French film review: Le septième ciel
by Charles Egert
The title of Benoit Jaquot's `Le Septième Ciel' refers to the ultimate degree of happiness. In this case it is synonymous with having an orgasm. Think of the song lyrics which go something like `I'm in heaven'. The film is a comedy. In the tradition of comedies an obstacle of some sort usually stands in the way obscuring the unerring happiness of a couple. This may just lead to temporary misunderstanding although it can even sometimes threaten the stability of the couple. One of the member's of the couple suffers, or each takes a turn at it. The problem in this film is that we never really are allowed to believe for a second that the couple's bourgeois Parisian existence really is threatened, so the acuteness of the comedy is lessened.
For a while in his films Benoit Jacquot has been concentrating via very original stories on telling us about young women's lives. He is quite good at creating novel situations for characters but less good at narrating a significant episode of their lives effectively. In La Désenchantée, for instance, a very young woman has been seriously propositioned by a much older man who is in a position to support her and all the members of her family who are fatherless and soon to be motherless as well. In the crucial scene where we see the older man coming towards her dressed only in his robe she hurriedly utters her acceptance, then faints.
In his new film Jacquot has gotten a good performance from the two leading actors as well as three or four supporting roles. The wife is a public `huissier' (sort of notary) who works in partnership with her mother, having lost her father at an early age. This turns out to be key since as the film opens she is going through a period of crisis. At twenty-nine Mathilde is exactly the same age as her father at his death. The scenes where her symptoms are enacted take place in a public space, which unfortunately is filmed less convincingly than it should be. There is in these artificially filmed scenes no whiff of the real life of Paris streets. I am recalling what Rohmer at least used to do in some scenes where we could see traffic circulating on foot or by car in the background as a vital piece of the story unfolded usually thanks to a perfectly natural dialog. The spectator was allowed to be there, to feel as well as hear the hum of traffic. We could look away, allowing ourselves to be distracted, but the characters had something usually revealing, even vitally important, to say.
The couple here is in no way under a threat, it's rather like an heirloom has been displaced in the meticulous accounting of Mathilde's professional life. She decides to look for it. The wife's lack of feelings in bed is not totally debilitating to the life of the couple, as one graphic bedroom scene makes clear. They have a cute child of seven and are more than moderately successful by Parisian standards, another major difference from Rohmer's films. If we think of the treatment Rohmer made of a party scene in `La nuit de la pleine lune' we can see some telling differences of camerawork. Rohmer's party was an occasion for the actors bodies to have a total value like in dance whereas during the party sequence in Jacquot's film everything is darkish with an occasional bright flash of clear light. This is perhaps meant to highlight the heroine's brief first encounter with a hypnotist who is going to affect her destiny. The camera focuses on his face and the sideways glances he gives her. The camerawork is one thing, however, which has made Jacquot an interesting filmmaker for me. In addition Sandrine Kiberlain does a good job as a woman who is uncomfortable with her sexuality if not exactly with her sexual identity. After several visits to the hypnotist's her arms dance and sway and we notice her whole body moving more sensually.
But the details in the story are afterthoughts which seem to come later, to affix themselves onto a plot that is too spare and too classical. Nico's marital infidelity is treated in such a way that we don't understand if this is something new which is done out of desperate vanity or on the contrary an illustration of the two-bit psychological wisdom exchanged in a cafe in the previous scene. It all boils down to the dictum that love is not sex, so sex is not the plus ultra, not the real betrayal of the love within the unit formed by the couple and including their son. The problem is that we never doubted it for an instant. So when Mathilde smirks reproachfully at her husband `Sex is all you think about', while sending him on one wild goose chase after another, the suspense and the comic relief consequently are in short supply. Also the causes of Mathilde's problem in bed appear and disappear, almost without anguish. Vincent Lindon's Nico is also less convincing. The film ends on a fadeout while Nico begins to learn to overcome his guilt over what we used to call handicapped sex and which beforehand constituted the sexual status quo within his couple.
And then the images don't always inform as much as they should. For instance there is ring in the story that is used as a type of potlatch, which symbolizes an obligation to the gift-giver by the receiver of the gift. We are obviously supposed to guess according to this gage how far towards sexual infidelity with her hypnotist Mathilde has really gone. This is finely measured, and an acute discernment on Jacquot's part becuse it, the ring, is an hierloom if not the hierloom, but I am not sure I understood an image meant to solve the enigma or could even formulate my opinion on the question. On the other hand there is a scene at home where 29-year old Mathilde is in her bath and which wonderfully illustrates the animal attraction she exercises on her family, both father and son. Christian Vincent in his film `La Séparation' was, however, more successful in my opinion in creating an intimate sense of what it is like to live in a real Parisian apartment, with pastels colors and occasional half-done projects cluttering up desks and other places. Here everything is neat and clean, even the kitchen at dinnertime, the walls are white, the prints and wall hangings uninformative as far as I could tell. Is this all supposed to show Mathilde's inner state before the film? If that is so why the warm steamy intimacy of the bath scene, and why is Nico, her husband, so irreversibly stuck on her? The only answer is that his doctor's ego is flattered by the fact that his wife is mentally ill. Her behavior in bed gives him an excuse to cheat on her with nurses.
Finally, this film is a comedy so it is meant to have a moral the audience will find delightful. At the beginning of the film we have the three-quarter image of Mathilde wandering the street in a daze. Her body is out of focus and, as the camera focuses better, the resolution begins rather by the people in the background, passers-by who seem to be moving one step ahead of her. At the end she catches up with everybody else and, even though she surpasses her husband, she has enough patient humor to wait until he is able to appreciate her new sensuality. And once again the light are dimmed so the audience can appreciate the lesson too.
Ch. EGERT e-mail: parisfash.@wanadoo.fr
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