THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
FEBRUARY 6, 1996
After failing to appreciate the breadth of her genius for 70 years, the world has been given a third chance to love French filmmaker Louise Flechette, best known for her astonishing first and final films, both of which were silent.
Flechette died yesterday in her Venice Beach condo, according to her caretaker. She was 94.
Beloved, loathed, feared, ignored and finally almost forgotten for her first film—a 1926 silent Biblical epic about the apocryphal Catholic saint Wilgefortis—the undeniable fact of the matter is that Flechette was an auteur of preternatural genius. She both wrote and directed the film at age 24, a year younger than Orson Welles when he marked his territory as film’s enfant terrible.
Flechette’s work was so groundbreaking that even today, film historians argue heatedly about her use of special effects. They cannot figure out what methodology Flechette used to make it appear Wilgefortis (played by Sicilian actress Dante Pellegrino) sprouted a beard in real time, horrifying her mother and leading to her ultimate martyrdom. “Obviously it’s highly skilled stop-motion artistry, but what’s remarkable is how real it looks,” said historian Sunny Patel, who wrote an upcoming biography called “Flechette: The Quivering Arrow.” “The audience demanded spectacle, but when Flechette finally gave it to them at minute 108, they couldn’t handle it. They fled the theater.”
All told, “The Courageous Virgin Wilgefortis” clocks in at nearly three hours, and every moment overflows with heartache and pathos. The viewer naturally sympathizes with poor Wilgefortis, doomed by a greedy and jealous mother to marry an old king whom she does not love. But somehow one is made to sympathize, too, with the selfish mother, who, in fixating so completely on her daughter’s safety, can imagine no other viable options than unwanted marriage. Letting her daughter set the terms of her own life seemed to the mother a fate worse than marriage, death and martyrdom combined.
The film’s failed premiere at Paris’s Le Louxor led to a stampede that injured four, a short-lived cult of drug-addled Weimar-era Wilgefortis “groupies,” and complete oblivion for the film and for Flechette. War engulfed Europe and the Nazis engulfed Paris, where the only known negative of the film burned in the bombings of 1940.
For Flechette, even worse than the loss of her opus was the loss of Dante Pellegrino, their romance something of an open secret in prewar Paris. According to recently unearthed letters, which will be published for the first time in “Flechette: A Quivering Arrow,” Flechette, Pellegrino, and Pellegrino’s daughter, Charlotte, had planned to flee together to South America, but the stress of coordinating the escape in secret had put a terrible strain on their relationship. The night they were to leave, Flechette stormed off after an argument. She would not realize until too late that her watch had stopped. She missed the first leg of the complicated transport plan, and so Pellegrino departed alone with Charlotte, thinking Flechette had abandoned her.
Flechette spent an unwise amount of money dispatching private investigators to Argentina in search of her lost love, to no avail.
It didn’t take long for the world to forget Flechette entirely. But then, she comes from a lineage of forgotten women. Her mother was an Algerian Muslim murdered by French occupiers not long after Flechette was born. Her father was a French settler in Algeria who saved Flechette by stowing her away in the mess of a military ship before perishing in the massacres himself. Flechette was discovered by the ship’s captain and adopted by his sister, an eccentric middle-aged socialite named Emilie Flechette, who quickly bored of the tedium of child-rearing and pawned Flechette off again to her live-in Portuguese maid. This complicated legacy of accidents and near-misses may have led to Flechette’s obsession with being remembered.
“I would rather be dead than forgotten,” said Flechette in her first public interview after a dusty print of “Wilgefortis” resurfaced in a Finnish hospital in 1973. “There is no one we love more than the dead. Even villains become heroes in death, is it not so?” Evading question after question, Flechette refused to ever speak of her past, other than to say she lived frugally in Paris while continuing her fruitless search for Pellegrino, supporting herself doing odd jobs backstage at Parisian theaters that performed for tourists.
And then, like Jesus Christ himself, Louise Flechette was resurrected. With no visible wounds, at the age of 71, a still beautiful woman whose signature dark-red hair had faded and grayed to a strawberry blond. She had ramrod-straight posture, six feet tall without heels. To the 1975 revival screening of “Wilgefortis” at the Paris Theater in New York City, she wore a tailored black shirt, black velvet tuxedo pants, and black flamenco boots. As she smiled and waved to the cheering crowd, she looked neither surprised at her fame nor distraught at having just learned, one hour before, of the untimely death of Dante Pellegrino.
The resurrection of “Wilgefortis” brought, if not a reunion with Flechette’s lost love in person, the chance to spend three hours with her beautiful face, frozen in time, still alive on celluloid.
Flechette was also offered an opportunity not typically extended to aging female artists: a second chance. She was, of course, mocked by some critics for celebrating the virginity of “Wilgefortis.” They called the film old-fashioned and Flechette out of touch with these concupiscent times, to which Flechette replied drily, “What if I told you that, by your definition, I too am a virgin?” Not a single man printed the exchange in their reviews.
To Flechette, Wilgefortis was a virgin in the tradition of ancient Rome’s vestal virgins, mystical and fearsome women who tended the fire/body of the deity Vesta, and who held positions of high esteem and self-determination unavailable to any other class of women in the empire. She claimed it was this definition of virginity, this freedom of spirit and adventure, that so terrified Wilgefortis’s mother. This fire that she wished to extinguish, out of fear of what it might burn.
The barest ember of Flechette’s career glowed red-hot after the 1975 New York revival screening of “Wilgefortis.” And beginning in the late 1970s, Flechette directed a half-dozen films in the gritty fashion of New York realism, overtly mimicking filmmakers like Scorsese, Lumet and Schlesinger to such a precise degree that it was impossible to tell if she was engaging in plagiarism, homage or mockery. Her films did well enough at the box office, due to their skill and also to the public’s hunger for stark realism, but they never possessed the depth of “Wilgefortis.”
In 1978, she married perennial Hollywood bachelor, thirty-six-year-old Alan Tremaine, to the surprise and delight of the tabloid press. Their marriage was rumored to be one of convenience, an attempt to distract from Tremaine’s homosexuality, but the arrangement backfired. Instead of the standard “gay exposé,” the tabloid presses now clutched their pearls at the much older Flechette “corrupting” the young Tremaine. An exasperated Flechette agreed to an interview with the National Enquirer in 1981 out of sheer exhaustion. “A woman can’t have arm candy?” she said. “She must always be it?”
After the 1980 “Heaven’s Gate” debacle, which heralded the end of the “second golden age” of Hollywood, Flechette once again found herself relegated to the sidelines. Then, in a second blow, the truth of Tremaine’s homosexuality and his struggle with AIDS were splashed across the front page of several tabloids. The famous image was captured by a brutally relentless young paparazzo named Sophia Righetti, who scaled the balcony of their Hollywood Hills mansion to snap the photo of an emaciated Tremaine through his bedroom window.
This exposé shocked the nation out of denial in those early days of AIDS, ultimately bringing with it some overdue sympathy and education, but Flechette insisted the scandal was the turning point in Tremaine’s condition. Tremaine would die of AIDS in 1983, with Flechette nursing him tenderly through his final days. She sued Righetti, to no avail, and never stopped blaming her for Tremaine’s death.
Flechette insisted that his obituary state plainly and clearly the cause of his death. “None of this ‘long illness’ or pneumonia [expletive],” she said. “My husband, Alan Tremaine, died of AIDS. I’m not ashamed and neither should you be. The people who should be ashamed—like Ronald Reagan and his sac à merde wife—or these disgusting paparazzi—never will be.”
The sad irony of her insistence on the truth was that Flechette so rarely spoke it herself. She had trained herself to keep a rather large secret, in fact: that she had been steadily losing her hearing since the age of 20. By the time of her reappearance on the scene in 1974, she was almost completely deaf, and had taught herself French and American Sign Language as well as lipreading. Cultivating a haughty demeanor meant she did not need to respond when people called to her, and a withering glance was always a proper response to any question she did not understand.
She would not tell a single soul of her condition, other than Tremaine, preferring to reveal it all at once in a blaze of glory, a “coming out” of sorts, with the release of her final film, “Chaos Agents,” in 1994. A quirky lesbian heist film populated exclusively by deaf actors, there was no sound of any kind, no music, no sound effects, no vocal speech. The movie was entirely in American Sign Language and subtitled for a hearing audience. Small-minded critics called it “Oscar pandering” and one particularly mean-spirited film reviewer wrote, “It seems Flechette has perfected the awards season Mad Lib: Disability + Sexual Deviance = Best Picture.”
“Chaos Agents”’ was nominated for several Oscars but lost Best Screenplay to “Pulp Fiction” and Best Picture to “Forrest Gump.” After awards season ended without a single accolade, a televised interview asked if Flechette was disappointed. “Why should I be disappointed? I am an old woman who got to be a part of New Hollywood,” she said. “There is no reason I should ever have had one chance to do something of consequence, and I have had three. I love making movies, and to do what you love is the greatest gift. We will all be forgotten, you know, there’s no escaping that. All we have is this fragile sliver of time between nonexistence and death.”
When the interviewer reminded her how in her youth, she said she’d “rather be dead than forgotten,” Flechette smiled sadly.
“Dante wanted to hide, and I spent decades trying to force her to show herself. Then, one photo of Alan changed my life forever. All I have to show for both are terrible losses. So, I suppose you could say…being seen and remembered has lost its luster.”
The living should always attempt to honor the dead’s wishes. But in this case, with all due respect, Ms. Flechette, we will remember you.