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André Delvaux’s Buried Treasures

This was written in late 2012 and early 2013 for the March-April 2013 issue of Film

Comment, but this magazine’s editor loves to improvise the contents of every issue at the

last moment, and this article has already been edited, scheduled, and then pulled from two

separate issues. Rather than run the risk of this happening a third or even fourth time over

the remainder of this year, and because I believe this web site may have a larger

readership than Film Comment anyway, I’ve decided to make a last-minute editorial

decision of my own and post it here. — J.R.

Part of the strength of André Delvaux (1926-2002) as a filmmaker is that, like the otherwise

very different Samuel Fuller and Jacques Tati, he was already pushing 40 when he directed

his first feature — having by then studied music, German philology, and the law, and also

taught Germanic languages and literature before he became a pioneer in teaching film at

Belgian state schools, where Chantal Akerman and Hitler in Hollywood’s Frédéric Sojcher

(who has written a short book on Delvaux) were among his pupils, meanwhile playing piano

to accompany silent films at the Brussels Cinémathèque.

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In various ways, Delvaux’s cultivated and detached, standoffish protagonists tend to reflect

this multidisciplinary background — the pianist hero of Rendez-vous à Bray, for instance, is

seen at one point accompanying a contemporary screening of Fantômas – although these

portraits, never wholly sympathetic, sometimes register as critiques (or autocritiques) of

these characters’ passive-aggressive traits. (A friend of Cinémathèque director Jacques

Ledoux, Delvaux wound up marrying the latter’s secretary, Denise Debbaut, who went on to

become both a major force in Belgian television and an invisible collaborator on her

husband’s work, reportedly as important to his filmography as Alma Reville was to

Hitchcock’s.)

One reason why Delvaux isn’t better known outside his home turf, where he’s widely

regarded as the greatest and most Belgian of Belgian filmmakers, is our difficulty in

navigating (as well as sometimes distinguishing between) Flemish as well as French

strands in that country’s culture — and part of Delvaux’s distinction comes from his roots in

both. Born in a Flemish-speaking part of Belgium, he entered a French-speaking school at

age six when his family moved. And the day before he died, at an international conference in

Valencia, he spoke ruefully and at length about the potent cultural mix that characterized his

country before it became a federal state where subsidies supporting Belgian filmmaking

had to come from either the French or the Flemish community but never from both — a

move which effectively banished Flemish cinema from most people’s awareness.

Delvaux’s first and still best-known feature, The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short (1965), is

Flemish; his next three — Un soir, un train (1968), Rendez-vous à Bray (1971), and Belle

(1973) — are French, but the first of these freely adapts a story by Johan Daisne, the

Flemish writer whose novel Delvaux had adapted in his previous film, and the conflicts

between Flemish/Dutch and French speakers (including the lead couple, played by Yves

Montand and Anouk Aimée) are central to the plot; similarly, shifts between languages crop

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up frequently in the other shorts and features. Delvaux’s next two films — With Dieric Bouts

(an extraordinary short essay from 1975, juxtaposing painting with film and past with

present, in which Delvaux’s contrapuntal use of sound is particularly remarkable), and

Woman in a Twilight Garden, a 1979 feature — were co-written in Flemish with Ivo Michiels,

and the second of these broached the then-taboo subject of Flemish (and Belgian-Catholic)

collaboration with Germany during World War 2. Delvaux next followed that feature’s French

lead actress, Marie-Christine Barrault, to the U.S., to make a feature-length documentary in

English about her next film, Stardust Memories, entitled To Woody Allen, From Europe with

Love (1980) — the only Delvaux film mentioned above that I haven’t yet seen — followed by

a feature mostly in French with Fanny Ardant and Vittorio Gassman (Benvenuta, 1983), set

mostly in Ghent as well as Milan, and a final feature in French partially set in Flanders

(L’oeuvre en noir aka The Abyss, 1988).

As noted above, we usually confront Belgium’s bilingual culture by ignoring the Flemish part

— as I just did in the previous paragraph, by giving English titles to all the Flemish films —

and sometimes confusing the country with France. But now that an excellent Belgian DVD

label, Cinematek, has brought out most of Delvaux’s major work with English subtitles, in

slim, handsomely designed trilingual editions (go here) — six of his seven fiction features,

and four of his major shorts (with other extras, including part of the speech he gave the day

before he died) on a seventh disc — this situation will hopefully change. The only missing

fiction feature — my second favorite, One Night, a Train, which remains unavailable due to

rights issues — is currently available at http://thepiratebay.se, but its presence on YouTube

tends to fluctuate. (Most recently, I could find only a brief excerpt there.)

***

It’s both tempting and limiting to call Delvaux a Belgian surrealist — or, as many prefer,

“magical realist”. French Surrealism is an actual movement but the other two categories are

at most tendencies. For me, one significant difference between French and Belgian

surrealism is that the former is in rebellion against the bourgeoisie while the latter virtually

equates the bourgeoisie with the cosmos — but this latter position can’t really be identified

in national terms, because Franz Kafka and Sadegh Hadayat, among others, seemed to

share it.

Un soir, un train, the Delvaux film that comes closest to both Kafka and Hadayat, follows a

Flemish linguist (Yves Montand) as he departs on a train to give a lecture in another town —

first quarreling with his longtime French partner (Anouk Aimée), who walks away from him

shortly before he leaves, but later unexpectedly joins him in his compartment, then

mysteriously disappears from it while he dozes off. After the train stops in a desolate

wasteland, things become progressively stranger as he gets off with an older and younger

man and they eventually wander into a mysterious town. I’ve recently discovered that the

“incomprehensible,” untranslated language they hear in this town is in fact Farsi — which

has made me wonder whether certain affinities of the story with Hedayat’s nightmarish

novella The Blind Owl might have prompted this inclusion.

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***

More generally, Delvaux’s seamless transitions from waking life to dreams tend to follow anemotional logic that retroactively seems logical, even inevitable. In the same film, forinstance,the hero’s failure to have a child and his inability to find his father’s gravesite together seemto bear some relation to the younger and older men who turn up as the hero’s companionsin the story’s increasingly terrifying second half. The hero’s schizophrenia in Daisne’s novelThe Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short is established by presenting his story as a flashbackfrom a mental asylum, but the film, far less guided by its first-person narration, introducesthis schizophrenia so incrementally and ambiguously that we’re held in a queasy kind of

abeyance, and can’t even be sure at the end whether or not he’s murdered the formerfemale student he’s so obsessed with; the fact that he barely looks at her during theirclimactic dialogue is only part of what’s so weird about the scene. There are odd hintsabout his condition throughout, from his behavioral tics to Delvaux’s unconventionaledits, but the fact that we can’t distinguish between his mental reality and our objectiveperceptions is a constant.

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There’s a similar tendency in other Delvaux films, Belle especially, to switch from apparent

objectivity to subjectivity and back again without clarifying when or how the transitions

occur — although one of the more remarkable facets of Appointment in Bray is that it

contains no literal fantasy, even in the Fantômas clip, yet virtually all of it feels magical.

To cite Delvaux himself about the two best known Belgian surrealist painters (speaking

to Dan Yakir in 1977), what he found striking in René Magritte was “the way he uses

real elements in an illogical way,” and in his namesake [Paul] Delvaux, “the use of

mystery, or settings I know well, old places with much charm, where people live as

if they weren’t there.” At least two famous Delvaux paintings, Soledad (1955) and

Trains du soir (1957), seem to have inspired a female nude on a railway platform

in Belle, first seen in a dream with the title heroine (who may not even be real), and

then evoked with the hero’s grown daughter in the “real” world, whose upcoming

marriage and his anxiety about it is tied somehow to Belle’s unexplained appearances.

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But Delvaux’s relation to music, informed by his virtually career-long collaboration withcomposer Frédéric Devreese, runs still deeper than his relation to painting. His art is largelycomposed of subtle structuring devices that work by way of emotions more than ideas (oneof his many affinities with Alain Resnais), and sometimes their subversiveness is sosubterranean that it seems to reach us by osmosis. Like Delvaux’s first feature, Belle andBenvenuta are both films about the central character’s sexual obsession, and the fact thatthis is related to incestuous impulses — the hero’s towards his daughter in Belle,Benvenuta’s towards her father — is partly conveyed through visual rhymes in the firstcase, editing patterns in the second. (Moreover, Benvenuta’s passion for an older man andfather figure, played by Vittorio Gassman, who becomes her lover, is juxtaposed with therelation of an older woman [Françoise Fabian], a novelist, recounting Benvenuta’s fictionalstory to a younger man [Mathieu Carrière], a filmmaker, who wants to adapt it into ascreenplay.) If we consider juxtapositions between repressed normality and kinky desires,a possible parallel between Belgium and Canada is suggested, at least if one considersthefilms of David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin. There also seems to be acommon preoccupation with death and decay — ranging, in Delvaux’s case, from therotten fruit at the end of the opening sequence of his first feature to his last film, the8-minute 1001 Films (1989), included on Cinematek’s shorts DVD (Andre Delvaux: Lifeand Work)– dedicated to the Belgian Cinémathèque and largely preoccupiedwith the deterioration of celluloid.

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***

My first encounter with his work was Appointment in Bray, which I now regard as his

masterpiece (it was Delvaux’s favorite as well). It is his most subtle and delicate film, and is

the hardest to describe. Based on a Julian Gracq novella, “Le Roi Cophétua” (an English

translation of which is still in print), it has a dense Gothic atmosphere and even denser

erotic texture that defy any synopsis — perhaps because, as Delvaux has pointed out, it is

structured more in musical terms (specifically as a rondo) than as a narrative. It concerns a

young pianist and musical journalist, Julien (German actor Mathieu Carrière), in 1917 Paris,

receiving a telegram from his composer friend Jacques (Roger Van Hool) — who is in the

air force -– inviting him to his country house in Bray, only a short distance from the

battlefront. On the train, Julien — a noncombatant from neutral Luxembourg whose German

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accent provokes some hostility from the French — begins to recall various prewar

encounters with Jacques and a fellow musician, Odile (Bulle Ogier, in one of her most

delightful and inventive comic performances); there are hints of a potential ménage à trois

that evoke Jules et Jim, albeit with far more sensual (and homoerotic) imagery; Jacques

and Odile are already involved, but Julien seems to shy away from her sexual interest, and

it’s suggested that he’s a virgin. Arriving at Jacques’ roomy mansion, Julien is greeted at by

a mysterious woman (Anna Karina, at her most luminous) who says that Jacques hasn’t yet

arrived, and serves him tea and then dinner. In fact, Jacques never turns up and the woman

eventually takes him to her bed, but we never discover either her relation to Jacques or the

reason for his absence, and in the morning Julien heads back to the train station, where he

lets the train leave without him, then hesitates about his next move.

A perfect and exquisite work filled with question marks that somehow thrives on its multiple

mysteries, Appointment in Bray leaves such a pungent aftertaste that, in spite of my

reverence for Chantal Akerman, if I had to select a single Belgian film to take to a desert

island, I’d pick this one in a flash. Undoubtedly part of what makes it so satisfying is the

sheer musicality and dialectical charge of its eroticism — the way that the story in the

present and its implied ménage à trois seem to resolve the sense of incompletion in the

flashbacks without resolving much of anything in the storyline.

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***

In the early 60s, Delvaux made four documentary miniseries for Belgian TV about Fellini,

Jean Rouch, Polish cinema, and Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, and these

experiences undoubtedly helped to shape his subsequent features. A wonderful 40-minute

episode from the latter, Behind the Screen, is included in Cinematek’s DVD of Delvaux

shorts; in it we get to see Demy directing Gene Kelly and working with Michel Legrand on

the score, plus a dance rehearsal and joint interview with Catherine Deneuve and

Françoise Dorléac. Delvaux met the lead actress of his first feature, Beata Tyszkiewicz

(Andrzej Wajda’s wife), in Poland, and from Rochefort he recruited an executive producer

(Mag Bodard), cinematographer (Ghislain Cloquet — a Belgian who’d also done major

work for Bresson and Resnais), and sound technician (Antoine Bonfanti, who’d also worked

extensively for Resnais and Godard) who would all work with Delvaux a number of times.

With the exception of Belle — an original script written before Bray, but realized afterwards

— all of Delvaux’s features are inspired by the fiction of contemporary authors with whom he

corresponded, freely adapting their work with their approval. Reportedly at least half the plot

of One Night, a Train is Delvaux’s own invention, and in Bray, he converts Gracq’s hero from

a wounded French World War 1 vet into a Luxembourgian civilian who no longer narrates,

and adds lengthy flashbacks that include an invented character (Odile). Like Stroheim

working from McTeague to produce Greed, you could call Delvaux an adaptor more faithful

to the spirit than to the letter of his sources, using his chosen texts as starting points for his

own inventions.

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Reading most of the few accounts of Delvaux’s work written in English — especially those

by the late Tom Milne, probably his most sympathetic critic — one often gets the impression

that all his features after his first were relative disappointments. This is the drift of Tony

Rayns’ recent appreciation of The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short in Sight and Sound,

and even Milne regarded the political turn in Woman in a Twilight Garden, a film about a

Flemish Catholic youth leaving his French wife to collaborate with the Nazis, as a lapse

(although arguably Delvaux was already critiquing Belgian society in The Man Who Had His

Hair Cut Short, One Night, a Train, and Belle, and would also critique its Catholicism in

Benvenuta and The Abyss). These aren’t my biases, even though I’d concede that

Delvaux’s last three available features are weaker than his first four.

The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short may indeed be his most significant contribution toBelgian cinema, and it’s clearly a major advance over his 1962 short School Days,beautifully filmed but relatively slight. But I can’t say I love it the way I cherish Appointmentin Bray, One Night, a Train, Behind the Screen, and With Dieric Bouts [see above still]. (Ihaven’t yet seen either his experimental 1985 feature Babel Opéra ou la répétition de DonJuan or his 1986 short that grew out of it, La Fanfare a cent ans.) The feature that has sofar engaged me the least is Delvaux’s final one, The Abyss — a grim tale about a Flemishdoctor and alchemist in flight and in hiding during the Spanish Inquisition — but even thismight well warrant a closer second look. No two Delvaux films are alike, and within myexperience, they all prove to be far richer than they first appear.

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