A French provincial school boy lopes across the playground toward a taller, older boy leaning against a stone wall, reading a book; the smaller boy gut punches that reader. A narrator speaks: “For no reason, without knowing why, I hit him. I looked in his eyes—he wasn’t even angry.” A reflection that’s a deflection. The dreamlike scene—early on in Jean Eustache’s coming of age film, Mes petites amoureuses (1974)—amounts to prophecy. Eustache’s anti-hero Daniel is fated for a similar, albeit metaphorical, gut-punch. He will soon be taken out of school and put to work by his mom and her new man—a stolid Spanish emigrant farm-worker who has no use for his stepson’s verbal fluency. The scene anticipates both the blow that’s coming and anger the hard-done-by boy will feel toward bourgeois heads who have no clue how lucky they are.
Eustache—best known for The Mother and The Whore (now widely regarded as one of the essential French movies)—grew up among working class country people. He never disclosed much about his past but he once allowed his non-documentary films were “as autobiographical as fiction can be.” In Mes petites amoureuses there’s an encounter which hints he never gave up on the idea he might find his way to cities of light (and the world of Cahiers cineastes). One young man in the working class crowd Daniel falls in with is still going to high school and he confirms it might be possible to study for University admissions exams on one’s own without benefit of formal schooling. Hope breathes for a second, but Mes petites amoureues isn’t about self-reliant climbers and/or ladders of mobility. While the child actor who plays Eustache’s youthful alter-ego is no less his own (French!) person than, say, Jean Pierre Leaud in The 400 Blows, the director is out to place him within the collective nexus of working class culture rather than focusing on the making of an artist—or equating that making with ruling ideas about “individuation.” Not that Eustache portrays his working class hero as being ready to submit easily to collectives (though his protests against his unscholastic parents are pretty muted as that early scene seems to forecast). The soon-to-be ex-school-boy is at once a comradely sort and a precocious ring-leader when he’s with his homies.
His name, Daniel, signifies. Like the biblical hero, he’s forced into a kind of exile. This Daniel is sent from his village—where he was at ease with his neighborhood surround and maternal grandmother—to a city where he enters a man’s world of trench warfare between classes and sexes. The movie ends with his summer vacation trip back to his original home. And that return underscores Eustache’s own refusal to give into siren songs of deracination. Along with fiction films, he made deep documentaries about the culture of working class French provincials. (A reviewer at Senses of Cinema has made a case for those films. And here’s another critic’s compaction of Eustache’s documentary Cochon:
Eustache, shooting in concert with Jean-Michel Barjol, follows a day of labor on a farm in the rugged Cévennes range in the Massif Central. A fatted hog is led into a courtyard by five farmers, smoking cigarette nubs and speaking slushy, vernacular French. Under a sparse snowfall, the bound victim’s throat is punctured. Gouts of blood, steaming in the cold, glug into a waiting bucket. At first pierced by shrill dread, the film settles into archiving of detail. The body is ceremoniously bathed and shaved, then decapitated, vivisected, emptied, the intestines washed out for sausage casing. The result is neither a PETA tract nor Franju’s abattoir philosophy, but an extraordinarily concentrated study in artisanal process.[1])
Eustache wasn’t sentimental. He didn’t disdain Vielle France but he was also a natural-born taboo-breaker. At the top of Mes petites amoureuses we see him getting his first hard-on bumping up against a girl in front of him—who’s aware something’s up—at his First Communion.
Daniel feels like a performer. Entranced by a magician at a traveling circus, he comes up with his own magic act, which he puts on for his buddies. He’s not above showing off like a little professor to kids who are at the mercy of his way with words: “Guess what we learned today…You breathe with your mouth and your nose and your asshole…” The demotic didact digs out his textbook to sway a doubter: “‘Two types of respiration: pulmonary and cutaneous.’…That means with the anus—your asshole.” Then they’re off—three on a bike—to another major locus of learning—the flicks, which teach you “how to live” (per the protagonist in The Mother and the Whore).
Mes petites amoureueses has a daring set piece at the movies. Once Daniel’s moved to the city, he finds the most anonymous of his little loves during a showing of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. They make out before he suddenly leaves her in the dark, without ever seeing her face. The interplay between their foreplay in the theater and scenes of Ava Gardner’s terminal femme fatale on the screen is, as critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has written, “one of the most memorably erotic film references in cinema.” It rhymes with other kisses in the film. Daniel’s mother who keeps her eyes clamped shut—and looks like death—as she kisses her Spanish lover and a “loose” woman in an alley who keeps her eyes open, gazing at Daniel as he watches her embrace that night’s guy. But the movie’s penultimate kiss comes when Daniel has his first true date. On a trip to a country dance with his city crew, Daniel and an older Romeo slip away from their friends (and competitors) to pick up two sisters. His first kiss with the younger sister, Francois (naturellement!?), is filmed (pace Rosenbaum) “in a slow, semi-circular Vertigo-like pan around the young couple and accompanied by the chatter of country insects.” Even the breeze, which lifts Francois’s locks, seems tuned to their caresses. Sexier than any porn scene (though it wouldn’t require an R-rating), their kiss is transporting. And it leads to another revelation. We learn Daniel’s name for the first time when he introduces himself, post-smooch, to his new amoureuse. He’s all there for us finally, defined—as ever—by his relations with other souls. This is art that beats privatizing notions of “the self” even as it revels in intimacies. Daniel is a wild child and a social being.
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Someone uploaded “Mes petites amoureuses” to youtube here a few years back. It’s been viewed over three million times…
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1 Nick Pinkerton: http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/his-little-loves-20080612