When we're all orphans: L'enfance nue on DVD

Maurice Pialat was already in his 40s when he embarked on his feature debut, but I like very much that he made it about what we used to call a “problem child.” I’ve read that Pialat was something of an overgrown problem child himself, tempestuous, demanding, and difficult to work with. L’enfance nue (1968) shows 10-year-old François (Michel Terrazon) being dismissed from one provincial foster home and shuttled off to another in the first 20 minutes, by which point we’ve already seen him throw a cat down several flights of stairs. Pialat was not himself a foster child, yet he repeatedly assured anyone who asked that L’enfance nue was a kind of self-portrait. Collaborators describe Pialat as having developed abandonment issues very early in life, feelings he could plausibly project upon François. But I wonder if when Pialat said L’enfance nue was about him he was actually referring to his adult self. This is a story about a shit disturber. It is also, incidentally, a truly remarkable, unnerving, yet also playful and affectionate movie by a filmmaker whose work most of us should probably know much more of.

I only really became aware of Pialat, who died in 2003, after being prompted to review Loulou (80) for Edmonton's Metro Cinema’s screening a few years back. It’s haunted me since, as a defiantly unresolved portrait of working class routines and erotic self-actualization, as a performance from Gerard Depardieu the likes I’ve which I’ve never seen, and as the closest thing in French cinema to a Bruce Springsteen song. I’d seen Pialat’s Van Gogh (91) when I was very young and recall being impressed by how little it catered to my notions of the eponymous artist’s persona or what bio-pics are supposed to do, by how immersed I became in its portrait of the milieux Van Gogh quietly slipped through. Unfortunately Pialat’s name vanished from my thoughts afterwards, probably because like so many of the most gifted post-New Wave filmmakers—Jean Eustache and Philippe Garrel spring to mind as members of this group I’ve belatedly come to cherish—he failed to gain any significant foothold in North American movie culture. But we’re coming around. Criterion’s already released Pialat’s À nos amours (83) and is now offering L’enfance nue for our consideration, accompanied by some excellent supplements, like critic Kent Jones’ video essay and Pialat’s early short L’amour existe (60), which inspired François Truffaut to help produce L’enfance nue. (Pialat based François on a real kid with the same name, so apparently it's only a coincidence that the character shares the same Christian name as Truffaut, who less than a decade earlier made his debut with one of world cinema's defining movies about difficult childhood.)

L’enfance nue might have been a documentary, and the residue of this early conception remains in its opening images of a demonstration, but more pointedly in the camera’s dexterous responsiveness to the action. Most of the players are non-professionals, and several, most memorably Marie-Louise and Rene Thierry, who become François’ sexagenarian second foster parents, were essentially asked to tell their own stories within the boundaries of Pialat’s loose, often elliptical narrative framework. The approach imbues L’enfance nue with an unsentimental yet touching sense of the real. Terrazon however was not an actual foster child and this was probably a wise choice, given that it resulted in a central performance that never for one second comments on itself. We see François do both terrible and tender things and it’s more compelling that he barely seems cognizant of the difference. We see his face when others aren’t watching and he’s clearly listening to what’s going on around him, yet he doesn’t seem to listen with set expectations as to what response his actions will incite. We see François make discoveries—such as the Polaroid camera or Marie Marc’s wonderful, largely bedridden Nana’s mischievous sense of humour—and in these moments our internal scorecard of François’ positive or negative traits falls away while we observe him experience a moment fully. He’ll eventually experience a wedding, a death, and serious punishment for his deeds, and through it all Pialat’s knack for letting a scene breathe before abruptly moving on the next one invites us to simply take it in as we go. It’s only after the final fade-to-black that we can begin to comprehend just how much we’ve been through.

On time, trousers, transcendentalism, and passing once more through The Doors of Perception

Books made me take drugs. Okay, music, general rebelliousness and very likely some fundamental predisposition toward shoe gazing and altered states of consciousness were also significant factors –but books were enormously persuasive, with one in particular holding a prominent position of influence.

Written in 1954, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception is commonly attributed with having turned a lot of middle-aged intellectuals onto psychedelics back in the day, but I’m surely far from alone in crediting Huxley with prompting my own first tentative frisks of various substances in my late teens. While reckless abandon had its allure (see Keith Richards), I felt more aligned with Huxley’s air of calm immersion, his heightened curiosity regarding what lies beneath life’s mundane surface. I wanted to penetrate the fabric of perception, and Huxley seemed a trustworthy guide.

Already 50 and established as a writer of novels and essays (in which drugs played a frequent role), Huxley’s introduction to mescaline was at once soberly approached (the dosage was administered by an “investigator” who monitored Huxley for the trip’s duration) and unrestrained in response. Huxley’s interest in psychedelics grew from his general fascination with mystic experience, yet his considerable intellect and skepticism kept his investigation well on the safe side of flakiness. I hadn’t read The Doors of Perception since my teens, but on returning to it, I suffered none of the disappointment that sometimes accompanies a revisit to one’s objects of youthful enthusiasm. On the contrary, I think I relate to it more deeply now.

“I had expected,” Huxley writes, “visions of many-coloured geometries, of animated architectures ... symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation.” What Huxley actually experienced connected more closely with the texture of immediate sensations. He sees “a slow dance of golden lights” and “sumptuous red surfaces,” but the world Huxley enters via mescaline isn’t the world of alien visions, rather, “it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open.”

Huxley does indeed awaken to Blake’s “infinity in a grain of sand,” but he does so through a dialogue with the tactile world surrounding him, through observing the radiant, complex beauty of flowers (and that marvelous awareness of plants breathing), through books and printed images, through sudden awe over the sublime nature of drapery, which he describes as “living hieroglyphs,” and “a major theme of all plastic arts.” Huxley looks at his trousers, at prints of Van Gogh’s chairs, at the undulating textiles in Antoine Watteau’s paintings: “Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles ... ” Though he begins The Doors clarifying the existential dilemma of individuality and irreversible separateness between people, Huxley, who claims to have never been a very visual person, suddenly seizes upon a way of accessing a great painter’s casual method of visualizing life’s intractable uncertainty through the ubiquitous unruliness of surfaces. It’s exhilarating to read his discovery, to witness how Huxley’s ode to drapery ascends from what first appears to be a druggy reverie over minutiae to something of tremendous insight.

Yet while Huxley spontaneously connects with the imaginative inroads of others while on mescaline, he also confesses to having a lack of interest in actual people while tripping:  “This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, for the necessary concerns involving persons.” I’m certainly sympathetic to Huxley’s essentially private rapture—the discoveries he’s making seem to luxuriate fruitfully when unencumbered by the rules of conventional human interaction—but it should be noted that not only was it his first time using mescaline, he was also the only one using it. (I have no doubt he would’ve had a radically different response had he, for example, had sex while high—there are few experiences as potentially rich with a sense of shared wonder.) For all Huxley’s introspection, it nonetheless moves me that it’s when he eventually hears vocal music that he reconnects with other people. Voices, he exclaims, became “a kind of bridge back to the human world.” He beautifully evokes that sometimes-difficult passage from interior to interactive states by falling in love all over again with music.

Huxley gets an incredible amount of mileage from this single venture into psychedelics, and in his posterior analysis, taking into account the dangers of drugs, he’s able to convey a larger idea of how we are always going to be drawn toward methods of transcendence, though some methods seem more productive than others. And in conclusion, Huxley thoughtfully imagines the ways in which agents like mescaline (or peyote or psilocybin) can grace one’s overall sense of awareness: the user “will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.” 

Postscript: On a related note, about an hour after posting this piece I read in the newspaper that Albert Hoffman, inventor, not to mention the first human guinea pig, of LSD, has died at his home in Burg im Leimental. He was 102.