by Sarah Casey Benyahia
In Pour une Femme (Diane Kurys, 2013), a film which explores how the France of the 1980s is shaped by the political and cultural changes of the post-war period, cinema is explored as an intersection of cultural memory, an official version of the past and the product of subjective desires, the latter which have been shaped by watching and remembering films. In making the central character, Anne, a screenwriter and director, memories become akin to the creative process. While Anne is ostensibly writing a screenplay about the past of her mother’s life before she was born, her sister points out that ‘’it’s a life you’re making up’’; the process of memory is always partial and creative. In this way, Pour une Femme explores how film making and viewing is part of a constant creation and recreation of the past – which is ultimately unverifiable.
Pour une Femme belongs to a category of cinema I have identified as the temporal gateway film (Casey Benyahia, 2019). This refers to a grouping of films from different countries and cultures which share characteristics in the way in which they represent the past and the process of remembering. The gateway in this context is their focus on temporality, a subject which transcends a range of borders, including the national, in contrast to the requirement of national knowledge about the specifics of a time and place. These films can appeal to a wide audience through their stylistic mix of conventions of global art cinema along with the familiar structures of narrative and genre established by Hollywood’s international dominance. As Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (2010) argue, global art cinema is an ‘’elastically hybrid culture’’, characterised by the intersection of ‘’popular genres, national cinemas, revolutionary film, and the avant-garde’’ (Galt & Schoonover, 2010, p. 3). Temporal gateway films including Ararat (2002), The Dust of Time (2008), The Headless Woman (2008) Even the Rain (2010), Incendies (2010) and Sarah’s Key (2010) exemplify this intersectional style in their mix of popular forms with more experimental techniques.
There are a series of narrative and formal motifs which define the temporal gateway film and its exploration of the past. The narrative focus is on a central character who is searching for something, to establish a truth about a past event which concerns them personally, but which is also linked to the wider political and historical context. In this way the films – and this is foregrounded in Pour une Femme – focus on an investigation of identity and how it can be constructed by historical events. The motivation for this inquiry is provided by a traumatic event in the present such as a death, illness or mental breakdown. The quest is usually a familial one, such as the search for an unknown parent or sibling, but sometimes a romantic one, and this structure encompasses the trope of family secrets and hidden relationships. These ideas are then connected to wider concepts of concealed, forgotten or misunderstood political histories. The function of the central character is to explore the sensation of temporality for the viewer, to represent how the present is continually shaped and revised by the past.
Pour une Femme, produced in 2013, takes place in two periods of French history: the film’s diegetic present of the 1980s, which follows Anne, a filmmaker who is writing a screenplay about her parents lives in the post war period before she was born. The film’s themes of memory and the uncovering of personal and historical secrets are foregrounded through the reliance on flashbacks to the post war period which provides the film within a film structure. The form of a film within a film, a type of mise-en-abyme (a motif which reflectively references its own form, like a mirror), draws attention to the many versions of the past which may exist. The post war scenes follow the lives of Anne’s parents, Michel and Lena, Russian Jews who survived the Nazi concentration camps, and their young daughter, Tania, Anne’s older sister. Soon after the end of the war the couple receive their French citizenship and settle in Lyon, living a stable life until the unexpected appearance of Michel’s brother, Jean. The narrative focus of this period is the relationship between husband and wife and the unsettling effect which the mysterious arrival of the brother has on the family. This relationship exists in narrative parallel with the political post-war context of France, particularly focusing on its past as an occupied country and the role of the Left in shaping its future identity. The motivation for Anne to write the film of her parents’ relationship is partly the death by suicide of her mother in the 1980s and Michel’s failing health. Her feeling of lacking knowledge about the past in personal and historical terms is crystallised by her discovery in her mother’s belongings of a post-war photograph of an unknown man standing with her mother and sister in a family pose, taking the place of Tania’s father Michel. The screenplay about the past becomes an investigation into the identity of the unknown man and an attempt to establish Anne’s own paternity.
From the beginning, the film’s present, or frame, narrative foregrounds the unreliability of memory and the arguments over what has happened in the past. Kurys does this through a range of formal techniques linked to an individual’s movement in time, each of which refers to the paradox of the need to uncover the past and the impossibility of doing so with any certainty. This idea is figured through artistic practises which focus on the relationship between intentionality and the uncontrollable nature of memories of the past. In this way the film explores the role of the artist – here a writer and director – in finding new strategies for film to represent the past. Anne’s screenplay is an imagining of the past, which, the film suggests, is all that memory can be. This destabilising of certainty is repeated throughout the film and is particularly evident in suggesting the impossibility of defining categories such as fact and fiction or truth and lies. The film within a film form found in several temporal gateway films imagines memory as a form of artistic imagination, it also suggests that what we remember can be shaped by memories of films; memories which overlap and become indistinct. The film within a film form encourages the replaying of iconic narratives from classic films and the role of cinema in the construction of cultural memory is central to Pour une Femme. The ambiguous status of the scenes in the past as memory (of someone not yet born), or as scenes from a film Anne is writing, make a direct connection between film as memory and memory as film. The film within a film is shaped by Anne’s romantic subjectivity and by her position as a film maker and film fan so that her own desires, historical fact and film narratives (already the product of someone else’s imagination) are infinitely interlinked, creating a structural mise-en-abyme. The inability to distinguish between these different forms of storytelling is emphasised in the shifts to the past which happen without noticeable transitions.
Pour une Femme uses intertextual references to specific films within the construction of the past tense of the film, suggesting the way representations of the past are filtered through the archive of film history. The key narrative development in the past, the reappearance of Michel’s brother, refers to an iconic narrative told in The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), remade in the US as Sommersby (1992), but itself a retelling of a tale – possibly true – from the sixteenth century. The reference to the pre-existing narrative focuses on uncertainty and enigma of identity, the impossibility of knowing the truth about the past. The chronological ending of Pour une Femme’s flashback, where Lena must choose between the amoral resistance fighter Jean, and Michel, the father of her first child, plays out as a homage to another iconic moment in film history: the ending of Casablanca (1942). Here Lena’s choice takes place symbolically at a crossroads with a bus – rather than a plane - waiting to take one of the men away. Overarching the specific reference to film history, is the reworking of Kurys’s own film archive in which Pour une Femme can be read as a remake of her earlier films, specifically Entre Nous (1983).
Pour une Femme is both the name of the film in 2013 and the film which Anne is writing within it. The film makes repeated reference to the process of writing, including objects of inspiration; a photograph, a ring, an empty perfume bottle (which function like mémoire involontaire; the brand of the empty perfume bottle is the inspiration for the film’s title), research, writing, revising and imagining. The two sisters – Anne and Tania – argue about events of the past in relation to their parents, the motivation for which is the sorting through a variety of treasured objects which their mother kept throughout her life. These are objects which belong to a past history but which now have no meaning in themselves having been removed from their context, instead they become props of mise-en-scene for Anne to write into meaning. Through Anne’s voice-over at this stage, her script is explained as the ‘’desire to bring them [her parents] alive again’’; that Jean had been reported as one of the dead of the concentration camps is another example of the desire to change the past, to bring the dead back to life, suggesting a reading of Pour une Femme as a post-memory film. This theme works on several levels. It foregrounds the notion that any film about the past is a subjective view, an unreliable representation, and it emphasises the ability of the present to act on the past to alter its chronology and meaning; at this stage Anne’s father is still alive. The repeated analogy of filmmaking with ‘making up’ the past - with the reference to different layers of storytelling each further removed from the historical event - is a clear reminder of the status of cinema as both a form of myth making around a nation’s past and its inherent unreliability. Here Pour une femme foregrounds the concept of cinema as memory, the way in which the constructed image can replace or affect the interpretation of the real. The role of the recorded image in myth-making is apparent from the credits onwards. Here photographs from Diane Kurys’s own family life, pictures of her with her sister and parents, with her own child and partner are interspersed in a collage with stills from Kurys’s previous films, where actors such as Isabelle Huppert and Miou Miou are stand-ins for the real people. This layering of the real and the performance of actors, the images of historical moments with recreations from cinema, introduce from the very start the idea of a film and filmmaker interested in the vicissitudes of memory and the role of storytelling and technology in transmitting those memories. Through this context, the importance of the photograph of Lena and Jean and its enigma of identity is signalled as an impossible search; there is no answer to questions about the past. It is this understanding of the nature of identity, the impossibility of answering the question who am I? which makes the past, with its motifs of post-war transition, shifting national borders, claiming of different citizenships as well as romantic choices, a reflection of the present of constant change.
Pour une Femme remakes and reimagines characters from film history, so that memories of films, family and history become intermingled with the creative process. It examines the way in which cinema in the twentieth century has influenced the construction of memories, creating another layer of remembrance to memory, making it impossible to return to the original historical subject. In attempting and failing to write herself into being at the end of the past diegesis, Anne – and the film - acknowledges the impossibility of certainty about the past.
References
Casey Benyahia, S., 2019. Lives in Limbo: Memory, History and Entrapment in the Temporal Gateway Film. Available at: http://repository.essex.ac.uk/24449/
Galt, R. & Schoonover, K., 2010. Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema. In: R. Galt & K. Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3-27.
Hirsch, M., 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocust. 1st ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Radstone, S., 2010. Cinema and Memory. In: S. Radstone, ed. Memory: History, Theories and Debates. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 325-42.
Turim, M., 1989. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. 1st ed. London: Routledge.