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Jul 10, 2009
Huillet-Straub : thank you for the shortcuts. (8/8)
According to the film credits, « Lothringen ! » is « tiré de » rather than « basé sur » -« pulled out » rather than « based upon »- a novel called « Colette Baudoche » : Huillet-Straub pull their film out of the book, like a rabbit out of a hat.
« Colette Baudoche » is the impossible love story of a German civil servant with the title character, a young woman from Metz after the French-speaking city was annexed, like the whole of Lothringen, but not Lorraine, by the German Empire born out of France defeat in the1870 French-Prussian war.
« Colette Baudoche » was written by Maurice Barrès, a patriotic right-wing writer, who would tirelessly campaign until WW1 for the return to France of the territories lost in 1870.
The novel is three hundred pages long, « Lothringen ! » is a twenty one minute movie : a viewer’s digest of a book nowadays about totally forgotten.
As with « Cézanne, dialogue avec Joachim Gasquet » and « Der Tod des Empedocles », Huillet and Straub do not comment the text from which they pull out their film, but only quote from it.
A long excerpt describes the exodus of the inhabitants from Metz just before their city becomes German and plays over a series of shots of what we expect, but are not told, to be present day Lothringen.
As we grow accustomed to the Huillet-Straub way, we now know better than wonder about our exact whereabouts or similar questions of little matter and instead focus our attention on the space on screen : unspectacular and rather dour cities of individual grey houses with tiny gardens, on which the camera slowly pans, from left to right, then right to left, as if looking for traces of the flood and ebb tides of an invasion.
Other shots show a countryside, crossed, like in « Cézanne », by a road or a railway, while, on the soundtrack, during long stretches empty Barrès’s words, only play the sounds of traffic and, again, wind in the trees.
We also see an attractive town, by a river, and another one, equally nameless, which we believe to be Metz, hear music by Haydn -which we are proud to identify on our own as the source for the German national anthem- and, in one brief shot, meet a young woman who wears late 19th -or early 20th- century fashion and utters one single sentence to an off screen character or herself.
She returns at the end of the movie, in an equally brief scene, with a question which, again alone on screen, she shall answer herself : « Can one be excused for marrying a German ? No. »
The film then closes, suggesting that, with its outcome revealed, we need to know nothing more about Maurice Barrès’s novel. We agree.
The titles give us one last bit of information : the young woman is played by Emmanuelle Straub, and we wonder if, though obviously older in « Lothringen ! », i.e. 1994, than Ernesto in « En rachâchant », i.e. 1982, she is older or younger than Olivier Straub in real life.
The relations between the two actors, as well as between them and Jean-Marie Straub, also remain appropriately mysterious.
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