Mothers, Sisters and Daughters in Contemporary French Cinema

Girls on Film: Mothers, Sisters and Daughters in Contemporary French Cinema. Fiona Handyside My foot slipped into the glass slipper. I was Mrs Elvis Presley. (Priscilla Presley) The above quotation, from a 1988 TV movie, opens Hilary Radner’s discussion of contemporary Hollywood film and its continuing reliance on the ‘Cinderella’ or marriage plot. Although given the changing dynamics of heterosexual relations (especially the entry of women into the workforce and later marriage, giving rise to the single but sexually active ‘Cosmo girl’ of popular culture), these plots no longer require sexual continence from the heroine, they still revolve around the idea that marriage is a just reward for an innate feminine goodness and that female maturation and recognition occurs primarily in the marital bed.1 It is striking that genres that address themselves to female audiences and showcase female stars – musicals and romantic comedies – tend still to end with heterosexual couple formation (and usually implied marriage). However, psychoanalysis tells rather a different story. The defining romance for the psychoanalytic narrative is not that of marriage, but that of a family romance – father, mother and child. Psychoanalysis unravels the development of the individual within this nexus: in this discourse, the successful socialisation of an adult is signalled indeed by their desire to reform their own triangle. The family then forces us to re-consider the way in which individual subjectivity is negotiated: not between Self and Other, but rather in a more complex set of inter-relationships between various 1 Hilary Radner, ‘Pretty is as Pretty Does: Free Enterprise and the Marriage Plot’, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 56-76. 222 Fiona Handyside manifestations of the self and of the other. Far from being the end of the story, couple formation is posited here as the beginning of the long and often difficult journey of family life. Hollywood cinema has neglected the triangular nature of the family romance in favour of the marriage plot, whose mechanics resolve gender difference. For example, Jane Feuer argues that the omnipresence of marriage at the end of the Hollywood studio musical represents the synthesis of its key oppositions of singing and speaking, sound and image, dream and reality, narrative and ‘number’, through the reconciliation of the binary opposition of gender in the harmony and blending of marriage.2 In contrast, French film has a tradition of playing out the triangular nature of the family romance and the concomitant confusion and collision of roles within the family sphere. The French ‘musical’ Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Demy, 1964) famously forces its heroine played by Catherine Deneuve to choose between a car mechanic, the father of her unborn child, and a diamond merchant. The film finishes with its chief protagonists separated by a large expanse of snowy garage forecourt rather than locked in a warm embrace, and the mechanic’s daughter being raised by the jeweller. Two key New Wave films, Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1961) and Une femme est une femme (Godard, 1961) both create uncertainties about role and gender in the heterosexual couple by turning to the triangular relationship as a metonymically symbolic way to re- examine our understanding of how the family functions. Jules et Jim, traditionally read as a drama of adultery, in fact asserts a relationship of equal intensity between all three of its protagonists (indeed, its title hints as the disavowed homoerotic relationship between Jules and Jim). As Jill Forbes concludes, ‘when Catherine kills both herself and Jim, Jules is less devastated than he might have been since their death helpfully resolves the ambivalence of his feelings by means of a symbolic fusion.’3 Une femme est une femme similarly dramatises a woman oscillating between two partners, in a witty rather than morbid mode. It would be impossible, not to say tedious, to enumerate all the threesomes of French film, but one can trace a thread from La Maman et la putain (Eustache, 1973) and most Blier films of the 1970s and 2 Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993). 3 Jill Forbes, ‘Design for Living: the Family in Recent French Cinema’, in Rosemary Chapman and Nicholas Hewitt (eds), Popular Culture and Mass Communication in Twentieth Century France (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1992), pp. 114-125 (p. 118). .

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