La truite

"Our village called us 'the savages.' We founded a club. ... A club whose aim was to get things out of men without ever giving them anything"

I confess I'm not a big fan of movies that have as their story line a young woman who uses sex with a series of men to rise above her humble upbringing, ala Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face(1933). They feel in some way as misogynistic as they are empowering. I'm even less a fan of movies that relegate Jeanne Moreau to such an undeveloped role, although she does get one nice scene standing up for herself towards the end. Oh, Isabelle Huppert is fine here, flirting and beguiling men to get what she wants out of them and flashing her pert little body along the way, but the story was one-dimensional, outdated, and sloppy.

At one point we see Huppert's reflection in multiple mirrors and it brought to mind Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Brigitte Bardot in La Parisienne (1957) from decades earlier. Maybe that's because Joseph Losey originally conceived of this film in the 1960's with Bardot in the lead role. There is an attempt to update things via the acceptance of being bi or gay, and Moreau's character is allowed to say "Nowadays, heterosexuality and homosexuality mean nothing. You're either sexual or you're not," which is pretty remarkable for 1982, but it didn't really feel integrated into what was a meandering plot, and the gay husband never seemed like a real person to me.

The young woman's backstory on the trout farm, in particular seeing her father and his buddy molest girls, tries to explain how she became so manipulative, but it could have been so much better told. The dialogue in the film wasn't very satisfying either. When asked what her first impressions of Japan are, she says that there are lots of Japanese. She meets an older woman who encourages her to have sex without shame, saying she's had it 33,000 times in her life. It's not exactly deep, but maybe this banality was part of the point. How sex relates to power is of course the main thing - as a means of social advancement for the young woman, and as a way of dominating and seeking pleasure for the older men after her. Unfortunately, too often there are scenes that don't push a cohesive narrative or develop these characters, only serving to elongate the movie. It just never pulls itself together, which is a shame, given those who worked on it.

Doesn't this movie have any defenders? Even Losey's biographers don't seem to be able to find a kind word for it. What I see is the work of a serene master who has left behind the trappings of drama and psychology to contemplate a world of pure cinema. Unfortunately the late masterworks of great directors are often misunderstood (see Griffith's "The Struggle", Lang's "1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse", Zinnemann's "Five Days One Summer") - maybe because there isn't a critical middle ground between workaday reviewers who are unable to see beyond story and acting and academic critics who are busy applying their pet theories. In any case, it's available on a beautiful DVD and ripe for (re)discovery.

It is surprising that the swansongs or the penultimate works of eminent directors, often their favorites, are dismissed by many critics. Examples: Zinnemann's "Five Days, One Summer," Lean's "Ryan's Daughter." One can add Losey's "The Trout" to that list. All of Losey's works looked at social and economic disparities--"The Trout" underscores that. Audiences who rave about the Korean film "Parasites" might not notice the similarities in this French work because the messages are subtler. Additionally it is a women's film made by a male, where all the male characters are found wanting except for an elderly Japanese man. It is also a fascinating study of a woman's love for her husband who is gay.

The last conversation in the film: Q to Frederique (Ms Huppert): It is better than in France?

Frederique: It is the same. But Galuchat (Frederique's husband) is in charge.

Those closing lines are spoken with the liquor-addicted Galuchat walking alone with a glass of alcohol outside the restaurant, while his wife has transformed from a village girl of limited means into an incredibly successful international trout farmer. The "trout eggs" have hatched! A small detail that might escape many--towards the end as rich trout farmers from around the world, including Frederique, arrive at the Japanese hotel in a long convoy of limousines, the only sound one hears are the closing of the limousine doors (recalling the final scene of Losey's "Accident" when you don't see the accident but hear it on the soundtrack!)

Even the most avid cineastes are unlikely to be familiar with this very late Joseph Losey opus. It was his penultimate film, made in France in 1982, and starring a young Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Moreau and frankly, it's pretty terrible. Huppert is the small-town girl with a gay husband, (Jacques Spiesser), and ideas above her station who, after hustling a rich, middle-aged couple, (Moreau and Jean-Pierre Cassel), at, of all things, bowls ends up going to Japan with Cassel's business partner.

The kindest thing I can say about it is that it's a strange movie that is also strangely dated, (there's lots of bad disco music), and it features some of the worst acting that either Huppert or Moreau ever did. There's the flimsiest of plots involving high finance but this, like much else in the picture, is hard to fathom. The best performance comes from the Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski as that business partner of Cassel's who has the hots for Huppert but even he can't redeem this hollow, empty affair that, together with "Streaming", brought Losey's illustrious career to a sorry end.

Joseph Losey established himself as a gifted filmmaker in the late '40s with The Boy with Green Hair, my favorite film from childhood. The thing about genuine artists is they can't kick the truth. Regardless how wayward they become in their obsessive lifestyles or imaginations, their deepest obsession remains with the truth. Losey would eventually make in the early '60s what was up to that point the best film exploration of the sado-masochistic impulse, The Servant, with the great film actor, Dirk Bogarde, and during that same period the effects of child sacrifice in The Damned. He would later explore the very dark dead-end of multiple sexual partners as a way of life in his film adaptation of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1979). But his great masterpiece, in my view, is his penultimate film, La Truite (The Trout, 1985). He must have experienced great satisfaction in knowing that every critic missed the central theme and all the deeper nuances of what he was conveying in the film, most thinking that it was simply a comic film about a cold-hearted bitch, played perfectly by the ever-surprising Isabelle Huppert. I will not dwell on the complexity of what this film is about, only to mention that it involves a precocious child, Frederique, who discovers much too early in life the sado-masochistic matrix of the world and begins her trek on finding ways to adapt to it while not allowing a core innocence to be destroyed by it, to keep an upper-hand in distance, a postmodern Fanny Price who is elevated not by dominance but by a detachment that, in its severance from God, borders on being the ultimate act of cruelty, indifference. She keeps in tow a hyper-sensitive, self-destructive husband who is gay and who, in discovering the dead-ends of sado-masochistic delight, is devastated every second of every moment by looking long and hard into the reality of love lost in the only territory he knows, the valley of the void where he commits to drinking himself to death. The heroine played by Ms. Huppert has only one ally, an elderly Japanese man who has achieved a similar detachment in his life, and they become spiritual friends. This film is not about a bitch, but about "misdirected transcendency" (Girard) in a world that is severed from God.