Tunisia, have come and taken their place here in Sarcelles. What I mean is that, within our multi-ethnic country, these Jews constitute a sort of ethnic national minority, which is in the story of their origins but now has no other task than that of transforming or generating the contemporary, multi-faceted, infinitely divided and reconciled-to-fate way of being and becoming French. The calm, composed artistry of this film lies in the way it replaces the theme of the “Jewish question” with the story of individual people wherein the old issue of “assimilation or particularism” breaks down. No, it is not a film about the Jews because, by virtue of being a film about these particular Jews, it is also a film about the Arabs, or the Africans, or the Portuguese – in short, a film about France. Not the France nostalgic for its harmonious, rural past but the France of today, where everyone, in the voice of an Other, has to give their views on how a people is created. The filmmakers’ direct frontal style, the framing of a truth that is utterly unlike the random seizing upon false facts, is well suited to the subject, because it is a question of fictionalizing what we are, not of “sharing” our inner exoticism.

In this film there is an ethics of cinema whose rule is: “If you want to avoid turning the people you are showing into a picturesque spectacle, then make sure you compose your shot carefully and have a clear understanding of it at all times.”

– II –

The lovers of the place

When in the film we see a TV film that the characters in the film are watching, we can clearly see that the television actors are bad actors. Loulou and his family are the real actors. The fake actors are the ones on TV, while the real ones are those watching them. Performing well is what makes real actors. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Toto,² in their native state, have all been gathered together in the city by this film: Loulou and his family are great comic actors. Comic no doubt because that is one of the ways they can perform their tragedy: with quiet misadventures, when a whole slew of events is crashing down around them. The image also performs, through the same process as that of the “actors,” composing and disposing itself before us in each shot, such as in the one where a few children sitting haphazardly on some steps change place and, with no miracle other than that of the filmmakers’ vision causing them to do so, form a graceful figure. The image also performs: a ship sails by on the horizon as a man gazes at it from the shore. Incongruous, familiar, in the brightness of the film and the light coming from the wide open spaces, the ship, painted in vivid colors that don’t bleed outside the lines, sails by and fills the screen. Slow-moving, stately, and colorful, the ship sails by in the frame, a real ship that is like a ship in the theater being pushed from the wings by 20,000 extras, an anti-Exodus at once melancholy and light-hearted. Not exotic because it’s joyful. You have to see the film of this diaspora: it only occurs once every thousand years.

– III –

Mouths from the South³

Loulou and his family are going to leave Tunis. Tunis near La Goulette,⁴ La Goulette near Tunis, the native peninsula, the luminous place at the end of the world. They are the last Jews, the last family to leave the country they love, which is their own. (The last of the Jews, the last of the Just?⁵ It is not as simple as all that.) Some of them dream in color. They and the filmmakers who accompany them see things in color. In color and in their true distance.

The exact distance of the real is its proximity. When Loulou and his relatives “move,” a team of filmmakers follow them, turning their exodus into a film and Loulou and his family into actors. Y a tellement de pays pour aller is a diaspora captured on film. Both a document and a comedy by the grace of the people who are in it. Never a documentary or a farce. To the “I was there” effect of newsreel films, to the portable cameras that steal images and film people without their knowledge, the directors’ desire for cinema responds with a fixed camera, carefully composed shots, and the full knowledge of the protagonists. With the decision to make a real film out of a true story. A documentary is a glut of images mounted on a given subject. Having wanted first and foremost to make a film means having been able to reconnect with something that is beginning, to capture things “at their mouth” (the way we say “at their source”), the mouths from the South, and the cinema of Méliès, and/or its extrapresent (the way we say extraterrestrial) image.

Here, the film is right in front of us. There is no mounting of anything, no collage, no looking down from above. Everything takes place within the frame, within the organization of depth, within a pure image, a distributed substance full of colorful clues. Real distance requires that what Loulou and his family say and do must take place within this frame, within this scene, and not go beyond it. Loulou and his relatives leave and arrive. From Tunis near La Goulette to Sarcelles near Paris. The frame of their life, the frame of the film. A formal constraint, a real constraint. Why did they leave?

To this question an old sage – they themselves – replies: dashed hopes for a certain kind of modern Muslim state, the former closeness with the French occupiers who separated the Tunisian Jews from their Arab neighbors … They mention dates, events, wars. Anti-Semitism, grievances are never brought up, but rather a chilling of the neighborly relations that, together with family life, constitute happiness in life. Where should they go? What does it mean to leave?

In Sarcelles, the big bright window that they are washing for Passover shatters like a bottle breaking against a ship at its launching. The apartment, divided in half by light and shadow, and the splash of red of the bowls in the middle of it are not stage decor, mere esthetic props, let alone sociological markers, but rather the very plot, the story, the suspense that these consummate actors are performing. Their dialogues, their monologues, the wonderful text they invent owe their funniness not just to improvisation, to their gentle rather than affectionate humor, but to their brilliant way of performing this comedy of places against the backdrop of a possible historical tragedy. “With my heavy build,” says Loulou, who is in fact overweight, “me with my heavy build … Always having to go up and down a spiral staircase … ” Loulou is a remarkable character. He has a kind of low-key volubility; he makes you laugh not at his misfortunes but at his little pleasures. A sort of born talker, Loulou is not a storyteller or a show-off or a smooth operator but someone for whom talking has always been a physical act; someone for whom giving a performance is a way of giving birth to himself (with all that entails in terms of the presence of the mother and the family), a manner of being constantly reborn to a precise, funny way of recounting things, which fills up the screen.

Between the Tunis of the search for lost time and the Sarcelles of time regained; between the Friday nights when “it was wonderful, there was the jasmine, the jebbas,⁶ the cured meats, a woman selling briks⁷ and home remedies; that’s the only thing that stays with you forever,” and the Sarcelles of cafés, of betting, of the kippah-wearing grandfather walking in a landscape of Black joggers dressed in blue, the Sarcelles of kosher and glatt-kosher grocery stores, too, there is the enormous gap of a life played out. And the way all the immigrants have, not of adapting their customs with a kind of folkloric fatalism or of turning daily life into nostalgic exoticism, but of turning life in France into a new life in which the boukha⁸-baguette-of-French-bread replaces the béret in the cliché.

“To have a home of your own,” says Loulou’s wife. In France, in New York, in Sarcelles, or in Israel, which will be mentioned only to be rejected? Reasons, good reasons, either to leave or to stay … We are told what they are, but what we are shown, whether there in Tunis or in this new “there” that is here and is Sarcelles, in the beauty of its colors, in the surrounding objects (the old-fashioned tripod for holding peppers, the children’s white stepstool) is a way of remaining, an anti-diaspora of feeling. The exilee of this sort is someone who is a lover of places. Of the place he or she leaves, of the place he or she finds again. Lying in bed in Sarcelles, Loulou talks about the things he enjoys: “I like it a lot here in Sarcelles. But there aren’t enough leisure activities.” The reasons, whether good or bad, are muddled, as are the explanations accepted for them; the ways of explaining things are muddled, in the face of the clarity of the place these people are able to inhabit. The question of the causes of their exile, of why they are leaving or have left, of when they should have done so is simultaneously present, buried, and elusive. Departicularized.

This film is no more a film about the Jews than it is a documentary. That is no doubt why a truth about them slips obstinately into the film. Those who left for a potential America that is located in Sarcelles. La Goulette, Sarcelles. Habit: “Will you be able to find peppers in Paris?” “Aren’t there peppers and tomatoes,” the grandmother replies, “in Paris?” Ah, habit!

Habit is the art of those who change. Not the habit of changing, of resigned wandering, but the habit of remaining, the habit of inhabiting.

Surrounding Loulou Ben Aïs are his wife, brothers, parents, sister-in-law, and children. The characters of a family who are those of a story. A story of the love of places, and of amazing people. A blue arched doorway, a yellow fly sprayer, the bottom of a door, a shadow, a curtain, the triumphant buzzing of flies … Who has seen these things? The filmmakers have, because the actors have.

When the blue door of the house in Tunis closes for good, there is a shot of its occupants with the shadow of the bamboo curtains streaking across them.

Le Perroquet, December 9, 1983