One or two things I know about Jean-Pierre Léaud

I just saw Jean Eustace’s ‘The Mother and the Whore’ and felt compelled to put some of my whirlwind thoughts into writing. I would have liked to slip surreptitiouslyinto the film, but the lead actor Jean Pierre Leaud is blocking my way. And even before I begin I will have to put my complex feelings and thoughts about Jean Pierre Léaud in some order. I encountered him first time in ‘400 Blows’ and admit that though impressed and a bit moved, Antoine Doniel had not yet cast a shadow over my mind. That came later when I saw a late teenage Jean/Antoine in ‘Antoine and Colette’ a 30 min short of Truffaut made for the film ‘L’amour a vignt ans’. I was well past my 18th year and was not particularly in love with any real person, but that is no excuse for not having a schoolboy crush on the film which is same as having crushes on its lead characters and Paris. In those days I was learning French, reading Camus-Sartre-Breton-Eluard-Rimbaud (mostly in translation) and had just discovered French new wave.

Antoine was slim, of medium height, having a shy charming smile and longish hair falling on eyes that had to be regularly flicked away, ‘My mom thinks you look romantic, it’s because of your hair’ Colette told him. Antoine worked at a record manufacturer, smoked profusely like any French or Bangali of his age, went to classical music concerts and public seminars, and lent books to Colette. There was no novelty in him as I realized later, but I was depressingly bored with my studies and milieu and Antoine conjured dreams of what I longed to be. My relationship with Kolkata was precarious in those days (now perhaps it is more so for very different reasons), I passionately loved certain parts of the city’s physical space, (once I was walking past Park Court building in park circus, the late autumn air and evening sunlight, anticipation of the philosophy seminar in Khaleel Munzeel AFC gave me the feeling of being in a different city, in a more lighthearted time); In turn I felt stifled by modhyobitto narrow mindedness, morality and mediocrity. Of course my loathing was also an act of unconscious self critique. ‘Intellectual’ was a magic word in those days, something very alien and enchanting. But Antoine was no intellectual. Although he had run away from home, he was a homely guy, spending time with Colette’s parents who adored him. I could identify with that nice guy image, being comfortable with parents of a girl or boyfriend. It’s endearing and disgusting at the same time. I could also feel Antoine’s sweet pain at Colette’s rejection, the romantic melancholy that he expressed physically so well. In sum I was in love with Antoine/Jean Pierre.
Some time later, after a violent argument with a guy about 400 Blows, I actually started to think of the younger Antoine, though not much. 3 films were released in 1959-60 heralding rebirth of cinema- Alain Resnais’ ‘Hiroshima mon Amour’, François Truffaut’s ‘Les Quatre Cents Coups’ (400 Blows) and Jean Luc Goddard’s ‘A bout de soufle’ (Breathless). I had already been haunted by Hiroshima mon amour and delighted by Breathless; 400 Blows came third in my list. In a couple of months I had seen most of Goddard’s pre May’68 films. But even in the midst of Goddard philia, I remained true to Antoine. During 2006 Kolkata Film festival when we came back home to recuperate from a terrible Brazilian film, I made Tua and Ranabir watch Antoine and Colette (and Chris Marker’s masterpiece ‘La Jetee’) while sipping some leftover red wine. Was I trying to vaguely enact my new wave icons? Belmondo was way beyond my league, his cool debonair mannerisms (alluding to another favorite screen icon- Humphrey Bogart) and heady hedonist characters too far away. But Jean Pierre was not wholly out of reach. Later that week we three-Suprovo, Tua, me came back home having seen some boring films at KFF and watched Goddard’s ‘Band a part’; While leaving Suprovo even enacted a scene, shooting a sub-machine gun dhish-dhish-dhish-dhish…. mimicking the sound of bullet shots. Some weeks later, we three walked out of Oly’ pub into luminous park street inebriated, puffing cigarettes and giggling on the day public drunkenness was made chargeable offence. When I look back, those moments seem no less filmic than the ones on screens. But most of the time I was alone with Goddard, Truffaut, Resnais, Marker, Léaud, Anna Karina and Jean Moreau. I was also watching and appreciating Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Tarkovsky et al. The ‘high priestess’ of cold sensuality-Monica Vitti had already drifted out of Antonioni’s depressing films into my reveries; but they were all distant stars on the sky, I couldn’t identify with them.
When I got hold of Goddard’s ‘Weekend’ and ‘La Chinoise’ (The Chinese) forcible land acquisition in Singur was already over, Nandigram was looming over the horizon. In the late winter of 2007, I had forgotten Singur and got over Camus. It was time to be more ‘radical’ in thought, always only in thought. I will skip narrating the outburst of pure joy and admiration that ‘Weekend’ provoked; but a tiny anecdote can be mentioned here: recently, not even a month back when we were stranded in the jammed streets of Gariahat on Saptami noon Iman exclaimed ‘the scene stretching before us is reminiscent of 8 ½ ‘, I instantly retorted ‘I’d rather have burning train of cars as in Weekend!’. Jean Pierre had a couple of scenes in Goddard’s macabre satire, in one of which he is Saint-Just. Dressed in Napoleonic attire he strides along a green field in the French countryside reading aloud from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793, while the lead characters of the film (a bourgeoisie married couple who sleep around and plot to kill each other but manage to work together in their attempts to murder the wife’s father) look on flabbergasted. In the other scene he is seen wooing his girlfriend on a public phone, while the couple attempts to steal his red car. Jean Pierre is no alien to activism, he was there on Cinémathèque Française the day Henri Langlois was sacked, distributing and reading out from pamphlets written by Goddard. Curiously he appears as himself 35 years later in Bernardo Bertolucci’s ode to May’68 ‘The Dreamers’. In the opening minutes we see an old Léaud haranguing a crowd from the steps of the Palais de Chaillot, the scene cuts to actual footage of 35 years younger Léaud. It is an uncanny moment in an otherwise highly romanticized yet endearing film. Of course The Dreamers introduced me among lots of other things to two beautiful actors- Louis Garrel and Eva Green. It may sound ironic but La Chinoise was a more difficult film to digest. I was confused by Goddard’s intention, was he idolizing the naïve revolutionary youth or satirizing them? I still don’t have the answer. Jean Pierre played Guillaume, a Brechtian actor shouting slogans like “A minority with the right ideas is not a minority”, “It is necessary to confront vague ideas with clear images.”, “We must be different from our parents” and “Reactionaries are paper tigers.” The film portrayed a group of youth in their late teens or early twenties cooped up in a bourgeoisie apartment decorated with Mao’s red book and grand revolutionary graffiti, plotting violent revolution. They spend their summer holiday talking politics, making love, lampooning reactionary Soviet communism, American government and all capitalist-imperialist-fascists in sum all ‘ist’ except Maoist. For Mao was the flavor of the season, as Claude Channes marvelous mock pop song ‘Mao, Mao’ from the film captures, the lyrics go:
Vietnam burns and me I spurn Mao Mao
Johnson giggles and me I wiggle Mao Mao
Naplam runs and me I gun Mao Mao
Cities die and me I cry Mao Mao
Whores cry and me I sigh Mao Mao
The rice is mad and me a cad

It’s the little red book that makes it all move
Imperialism lays down the law
Revolution is not a party
The A bomb is a paper tiger
The masses are the real heros
The Yanks kill and me I read Mao Mao
The jester is king and me I sing Mao Mao
The bombs go off and me I scoff Mao Mao
Girls run and I follow Mao Mao
The Russians eat and me I dance Mao Mao
I denounce and renounce Mao Mao
It’s the little red book that makes it all move
The soldiers are the foundation of the army
Real power grows out of the barrel of a gun
All the monsters will be defeated
The enemy does not fall on his own accord.


March 14 2007. Terror unleashed on Nandigram. It is perhaps too early to tell what that date meant for Bengal and India, but for me the day changed quiet a few things. I cancelled a date to attend students and intellectuals protest demonstration, my first. I can’t go into details of those times, of what I saw, heard, felt and thought. It requires more time and thought. But those days were colored in two very different emotions-that of outrage, helplessness and of lightness and euphoria of being finally witness to an event. In demonstration I joined my voice to clichéd and grandiose slogans like ‘hate hate comrade gore tolo barricade’ and ‘lorai lorai lorai chai, lorai kore banchte chai’; there were meetings and web campaigns. I didn’t even realize when I had surreptitiously gotten over all the heady political activism; perhaps mid-term exams put a break to my already fledging enthusiasm. But I deeply suspect that behind most of my activities loomed cinema loomed Goddard, Jean Pierre Léaud and Bertolucci. I was slipping from ‘reality’ to ‘cinema’ and back again. Barricading Dharmatala crossing, shouting slogans at RAF while holding hands of pretty girls, wasn’t I enacting an unscripted film made from assemblage of those I adored? Many youths gathered there spoke proudly of their Naxal genealogy. These children of 70s radical Naxals turned bourgeoisie perhaps felt some connection with those times of our parents; but I, felt primarily the halo of May’68 Paris-a time reconstructed from films, graffiti and posters. Those moments didn’t last long. Grand old pa, Marx wrote that history repeats itself-first as tragedy, then as farce. Later a friend of mine brilliantly likened the demonstrations and meetings to a quick orgasm, momentary, necessary yet wholly self-fulfilling. Above all the time marked periodic return to naïveté, rebelliousness and unapologetic grandiloquence. Jean Pierre was there with me through it all.
‘Masculin Femina’ is a film much closer to my heart. One of its inter-titles read: “This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Jean Pierre plays Paul, a romantic young idealist and wannabe literary star that chases budding pop star Madeleine. Despite markedly different musical tastes and political leanings, the two soon become romantically involved. It’s a tale of 60s French youth and has reality styled interviews with lead characters about love, love-making, art and politics. Perhaps this is the Goddard film I identified most with, the Léaud character I felt nearest to. Though I don’t really know now, I will have to watch the film again to realize my current feelings. In a way Masculin Femina leads on to The Mother and the Whore (released in 1973). Of course they are by different directors with very different cinematic sensibilities and separated by the momentous events of intermediate years, but still there is something similar in them, something that I am not able to pin down right now. Perhaps it has to do with one’s relationship with self and the other. Both films depict relationships between youths of opposite sex and are filled with conversation. But there is something beyond this male-female dichotomy that fascinates me. The relationship with ones own self is brilliantly yet never explicitly sketched. What mask did I wear in front of myself?
In one and half years I had forgotten Jean Pierre, for I wanted to forget a certain parts of my past, for various conflicting reasons. I know the intellectual/pseudo-intellectual games I have occasionally played with myself and others, the long heated debates and conversations, the defensive walls I had erected against love and romantic attachment. I wont call that folly, never, but with time I have come to realize the sweet yet at times dangerous naivity of it all. Beyond all the name droppings, elitism and confusion there was still a dominant wide-eyed-wonder boy inside me. It was not difficult to believe that you could change your life and sorroundings even the world if you tried hard and intelligently enough. Is that time irrevocably lost? Alas! I suspect so. But when I look back, there is less of nostalgia and more of wonder and amusement comparable to that felt for certain Jean Pierre films.
The long haired, bare chested Leaud seating on the bed of his mistress, listening to Edith Piaf record brought back memories of bygone times, of his and my past. Thus trying to write about this film The Mother and the Whore, I have drifted into labyrinths of my memory. It is a detached, calm, un-dramatic yet devastating film; As if its purpose is silent annihilation of all 60s romanticism, idealism and optimism epitomized in films. Perhaps it can also be read as heralding belated demise of French new wave cinema. The mother and whore treads ground where May 68 slogans like ‘Demand the impossible’ sound hollow, for here, now, even the possible turns out to be impossibly lost. I live in such a time. On my recent visit to Kolkata after 6 months, the principle topic of discussion among friends was disillusionment with work and marriage plans. A friend said that he was depressed; the world was falling apart- Nano was leaving from Singur, he was still single, finance markets were crashing, friends were getting married and Saurav Gangully was retiring. He was half joking, but had hit upon some real anxieties. We were getting old and our life blending into comfortable bourgeoisie banality. It is then that I remembered young Antoine, Jean Pierre of 400 Blows.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about him; the type writer stealing, expertly lying adolescent. 14 is a good age to run away from home. According to the hero of a Murakami novel 15 is the perfect age. As my 24th birthday draws near I often wish I could go back 10-11 years. Perhaps I would never have had the guts to run away from home for a long stretch, but I could prolong those hours of swift flight, throwing aside the good boy image I could be a bit ‘bokha’-smoking cigarettes, bunking school, kissing boys and girls. Ah! Wishful thinking, what would Jean Pierre say to that?