Les hautes solitudes

This is an awful and shocking exploitation of a wonderful woman (Jean Seberg) in despair. There is a great deepness of human feelings, but also a sense of cruelty in showing it, a gut-wrenching horror. Absolutely disturbing. It raises the question if the director was just a voyeur, with no compassion towards its subject.

Philippe Garrel is one of the enfants terribles of world cinema. At times you might describe his films as 'anti-cinema', like a terrorist's attack on the medium. Shot entirely in silence and in a kind of scratchy black and white "Les Hautes Solitudes" could best be described as a meditation on the nature of celebrity or perhaps on pain or on the concept of 'cinema' itself, that one on one experience of sitting in the dark in a building we call 'a cinema' or even in our living rooms, interpreting in our mind the images in front of us.

Cinema is an entirely personal experience. What one person might love about a film another will hate; sometimes even discerning what a film is about will differ from person to person. "Les Hautes Solitudes", it seems to me, was made for no-one other than Garrel and perhaps his 'star', if 'star' is the correct term here, who happens, in this case, to be Jean Seberg.

Seberg, as any cineaste will know, was an American actress who, at the age of nineteen was cast as Joan of Arc in Preminger's film of "Saint Joan". It was a disastrous piece of miscasting as Seberg, a natural beauty, seemed to have no discernible acting talent, certainly not enough to carry off such a demanding role. However, it was said that Seberg was not only Preminger's protégé but also his lover and he cast her again as Cecile in his film of Francoise Sagan's "Bonjour Tristesse". This time the casting was perfect and Seberg was superb as the spoiled, willful woman-child who goes out of her way to destroy her father's romance. A couple more films of little distinction followed then Seberg returned to France and to "A Bout de Soufflé". The role, her performance and the film itself are iconic. Whatever her limitations as an actress, in the right part and with the right director Seberg could be extraordinary. Perhaps her greatest performance was again as the willful, destructive and mentally unstable "Lilith" in Robert Rossen's film of J.R. Salamanca's novel but by then it was clear that Seberg had her own demons. Her marriage to the writer Romain Gary would end in divorce in 1970 and though she remarried the actor and director Dennis Berry, her name was linked to the Black Panthers and she was 'investigated' by the FBI. She died in Paris in 1979 'under mysterious circumstances', a probable suicide.

Garrel shot "Les Hautes Solitudes" three years before Seberg's death. As I said, this silent picture concentrates largely on Seberg's face and on the faces of 'co-stars' Tina Aumont and Nico and is nothing more than a plot less series of images like out-takes from an altogether different film dealing, perhaps, with a young woman's descent into madness or perhaps simply from a documentary about Seberg's descent into madness where she is cared for by the actress Tina Aumont. Since there is no soundtrack of any kind we can only judge by what we see. We, the individual members of the audience, are left to make up our own minds on what Garrel's film is 'about'. Ironically, Garrel's concentration on Seberg's face reminded me of Carl Dreyer's concentration on the face of Falconetti in his silent masterpiece "The Passion of Joan of Arc" as if Garrel was paying some kind of conscious tribute to the role that launched Seberg's career. It also seems to me that films don't have to be 'about' anything and that we can certainly do without sound. As Norma Desmond said, "We didn't need words, we had faces then" and again, whatever their limitations as 'actresses' the faces of Seberg, Aumont and indeed Nico are among the most expressive ever put in film.

What this movie is, depends to a larger extent than usual on you the viewer. Garrel films Jean Seberg, Nico (in a relationships with Garrel at the time), Tina Aumont and Laurent Terzieff in Seberg's apartment, there is no sound recording or soundtrack. It's a silent movie consisting mainly of closeups of their faces. To me it was like visual Bach, I thought of his Goldberg Variations mostly. A large proportion of the film is Seberg, which I preferred as she was being the most intimate. Tina Aumont seems like an extravert in the Jungian sense, like she ceases to exist to an extent when others aren't around, and Nico seemed very distant in her few scenes. There was a certain amount of vanity on display, but also Seberg looks into the camera like she really wants to connect. She can laugh with just her eyes. There's a Zanzibar film called Deux Fois by Jackie Raynal where Raynal plays this sort of trick with editing where she shines a mirror at the camera and then disappears, and it appears like she is trying to make the same sort of connection that a magician makes with their audience. I had a similar feeling watching Seberg in Les Hautes Solitudes. Garrel incidentally was part of the Zanzibar group, although this film is post-Zanzibar.

Probably the iconic shot from Les Hautes Solitudes is the side of Seberg's face reflected against a polished surface, filmmakers love their mirrors. I wondered if this was some sort of comment about being an actor, that is having difficulty separating your roles from who you are, certainly I once saw a film where some people were being taught acting and a lot of it was about personal deconstruction, which must be as tremendously psychologically damaging as it is professionally rewarding. The reflection in the polished surface looks like the "silver screen".

Some people get Murnau or Dreyer type feelings when they watch this, i.e. as if they are watching classical drama as opposed to a type of documentary (Nosferatu or Vampyr). I just saw a woman to some extent lost, to some extent searching, and also thinking about the past. Her pain at some points seemed very raw and I wanted to comfort her. I thought a bit since about Garbo in Camille, and how nuanced and beautiful that role was, and the pain of her character there. It's rare that I ever see a film and think about how great it would be to meet the actor, but Garbo in Camille was one time it happened and here is another.