Nathalie Granger
1972, directed by Marguerite Duras
Thirty-four minutes into Nathalie Granger, Gérard Depardieu walks into the house trying awkwardly to sell a washing machine. At this point any viewer might breathe a sigh of relief that something at last is happening. Until now, all we’ve seen are narrative fragments. Nathalie is being expelled from school for violent behavior. The household’s Portuguese maid is being deported. A recent windstorm has strewn branches around the back yard. The radio tells of two teenage killers on the loose in the Dreux woods 40 kilometers away.
It’s natural to seek connections in this material, but the fragmentary presentation thwarts any effort to form a story. The sequence is sometimes linear (clearing the table before washing dishes), sometimes out of order (cutting back and forth to a meeting with Nathalie’s principal), but in any case we’re given minimal context. How are the two women and the two girls related? Who is the guest seen fleetingly right after the titles? Why does Jeanne Moreau tell a caller that there’s no phone in the house? Why is the film named for a child who doesn’t speak a single line? Some viewers will get frustrated, others will look on with curiosity, but when Depardieu walks in, at long last the film starts to come into focus. As strange as his visit may be, at least something definable is happening.
Depardieu’s sales pitch is the film’s centerpiece. The passages of time before he knocks and after he first leaves are nearly equal. Not only does the scene bring narrative focus, it also gives us a place to put our emotions. We might feel irritated or outraged that a salesman would enter a house unbidden, but we can still sympathize with the man’s struggle to appear professional. The way the two women unnerve him can be funny and suspenseful at the same time, and the scene ends with a joke as it turns out they already own a Vedetta Tambour 008 washing machine.
After that central scene, things start to make a little more sense. Jeanne Moreau goes out to fetch the girls, and Nathalie plays with cats and a baby carriage in the back yard. Laurence helps to skim algae from the pool, and the children have a piano lesson. The radio announces the teenagers’ arrest in Dreux. All of this may not add up to a story, but at least we can follow it. After the piano lesson Depardieu returns to confide his failures to the women, who listen sympathetically. Again it’s strange behavior all around, but it’s consistent with what we’ve already seen from everyone.
As the salesman finishes talking, the women drift off. Now the film becomes as enigmatic as it was before. Isabelle Granger (Lucia Bosè) wanders like a phantom through the garden. The piano continues playing, although Moreau and the two girls are resting. Depardieu wanders freely through the house then follows Isabelle outside. Suddenly, as if frightened, he quickens his step, hurries out of the house, and drives away. At the final moment a man comes walking a dog. Like Depardieu the dog seems to sense something uncanny, and it refuses to approach the house.
If Depardieu’s character brings relief, one reason must be that he’s such a total surrogate for the viewer. Like us he enters the house uninvited, unsure of himself, unfamiliar with the ways of its inhabitants. He always thinks of himself, like people who seek to identify with a character instead of trying to understand someone different. He wants the two women to buy his product, the way a typical viewer puts demands on a film. The women, in turn, are largely mute, as a film will be to anyone who watches with an agenda. They welcome him in, but they challenge him, telling him he’s not who he thinks he is. He gets flustered, the way so many viewers do when a film doesn’t cater to them. It turns out the women already have what he wants them to have, which he might have discovered sooner if he had come to listen instead of unloading his feelings.
Depardieu returns later, tired and ready to give up, like an audience mystified by a film. He shares his life story, like a viewer whose thoughts always stray back to personal experience. His self-absorption prevents him from seeing or receiving the sympathy offered to him. Eventually the women leave him alone. He explores the house without grasping what’s around him. He tries to follow one of the women, but he quickly concludes that he’s out of place, and he runs away. His reaction is the common response of viewers who find a movie hard to relate to. He might as well have walked into a haunted house or a vampire’s castle, and the dog’s intuition in the final seconds is a joking confirmation of the spookiness Depardieu is fleeing, which after all is simply a metaphor for the unfamiliarity that deters people from connecting with a film.
By holding a mirror up to the viewer in this bumbling salesman, Nathalie Granger aims to correct our viewing habits in the most gentle, good-natured way possible. Each of Depardieu’s appearances ends with a punchline, but a light sense of humor sustains every scene he’s in. The film is a palate cleanser for audiences conditioned into bad viewing habits, teaching us to pay attention to what’s given to us, rather than what we want to see. Again and again the film comes back to the idea of cleaning. The two women spend almost two minutes clearing and wiping a table. Jeanne Moreau gathers sticks from the garden, and she and Laurence clean algae out of the pool. Depardieu says he’ll return to his career as a laundry assistant after failing to sell washing machines. It’s significant that the washing machine is never shown. All the cleaning we see is done by hand. Insofar as the film sets out to “clean up” our viewing habits, it will not do so mechanically. The task can only be accomplished with a human touch, carefully and piece by piece, the way the women clean the table. Nothing is forced or foisted on the audience against its will.
The idea of Nathalie Granger is to set our vision aright, so that we might wander through the house – or through the movie – without running away. Movies typically direct people’s vision through dramatics, and the opening continually hints at the dramatic: killers in the forest, a child with a violent streak, conflicts with school and civic authorities, the aftereffects of a storm, packing for a trip, a showdown with a trespassing salesman. All of these, like the vague hints of the supernatural, are teasers. The film doesn’t go very far in any of those directions. Instead of indulging viewers with dramatics it weaves a web of connections that may seem meaningless, but that summons us to a more intense level of vision.
All of the threads and incidents in Nathalie Granger are interconnected through echoes, rhymes, and symmetries. Nathalie’s reported violence mirrors the deadly violence of the killers on the news. Her expulsion from school parallels the maid’s expulsion from France, and we hear that Nathalie told her teacher she wanted to be a Portuguese maid. Jeanne Moreau’s nonsequitur on the telephone foreshadows the absurdity of telling Depardieu “You’re not a salesman,” and in both cases the listener is thrown off balance. The salesman’s embarrassment before his hosts mirrors their embarrassment before the schoolmistress. Gathering sticks from the yard is like gathering algae from the pool. One woman makes a bonfire outside, the other burns sheet music in the fireplace. The phantom notes on the piano toward the end have a precedent in Nathalie’s piano lesson when she’s accompanied by non-diegetic notes from an invisible player. Fragments of melody reflect the fragmented narrative. The cat’s footstep on a piano key produces the same note that begins the children’s exercise. A dog at the end mirrors Depardieu’s fear.
These hidden rhymes may seem like an empty formalist gesture, just as anyone may take the movie itself as a meaningless piece of artiness. It’s surely fair to say that no particular meaning resides in these echoes. If they were placed mechanically then we could rightfully dismiss them, but on the contrary, we can sense the handiwork in them. They’re placed with a kind of artistry, weaving an almost inexhaustible fabric of coincidences that should evoke wonder. These connections substitute for, and more than make up for, the narrative connections missing from the fragmentary film. Even their intentionality is hidden; we can only guess whether any one of the links is meant to be there. If we follow these coincidences, however, it’s not the form of the moving picture that we’ll end up marveling at, but rather the ordinary life in and around the house, which we can now see with total freshness, appreciating its newfound unfamiliarity. We don’t need to take the hints of the supernatural literally to view the place as a haunted house.
CONNECTIONS:
L’avventura – Rhymes or echoes serve as a pathway to seeing the material more closely
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant – Character who’s a surrogate for the viewer in multiple ways
India Song – Nameless character who enters the house uninvited and adds narrative weight to the fragmentary story
Baxter, Véra Baxter – Nameless character who enters the house uninvited and adds narrative weight to the fragmentary story