1 Mediterranean Seascapes in Contemporary French Cinema

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Mediterranean Seascapes in Contemporary French Cinema: Between Myth and Reality

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Caroline Noble, M.A.

Graduate Program in French and Italian

The Ohio State University

2018

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Margaret Flinn, Advisor

Professor Patrick Bray

Professor Benjamin Hoffmann

Caroline Noble

2018

Abstract

Can the presence the sea in French cinema have a function other than that of a backdrop and if it is the case, what does its presence imply? My dissertation examines this question by focusing on the representation of the Mediterranean Sea through a psychoanalytical lens, mainly dialoguing with Bachelard and Jung. Seen as a symbol for the unconscious, motherhood, and femininity, the study of the function of the sea in films allows for questioning about identity, gender stereotypes, and sexuality. Because of its mythological tendencies through painting and arts, the Mediterranean Sea has often been perceived as an object of fascination. Additionally, unlike films set by the Atlantic which are generally characterized by a more hostile and uninviting climate, the south of France has been a suitable place for the expression of sexual freedom and female emancipation. My dissertation starts tackling the invention and mythicization of the Mediterranean seascape in French film, notably thanks to the presence of the French icon Brigitte Bardot. Indeed, what the first films which use the allegorical function of the sea have in common is the presence of the famous actress. In Rozier’s Manina la fille sans voile (1952), Vadim’s Et Dieu créa la femme (1956) and Godard’s Le mépris (1963), the obvious parallel between Bardot and mythical creatures contributed to the idealization and promotion of the Mediterranean Sea as a sensual place at a time when France was in search of a national symbol. At the same time as women’s rights were increasing, masculinity crisis grew stronger and contributed to shaping the

Mediterranean Sea as an allegory of inner struggles and fear of castration. Both Jacques and

Brice, the respective protagonists of Besson’s Le grand bleu (1988) and Huth’s Brice de Nice

(2005) are anything but the embodiment of the traditional male hero. Both male protagonists have recurrent dreams about mermaids and prefer the sea as a way to reject any form of

ii sexuality and reconnect with their nuclear family. Additionally, it is the woman who is in charge of their sexual education and participates in reversing the traditional gender roles.

Eventually, I contend that the representation of the Mediterranean Sea in French cinema has been affected since the end of the Algerian war of independence. No longer seen as a place suitable for love-making or for the expression of repressed male sexual desires, the sea has been demythicized because of the social changes occurring in the Mediterranean basin. Both

Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) and Merzak Allouache’s Harragas (2009) use the sea as a rejection of society and portray the journey of men and women towards the acquisition of a new identity in a context that oppresses them. I conclude this dissertation by making an analogy between the sea and the topography of the mind insofar as the Mediterranean Sea is used as a map of the mind so as to enable a crystallization of French myths and realities.

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Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank my advisor, Professor Flinn, for her continuous support during these past two years. I am extremely grateful for her confidence in my project, her patience, understanding, and guidance all along the different steps of the dissertation writing. I am also indebted to Professor Bray and Professor Hoffmann for their valuable insight and their constant encouragement. It has been a real pleasure and honor to work with knowledgeable and talented professors like you all.

I am thankful for all the wonderful professors, colleagues, and friends from the French and

Italian department at Ohio State. I will certainly miss working with such warm-hearted and gifted persons.

Finally, I would like to thank my loving partner, Alexander, for his attentive listening, kindness, and affection during the many ups and downs of this process. Thank you for being here during every step of it.

Vita

June 2003 ...... Lycée Dumont D’Urville

2008 ...... M.A. English, Université de Toulon

2011 ...... M.A. French, The Ohio State University

2014 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate,

The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: French and Italian

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Vita ...... v

Introduction: The Lure of French Seascapes ...... 1

Psychoanalysis and the sea …...... 3

Scholarship on the sea in French cinema …...... 5

France and the Mediterranean …...... 7

The Mediterranean Sea before the 1950s …...... 14

Chapter 1: And Bardot… Created the Mediterranean ...... 22

The ambivalence of the Bardot myth…...... 31

Recreating a mythological space …...... 36

Bardot's nudity …...... 53

Rohmer's blazon of the seascape: a shift in the representation of the Mediterranean...... 58

Chapter 2: Sea, Sex and Sons: Masculinity in Crisis in Luc Besson’s Le grand bleu and James Huth’s Brice de Nice ...... 66

Narcissist child-men in Le grand bleu and Brice de Nice…...... 72

Questioning the oedipal model: the sea as the mother …...... 82

Jacques, Brice, and women …...... 88

Water and dreams …...... 93

The sea as the preferred space for homosocial bonding …...... 99

Jacques and Brice's self-realization …...... 106

Chapter 3: “Poussée vers l’eau-delà” or the sea as a threshold between society and the ego-ideal in Pierrot le fou and Harragas ...... 112

The sea as a threshold between Ferdinand's outside and internal worlds …...... 115

The sea as a transformative place in Harragas …...... 134

Mapping the mind …...... 154

Conclusion: Seascapes beyond France and the Mediterranean ...... 157

Bibliography ...... 168

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Introduction: The Lure of French Seascapes

In a conference on “Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie” held in March 1943 at the

Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, Maurice Merleau-Ponty spoke about the connection between the mind and the senses, that is to say how the perception of the world varies from one human being’s perspective to another’s, before moving on to the effects of cinema upon the mind. While evoking the difference between literature and film-making, the phenomenologist essentially argued that “le cinéma ne nous donne pas, comme le roman l’a fait longtemps, les pensées de l’homme, il nous donne sa conduite ou son comportement, il nous offre directement cette manière spéciale d’être au monde” (23). According to the philosopher, while literature often enables the reader to have access to a psychological reading of the characters, cinema creates more distance between the character’s inner state on the one hand and the spectator on the other hand, to become for the latter nothing but an experience that is perceived, as opposed to being an experience that is thought and processed. Undeniably, for

Merleau-Ponty, “le cinéma ne se pense pas, il se perçoit” (22). If the argument according to which having access to the character’s psychological development is more challenging in a film than in literature might have been valid for the phenomenologist, on the contrary, Christian Metz argues that cinema is a “veritable psychichal substitute” (4) that sheds light onto the mechanisms of the human mind. This dissertation therefore wants to take an opposite stand to that of

Merleau-Ponty by exploring what a psychoanalytic reading of films set by the Mediterranean Sea and the presence of water can help understand about the protagonists’ thoughts and their unconscious. 1

When it comes to the study of the psychical function of landscapes and their effect, the

latter are usually seen as having little incidence upon the narrative and are therefore only

perceived as opposed to being thought and processed, to go back to Merleau-Ponty’s argument.

Actually, as Maurizia Natali points out in L’image-paysage, landscapes (and therefore seascapes)1 are generally seen as a way to situate the characters within the plot: “l’image du

paysage garde toujours la connotation de décor supplémentaire parce que notre imaginaire est

centré narcissiquement sur les corps” (71). Therefore, the focus on bodies, the plot, and the mise-

en-scène very often dismiss the sea as background instead of being seen as an object shaping the

characters’ inner development. Although poetically described by Jules Michelet in La Mer and

being seen as very consistent for its “solennelle alternative, le retour invariable de la même note,

forte et basse, qui de plus en plus roule, gronde” (8) and being praised by l’Ecole française for its

“perception moléculaire”2 (Deleuze 116), I want to suggest that the sea in films is more complex

to analyze than the simple dichotomy between “molaire” and “moléculaire” (or solid and liquid)

and that the different ways it is used aesthetically invite us to ponder over the mechanisms of the

psyche. Indeed, according to David Melbye, landscapes in films are imbued with an allegorical

dimension: “Once a natural landscape has become encoded with meanings specific to a particular

culture, this landscape can come to symbolize something beyond itself to the people who make

up that culture” (3). In other words, one can apply this argument to the presence of seascapes in

films and infer that it is not always simply a choice of the mise-en-scène but it encompasses a

1 Even though seascapes are a form of landscapes, little attention has been paid to the sea. As I shall demonstrate later, although recent scholarship has been focusing on beachscapes, the presence of water in films is still largely overlooked. 2 “Finalement, ce que l'école française trouvait dans l'eau, c'était la promesse ou l'indication d'un autre état de perception : une perception plus qu'humaine, une perception qui n'était plus taillée sur les solides, qui n'avait plus le solide pour objet, pour condition, pour milieu. Une perception plus fine et plus vaste, une perception moléculaire, propre à un « ciné-œil »” (Deleuze 115). 2

meaning that goes beyond their visual representation.

Psychoanalysis and the sea

Because of the many symbolic functions that this dissertation claims the Mediterranean

Sea in French film has, I will mainly dialogue with psychoanalysis, a field which is mainly

interested in the unconscious and the interpretation of symbols present in dreams; water being

particularly at the core of Freud and Jung’s thoughts. According to Jung, “Whoever denies the

existence of the unconscious is in fact assuming that our present knowledge of the psyche is

total. And this belief is clearly just as false as the assumption that we know all there is to be

known about the natural universe” (Man and His Symbols 6). Psychoanalysis and the study of symbols is therefore an essential discipline that allows for a deeper understanding of the psyche.

For Jung, “What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning” (Man and His Symbols 3). Therefore, I contend that the sea and the way it is filmed has a meaning that enlightens us on the mechanisms of the mind and the duality between conscious and unconscious states all the more so, the uses of space in cinema “afford an

opportunity for thinking spatially about the unconscious” and for thinking about the effect of the

unconscious upon the representation of space (Pile 136), which therefore can help understand the way the Mediterranean Sea has been screened in French film. Although Freud and Jung are mainly interested in the symbolism of dreams, Jung also admits that it is “not necessary to use a dream as the point of departure for the process of ‘free association’ if one wished to discover the complexes of a patient” (Man and his Symbols 11). In some of the films that I will analyze, dreams about the sea are part of the characters’ construction, but not always. Besides being present in the nocturnal activities of the mind, the Mediterranean Sea within narrative is encoded

with a meaning that sheds light onto the characters’ inner states. Additionally, since in the field

of psychoanalysis, water is perceived as a synonym for the unconscious, the forgotten, and the

repressed, one might wonder to what extent the representation of the sea allegorizes the mind. In

his interpretation of dreams, Jung gives the example of a dream one of his patients had, which

takes place by the sea: “The sea breaks into the land, flooding everything. Then the dreamer is

sitting on a lonely island” (Dreams 122). The Swiss psychoanalyst goes on to explain that “The sea is the symbol of the collective unconscious, because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface. Those who stand behind, the shadowy personifications of the unconscious, have burst into the terra firma of consciousness like a flood” (123). Jung further

argues that “The symbol of the sea is another synonym for the unconscious” (262) but does not

develop what this analogy entails. It is Gaston Bachelard who went further by translating the signification of material images through literature in Water and Dreams. In his work, the French philosopher makes the claim that “Emotionally, nature is a projection of the mother” (115) and that water is generally used as an allegory of motherhood and female sexuality: “This substantial valorization that makes water an inexhaustible milk, the milk of Mother nature, is not the only valorization that characterizes water as profoundly feminine” (126). As a result, shifting away from literature to study the allegorical function of water in cinema can enlighten us onto the mechanism of the human mind all the more so since, according to Vicky Lebeau, cinema is “a way of talking about, picturing, the mind of psychoanalysis – just as the mind becomes one way to consider the mechanism, and fascination, of cinema” (2). If many recent studies have been focusing on a geopolitical representation of the Mediterranean Sea, the question that I thus want to raise in this dissertation is this: how does the Mediterranean Sea participate in the construction of cinematic characters’ subjectivity and help shape French identity in relation to gender norms

and sexuality? The present dissertation explores this question through the lens of French film

directors who have set their plots by the Mediterranean Sea.

Scholarship on the sea in French cinema

Despite filmmakers’ ongoing fascination for the aquatic element since the early stages of

cinema3, only a limited number of scholarly works tackle the presence of water in films and

when they do, it is from a different standpoint than the psychoanalytical approach that I intend to

take. In L’eau dans le cinéma des années 20, Eric Thouvenel focuses on a variety of

geographical locations but limits his survey to the 1920s. His work examines all types of bodies

of water (rivers, lakes, etc) as opposed to focusing solely on marine waters, which Thouvenel

only touches on. Moreover, Thouvenel mainly gives a social and topographical perspective by

arguing that water became an object of attention in early cinema and that its focus within the

post-war era is an indicator on how the French territory was conceived right after the conflict ended, both in terms of human losses and architectural ones. Eric Thouvenel argues that the presence of water in films is part of a “reconquête territoriale” that took place after the war:

L’une des clés de cette “résurrection” est la réinvention opiniâtre et concrète du territoire

national par le cinéma, qui va s’appuyer sur les singularités du paysage français pour en

faire tout à la fois une vitrine et l’instrument d’une exploration de son identité. La

géographie et le climat du pays font que l’eau y est omniprésente, et sous des formes

extrêmement variées: les cinéastes se saisissent alors de l’élément, dans toutes ses

configurations topographiques ou climatiques, comme un moyen d’arpentage du territoire

3 Louis Lumière’s La mer (1898), Parnaland’s Mer (1902), and Alice Guy’s Effet de mer (1906) showed a genuine interest in the sea and the motion of the waves, but the aquatic space was not invested with a symbolic dimension yet. Later on, directors such as Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, and Pierre Schoendoerffer continued to be captivated by the fear and beauty that the liquid mass inspired. 5

mais aussi comme un marqueur des grands lieux de l’imaginaire national dans une

période qui est à la fois le théâtre d’une exacerbation du sentiment national, et (modernité

oblige) d’importantes mutations des modalités du regard. (20)

In other words, Thouvenel asserts that the increasing presence of waterscapes in films served to

establish a significant connection between space and identity in that it allowed us to reassess

questions about national values. Expressly expanding from Thouvenel’s study, I want to extend my analysis to the limits of the “mare nostrum” and explore how it has enabled a shaping of

French identity.

Undeniably, because of its geographical location and its relatively temperate climate, the beach and the sea are the place where French identity expresses itself without the constraints that are imposed by the limits of a city. Furthermore, unlike the mountain, which is characterized by its cold climate and challenging access, the sea is the place where the body can unveil itself freely and where the association between the body and the aquatic element can lead to an understanding of how France perceives sexuality and gender relations. As far as the countryside is concerned, if in Renoir’s Partie de campagne (1946) water is used as a metaphor for the sexual act, Ludovic Cortade points out that “Renoir’s landscapes do not incarnate any essence since they attempt a rereading of French history using as evidence its transnational dimension. In

Toni (1934), Renoir composes a hymn to the Mediterranean’s integrative function rather than to its so-called ‘essence’” (161). I believe that the difference between Renoir’s use of water in films and the films set by the Mediterranean Sea also results from the mythology associated with the sea along with the feelings of repulsion and fascination that the underwater world has always inspired, which makes it a more favorable place for the outpourings of hidden and repressed desires.

In her book Cinema at the Shore: The Beach in French Film, Fiona Handyside contends that the beach is a liminal space onto which questions about identity can be projected: “the beach offers a unique crystallization of our attitudes towards nature, culture, the body, space, and time”

(5/69). Additionally, Handyside adds that French beaches in cinema have been the locus where

“Frenchness” has been able to express itself without any filter. Away from societal norms and conventions, the characters at the beach are able to free themselves from the coercive norms imposed upon their bodies: “The body on the beach, increasingly naked as the century draws on, often part of a massed crowd, sometimes lying on the sand, sometimes strolling on the promenade, becomes linked in direct ways to the body in the cinema through its characteristics of modernity and mobility” (37/69). The British scholar concludes her examination of the beachscape by arguing that: “The beach, the limit and the edge of the nation, remains the final frontier, beyond which French cinema dissolves and transforms, and a new set of cartographers is required” (6/6). If for Handyside there is nothing beyond the limits imposed by the edge of water, what I offer to do in this dissertation is to push this liminality further by emphasizing that the sea, used as metaphor for the unconscious, motherhood, and femininity, constitutes another layer of subject formation and serves to question issues related to subjectivity. The immanence of the body and the sea and the latter’s symbolic functions enables a deeper understanding of the articulation of French identity, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships while a focus on the beach is, I will argue, too limiting.

France and the Mediterranean

Before introducing the material that will be analyzed throughout the different chapters of this dissertation, one might raise the question as to why focus on the “mare nostrum” as opposed to the Atlantic and why concentrate our attention on France as opposed to the other countries that

surround the Mediterranean basin. As far as the second part of the question goes, the

Mediterranean Sea in French cinema benefitted from a great attention as opposed to Spain, which was ruled by dictatorship until 1975 and whose cinema was mostly dominated by images of ravaged landscapes (Cortade 160). Meanwhile, Italy was mostly preoccupied by the living conditions of the working class, a central theme of the neorealist movement, which featured cityscapes and countryside’s local life more than the attractiveness of the country’s coastal regions. According to Bouchard and Ferme, representations of the South were central to

Rossellini’s and Visconti’s films, which emphasized a “sense of immutablity” along with

“stereotypes of the Italian South and its poorer citizens” (122). Later on, “comedy Italian style” played on stereotypes of the southern part of the country as “a social critique of its institutional, political, and cultural shortcomings” (Bouchard and Ferme 123). Additionally, docufiction offered “a much more serious approach to crime and mafia” relevant to the South, representations which “provided fairly negative views of the South as a whole” (124). It is only in the late 1980s and 1990s that southern Italy was promoted as “Eden-like” in cinema (124), providing spectatorship with images of beautiful Mediterranean seascapes. The coastline was represented as a site of “ultimate escapisms, an avoidance-laden land that metaphorically allows the viewers to escape from the harsh economic, political, and cultural realities of contemporary

Italy” (124). Therefore originally, the representation of the Mediterranean in cinema is particularly tied to France, hence a wish to focus on this country to understand the way it has been shaped by French filmmakers and has worked as a mirror of social changes.

As far as the first part of the question is concerned, studies on the Mediterranean have recently multiplied, notably due to the increasing waves of migration that have been occurring in the Mediterranean basin over the past fifty years, which has lead to the emergence of a new

category of film referred to as “migrant cinema”. Indeed, the media have increasingly been

broadcasting images of boatloads of migrants being rescued or perishing at sea, and have been

giving accounts of the number of deaths that the sea had been collecting. Recalling what

Alexandre Dumas wrote in Le Comte de Monte-Cristo during the episode when Edmond Dantès manages to take place in a burial sack to escape from the prison and is thrown at sea, “La mer est le cimetière du château d’If” (219), the Mediterranean Sea has now also become a vast cemetery for those trying to cross over.

Indeed, the recent release of Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (2016) along with Daphne

Matziaraki’s documentary 4.1 Miles both nominated at the 2017 Academy Awards reveal a thriving preoccupation by filmmakers to register how social movements have been shaping seascapes in new ways and how in turn seascapes have been affecting the life of migrants crossing over the Mediterranean. As Elena Past points out in her study on Italian film director

Emmanuele Crialese, a director whose films emphasize a strong relationship to the sea, the life of human is undoubtedly interconnected with that of non-human nature. In her article “Island

Hopping, Liquid Materiality, and the Mediterranean Cinema of Emmanuele Crialese”, the scholar argues that the sea is not just a liquid border establishing a division between humans but a protagonist of Crialese’s films. Working from an ecocritical perspective on the Italian director’s works, Past argues that the Mediterranean Sea is entangled with the life of the men who live close by and that their identity cannot be defined without taking into account the importance of the liquid mass into their daily life. In an other article “Lives Aquatic:

Mediterranean Cinema and Ethics of Underwater Existence”, Past draws a thought-provoking comparison between Crialese’s Respiro (2002) and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve

Zissou (2004), the latter is of course, to a large extent a reference and a parody of Captain

Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s documentaries. By incorporating the theories of Franco Cassano on

Mediterraneism, Gilles Deleuze’s theory on water and Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, Past mainly examines the relationship between human and non-human nature (that is to say between man and the sea) and claims that there is a connection between saline water and their contemporary existence: “Their respective moves underwater are not simply physical, I propose, but extend invitations to theorize the connection between the saline waters and contemporary existence” (53), implying as a matter of fact that the sea participates in defining the human. Yet, the symbolic function of the sea is only vaguely alluded to, although I believe that it participates in the understanding of the human existence to which Past refers.

However, the word “Mediterranean” itself is twofold and raises several questions as to what it actually entails. Indeed, when alluding to the Mediterranean, we can either refer to the surrounding countries and their inhabitants, encompassing Italy, the Balkans, Anatolia, North

Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, according to Braudel’s definition of the Mediterranean world in his groundbreaking work La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, or we can look solely at the liquid mass that it represents, which is Alain Corbin’s main focus in his prominent work The Lure of the Sea. Although both perspectives are conceivable, this dissertation scrutinizes the maritime world of the Mediterranean and examines the varying ways the sea is coded. The increasing number of films and studies about the Mediterranean shows that

“in recent years, the humanities has seen a critical shift in interest from the temporal/historical to the spatial/geographical in areas as diverse as new historicism to gender studies” (Handyside

4/69). While the aforementioned studies by Braudel, Past, Thouvenel and Handyside respectively adopt historical, ecocritical, and social approaches, I offer a different reading of the presence of the Mediterranean Sea in French film by demonstrating that the sea is not just a site of passage

and migratory movements or a space of commercial exchanges, but that it crystallizes aspects of

French identity in ways that other maritime locations such as the Atlantic Ocean do not.

One of the essential differences regarding the dichotomy between the eastern and the

western coast of France is that of narrative. While films set by the Atlantic often stage the sailor

gone out at sea while the woman is waiting on shore, desperately hoping for her companion to

come home, films set by the Mediterranean convey a more sensual vision of the sea, which will

be at the center of the first chapter. One of the reasons that explain that difference is the climate

and light of Brittany, which is little conducive to open-air love-making and the display of bodily

attributes. Filmmakers such as Marcel L’Herbier or Jean Epstein constructed plots that revolved

around their fascination for the sea and made it one of their protagonists. In L’homme du large

(1920), a film based on Balzac’s short story “Un drame au bord de mer”, L’Herbier uses the sea

as the main character of his film. The plot features Nolff’s son Michel who, unlike his father,

despises the sea and has for his only goal in life to steal money from his parents to fulfill all his

needs. Interestingly, L’Herbier builds the film around the opposition between the rocks that

always seem to appear in Michel’s background so as to suggest his inability to leave the land,

and the sea, which is always part of Nolff’s frame, so as to suggest the father’s attraction to

marine life. Eventually, Nolff strangles his son after he has stolen money from his family and

sends him off to sea. Essentially, L’Herbier’s film perpetuates the stereotype of the sailor

passionate about the sea rather than using water as a metaphor for gender relations and sexual

identity, as it is the case with films set by the Mediterranean.

The Atlantic Ocean also plays a great role in Jean Epstein’s “Poèmes bretons”. In his series, the filmmaker attempts to create a link between cinema and poetry by revealing Brittany’s stunning landscapes. In Le tempestaire (1947), the off-screen diegetic sound of the wind along

with the movement of the camera, panning from left to right and then from right to left, give the

spectator the feeling that the main characters of the plot are not the persons we see but the natural

elements themselves. The notion of physical sensation is particularly significant in that film so as

to immerse the spectator within the life of the locals. The opposition at the beginning of Le

tempestaire between the movement of the waves and the immobility of the characters who are

shown in freeze frame as if they were photographs emphasizes the solemnity of the seascape.

The shot reverse shot between the two women (the young girl waiting for her fiancé gone at sea

and her grandmother) and the strong waves translates the overwhelming anxiety of the ones

waiting on shore as their relatives are gone out to sea. In Le tempestaire, Jean Epstein truly

manages to render the idea of the “sublime” that first finds its definition in eighteenth -century literature, that is to say a mixed feeling of beauty and terror inspired by the outside elements, which is different from the allegorical function I wish to investigate.

As a consequence, films set by the Atlantic Ocean generally emphasize the pride in being

a sailor rather than being imbued with a symbolic meaning; Grémillon’s Remorques (1941) and

Pierre Schoendoerffer’s adaptation of Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’Islande (1959) being two other examples. In the former, Captain Laurent (Jean Gabin) is fascinated by the ocean (which he prefers to his depressed wife) while in the latter, Yann also leaves Gaud to go to sea.

Schoendoerffer plays onto a gripping contrast of colors between the life at the harbor and the life at sea, where the yellow parkas of the crew members stand out against the grey sea so as to illustrate the place where the sailors belong. If to some extent the sea becomes a substitute for the sailor’s wife, this allegory of the sea as woman is not further exploited. Essentially, this division between the western coastal regions of France and the Riviera is explained by Braudel who argues that “la Méditerranée n’a pas la profusion de races marines des mers du Nord ou de

l’Atlantique. Elle ne les produit qu’en petit nombre et dans certaines régions seulement” (126).

Therefore, France’s history in relation to its coastal regions has had an influence on the films’

narratives.

That is not to say that films set by the Atlantic are only about sailors and their wives. In these films, it is the beach rather than the sea that constitutes this liminality that Handyside refers to. Nevertheless, when films do not play on the stereotype of the manly sailor, the Atlantic is usually characterized as more hostile, uninviting, and violent than the Mediterranean Sea.

François Ozon’s Regarde la mer (1997), which plays on the homonymy of the words “mother” and “sea” so as to question the notion of motherhood along with Catherine Breillat’s A ma soeur

(2001), which is about a young girl’s sexual coming of age, articulate the link between the aquatic element, femininity, motherhood, and sexuality in a more unsettling and cruel way, that either leads sometimes to homicide and abduction (Ozon) or rape and murder (Breillat). As far as

Eric Rohmer’s works (which often take place by the seaside) are concerned the dim light of the

Breton and Norman seascapes he prefers (La collectionneuse, set near St Tropez, which I analyze at the end of the first chapter, is a notable exception), along with the absence of interaction between the characters and the sea, make it more challenging to use the sea as a symbol for the unconscious and to access the characters’ inner desires.

Accordingly, part what explains the Atlantic/Mediterranean split is that representations of the Mediterranean coast offer a particular combination of mass touristic and locally regional appeal for potential audiences—one which, thanks to Bardot (among others) on the beach, takes on a particular relationship to visual pleasure. French film directors strove to “sell” a beautified image of the South to audiences as a way to overcome American cultural hegemony and the invention of television. Indeed, “Directors and producers working in the French film industry in

the early sound period of the 1930s were well-aware of the competition they faced from

Hollywood and used the advent of sound to reclaim their national audience with domestic productions in the French language” (Celli 47). American films became even more present in

France after the Second World War when it came to the film industry. In The Cinema in France after the New Wave, Jill Forbes explains that France and the United States have always had an ambivalent relationship since the end of the Second World War. After the victory of the Allies, the United Stated tended to impose their model as “a condition of aid for reconstruction” (47),

which aroused a certain feeling of anxiety among French film directors. Besides the “films

d’auteurs”, the promotion of the French territory and especially of the southern region might

explain a need to make the sense of regional identity stronger by emphasizing the originality of

its coastal region. Georges Guarracino points out that Paris generally appears as the place of

bustling activity whereas “la Provence donne le ton et la couleur de la France profonde sur les

écrans de tous les pays” and that this region “est profondément marquée par le culte de l’eau.”

(10). The Provence region, along with the French Riviera, passes on an idea of authenticity and

also sensuality that was not found in films set by the Atlantic, usually dominated by low-key lightning and little interaction between bodies and the sea.

The Mediterranean Sea before the 1950s

It is only around the 1950s that the Mediterranean Sea began to be represented frequently on screen and started having a function other than that of a fertile ground for scientific exploration, which is why the corpus of films chosen for this dissertation starts around this date.

If in the 1930s Jean Painlevé, followed a few years later by Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau, was considered a pioneer of underwater filmmaking, his technique was somewhat limited: “Painlevé, in contrast to Cousteau’s high-tech adventures of the boundless sea, worked mostly in the

controlled theater of the aquarium and when it came to things technical he was a bricoleur, a

tinkerer patching together camera apparatus to meet a specific need” (McDougall 17).

Additionally, both men’s mission was essentially to provide with the spectator for a deeper

knowledge of the sea and the ocean, which is the reason why their documentaries remained primarily scientific, although the lyrical and dreamlike aspect of Painlevé’s work is undoubtedly unparalled: “Painlevé’s cinematography is also extraordinarily beautiful, boasting images so elegantly composed and strikingly lit that they seem more appropriate to art films than to documentaries and lend his films an aesthetic self-consciousness that vies with their apparent educational function” (Rugoff 49). However, despite Cousteau’s state-of-the-art invention, the

Aqua-Lung (a breathing apparatus designed to allow divers to spend more time under the water’s surface), his documentaties are filled with a will to reveal the diversity of the underwater world and showcase his mastering of the aquatic element rather than exploring its symbolic function.

The Mediterranean Sea also appears earlier than the 1950s in Jean Vigo’s A propos de

Nice (1929), although the filmmaker only offers fleeting images of water. During the first minutes Kaufman’s camera offers an aerial view of the sea, it is only to assess how the beach is an important aspect of the city’s tourism. A tracking shot of the white sand beach divides the frame into two parts: the sea is on the left side of the frame while the city is spreading out on the right side of it. This tracking shot serves to establish a division between the inhabitants of the city and the tourists, while the sea is only filmed so as to question and criticize the increasing flux of foreigners taking over the Riviera during summertime. If Vigo mocks the sunbathers who come to the Promenade des Anglais (their faces suddenly turn black to suggest their stupidity for staying in the sun for hours) and briefly alludes to the nudity of some of the visitors (Vigo shoots a woman in a chair who momentarily appears naked), the Mediterranean Sea is never used in an

allegorical way to allow access to the characters’ unconscious and identity. Instead it is perceived only from a sociological standpoint.

Vigo’s critique of tourism results from the fact that the beach and the sea were, before the

1950s, generally associated with a negative image. In The Lure of the Sea, French historian Alain

Corbin explains that the sea used to inspire fear due its lack of biblical representation. Indeed,

“There is no sea in the Garden of Eden. There is no place within the enclosed landscape of

Paradise for the watery horizon” (Corbin 2). Besides, ships were seen as a place of putrefaction due to their poor hygienic conditions, a place where diseases would spread and be carried to the shores (a three-master is supposed to bring an unexplainable disease from Brazil in Maupassant’s

Le Horla of 1886). It is during the second half of the eighteenth century that the seaside became more inviting, notably because improvements in terms of navigation made the sea less of an untamed territory. Moreover, marine water and sea air started to gain attention from the medical field as they were supposed to have considerable health benefits, a belief which significantly increased the number of visitors going to the seaside. The English seaside and the Northern coast of France were therefore the perfect resorts for cure-takers for a long time and tourists were indeed more reluctant to explore and seek adventure themselves around the French Riviera (the

Mediterranean Sea was also considered to be fertile ground for pirates, who took advantage of the trade occurring in the basin), which had not been discovered yet by writers and painters.

Corbin asserts that “The shore of Provence and the Riviera aroused admiration only when they were covered with orange or lemon trees, or when they offered a picture of pleasant towns surrounded by verdant gardens” (154). The suffocating heat that characterized the Riviera

“inspired sadness if not repulsion” (Corbin 154). That said, the feeling of repulsion gradually diminished. From the middle of the nineteenth century, writers - mostly from Paris - came to the

Riviera “partly to relax and partly to re-charge their creative batteries” (Hale 115), some of

whom like Prosper Mérimée ended up having “a profound connection with the Riviera” (Hale

116). As Julian Hale points out in his History of the French Riviera, writers contributed to the

‘invention’ of the Riviera throughout their novels and managed to impregnate the mind of their

readers with descriptions of beautiful landscapes, local traditions, and regional authenticity.

Authors who were native to the south of France like Marcel Pagnol contributed by asserting a

strong sense of regional identity that distinguished itself from the rest of the country. In the

Trilogie Marseillaise, which was adapted several times on screen, the accent of the characters, the exaggerations typical of southerners, the pride in their region, and the proximity to the sea conveyed an image of genuineness that participated in the invention of the Riviera, even though some purists would exclude Marseille from the Côte d’Azur. The presence of the sea in the very first filmic adaptations of Pagnol’s novels was nevertheless limited (except for Daniel Auteuil’s versions, which do take place in the famous inlets or the “calanques” so as to emphasize a certain necessity to return to nature as a form of authenticity). Most of the action of Pagnol’s narratives are set on the harbor, a place which Thouvenel describes as ambiguous. For Thouvenel, the harbor is a “Pôle d’attraction/répulsion, seuil et passage, point de chute et point de départ, le port figure tout cela, simultanément” (57). Therefore, Pagnol’s adaptations often stage the hesitation between the land and the sea, a hesitation preventing his films from being a fertile ground for my analysis of the symbolic representation of the sea.

The Côte d’Azur was thus an ambivalent term that would at first refer to the rich and glamorous cities by the sea. Although Nice was the poorest of the French départements (Blum

36), the emergence of tourism transformed the city into a very attractive location. On top of

Monaco’s transformation during the second half of the nineteenth century (the casino was built

in 1878) and the arrival of monarchs on the Riviera (Queen Victoriaregularly visited the town of

Hyères, near Toulon), the literature of the 1930s played a decisive role in the representation and promotion of the Riviera both on a national and worldwide scales. Whether French or foreigners

(one can think for example about Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the night, published in 1934 and inspired by the author’s very stay in the South of France), the Côte d’Azur inspired authors because of the way the sun “heightened the senses” (Blum 73).

Before it was popularized and glamourized through the medium of cinema in the 1950s, the Riviera also found its mode of expression through other forms of arts, such as painting.

Kenneth E. Silver explains that “Because it had for such a long time been terra incognita – geographically, socially, and poetically – the Côte d’Azur was useful to artists in a way the rest of France was not. […] the Riviera was ripe for ‘artistic discovery’” (Silver 29) and became a place that Impressionists favored. Indeed, Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet were the “pioneers of artistic tourism of the Riviera” (Silver 32). The connection between painting and tourism is fascinating in the sense that painting could provide a more “visual” or “direct” representations of the landscapes that words could fail to transcribe through literature. Furthermore, one did not necessarily have to be literate to be seduced by the beauty of the south that had been captured by painters. To some extent, painting helped promote the Riviera by depicting its colors, its shoreline, and the various leisure activities that were possible by the sea. According to Silver,

“painters turned geography into myth” (25), implying that arts contributed to the mythicization of the Mediterranean Sea, which can further explain the difference in the representation between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in cinema.

The southern coastal region was gradually seen as more attractive in that it offered a variety of activities and landscapes that were suitable to the imagination as “one may lie on the

beach or work in the morning, visit a fishing port for lunch, work or play again in the afternoon, go up into hills for dinner in the evening, or over to Monte Carlo for gambling” (Silver 23). In his book Making Paradise: Art, Modernity and the Myth of the French Riviera, Silver also points out the importance of the creation of the PLM (the Paris- Lyon-Mediterranean railroad), which facilitated commerce and tourism (Silver 26). Additionally, the opening of the International

Cannes Film Festival at the eve of the Second World War put a spotlight on the Mediterranean region, which in some senses became to France what Hollywood was to America.

Therefore, as mentioned earlier the first films featuring an intriguing connection between characters’ bodies and the Mediterranean Sea came out around the 1950s, mainly starring actress

Brigitte Bardot. This dissertation will be divided into three distinct chapters. Particularly dialoguing with Mircea Eliade and Roland Barthes on the definition of myth, the first chapter contends that the Mediterranean Sea was reinvented in French cinema and rendered as myth thanks to the presence of famous icon Brigitte Bardot, whose bewitching power served to eroticize the southern coast and convey a sensual image of that region. Her appearance in Willy

Rozier’s Manina la fille sans voile (1952), Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu…créa la femme (1956) and

Jean-Luc Godard’s Le mépris (1965) contributed to the promotion of the south of France and especially the Mediterranean Sea as a sensual paradise. The second chapter explores how questions related to masculinity shaped the representation of the Mediterranean Sea in cinema. I essentially argue that when it comes to representing male figures, water serves as a space where male fears and repressed sexual desires are projected. For Jacques Mayol, the protagonist of Luc

Besson’s Le grand bleu (1988) and Brice, the anti-hero of James Huth’s Brice de Nice (2005), the Mediterranean Sea allegorizes a masculinity in crisis, which is trying to redefine itself while women are reversing traditional gender roles. Finally, in the third chapter of this dissertation I

make the claim that towards the end of the 1960s the screening of the Mediterranean Sea

translates a national anxiety to redefine itself. The representation of the Mediterranean Sea is

demythicized in the sense that it ceases to be portrayed as sensual and goes beyond gender

divisions to express a rejection of society and allow questioning about the notion of a fixed

identity. The sea becomes a way to represent the characters’ duality and their willingness to

overtake their current condition to either find their true self, as it is the case for Godard’s

protagonist in Pierrot le fou (1965) or to westernize themselves as it is the case for the characters

of Merzak Allouache’s Harragas (2009). I eventually conclude this dissertation by maintaining that the sea works as a mirror effect and represents a space where social norms and inner desires are projected and collided. As a consequence, if its representation through films is always a response to a specific social and political context, the sea can be allegorized as a map of the mind. Indeed, in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud draws a topography of the mind and compares the unconscious, preconscious, and consciousness to the different rooms of a house. To Freud, the unconscious might be related to an ante-room, where the repressed feeling and thoughts stand while consciousness is seen as the reception-room. Freud adds that “on the threshold between the two there stands a personage with the office of door-keeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censors them, and denies them admittance to the reception-room when he disapproves of them” (305), which corresponds to the locus for preconscious thoughts. Since water is generally used as a symbol of the unconscious, I want to offer the same analogy between the aquatic space of the Mediterranean and the human mind, implying that the surface of the sea represents a threshold between the repressed desires that lie within its depths and conscious desires above its surface. In other words, the depth of the sea is the unconscious and its surface the conscious representation of the ego. Bardot emerging from the

sea is a conscious representation of the essence of womanhood fantasized within French society,

whereas Jacques Mayol and Brice de Nice return to the underwater worlds to reconnect with

their sexuality and repressed desires. For Ferdinand/Pierrot, the horizon of the sea filmed at the

end of the film represents a threshold between his conscious representation of the world and his

ideal while the three main harragas of Allouache’s film cross the liminality of the sea burning their old selves in order to become the idealized other. As a consequence, if the Mediterranean

Sea is a map of the mind, it is the preferred space where French identity can unfold itself,

between myth and reality.

Chapter 1

And Bardot… Created the Mediterranean

“Sur la plage abandonnée, Coquillages et crustacés, Qui l’eut cru déplorent la perte de l’été, Qui depuis s’en est allé” BB. La Madrague, 1963

When her song “La Madrague” came out in 1963, actress Brigitte Bardot not only started her career as a singer, but she also positioned herself as the ambassador of the French Riviera, more specifically of the little town of St Tropez (or St Trop’ as the fashionistas like to call it) that has by now become one of the most popular and glamourous tourist destinations in the south of

France. The famous lyrics written by Jean-Max Rivière “Sur la plage abandonnée, coquillages et crustacés…” are an invitation to reflect on summertime and see the Mediterranean as a peaceful and sensual place. What better emblem than famous icon B.B to interpret that song? Indeed, for a whole generation Bardot was a model of femininity and sex appeal that had no precedent, two characteristics that were also intrinsically linked to southern France. Throughout the films she had shot prior to and after the release of this song, Bardot became a “myth”, a model that French women and women around the world sought to imitate during the 1960s. Many wanted to look like the famous actress, whose style was dutifully copied. As Françoise Audé points out :

Autour de 1960, on vit partout des yeux lourdement cernés d’un trait de crayon gras, des 22

pulls collants et décolletés qui découvraient la ‘rondeur’ des seins enchâssés dans des

soutien-gorge ‘balconnets’. Les sandales à talons aiguilles accentuaient la cambrure

désinvolte, passablement effrontée, des reins. Telles des proues de navires, les filles,

pieds nus ou talonnantes, fendaient la foule. Allaient à la conquête du monde. Brigitte

Bardot incarnait leur aspiration à l’indépendance et, plus que des comportements, une

conduite. (Audé 29)

Not only was Bardot’s style to be imitated, but her nonchalant attitude and her apparent sexual freedom was also a source of inspiration for many women who wanted to free themselves from the stifling moral and social codes imposed upon their gender.

Furthermore, the image of the liberated woman she displayed was embedded with a natural aura that found its origins in the films she played, which very often used landscapes and seascapes as a way to enhance her natural beauty. If Bardot is indeed essentially remembered for

“her spectacular youthful looks, her insolent wit, her blatant promiscuous lifestyle and her outspokenness” (Vincendeau 94), in her work on the French icon Ginette Vincendeau also argues that “Bardot is portrayed as natural in three ways: through her sexuality, her clothes and her association with images of nature and landscape” (100). This chapter therefore focuses on how the presence of the actress in Willy Rozier’s Manina la fille sans voile (1952), Roger Vadim’s Et

Dieu… créa la femme (1956), and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le mépris (1965) participated in the mythicization of the Mediterranean Sea in French cinema, which in its turn participated in the invention of the Bardot myth. Although Godard’s film takes place in Italy and is set by the

Tyrrhenian Sea, I have decided to incorporate it within this corpus of films based on the definition of the Mediterranean space that Fernand Braudel gives in his groundbreaking book La

Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Indeed, if one takes

Braudel’s definition of the Mediterranean into account, one can incorporate Godard’s work

among the films that contributed to the invention and promotion of the Mediterranean as a

sensual and exhilarating place. Braudel argues that “Ce basin tyrrhénien, divise et composite, est

donc trop mêlé à la vie générale de la mer pour avoir des couleurs très personnelles” (111),

implying that the Thyrrhenian Sea cannot be dissociated from the rest of the Mediterranean

basin. Besides, Braudel makes the claim that the latter is actually a “‘complexe de mers’, et de

mers encombrées d’îles, coupée de péninsules, entourée de côtes ramifiées.” (13) In other words, the Mediterranean Sea must be apprehended as a common place of exchange and a contiguous

space rather than a place marked by strict geographical and political boundaries. Thanks to

Bardot and the character she plays in Rozier’s, Vadim’s, and Godard’s films, the south of France

became a place synonymous with sexual freedom and female sexual emancipation. More

specifically, Bardot shed new light onto the Côte d’Azur, which according to Mary Blum is a

term that was invented by Stephen Liégeard in 1887 and which raised much discussion as to its

geographical delimitation. Indeed, Blum observes that “some purists limit the Côte d’Azur to

Cannes-Nice-Monte Carlo” (9). Interestingly, Mary Blum uses the term “mythology” to explain

the way the Riviera was shaped and idealized in the late nineteenth-century literature and

painting (especially through the writing of Maupassant’s Sur l’eau, which Blum cites as an

example).

Nevertheless, as Mircea Eliade points out in Myth and Reality, the term “myth” is in itself

problematic because of the many significations that it has been given. In the first pages of his

work, the Romanian mythologist raises the following question: “is it even possible to find one

definition that will cover all the types and functions of myths in all traditional and archaic

societies? Myth is an extremely complex reality, which can be approached and interpreted from

various and complementary viewpoints” (5). Indeed, one can also take a Jungian or Barthesian

approach to myths when it comes to understanding their origin and structure. Although Jung

explains the myth as originating from a need to find “a sort of mental therapy for the sufferings

and anxieties of mankind in general” (Man and His Symbols 68), Barthes defines the myth in

terms of language, drawing his own conclusion from Saussure’s linguistics and explaining that

“il n’est nullement besoin d’un inconscient pour expliquer le mythe” (229). Unlike Jung, who

wants to find a psychoanalytic explanation as to why myths exist, Barthes indeed defines this notion as “un système de communication”, that is to say “un message” (215). Additionally,

Barthes explains that “ le mythe ne saurait être un objet, un concept, ou une idée; c’est un mode de signification, c’est une forme” (215). Barthes uses Saussure’s theory on the signifier,

signified, and sign in linguistics to explain how a myth can be interpreted, since according to him

a myth is “une parole” (215) that is imbued with a certain signification. In order to find its

meaning, each myth is thus constituted of a “significant” that Barthes calls “forme”, a “signifié”

or what Barthes calls “concept” and a “signe” which corresponds to what Barthes refers to as the

“signification” of the myth (224). The analysis of the three components put together give the

overall meaning of the myth. As a consequence, according to Barthes, anything can become a

myth. As far as natural elements are concerned, Barthes explains that they are devoid of any

meaning in themselves but that it is the representation that is made of those elements that

becomes mythical. For instance, when it comes to the sea, Barthes points out that “Je suis là,

devant la mer: sans doute, elle ne porte aucun message. Mais sur la plage, quel matériel

sémiologique ! des drapeaux, des slogans, des panonceaux, des vêtements, une bruniture même,

qui me sont autant de messages” (219). While the liquid mass seems to be devoid of any

message, the objects that are on the beach do have a meaning that has been assigned to them. The

flag will for instance indicate whether it is safe or not to swim in the sea, while the slogans will

promote a certain product and the clothes will give away clues as to the gender and social

background of the sunbathers. As far as the sea in concerned, Barthes argues that it is not the

product of a social construction; it is just lying there, it is nothing but a natural element which is

imposing itself. To make that argument, Barthes gives the example of Continente Perduto, a

documentary shot in 1955 by Enrico Gras, Giorgio Moser and Leonardo Bonzi and exclaims

“quoi de plus naturel que la mer? et quoi de plus ‘politique’ que la mer chantée par les cinéastes

de Continent perdu?” (253). Essentially for Barthes the sea is not socially constructed but the

representation of the sea can become myth: “Un film, Continent perdu, éclaire bien sur le mythe

actuel de l’exotisme” (183) in that it denies the history of the island to present a colorful vision

of the location. Therefore, to go back to the representation of the Mediterranean Sea in French

films and that of Brigitte Bardot, I argue that the seascape, the actress, and her nudity are all signs that participate in the construction of the Mediterranean Sea as a mythical space.

As far as Eliade is concerned, the mythologist eventually suggests a historical definition

of the myth:

In general, it can be said that myth, as experienced by archaic societies, (1) constitutes the

History of the acts of the Supernaturals; (2) that this History is considered to be

absolutely true (because it is concerned with realities) and sacred (because it is the work

of the Supernaturals); (3) that myth is always related to a “creation,” it tells how

something came into existence, or how a pattern of behavior, an institution, a manner of

working were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant

human acts; (4) that by knowing the myth one knows the “origin” of things and hence can

control and manipulate them at will; this is not an “external”, “abstract” knowledge but a

knowledge that one “experiences” ritually, either by ceremonially recounting the myth or

by performing the ritual for which it is the justification; (5) that in one way or another one

“lives” the myth, in the sense that no one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the

events recollected or re-enacted. (18)

But how can such a definition apply to a place (the Mediterranean Sea) and an actress (Brigitte

Bardot) who both have nothing to do in our current society with the “supernaturals” Eliade refers

to as an essential component of the myth? Eliade further explains in detail that through time, the

myths were no longer taken literally and that they have become an object of interest for their

symbolic representation. Indeed, “dying antiquity no longer believed in Homer’s Gods or in the

original meaning of their myths” (156), partly due to the importance of Christianity, which

believed that myths no longer carried religious values. Eliade adds that “the Gods and their

myths were conveyed to the Renaissance and the seventeenth century by works, by creations of

literature and art” (157), which in turn created what Eliade calls a “demythicized mythology”

(157). Because myths have not been systematically expressed in writing and have, on the

contrary, been transmitted through oral culture, they have lost some of their cult aspects at a time

when written documents became more important (158). The last part of Eliade’s Myth and

Reality might actually be the most relevant part to this chapter as Eliade traces the evolution of

myths from their oral transmission to their representation through mass media and comic strips, which “present the modern version of mythological or folklore Heroes” and “incarnate the ideal of a large part of society” (185). Giving the example of Superman, Eliade adds that its myth

“satisfies the secret longings of modern man who, though he knows that he has fallen, a limited

creature, dreams one day proving himself an ‘exceptional person’, a ‘hero’” (185). Eliade also

refers to what he calls the “mythicization of public figures”, that is to say actors, politicians, etc.

who are taken as the modern incarnation of mythological figures and are therefore seen as models. Therefore, since according to Eliade a myth is always related to a creation, the

“mythicization” of Brigitte Bardot and of southern France, participated in the creation of the actress as a sexual symbol which correlated to the invention of the Mediterranean Sea in contemporary French cinema. Indeed, what all the films about the Mediterranean Sea have in common is the famous actress. This mythicization was symptomatic of the context during which she shot her movies at the beginning of her career (until her late thirties) which was women’s emancipation.

Incidentally, this emancipation found its mode of expression throughout many films that came out after the Second World War; and according to Michel Zancarini-Fournel, “L’immédiat d’après-guerre rompt avec l’idéalisation des figures féminines du cinéma de l’Occupation. Les

‘garces’ vont séduire les hommes par leur beauté: cette diabolisation des femmes est sans doute le produit des humiliations masculines de la défaite et des ‘années noires’ et s’accorde avec la virilisation des images à la Libération” (196). Far from the traditional image of the “femme au foyer” that had been especially emphasized and advocated by the Vichy government, which created the “Fêtes des mères” in France and rewarded mothers for having large families, French cinema gradually started to offer a representation of a woman free from social conventions. This new version of femininity was seen by Simone de Beauvoir as an answer to the crisis of masculinity France experienced after the war. In her book Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita

Syndrome, Beauvoir explains that the presence of the actress on screen revealed both a need to revive cinema at a time when it was in crisis and a need to find a national emblem for the French

Republic (7). The French feminist explains that Vadim invented “a resolutely modern version of the ‘eternal female’ and thereby launched a new type of eroticism […] in an effort to win back

the public’s affection” (7). Although female actresses were famous in the United States for their appealing physical assets (Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Lauren, among others) the discovery of

Brigitte Bardot by Roger Vadim on the cover of May 8, 1950 issue of the famous female magazine Elle4 constituted a turning point in the history of French cinema and corresponded to the creation of a new myth, which coincided with the invention of the Mediterranean Sea in

French film. Bardot was promoted as an icon when both French cinema and French society were going through significant changes, which deeply shaped the representation of the Mediterranean

Sea in films.

Throughout her career, Bardot has also often been used as a political instrument, which also contributed to her “mythicization”, a term mentioned earlier while evoking Eliade’s definition of the term “myth”. Although her fame was at its apex in the 1960s, France still has not forgotten the impact of the actress on French society. In an interview by Anderson Cooper last year on the status of immigrants in France and the authorization of the “burkini” on French seaside resorts5, extreme right candidate to the presidential elections Marine Le Pen expressed her indignation towards what she perceives as essentially anti-French behavior. Le Pen responded that “France isn’t burkini on the beach. France is Brigitte Bardot. That’s France.”6 In other words, according to the candidate of the Front National, the image of Brigitte Bardot

4 The cover of the issue represents a mother sitting at her kitchen table, sipping what seems to be a cup of coffee, while her daughter (Brigitte Bardot) is standing behind her, also holding a cup of some sort of beverage. While the mother is gazing down on her cup, her daughter looks directly at the camera, smiling to the potential reader. Brigitte Bardot is wearing her hair up, a black and white striped shirt with a tie. It is very ironic that one of the article present in the issue questions “Les jeunes filles sont-elles détestables?” considering that later on the one who is at the origin of the “phénomène BB” will either be hated or adored by other women. 5 Yet, a year after France banned the burkini on the beach, Morocco banned the sale, production, and import of burkas in January 2017, therefore becoming an issue also applying to Muslim countries. The fact that Brigitte Bardot was mentioned as an example as opposed to other countries banning the fabric revealed how women’s bodies are used as tools to become political arguments. In her article in the newspaper Independent, Saeida Rouass, rightly defends women’s bodies by stating that “The female body is not a canvas on which society can draw lines to demarcate the limits of its morality.” 6 Le Pen, Marine. Interview by Anderson Cooper. Anderson Cooper 360. March 5, 2017. 29

coming out of the water and posing on the beach in her half-open beige dress is seen as the very essence of the French woman and femininity as opposed to the image of fully covered Muslim women. Without entering into any heated political debate, Marine Le Pen’s reference to the

French icon nevertheless pointed out a compelling argument that Brigitte Bardot personifies

French identity and femininity, or maybe precisely because the actress never hid her support to the extreme-right party and could have therefore been chosen as an emblem not only for the image she conveyed in her films but also for her political beliefs (which, of course, Le Pen was aware of). What that statement revealed is that even if Vadim’s film Et Dieu... créa la femme did not meet with an immediate success when it came out, as its plot was considered immoral, several decades later the audience’s minds are still filled with the memory of Bardot coming out of the water in the deserted beach of Saint-Tropez. Despite the many other roles she played

(Vadim’s film was her sixteenth), not only does this moment correspond to Bardot’s most sensual one that contributed to making this scene a cult one, but it also contributed to promoting the already famous south of France as a seductive place.

On top of being a reference made by Marine Le Pen, Bardot was also for some time the face of Marianne, the emblem of the French Republic. However, contrary to popular beliefs, in

Marianne, Les Visages de la République, Agulhon and Bonte explain that B.B was not chosen as

Marianne purposefully:

En 1969, le dessinateur et sculpteur Aslan s’amuse à sculpter le buste de femme à bonnet

phrygien avec les traits bien reconnaissables, et le torse à peine voilé, de l’actrice de

cinéma Brigitte Bardot. Ce ne pourrait être qu’une anecdote ; mais l’un de ses proches,

maire du village Thiron-Gardais, en Eure-et-Loir, réussit, par jeu, à implanter la nouvelle

Marianne dans sa mairie, malgré la grogne de quelques vieux conseillers municipaux.

Cette originalité locale, bientôt connue, se répand et le bon public croit que ‘la nouvelle

Marianne’ c’est Brigitte Bardot, comme si ce fait de fantaisie, passé en mode, sinon en

coutume, avait jamais été une décision d’Etat ! (92)

Therefore, all the various political figures Brigitte Bardot embodied, which contributed to her

mythicization, along with the women whom she played in her films, often associated with the

presence of nature, made the Mediterranean a myth through French cinema.

By insisting mainly on the connection between seascapes, Bardot’s body, and mythological references, I demonstrate in this chapter how Rozier, Vadim, and Godard, shaped the south of France a legendary place. I conclude the present chapter by contending that

Rohmer’s La collectionneuse (1967) constitutes a turning-point in the representation of the

Mediterranean space, which was until then depicted as exclusively feminine and sensual. While

Bardot was made famous in the early 1950s, by the second half of the twentieth century the

Nouvelle Vague already had a different relationship with the French icon. Rohmer uses the sea in

La collectionneuse as a way to illustrate the ambiguity between female and male desire. Indeed,

Rohmer plays with the interaction between the sea and the characters’ bodies along with the codes of the blazon poetry as a way to focus on the sea’s aesthetics rather than a metaphor for female sexuality. La collectionneuse shares some striking similarities with the films in which

Bardot played, which reveals the extent of her influence onto French cinema and the way she

shaped Mediterranean seascapes, while nonetheless providing the audience with a different image of femininity.

The ambivalence of the Bardot myth

As mentioned earlier, what all the first famous post-war movies about the Mediterranean

Sea have in common is the actress. Not only did Bardot become a fashion icon and a political

instrument, but she also drew more attention to the south of France, bringing the Riviera a

sensual aura that films set on the Atlantic coast do not have. It is through the eroticism she

conveyed in films that Saint-Tropez became more and more popular. In fact, Vanessa Schwartz

points out that Vadim’s film, Et Dieu... créa la femme turned out to be an incredible asset not

only in the development of the actress’s popularity but also for tourism:

The water and coast are everywhere in the movie (and the widescreen format encouraged

many coastal and port views) and while Saint-Tropez still has a sleepy look, the film’s

message is clear: the Côte d’Azur is ready for tourism, the last sleepy town is about to get

its casino. Saint-Tropez promises what Juliette announces she loves Michel, her young

husband in the film played by Jean-Louis Trintignant: water, the sun, warm sand, food,

and music. (137)

Furthermore, in the last twenty minutes of Chronicle of a summer (1961), Jean Rouche and

Edgard Morin leave the capital to go to Saint-Tropez. Landry explains to Christine how even when he was in Africa he had heard of the little touristic town. While on the harbor, he and his companion encounter one of Bardot’s lookalikes who, just like the famous actress, has long blond hair, black eyeliner, and is wearing some quite revealing clothes. Handyside suggests that

“The ‘fake’ Bardot employed by Rouch and Morin, Sophie Destrade, explains how, even in the summer of 1960, St Tropez had already become full of ambitious young hopefuls looking for their big break, imitating Bardot in appearance” (24/53). To some extent, Sophie Destrade embodies what Aude points out, that is to say the influence of Brigitte Bardot onto social behaviors and tourism (the young lady mentions that all the girls come from Paris with a bikini and that all the men want to be seen with a girl from St Trop’). The use of Technicolor and

Vadim’s focus on the ingredients intrinsic to the south of France and summertime (turquoise

water, sun, warm sand, cicadas, food, and music) all promised to make the south and St-Tropez akin to a paradise, which probably would not have been revealed as such without the sexy and debauched attitude of the French actress. Like Juliette, who is refusing Carradine’s invitation to meet with him says “Ce que j’aime, je l’ai ici: la mer, le soleil, le sable quand il est bien chaud, la musique… et manger!” Bardot was undeniably associated with the south. Although Grace

Kelly had contributed to drawing attention to the Riviera in To Catch a Thief (1955), her aristocratic beauty and her elegance made the place more glamorous than sensual. Kelly’s aura was indeed far different from the licentiousness Bardot emanated through the display of her bodily attributes.

While most scholars and the public tend to see Brigitte Bardot as a sensual woman, free from social rules and moral codes, as I have demonstrated in the introduction of this chapter, I intend to emphasize the ambiguity of the characters played by Bardot. It is also because she is hard to define that Bardot is memorable. If Simone Beauvoir coined the term “Lolita syndrome” to refer to the actress, I argue that Bardot’s characters in her Mediterranean films are actually more complex than this simple dichotomy between childhood and womanhood that the term

“Lolita” suggests. For Beauvoir, the “Lolita” is a “child woman” who moves in a universe in which man cannot enter but is terribly attracted to (14). Although the first part of this argument is irrefutable in that the actress is constantly the center of male attention in the films she plays,

Bardot’s characters actually have little agency and are subjected to male desires and command.

Besides, I believe that Beauvoir’s term, although it suggests the ambivalence of Bardot’s roles, is too reductive because it omits the mythological dimension that is characteristic of the

Mediterranean and the characters of the films Bardot appears in.

The term “femme fatale” used by Mary Ann Doane aligns to some extent with the characteristics of Bardot’s characters in the films studied in this chapter. In her book on feminism and film theory, the scholar suggests that the “femme fatale” is “frequently punished or killed” (Doane 2). Although Manina is the only one who is not punished nor killed at the end of

Rozier’s film, Juliette is indeed slapped by her husband Michel in Et Dieu... créa la femme, and

Camille ends up dying in a car accident in Le mépris. Moreover, Doane adds that the fatal woman is “involved a desperate reassertion of control on the part of the threatened male subject” and that she represents “a symptom of male fears about feminism” (3). Doane’s definition of the term also suggests that the “femme fatale” is not conscious of her power and that “She is an ambivalent figure because she is not the subject of power but its carrier” (2) implying that “In a sense, she has power despite herself” (2). Indeed, the characters played by Bardot exert a fascination onto men but she is still under their domination.

If Manina, Juliette and Camille do indeed exert their sexual power on men and are often associated to mythological figures, a point I shall develop later, they are nevertheless subjected to male power. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey offers a feminist and psychoanalytical approach to film analysis. She argues that psychoanalysis and cinema are intrinsically related as, she writes: “the cinema poses questions about the ways the unconscious

(formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking” (15). In other words, it answers a voyeuristic need of the unconscious while also pondering over the mechanisms of the human mind. Woman is central to Mulvey’s readings of films as, she argues, woman is presented in a way so as to satisfy man’s needs and impulses: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.

The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled

accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact” (19). The opposition between female passivity and male’s active gaze presents woman as an object meant to respond to male fantasies, which Bardot’s films all do. Her characters are ambivalent as the image of the liberated woman that sticks to the actress is actually under the domination of the opposite sex.

For Mulvey, this objectification of the female sex also serves to answer the spectator’s voyeuristic pleasure: “Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic objects for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium” (Mulvey 19). There is actually a discrepancy between Bardot’s erotic power, reinforced by the allegorical function of the sea, and her lack of emancipation.

Therefore, the construction of the Bardot myth is ambivalent in these three films. The very last shot of Vadim’s Et Dieu… créa la femme is from the sea, showing the village of Saint-

Tropez, suggests the idea that the newlywed couple played by Juliette and Michel has eventually found a form of harmony. This shot is insightful in that it reverses the roles of male/female domination. Indeed, it is not until her husband slaps her in the face for sleeping with her brother that Juliette (Brigitte Bardot) starts respecting Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an image that causes problems on several levels. Not only does Michel’s gesture towards Juliette support the idea that a man can only be respected through the use of physical violence, no matter how unintentional that meaning of the gesture might seem to be, but it also suggests the idea that love and matrimony can only be possible through male’s domination over woman. As a consequence, the reversed shot at the end of the film and the view of the couple’s home from the sea suggests the idea that a woman can only lead a settled life if she accepts her husband’s authority and puts her sexual desires aside, which is why the essence of womanhood suggested by Vadim is

ambivalent, because the woman has to be sensual, free to express her sexual desire, while at the same time being “une jeune fille bien rangée” or a housewife. The definition of womanhood suggested by Godard is also problematic because it is after Camille’s body has been subjected to scrutiny by the filmmaker, her husband, and the spectator that she decides to leave her husband to eventually die in a car crash. As for Rozier, the different close-ups onto the lustful glances that men cast at Manina reveal her vulnerability and portray her as a prey. Therefore, both the male actors and the spectator become possessor of the female object presented on screen (Mulvey 21) and Bardot is only used for her sexual appeal. As I demonstrate, all three filmmakers use the myth of Venus and other biblical and mythological references (Eve, mermaids) to project male desires and fears about woman’s emancipation.

Recreating a mythological space

If the Mediterranean became a myth, it is essentially because the movies in which Bardot played were shot by male directors who used her image and displayed her body to offer a new vision of femininity, a vision of femininity which I insist remains nonetheless ambiguous.

Indeed, Willy Rozier’s film Manina la fille sans voiles, Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu... créa la femme along with Godard’s Le mépris all have in common that they displayed Brigitte Bardot’s body to present an image of femininity synonymous with sexual emancipation at a time when France was in need of a national symbol and French women were gaining access to more rights and independence. Seascapes undeniably played an important part in the creation of the Bardot myth and that of the Mediterranean, as both cannot be conceived independently from one another.

According to Thierry Houlle, water is an essential element of mythology: “l’eau est vénérée par les anciens comme une puissance active et bénéfique. L’eau est un langage que les hommes ont voulu déchiffrer, l’eau est un miroir où se reflète le monde, un oeil ouvert sur le mystère (…) Les

eaux ont inspiré la parole des poètes et des oracles” (190). If Houle’s analysis remains somewhat

limited and lacks a deeper psychoanalytical explanation, the link between water and femininity is

further analyzed in Bachelard’s work. In Water and Dreams, Bachelard offers what he calls a

“psychology of water” (152) and studies the representation of the liquid element in literature.

Although Bachelard largely favors the presence of fresh water and advocates its superiority over salt water, I believe that his archetypal image of the “woman landscape” can be applied to

Bardot’s Mediterranean films. By coining this term, Bachelard imagines a symbiosis between female body and waterscapes as the latter are often used as an allegory of women’s bodies.

Water and femininity are intrinsically related as water is used as a symbol of mother’s milk and

birth:

In every man’s life – or at least in every man’s dream life – a second woman appears: the

beloved or the wife. The second woman is also projected upon nature. The woman-

landscape takes its place beside the mother-landscape. Of course, the two projected

natures may interfere with or screen each other. But there are cases in which they can be

distinguished. (126)

To some extent, Bachelard argues that man projects onto nature his desires related to the

opposite sex. Water, and in this case the sea, is seen as an allegory of femininity, motherhood,

and sexuality. Going back to Bardot and the Mediterranean, the presence of the seascape in the

movies in which the actress plays is not only a way to reinforce her sexual appeal and eroticize

the Mediterranean, but it is also a way to give both the woman and the aquatic space a mythical

dimension.

Manina la fille sans voiles is actually the second film Bardot appeared in (her first one

being Le trou Normand with Bourvil, shot in 1952 by Jean Boyer). Although she had been 37

noticed by the audience in her previous film and in Manina, Rozier’s film did not achieve the success of Vadim’s Et Dieu... créa la femme. In her memoirs, Bardot wrote about the shooting of

Rozier’s film that “Je m’attendais à l’enfer, je ne trouvai que le purgatoire!” (Bardot 84), which clearly indicates the lack of enjoyment she had on the film set. According to Vadim, the failure of Rozier’s film lay in the fact that “The director of this dreadful piece thought he knew something about eroticism” (Vadim 53), although Vadim himself does not provide any definition as to what eroticism should entail. Rozier was certainly interested in shooting erotic films later on in his career; however, Manina la fille sans voiles remains rather innocent despite its suggestive title, which plays on the ambiguity of the term “voiles”, referring both to the absence of fabrics and the lack of a moral standard. Roger Vadim, who later became Bardot’s husband, added that the failure of Rozier’s film was also partly due to the fact that “Censorship being what is was in the fifties, we were only permitted to see Brigitte emerge from an ocean wave in a bikini” (Vadim 53). It is quite ironic that the presence of that very tiny piece of fabric would be a hindrance on the eroticism of the film. Even though Bardot appears naked in Et Dieu... créa la femme, it is only during the opening scene of the film. The lovemaking scene at the beach between Juliette and Antoine is not shown, only hinted at. Therefore, the eroticism of Vadim’s success lies elsewhere, that is to say in the presence of the seascape, Juliette’s revealing clothes along with her nonchalant attitude.

Manina la fille sans voiles is actually more memorable for the presence of the seascape and that of Bardot’s body than the creativity of its plot. Rozier’s film is about a young law student, Gérard (Jean-François Calvé) who finds a treasure – a Greek amphora - off the coast of

Corsica. Eager to find such treasures, Gérard decides to go back to the same spot a few years later, which gives him the opportunity to reconnect with Manina (Brigitte Bardot), the daughter

of the lighthouse keeper who has now blossomed into a pretty (and curvy) young lady. At the end of the film Eric (Howard Vernon), whose smuggling boat Gérard has borrowed in order to be able to access the location, sails away with all of the findings. Gérard desperately swims after him and almost drowns until Manina dives into the water to save him. Rozier’s film was seen as an illustration of the various changes occurring in France at the time it was shot: “Manina was shot in Corsica, and Bardot and her bikini crystallized sociological and fashion shifts from the city and home, to the beach and the Mediterranean” (Vincendeau 27). The invention of the bikini by Louis Réard in 1946 along with Bardot’s screen debut reflected an important change in the way women perceived themselves or wanted to be perceived, that is to say as masters of their own lives and bodies while still wanting to present themselves as seductress. Despite a somewhat unimaginative plot, references to sexuality through the medium of the representation of nature and the seascape are undeniably present in Manina la fille sans voiles. The actress’s sensuality is not only apparent through the different shots that reveal the “silhouette” of the sublime actress

(long shots are often used to show her whole body from head to toe) but also thanks to Rozier’s various close-ups of the lustful glances that the men cast at her (especially during the scene when

Manina climbs aboard the smuggling boat that Gérard has borrowed).

From the outset, the sea is presented as a place that encapsulates secrets of the past while also being used as a metaphor for sexual coming-of-age. The use of the word “proie” by the

Professor of La Sorbonne can be applied to the female character of the film: “La mer garde son secret mais aussi sa proie”, foreseeing that whatever Gérard encounters in the water (Manina included) will remain his. While all the other students seem bored, busy flirting with their classmates or doing unrelated things, the Professor happens to be talking about Ptolemy, who narrated the story of a shipwreck and the loss of Trolius’ treasure. Captivated by that story and

eager to follow Trolius’ footsteps, Gérard later announces to his professor that he has the

intention to go back to the place where, five years earlier, he found his first amphora. When

Gérard goes back to Corsica, the location’s remote setting and the presence of the seascape give

his romance with Manina a more intense tone. Furthermore, the references to mythology enable a

mythical representation of Corsica.

In all three films, the presence of water enables a sensual apprehension of the main character’s body, who is seen very often swimming in the simplest attire (when of course she is not wearing anything). The most interesting visual moment of Manina la fille sans voiles is undoubtedly the series of underwater shots that come just before Manina and Gérard meet each other again for the first time since Gérard’s initial visit on the island a few years ago. After anchoring the boat, Gérard goes diving and from his perspective at the bottom of the sea, sees a woman swimming on the surface of the water. The low angle shot of Brigitte Bardot makes her akin to a mermaid. The analogy with the mermaid is also present when Manina happens to sing while walking around the rocky island, which to some extent recalls Lorelaï (a nymph who would lure sailors by singing and force them to capsize near her, or even the singing of the sirens that Ulysses tried to keep his crew away from on his way back to Ithaca). In the film however, instead of causing Gérard’s death or trying to keep him in captivity, Manina actually saves him from drowning. The reference to the sea creatures reinforces the idea that Manina is like no other woman and has a mythical aura attached to her. Back lighting gives the impression that Manina is not wearing anything, arousing the interest of Gérard along with the spectator’s “voyeuristic pleasure” (to use Mulvey’s expression) even more. In that sequence, Rozier plays on a series of shot-reverse-shots to announce the imminent encounter between the two characters. Surprisingly, though the older Manina has nothing to do with the young one (even their hair color is different),

Gérard recognizes her immediately. His allusion to their past encounter suggests that even as she

was younger, he felt some strong attraction towards her (he asks her if she remembers the songs

that she would sing to him and admits that he has not forgotten her). Rozier uses water

allegorically, both as a symbol of birth (since a new idyll is about to unfold) and as a way to reinforce Manina’s sexual appeal.

The erotic power of Manina’s analogy to a sea creature is emphasized by the

Mediterranean Sea in Rozier’s film. As Bachelard demonstrates in Water and Dreams, water is

an element generally used by authors to convey the idea of female sexuality and nudity (33). In

Manina, Gérard dives daily in order to find more treasure off the island, until one day he

penetrates an underwater cavern filled with findings, an image which for Freud is allegorical of

the female sex: “The female genital is symbolically represented by all those objects which share

its peculiarity of enclosing a space capable of being filled by something—viz., by pits, caves,

and hollows, by pitchers and bottles, by boxes and trunks, jars, cases, pockets, etc” (A General

Introduction 163). During one of his explorations, the cavern in which the young student is

entering to find more amphorae can be interpreted as a metaphor of sexual penetration: the

young man swims towards the light while black rocks surround the frame, an image that is quite

evocative of female genitalia. This metaphor of sexual penetration is reinforced by the fact that

simultaneously, Eric (the owner of the boat) forces Manina to kiss him, therefore creating a

compelling tension between male and female desire insofar as male desire is depicted as being an

intrusive act. As Mulvey points out, woman is objectified in that as far as this scene is concerned,

sexual desire is forced upon the eponymous character. As a consequence, the image of the

underwater cavern, its shape and the colors associated with it could certainly be seen as a

metaphor of the sexual act that has not happened yet, a fact that creates some sexual tension

throughout the film.

In Vadim’s Et Dieu… créa la femme, sensuality is also mostly conveyed by the seascape

itself, which appears in the background of the opening scene. To some extent, all the senses are

enhanced as this scene is visually and aurally appealing, which implies that all of the spectator’s

senses are stimulated. Although there are no underwater shots like in Manina to suggest a

metaphor of the sexual act, the presence of the sea in the distance prefigures the outcome of

female sexuality since it is at the beach that Juliette will later betray her husband with his

brother. Thus, to some extent the sea announces Juliette’s duplicity and symbolizes the rise of

her repressed desires for Antoine (Christian Marquand). An extreme long shot frames the village

of Saint-Tropez with the glittering sea in the distance, revealing the beauty of the location and

working as a mirror to reflect the sexual appeal of Juliette: the mountain behind the sea echoes

the curves of Juliette’s naked body in the opening scene, creating a perfect harmony between the

young woman and nature so as to inscribe her presence even more in the space in which she

moves around and associate Bardot’s characters to the Mediterranean.

The plot of Vadim’s film revolves around the love triangle between Juliette (Brigitte

Bardot), an orphan girl who walks barefoot through the streets of Saint-Tropez, Michel (Jean-

Louis Trintignant), who owns a little company that careens ships and Eric Carradine (Curt

Jürgens), a businessman who wants to buy Michel’s company. From the outset, the name of the main character highlights her ambivalence in that it can be seen as an allusion to Sade’s novel

Juliette ou les prospérités du vice to emphasize Juliette’s immoral actions or it can also be interpreted as a reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to infer the main character’s innocence. Therefore, Juliette is presented both as an innocent and a dominant figure, a temptress whom men cannot help to fall for. Another man steps in, Antoine, whom Juliette makes love

with on the beach while his brother Michel is gone to a nearby city for business. Eventually

Michel, who has married Juliette so that she does not have to be sent back to an orphanage,

forgives his wife for her misconduct and both live a happy matrimonial life.

The opening scene of Et Dieu… créa la femme, with its biblical allusions, create an obvious parallel between Vadim’s protagonist and Eve. The presence of an abundant nature and female nudity convey an image of a paradise and a seductress who is at the origin of sins.

Moreover, the title of Vadim’s film could not be more explicit. Et Dieu...créa la femme

underlines the idea that Vadim set himself, through the medium of his film, as the creator of a

new type of femininity. Juliette is the only female character seen in the film (besides her

adoptive mother and Carradine’s friend, who is seen very briefly on his boat), which serves to

highlight her importance within the plot and emphasize her attractiveness. Several biblical

references appear during the opening scene of Et Dieu... créa la femme which supports the idea

that Juliette is supposed to embody the very essence of a new type of femininity. As Carradine

steps into the garden to find Juliette (which could be seen as a metaphor for the Garden of Eden),

the businessman says: “J’ai apporté la pomme”, to which Juliette answers “Quelle pomme?” “La

tentation”, he answers. When she stands up, Juliette realizes that the car that the businessman

promised her is only a miniature toy (Carradine is clearly playing with her) and exclaims “Vous

m’avez bien eue!” to which he answers “Pas encore.” There is an interesting parallel to be drawn

between the little red car that Carradine holds in his hand and the red Alfa Roméo in which

Camille dies in Godard’s movie, as if the latter was constantly trying to recreate the same

mythical image of the actress as in Vadim’s film. Besides, Camille says to Prokosch “Monte

dans ton Alfa… Roméo” as if it was a way for Godard to make another intertextual reference

(Shakespeare) and even also make a direct allusion to the influence of Vadim’s heroine onto his

film. Carradine’s reference to The Bible and his final answer betray his sexual attraction towards

the young lady. The explicit mythological allusions will be absent from the rest of the film as she

will turn out to be a genuine seductress who is not afraid to test her power on men before she

eventually leads a settled life with her husband. The contrast between the opening scene and the

last shot of the film shows that Juliette is portrayed both as an object of male desire and as a

subject who gets what and whoever she wants in order to reveal her complexity and her effect

upon the men who are intrigued by her. That first scene is important in that it sets the tone of the

narrative and presents the Mediterranean as the birthplace of a new myth, therefore contributing

to mythicizing the Mediterranean.

The presence of water also participates in building up the sexual tension present throughout the aforementioned film and emphasizes the analogy between Bardot and the goddess

Venus. Water being often associated with sexuality, the sea in the three films conveys a certain sensual aura. Even the soundtrack in Vadim’s film is meant to suggest the sexual power of the place and of the character7. The connection between Botticelli’s painting and the representation of Bardot is especially quite obvious in Et Dieu… créa la femme. In Botticelli’s painting, the

Roman Goddess comes out of the sea, standing onto a seashell. Her luxurious blond hair hides

parts of her body while the contours of her white milky flesh stand out against the blueness of the

sea. Water appears as a central element of Venusian qualities. Shahrukh recalls that Venus (the

Roman equivalent of Aphrodite) was born in the sea:

7 The soundtrack, which Harper and Rayner define as “aural landscape” (19) is also relevant in conveying the sexiness of both the place where the action is set and the characters. According to both scholars, “Sound and music are integral to cinematic landscapes. Whether these work as naturalist reinforcements of the image, or whether they are complementary, their contribution is considerable” (19). In other words, Paul Misraki’s composition in Vadim’s film is important in the sense that it is actually another way to emphasize the sexual tension at the core of the film, as if all of the spectator’s senses were titillated so as to make him participate in a sensual experience. Indeed, the saxophone is both languishing and spellbinding. Moreover, it transmits the idea of sensuality that will be present throughout the entire film and that is intertwined with the image of the south of France. 44

Aphrodite came into being when the sky god Uranus was castrated and produced at last,

mighty ejaculation which foamed in the sea and coagulated in the goddess. She was

blown from friendly winds until she came ashore on Cyprus, where she was clothed and

venerated. She was eventually co-opted by the Greeks into the Hellenic system, but

remained unruly, like her source, the sea-womb. It is possible that she became the

divinity of sexual love because of a metaphorical link between the sea and desire: both

are unpredictable, mysterious and potentially overwhelming. (51)

Vadim intentionally tried to recreate the famous painting in the scene where Antoine tries to rescue Juliette at sea. At the time when the Franco-Russian director shot Et Dieu...créa la femme,

Brigitte Bardot and himself had been married for a few years already although their relationship

was threatened by Bardot’s encounter with Jean-Louis Trintignant (Michel in the film), who

turned out to be Bardot’s lover both on and off screen. A reading of his memoirs on the different

actresses that Vadim had been with during his life (among whom Catherine Deneuve and Jane

Fonda) enables an understanding of his perception of Bardot, whom he compared to Botticelli’s

portrayal of the birth of the Roman goddess. Indeed, one can read as the opening sentence of the

chapter dedicated to Bardot the following comparison:

The goddess of love had not been seen emerging from the sea since Botticelli painted

Venus floating on a mother-of-pearl shell. But this was the spectacle that two thousand

American marines witnessed on May 12, 1953, at 11/30 a.m. from the aircraft carrier

Enterprise, anchored in the Bay of Cannes. First they saw her long tresses floating on the

surface of the water; then her face, streaming with drops of water, glistening in the sun

like so many diamonds. Her innocent, sensual mouth and perfect oval eyes, her delicate

nose, her cheeks as round as a child’s, were made for pleasure and laughter. Two hands

with aristocratic wrists gripped the edge of the Christ-Craft and the apparition hoisted

herself on board: a delicate neck, a thin waist that a man could encircle with two hands; a

round, provocative and tender derriere that would have been the envy of Adonis and

Aphrodite; perfectly curved hips, long, firm thighs, charming ankles, and the arched feet

of a dancer. A little bikini, a shadow rather than a garment, hid nothing of this sensual,

glorious body. (13)

Although it is unlikely that the actress would have climbed onboard the aircraft-carrier in the simplest attire, the parallel that Vadim drew between Bardot and the goddess is obvious in his film. Indeed, the connection between water and the female body is at its climax in the beach scene. Although Juliette wears a dress and has her hair tied up, these differences are here to hint at the woman’s sexual appeal. Without revealing too much of her body (although he does in the opening scene), Vadim recreates his analogy between Juliette and Venus to eroticize and mythicize the beachscape. Not only is the connection between Bardot’s body and the

Mediterranean Sea common to all three films, but as I will explain, the mythological and biblical references continue to make that parallel between the actress and mythological images explicit.

If the opening scene’s allusion to myth presents Juliette as an ambiguous character and only hints at her potential sexual power, the scene of Vadim’s film that contributed to make

Bardot a modern myth is undoubtedly that of the beach. The location, Saint-Tropez (and the

Victorine Studios in Nice) were seen as a perfect choice: not only were Bardot and Vadim already familiar with the little fishermen’s towns as Bardot’s parents had bought a small house in

La Madrague, but it was also ignored by tourists who spent their time in Cannes, Antibes, Juan- les-Pins, Monaco and the Promenade des Anglais in Nice (Vadim 36). Therefore, the untouched nature of Saint-Tropez made it a perfect choice for idealization and mythicization of the scenery

and that of the woman. During the beach scene, an extreme long shot of Juliette and Antoine swimming back to the shore shows an array of very bright colors and the different shades of blue that the Mediterranean Sea offers give an impression of an untouched landscape that almost makes the viewer want to bathe in that crystal clear water. All the elements of the summer are combined in this scene’s aesthetic: the noise of the waves along with the deafening singing of the cicada make the scenery akin to a paradise. The untouched nature is also true in the sense that it gives the impression that no editing has been performed and that the nature has been shot just as it is. White sand beach, turquoise water, blue sky: all the characteristics intrinsic to the south are essentially gathered in this very photogenic scene designed to awaken the spectator’s senses and recall the idea of lost paradise. In this famous scene, Juliette’s husband Michel has gone to a nearby city for business. Probably out of boredom, Juliette borrows a small sailing ship to go to sea. When her brother-in-law Antoine arrives on site at the fairing company that he owns, he realizes that Juliette has taken the small boat which is in reparation. Worried that she might have an accident, Antoine drives to the beach, swims to the boat in flames and pushes Juliette into the water to rescue her from the fire. A few moments before the love-making scene, a long shot reveals the two bodies recovering on the edge of the water after a long swim, while the blueness of the sea and that of the sky in the background evoke the beauty of summertime and of the

Mediterranean Sea. The presence of the two young people creates a striking contrast with the imposing seascape. As Juliette emerges from the water, her white dress is half open, allowing

Antoine and the spectator to catch glimpses of the contours of her body, a shot that enhances the erotic tension of the scene. Filmed in a low-angle shot, Brigitte Bardot looks like a divine creature that has emerged from the sea, an image that recalls Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The passage from the inside of the water to the outside symbolizes the rise and conscious acceptance

of her desire for Antoine.

As Juliette puts her foot onto her brother-in-law’s face to burrow it into the sand as an act of domination and provocation, the scene at the beach starts to become more powerful. Antoine pulls her leg and drags her down onto the sand. Juliette lies down, but in a very unnatural way: the pause she takes so that her curves stand out against the blue color of the sea undoubtedly calls for Antoine’s attention and that of the spectator as she is undoubtedly away of her seductive power. Antoine eventually lies her down under the branch of a tree, whose undulating form recalls that of Juliette’s body. Although the love-making act is not shown, the scene is imbued with considerable sexual tension, which is probably what makes it even more memorable. After they are done making love, Antoine walks away while Juliette dresses herself. The branch of a tree obstructs the shot and establishes a clear division between the two characters: Juliette is on the left, separated from Antoine by the branch, an image that suggests that the two lovers will not reconnect later in the film and that Juliette has somewhat lost her status as the goddess of love and sex. As a consequence, Vadim uses explicit allusions to mythology to make his character akin to a Venus who eventually turns out to be nothing more than the product of male fantasies about the opposite sex.

Nevertheless, out of the three film directors scrutinized in this chapter, it is probably

Godard who plays with the notion of nature and space the most. The presence of the seascape in

Le mépris is indeed quite imposing. Based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, Il Disprezzo, Le mépris tells the story of the disintegration of a couple, Paul (Michel Piccoli) and Camille

(Brigitte Bardot), during their stay in Capri, Italy. Paul Javal has been asked by film producer

Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) and film director Fritz Lang (played by Fritz Lang himself) to rewrite the script of Ulysses, a project which Paul reluctantly ends up accepting mainly because

he needs money. Paul cowardly tries to push his wife into the arms of Prokosch, which Camille resents. Step by step, the contempt she directs towards her husband grows, until neither can communicate or understand the other. Out of revenge, Camille eventually leaves with Prokosch and dies in a car crash.

Bardot was twenty-eight years old when she was cast by Godard and the salary that the actress cost him was actually half of the film’s one-million dollar budget itself. She was already famous when she started the shooting of Le mépris and Richard Brody explains that Godard had been wanting to work with her for a long time: “He had long wanted to work with Brigitte

Bardot, whose performance in Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu… créa la femme from 1956, had seemed to him and his friends at Cahiers like a riotous, erotic intrusion of brash youth into the sclerotic film industry. But working with Bardot, and dealing with her demands and her celebrity, turned out to be difficult.” (157) Brody also adds that the relationship both Godard and Bardot had was

“a silent and mutual disillusionment” (165) as both were very different from each other and

Godard could not have the same connection with Bardot that he had with Karina. That said, as is usually the case with Godard’s work, the film is noticeable for its use of space. Through the medium of mise-en-abyme, the presence of the seascape not only reflects Ulysses’ journey back to Ithaca after ten years of absence, but it also creates a discrepancy between the secluded life of

Camille and Paul, confined to their apartment in Rome, and the openness of Prokosch’s Villa

Malaparte in Capri.

Godard therefore plays on the presence of the mythological space, inherent to the story of

Ulysses, and the symbolic representation of space, since the seascape serves to reflect on the impossibility of Camille and Paul to ever be united together. In his article on Godard’s use of cinematic space, Ross Exo Adams explains that the filmmaker’s use of the scenic background is

meant to “destabilize the smooth cinematic experience” (15). While a film’s landscape or seascape is usually just seen as a backdrop to a narrative, in his films Godard plays with the spectator’s expectations by using Bazin’s thoughts on the presence of the landscape:

In mainstream cinema, the cinematic space as a background to the unfolding drama

almost always plays a role subordinate to the action and presence of the film’s central

figures. In its most general sense, the scenic background provides a basic topography in

which the central plot can take root and develop – a luminous surface which renders the

precise texture and tension that the audience is supposed to read between characters. And

much like the effect a soundtrack produces, the background often supports a singular

reading of the film’s drama. Yet in many of Godard’s films, and quintessentially in his Le

mépris, he inverts this relationship, turning the background into a kind of formal device,

which interacts with the drama of the film in a bizarre and unsettling way. As evidenced

by Le mépris, Godard’s use of filmic space – the background in relation to the characters

– puts into question this very coherence that we expect to see between the space of the

film and the consistency of action taking place within it. (16)

The overwhelming presence of the seascape in Le mépris serves to play with the notion of space and project reflections on abstract notions such as infinity and death that are characteristic of the myth. Adams also identifies three types of techniques used by Godard himself: the “scale shift”, when “the characters in the foreground become reduced to a point where the composition of the background suddenly competes with and overwhelms their presence” (17), the “character positioning”, when Godard gives more importance to the background than to the characters themselves (17), the “obstruction” of objects and background décors prevent from seeing the characters entirely and the “absorption” or the “subtle and momentary dominance of a deep

décor” (18). Adams argues that all of these four techniques find themselves combined in the

scene at Paul and Camille’s apartment. Godard plays with the space of the film within the film

and that of the actual film so as to overlap them and confound the spectator as to what experience

he is actually participating in as a way to criticize the codes and narrative conventions imposed

by mainstream cinema (Adams 21).

However, one thing that Adams does not quite focus on in his article is the

psychoanalytical reading of the seascape. Indeed, the scholar mentions various types of

backgrounds such as buildings, rooms, décors, and landscapes used by Godard as a way to question the aesthetics of cinema. Yet, I believe that Godard’s particular focus on the aquatic space and the presence of Bardot give both the sea and the actress a mythical aura. By emphasizing the importance of the sea, Godard gives an impression of infinity, a feeling necessary to experience what the Gods actually felt themselves. The final shot of the film, which we find again two years later in Pierrot le fou (1965) is an extreme long shot of the sea after

Ulysses is seen raising his arms in front of the vast aquatic element. The camera ignores the

shooting of the film within the film to focus on the immensity of the sea as a way to suggest its

mythical dimension.

Besides its use of space, Le mépris also makes direct references to mythology since the

film’s plot revolves around the shooting of a film on Ulysses’ journey. Discussions about Greek

gods are present from the very beginning when, during the viewing of Lang’s film, Prokosch

claims that he loves gods and knows exactly how they feel. Fritz Lang answers that “The gods

have not created men. Men have created God” which is exactly Godard’s moto, as the director

strives to make his characters akin to mythical creatures. Through his mise-en-abyme, different

Greek statues are filmed in low-angle shots, some with a painted face or a painted body part. The

color used (blue, red, and sometimes black) on their white bodies recall the lights that Godard uses in the opening scene between Camille and Paul lying onto their bed, therefore creating a first comparison between the female character and deities. After a close-up of Homer’s face,

Lang’s camera cuts to a shot of a dark-haired woman, swimming naked in the sea. Prokosch asks: “Francesca, what is that?” to which the assistant answers that it is a mermaid. Godard manages to create a subtle parallel between the mermaid present in Lang’s film and Camille.

When in their apartment later on, Camille puts a dark-hair wig onto her, recalling the character of the film within the film (and also Anna Karina, who was Godard’s muse and inspiration).

Camille also swims naked in the sea when she decides to leave Paul. To some extent, these two elements make Camille as if she wanted to position herself as a divine sea creature.

The mise-en-abyme in Le mépris not only serves as a reflection on cinema but also as a way to pause and ponder Camille and Paul’s relationship. Incidentally, Paul associates Camille with Penelope. Indeed, he is convinced that if Ulysses did not return earlier from his adventures, it is because he did not want to get back to Penelope. Paul is convinced that Ulysses’ wife cheated on him, just like he is convinced that Camille does not love him anymore. Eventually, when Camille dives naked into the sea at Prokosch’s villa in Capri, the scene alludes to the one of the mermaid swimming naked in Lang’s film so as to present Camille as a sea creature.

During Camille and Paul’s last argument, the frame is divided into two parts: on the left side, the rocks are behind Paul while on the right side of the frame, Camille is swimming in the openness of the turquoise sea. The opposition between the two backgrounds reveals that both characters belong to different spaces and that their relationship is doomed to fail. Camille swims away, leaving Paul. It is the last time she is seen before her car accident with the film producer

Prokosch.

It is noteworthy that the presence of nature and the imposing presence of the seascape

cannot be detached from the focus that all three filmmakers have on the body. Although I have

briefly referred to Bardot’s body in Manina with the use of the bikini, it is especially in Vadim’s

and Godard’s films that her nudity is openly displayed. The presence of her nudity juxtaposed to

that of nature, recalling Botticelli’s famous painting and other mythological creatures, is what gives Bardot, the characters she plays, along with the Mediterranean a mythical dimension.

Bardot’s nudity

Talking about Bardot comes down to talking about her body which, as I have demonstrated before, was seen as an object of fascination for both men and women and contributed to give her a goddess-like aura. In an article on the American version of Et Dieu... créa la femme, shot by Vadim himself in 1988, Stanley Kauffman wrote that he could not remember much of the original plot if not the curves of Brigitte Bardot.8 Bardot was indeed as

famous for her beautiful shapes, her negligent hairstyle and her frequentation as her acting,

although Godard’s Le mépris (1964) did enable her to assert her credibility in the eyes of the

public after she shot Le repos du guerrier with Vadim a year earlier. Bardot was both praised and

hated by French women, who considered her a model and sometimes an immoral woman whose

conduct was often judged as reprehensible at the time. Nevertheless, Bardot’s body appears as a

fascinating motif in the films she plays, as if some of the movies she is in were sometimes just an

excuse to have her exposed once again to the public’s eye and subjected to scrutiny. Her body

became a sacred object by film directors who used it as a way to market a certain ideal of the

female body and femininity. While defining the notion of femme fatale, Doane explains that “she

8 Kaufmann, Stanley. “Et Dieu...créa la femme” The New Republic. Vol. 198. April 4 1988. 24. Web 15 Oct. 2016. 53

is attributed with a body which is itself given agency independently of consciousness” (2). To

some extent, Bardot’s body crystallizes male fantasies about the opposite sex while also

encoding their fear of castration. It is therefore essential to consider Bardot’s body as what

revealed her as a myth, a myth that goes with the invention of the Mediterranean as a sensual

place. Although she was still young when she shot Manina (barely eighteen years old); Bardot’s

bikini exposed her potential sexual appeal that was subsequently exploited by Vadim and

Godard, whose films both share some very compelling resemblance in the way her body is used

to depict sexual freedom, eroticize, and mythicize the Mediterranean.

The opening scenes of both Vadim’s and Godard’s films are very similar and present

Bardot’s body as an object of desire. In Et Dieu... créa la femme, when Carradine walks into the

garden of Juliette’s adoptive parents, a white sheet falsely suggesting the idea of innocence is

hanging, hiding Juliette’s naked body (only her legs and her feet are revealed to the spectator’s

gaze and Carradine’s). As she sweeps the air with her feet, she is immediately presented as a

playful and nonchalant character. Her face is still not shown to the spectator so as to arouse their

curiosity (Carradine already knows her as both live in the same little town). The camera cuts to a

long shot of Juliette’s naked body, lying on the ground, therefore revealing her perfect curves

and her blond hair while her face remains turned to the opposite side. From the outset, it is as if

Juliette and Bardot could not be dissociated from one another as the character that the actress

was in real life was not far from the playful woman that she embodies in Vadim’s film.

Therefore, the presence of nudity in the opening scene, overlapping the luxurious nature which I

have previously demonstrated, is meant to build the sexual tension that will be at the core of the

film and which is essential in order to make Juliette/Bardot stand out as a model of sensuality

which he clearly announced in the very title of his film.

Camille, the heroine of Godard’s film, is also portrayed from the beginning as an object

of desire. Right after the credits of Le mépris, a shot reveals Camille and Paul lying on a bed who are being introduced to the audience as a couple for the first time. A medium shot of their faces and the low-key lighting convey an atmosphere of intimacy. Unlike Juliette who seems more self-confident and who does not need the confirmation of one man regarding her sexual appeal,

Camille enumerates every single part of her body and subjects each of them to Paul’s opinion: indeed, she starts asking whether he likes her feet or not and goes on to name each part of her body going from her toes to her head. The detailed attention to Camille’s different parts reinforces the search for bodily perfection, as if she was presenting herself as a divine creature.

The blazon also creates a parallel between her body and that of the Gods who are constantly mentioned in the film, either through the film they are shooting or the books about Greek Gods that Camille reads through at Prokosh’s house in Rome. In their article on Le mépris, Silverman and Farocki assert that the scene between Camille and Paul is a reference to blazon poetry:

This scene, which consists of a single shot, also performs an interesting inversion of a

traditional form of praise: the blazon. The blazon had been used by poets for centuries to

describe the beauties of the human body. Conventionally, it proceeds through a male

anatomization of a woman’s charms, and could be said to be territorializing in effect.

Here, however, the woman performs the anatomization herself and orchestrates the

praise. (34)

Silverman and Farocki also add that Camille anatomizes her own body to establish that it is adored (34). The notion of “territorializing” put forward by the two scholars is quite compelling in the sense that Camille’s body is intrinsically associated with the Mediterranean space as a way to eroticize and mythicize it at the same time. In that scene, the connection between female body

and French identity is also reinforced by the use of the lights: Godard uses red, white and blue lights as a reference to the French flag. If Godard likes to play with other colors in that “Toute la

deuxième partie sera dominée par le bleu profond des mers, le rouge de la villa et le jaune du

soleil; on retrouvera ainsi une certaine trichromie assez proche de la statuaire antique véritable”

(Godard 81), the filmmakers’ intention in that scene is to present Camille/Bardot as not only the

embodiment of national values (which he questions by introducing the color yellow and

associating it with the red as a reference to communism) but also as a goddess.

Moreover, the effect of the blazon is reinforced by the movement of the camera and the close-ups on Camille. After she asks her husband whether he likes her shoulders, the camera goes down her body. The close-up added to the slow motion of the camera corresponds to what

Laura Marks calls “haptic visuality” (2) that is to say when the camera moves over the surface of

its object to discern its texture in order to convey a tactile experience to the spectator: “Haptic

perception is usually defined as the combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive

functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies. In haptic

visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch” (2). Marks makes the distinction

between “haptic visuality,” which implies the involvement of the viewer’s body in the process of

seeing and “optical visuality,” which implies more distance between the viewer and the object.

Furthermore, the scholar argues that even if a scene is not fundamentally erotic per se, the

“haptic visuality” is in itself erotic in that haptic images necessitate giving up visual control and

“construct a particular kind of intersubjective relationship between beholder and image” (13).

For instance, whereas pornographic movies are not necessarily haptic, “Haptic images pull the

viewer close, too close to see properly, and this itself is erotic” (16). In other words, by reducing

the distance between the viewer and Camille and by focusing on the latter’s skin and curves,

Godard draws attention to the character’s body and underscores her erotic power from the very beginning of the film. Moreover, when Godard’s camera travels down Bardot’s body in order to go up again, it is as if the camera and the spectator were caressing Camille. Therefore, cinema becomes an experience in which the spectator is invited to participate, feel and somewhat

“possess” the female character. As Vivian Sobschack points out, “the film experience therefore, rests on the mutual presupposition of its intersubjective nature and function, based on the intelligibility of embodied vision” (6). Both introductions to Juliette and Camille present her body as a perfect vision of femininity, as the incarnation of a goddess.

While Juliette’s nudity is only seen at the beginning of Et Dieu... créa la femme although the film is constructed around the sexual tension aroused by her, other scenes in Le mépris insist on the erotic power of Camille’s naked body. During Camille and Paul’s argument at their apartment, both voice-overs overlap to comment on their relationship while the camera cuts several times to various shots of Camille who is lying naked in front of the camera, her arms wide open. Camille is resting on a white then on a blue and a red carpet, recalling once again the colors of the French republic so as to present her as a national symbol. As a consequence, the presence of nature and that of the aquatic space, used as a metaphor of femininity and sexuality, along with the nudity of the characters played by Bardot prepare her to become a myth.

Interestingly, the American version of Et Dieu... créa la femme (1988) shot by Vadim himself has absolutely no resemblance whatsoever with the original plot and stunning seascapes.

In his American version, Robin Shee (Rebecca de Mornay) is a convict who has sexual intercourse with one of the prison’s carpenters, Billy Moran (Vincent Spano), and who marries him to get out of prison and pursue her career as a rock singer. Robin and Billy have a love-hate relationship as Robin only married him so she could get out of prison and she tries also to seduce

a politician who can help her with her parole hearing. Robin and Billy eventually become

infatuated with one another and live happily married. Not only has Rebecca de Mornay nothing

of a Lolita despite her physical assets: the rock singer haircut of the nineties and her slender

figure as opposed to Bardot’s curves make her less of a phenomenon. Additionally, the plot

remains dull and uninteresting. Bardot’s relationship to the Mediterranean and her presence as a

sex symbol evolved after the late 1960s. As Sellier points out in her book Masculine Singular,

New-Wave film directors had an ambiguous relationship with Brigitte Bardot. While Truffaut

saw the actress as a new symbol of femininity, “Bardot, having reached the status of a star of

popular cinema, became a bad object for auteur cinema” (200), who favored actresses like

Jeanne Moreau for instance. In La collectionneuse (1967), Rohmer suggests the influence of

Bardot onto the perception of the Mediterranean Seascape to present a new version of femininity.

Rohmer’s blazon of the seascape: a shift in the representation of the Mediterranean

Although Bardot participated in the invention of the Mediterranean Sea in French film as a mythical space, Rohmer’s films also undoubtedly take on a specific relation with the sea. If most of them are set on the coast of Brittany or Normandy, La collectionneuse (1967) is the only one set near Saint-Tropez. In her article on Rohmer and the beach, Fiona Handyside analyses

Pauline à la plage (1982), Le rayon vert (1986) and Conte d’été (1996), and mainly argues that

Rohmer’s “films analyse the differing ways in which the cinematic beach can express modernity:

as site of narrative ambivalence, isolation, and loneliness, and as site of mass culture leisure and

pleasure activities” (150). I would like to develop that statement by arguing that La

collectionneuse is not paradoxical in that it plays on the ambiguity between isolation and mass leisure, but that it plays on the equivocation of male/female desire while taking on a particular visual pleasure and sensual experience of the sea for the spectator at the same time.

The film stages the summer of Adrien (Patrick Bauchau), a young and attractive dandy

who owns an art gallery and who decides to go to the South of France to spend some time off.

While on vacation, the artist stays at a friend’s villa with his friend Daniel (Daniel

Pommereulle), when the young Haydée (Haydée Politoff) steps in and stays at the same house.

Adrien finds his routine interrupted by the girl’s arrival, whose presence triggers several questions in terms of the desire that she arises in him. Although he is not absolutely attracted to her, Adrien is still intrigued by her nonchalance and the various partners she is often accompanied by. Trying to remain indifferent to her potential attractiveness, Adrien spends his time going to the beach and meditating on his feelings. His attempt to seduce Haydée fails as she clearly seems more interested in Daniel’s company than his own. After a series of ambiguous moments between the two protagonists, Haydée eventually leaves for Italy with some friends and

Adrien decides to travel to London to meet his girlfriend (played by Mijanou, Brigitte Bardot’s sister, an intriguing coincidence).

Rohmer plays on the parallel between the blazon of the body and that of the sea in a very compelling way so as to emphasize the beauty of the Mediterranean space and suggest its allegorical function. Indeed, even though Haydée is less sexy than the characters played by

Bardot, Rohmer still uses the beautiful nature of the south and shots of the female body to reveal and allegorize the equivocation of male/female desire. Although the “Premier Prologue” focuses on Haydée and the beach, in the film Rohmer challenges Bachelard’s image of the “woman landscape” that is to say the assumption that the sea is necessarily associated with femininity, by introducing the character of Adrien. The film opens with a long shot of Haydée walking along the shoreline, her slender silhouette standing out against the sea: “she is seen strolling in a skimpy bluish bathing suit against a huge blue background of sea. This at once associates her

firmly with that of color and with nature” (Crisp 43). If the color of her swimsuit echoes that of

the sea, unlike for Manina, Juliette, and Camille her interaction with nature is somewhat limited:

incidentally, Haydée is never seen swimming in the water or coming out of it, as if staying on the

edge of the sea was highlighting the apparent ambiguity of her character: not completely on the

beach, nor within water, Haydée has, unlike the characters played by Bardot, no mythical

dimension as she is not associated with water. Although Crisp sees her as “a Venus emerging

from the sea” (43), I do not agree with this statement for several reasons: not only do we not see

the character interacting with water, as she only stays in between the sea and the sand (which

clearly denotes the impossibility to understand or control her), but also her pout, her black short

hair, and the absence of curves make her akin to a Lolita rather than a goddess or a mythological

sea creature to use the term Beauvoir defines in her book on Brigitte Bardot.

The shots Rohmer uses serve to emphasize her potential sexual power and recall the

opening scene of Le mépris, therefore creating a compelling contrast between Camille and

Haydée. The camera pans to follow a young woman walking along the beach which, as opposed

to a tracking shot, serves to highlight the fact that she is an intriguing woman who attracts

attention but who remains hard to follow. The woman is filmed in a long shot for about twenty-

five seconds and the absence of monologue and/or voice-over replaced by the sound of the

waves immerse the spectator within the environment. The camera cuts to a close-up of her feet, an image that fetishizes the water from the outset. The camera tilts up Haydée’s legs to frame her knees, and goes down her legs again to frame her feet. The “premier prologue”, of about a minute long, is filled with many different close-ups of her body parts: a medium shot focuses on her shoulders and her face. The young woman is seen pouting, looking down at the sand, recalling once again Beauvoir’s use of the expression “Lolita”. Yet if she is perceived as a child,

the close-ups suggests her sexual attraction. Indeed, the camera tilts down from her face to focus

on her stomach and the region below her navel before cutting to a close-up of her back and

shoulders. The light is becoming stronger too, suggesting the increase of desire and the camera

cuts to a close-up of her knees seen from behind (recalling Jérôme’s attraction to Claire’s knee in

Rohmer’s Le genou de Claire). The camera cuts from the back of her knees to the front of her

knees and tilts upward, unveiling all her body parts one more time until the camera stops on her

face. The camera cuts to a close-up of her neck before cutting to the second prologue, which

presents Daniel to the spectator. In this opening scene, Haydée’s body parts are systematically

dissected and submitted to analysis: the young woman is akin to an object, she is reduced to her

“animal vitality” (Crisp 44) and desire becomes one of the central elements being questioned

within the plot. That series of shots recalls blazon poetry and the opening sequence of Le mépris,

therefore underlining the influence of Bardot’s representation of the female body. For the

moment though, the “collectionneuse” is the one who is being part of the spectator’s own

collection of bodily images through the presence of these close-ups. Once again, this series of shots is intriguing because Haydée’s physical assets have nothing of the famous icon that B.B embodied. Rohmer films her in a way that suggests her erotic power to create a wider discrepancy between the way she is filmed and the absence of relationship between her and

Adrien that will subsequently be at the center of the film’s narrative. There is indeed a noticeable

parallel in the way that Rohmer films the woman’s body and the way he films the sea, for which

he uses exactly the same series of cuts and close-ups. Rohmer uses this parallel technique to

actually shift the attention of the spectator from the woman’s body to the sea in order to offer a

haptic and very sensual experience of the aquatic element.

Rohmer voluntarily uses those series of rapid shots to play with the spectator’s

expectations. If at first the filmmaker focuses on Haydée’s potential assets, he then shifts the attention to Adrien, whose routine and behavior will be impacted by the presence of the young woman. Whereas the opening scene focuses on the presence of the young lady by the seaside to suggest her potential effect on men, the film later decides to concentrate on Adrien’s relationship to the water. Each day, Adrien creates a routine to take a dip in the Mediterranean Sea. While for

Bachelard water is essentially associated with motherhood and female sexuality, as I have demonstrated throughout my analysis of Bardot’s three Mediterranean films, the presence of

Adrien and his willingness to enjoy the seascape that surrounds him demonstrates a significant connection between the aquatic element and the representation of masculine desires. Indeed,

Adrien experiences a very sensual relationship with the sea in which the spectator also takes part through the presence of close-ups of the water and the sound of the waves. On his first day, the dandy is seen standing on one of the rocks, contemplating the aquatic element and enjoying his solitude. The camera films several long shots of the water to insist on the presence of the sea in his newly-found routine. The different close-ups of the crystal clear water reveals Rohmer’s willingness to focus on the sea’s aesthetic beauty and recall Laura Marks’s definition of “haptic visuality”, which is an essential component of Godard’s introduction of Camille. In La collectionneuse, the close-ups of the sea also serve to enhance the sensual experience of the character and of the spectator, which speaks to what Jennifer Barker refers to as a reciprocal action between the film’s body and the spectator’s body: “the viewer’s skin extends beyond his or her own body, it reaches towards the film as the film reaches toward it” (33). This dialogic relationship between the viewer and the viewed object is present in this very scene: the shots are very tempting and make the spectator want to experience and feel the beautiful water. This scene is sensual in that it stimulates both the character’s and the viewer’s senses.

The use of rapid cuts in Rohmer’s film reveals a wish to pay closer attention to the beauty

of the seascape than to the representation of the woman as a sea creature, which is what makes

the representation of the Mediterranean Sea less “mythical” than in the three other films

considered in this chapter, which play onto the parallel between water an mythology. The way

the water is filmed by a series of close-ups indicates a desire to seize the beauty and the truth of

nature: “la représentation chez Rohmer unit le Vrai et le Beau, la Vérité et la Nature” (Desbarats

128). However, during a colloquium on “Peinture et Cinéma” that took place in Quimper in

March 1987, Eric Rohmer claimed that: “je n’ai jamais cherché dans mes films à imiter des

tableaux” (Desbarats 110). In the same colloque Rohmer explains later that “Il se trouve même

que le film peut être le plus pictural parmi eux, c’est La Collectionneuse, et dans La

Collectionneuse, il n’y a absolument aucun tableau. Si : il y a une œuvre d’art, mais qui est une

sculpture montrée par l’un des personnages, le peintre Daniel Pommereulle, qui d’ailleurs apparait sous son vrai nom et joue son propre rôle” (Desbarats 111) before insisting that what matters most for him is the idea of “vraisemblance” (111). Although the film does not imitate

one painting in particular, the series close-ups onto the sea that Rohmer makes somewhat recall famous paintings by the Impressionist school who often used the seaside as a source of inspiration. To some extent, Rohmer’s film and use of the blazon technique also contributes to

the beautification of the Riviera. However, the filmmaker insists on its beauty and the

relationship between water and desire instead of contributing to the myth-making of the

Mediterranean seascape through its interaction with female bodies.

As Adrien narrates that “J’étais seul devant la mer”, the camera cuts to a close-up of the pebbles under the crystal clear water, which is followed by a cut and a close-up of the seaweed.

The camera cuts to a close-up of green plants under the water, capturing their movements before

cutting to another shot of the pebbles previously shown. The camera then cuts to a medium shot

of Adrien playing in the water and drawing circles with his arms. The young artist explains that

he was feeling “une espèce d’euphorie où vous met le premier contact de la saison avec la mer”

and then starts swimming. The camera cuts to a close-up of seaweed before cutting to a long shot

of Adrien coming out of the water. Incidentally, Adrien explains during his first encounter of the

sea that he is fascinated by the different movements of shades and lights. Even though he is

pretending to not be interested in the landscapes unlike painters and writers from the

Impressionist movement (or the Romantic and Realist movements as far as literature is

concerned), the different shots of that sequence inadvertently recall the interest the

Impressionists had for water and beautify the location where Adrien is spending his vacation.

The same way that he uses close-ups to reveal the natural beauty of the landscape, Rohmer uses a

series of cuts to highlight his characters’ bodies. However, while Haydée is mostly shown for her

body parts, Adrien’s body is not showed to suggest that his connection to water is stronger. On

one hand, water serves to reveal the potential erotic power of the woman and on the other hand,

it serves to narrate the male’s experience with beauty. Adrien admits that he wants to melt into

water: “Je m’imaginais très bien coulant, pendant tout un mois, mes journées dans le même

moule” that is to say to become one with water therefore changing the focus of femininity to

masculinity. To sum it up, it is as if the water was helping him shift his heterosexual desire from

Haydée, whom he cannot have, to the sea.

In conclusion, whereas Rohmer eventually offers a different representation of the aquatic

space insofar as the director shifts the attention from the female body to a collection of images of

the sea so as to not only present an image of feminitity who is not subjected to male domination

and also point out the aesthetic of the sea, the present chapter argued that the invention of the

Mediterranean Sea in films coincides with the invention of the Bardot myth to create a space that is eroticized and mythicized. Indeed, the first films in which the Mediterranean seascape appear significantly all have the presence of the famous French actress in common. The sea works as a symbol of femininity and contributes to enhancing the sexual power of the actress. The seascapes along with the references to mythology give the icon a mythical aura at a time when France was looking for a new emblem, which in its turns contributed to make the visions of the

Mediterranean in French cinema mythical, as tourism in the south of France increased. Yet, the

Bardot myth is quite ambivalent. The three filmmakers at the core of this chapter, Rozier,

Vadim, and Godard all answered a need to create a new version of femininity, a woman both sexually free while still being controlled by the male gaze. The characters embodied by Bardot are more complex than might seem at first. As a conclusion, I used the example of Rohmer to draw the attention to the interaction between seascapes and male bodies which will lead me to concentrate on space, body, and male subjectivity in the following chapter. Indeed, the question I want to raise is: what treatment is imposed upon the Mediterranean Sea to represent questions inherent to masculinity? If water is used as a symbol for the unconscious, what does its representation in films tell us about men’s place within society? By continuing the analogy to

Freud’s topography of the mind and putting into dialogue two different genres of films shot at two different time periods, Luc Besson’s Le grand bleu (1988) and James Huth’s Brice de Nice

(2005), I will demonstrate that the depth of the sea can also be used in films as a symbol of repressed sexuality to evoke a masculinity in crisis. The Mediterranean Sea is therefore not just a space that is eroticized and that has been mythicized thanks to the presence of women but also becomes a space onto which male fears about castration are projected.

Chapter 2

Sea, sex and sons: male subjectivity in crisis in Le grand bleu and Brice de Nice

“Je me demandais tout à l’heure… Quel genre de vague tu peux surfer en Méditerranée?” Marjorie in James Huth’s Brice de Nice.

If Serge Gainsbourg’s lyrics “Sea, sex, and sun” perfectly describe the Mediterranean Sea in the 1950s, it is essentially thanks to the youthful looks and promiscuous lifestyle of Brigitte

Bardot, whose films participated in the eroticization and mythicization of the Mediterranean seascape. The films that made her famous shaped an ambivalent vision of femininity that was idealized, mythicized while at the same time being subjected to the male gaze. Women were seen as objects of desire as opposed to subjects having an agency of their own. That said, one aspect that has been less emphasized until now is the connection between masculine bodies and the sea and the way this connection has enabled a representation of masculinity with respect to the opposite sex. If in Bardot’s films, men are captivated by the aura of the characters she plays and are seen as “des machines désirantes” (66), to use Deleuze and Guattari’s expression, this chapter offers a deeper understanding of the relationship between masculinity and the seascapes in

French films that goes beyond the sexual attraction aroused by female characters upon their male counterparts. According to Bachelard, “The sea-oriented unconscious is a spoken unconscious, an unconscious too dispersed in adventures tales, an unconscious that never sleeps.” (153) This chapter argues that while women in films set by the sea are seen as objects devoid of any 66

unconscious representation, the sea essentially offers an access to repressed male desires. Indeed,

Handyside argues that “the films that deal with the question of female subject formation date from the 1990s onwards, and it is more difficult to find earlier films that offer a sympathetic engagement with female subjectivity and the beach” (19/102). As a consequence, the question that I want to investigate is the following: what does a psychoanalytical reading of the presence of the sea in films set by the Mediterranean can tell us about the construction of male subjectivity?

When thinking about male figures in relation to the sea, two French films particularly stand out. Who, for instance, does not remember the heroic figure of Napoleon facing a raging storm in Gance’s biopic or Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s underwater exploration of the

Mediterranean Sea? In both Napoleon (1927) and The Silent World (1955), masculinity is portrayed as fearless and courageous. These two films essentially present the male figures as masters of the sea, one defying the natural elements (Napoleon) and the other popularizing marine life (Cousteau). Nevertheless, in these two examples, the waters of the Mediterranean Sea remain solely a space of conquest as opposed to becoming a space where, as Bachelard argues, the male characters can pour fourth their repressed desires. Indeed, Gance uses the natural décor of the sea to offer a compelling illustration of Napoleon’s relationship to space and his wish to master it. To some extent, the aquatic space becomes an object of power and domination for the future Emperor. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre makes the distinction between

“dominant”, “dominated,” and “appropriated” space. According to Lefebvre, “dominant space is invariably the realization of a master’s project” (165) such as military infrastructures forts and ramparts) which dominate the space by their imposing architecture. As far as dominated space is concerned, it is “usually closed, sterilized and emptied out” (165). Motorways are an example of

a dominated space where nature is transfigured by the roads. As for appropriated space, “Often

such a space is a structure - monument or a building – but this is not always the case” (165). The

notion of dominated space that Lefebvre offers remains somewhat unclear and it is not quite

obvious whether this can be applied to landscapes and seascapes. Furthermore, Lefebvre admits

that the characteristics of dominated and appropriated space sometimes overlap, which makes the

distinction between the two somewhat vague. His argument also lacks clarity when writing that

claiming a landscape as its own is self-deceptive (189). To go back to the Mediterranean Sea, I contend that both Napoleon and Cousteau claim the aquatic element as their own, even though their achievements were contested and criticized. Although he was considered a hero and received a Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, the opening scene of The Silent

World (which is anything but silent) along with the shark massacre and the use of dynamite in the documentary unveil Cousteau’s disruptive behavior with respect to the maritime environment. In some way, the Mediterranean Sea is illustrated as an “appropriated space” by these two emblematic figures who, for different reasons, demonstrated a spirit of conquest. In the case of Gance’s Napoleon (1927) water was a way for the Emperor to express his revolutionary ideas and expand his territories beyond his homeland while for Cousteau, his knowledge of the sea is what made him an inspirational figure for previous generations, who considered him an explorer of the modern times.

In the two films I analyze in this chapter, Luc Besson’s Le grand bleu (1988) and James

Huth’s Brice de Nice (2005), the notion of appropriation of the aquatic space represents a shift in the construction of masculinity. While Napoleon and The Silent World concentrate on the relationship between the natural element and the male body, offering access only to the external representation of these heroic figures, I argue that in Le grand bleu and Brice de Nice the sea

becomes a symbol of the unconscious, allowing a deeper access to the character’s inner development. While evoking parenthood, dreams, and sexuality, the two films under study enable us to understand how male subjectivity reconstructs itself. On one hand Besson’s protagonist wishes to be part of the sea and become one with the underwater world as a way to reconnect with his nuclear family, while Huth’s eponymous character wants to claim the

Mediterranean Sea as his own before being able to figure out who he actually is. Therefore, both films offer a deeper insight of male subjectivity and a portrait of masculinity that is far from the representation of the heroes of the sea aforementioned.

Consequently, my goal is to challenge Bachelard’s work and go further than the mere representation of water as an allegory of femininity and motherhood that he offers in Water and

Dreams, which was perused in the previous chapter. By understanding the relationship of the masculine sex with water, I intend to shed new light onto the representation of masculine subjectivity in French cinema. If Bachelard’s image of the “woman landscape” articulates a compelling connection between the female body and the aquatic element, one objection that might be made to his fascinating psychological reading of the sea in literature and poetry is that

Bachelard does not question the relation between masculinity and aquatic space, nor does he hint at the representation of masculinity through the presence of water. The only masculine image the

French philosopher refers to in Water and Dreams is that of the swan, present in some literary works: “it will not be difficult for the least experienced of apprentices in psychoanalysis to discern the masculine traits in this last image of the swan. Like all images active in the unconscious, the image of the swan is hermaphroditic. The swan is feminine when brilliant waters are contemplated, but it is masculine in action” (36). Bachelard further adds that the symbolic of the swan’s song is always that of sexual desire (37). Essentially, the swan remains

an ambiguous creature that encompasses characteristics of both sexes and that is embedded with

a strong sexual desire. Although water is still portrayed as an allegory of femininity and sexuality

in Luc Besson’s and James Huth’s films, as references to motherhood and sea creatures such as

mermaids abound, I want to ponder the way French cinema has enabled a portrayal of a

masculinity in crisis by contesting the norms associated with the distribution of gender roles.

Interestingly, I demonstrate that the protagonists of the two films I scrutinize share, like the

swan, sexually ambiguous traits. Because of their repressed sexual desires, both Jacques Mayol

and Brice de Nice are still at a pre-oedipal stage where they are in search of their identity.

Therefore, if according to Bachelard water remains essentially feminine as “The sea is maternal;

water is a prodigious milk” and that “The earth prepares in its womb a warm and rich food”

(119), I expand on Bachelard’s work and examine how masculinity and the sea are actually

intrinsically connected to offer access to male hidden and repressed desires.

However, before diving into a detailed analysis of both Besson’s and Huth’s films, one might ask what is meant by the terms “masculinity”. How is this term different from the French word “virilité” and how do these two terms contrast with the notion of heroism mentioned in relation to Napoleon and Cousteau? In order to answer this question, it is first important to pause a moment on the etymology of these terms and distinguish the difference between the French equivalents “masculinité” and “virilité”. According to Jean-Jacques Courtine, “‘masculin’ n’a

guère le plus longtemps été qu’un terme grammatical. Au XIXe siècle, et dans le premier XXe

siècle encore, on n’exhorte pas les hommes à être ‘masculins’, mais ‘virils’, des hommes, disait-

on, ‘des vrais’… Que ‘masculin’ en soit venu à supplanter ‘viril’ est bien le signe qu’il y a,

décidément, quelque chose qui a changé dans l’empire du mâle.” (8) As a consequence, if

“masculine” is a grammatical construction used to refer to the male gender, the word “virilité”

was invented in order to suggest societal expectations with regards to the attitude that the masculine sex was supposed to assume. Courtine defines the word “virilité” as an “idéal de force physique, de fermeté morale et de puissance sexuelle” (8) and also adds that “cette domination masculine ne relève d’aucun état de nature, mais qu’elle est profondément inscrite dans celui de la culture, du langage et des images, des comportements que ceux-ci inspirent et ordonnent.” (8)

Therefore, the term “virilité” came to suggest that the society projected an ideal of perfection and accomplishment that the masculine sex had to respond to and that one can be a man without necessarily being “virile”. The physical, moral, and sexual strength that man is supposed to encompass are questioned in the two films aforementioned. Indeed, the characters Jacques Mayol and Brice de Nice are used by the two directors as a way to challenge those coercive values imposed upon their sex.

Additionally, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau explains that this “virilité” constructed by

French society became a factor of significant importance during wartime and was reinforced by the conflicts that France went through at the end of the nineteenth-century. According to Audoin-

Rouzeau, the different wars led to what he calls a “militarisation de la virilité” (201) in that it was mainly through soldiers that this constructed idea of “virilité” came into existence. The soldier was seen as a manly figure who had to be strong and fearless, two moral criteria that made men “viriles”. Incidentally, men who had been drafted were expected to shut down their emotions when in combat in order to fight and not risk their own life: “la virilité, pour soixante- dix millions d’hommes sous les drapeaux, s’est lue dans leur capacité à affronter le combat et la peur, à faire face au risque de l’atteinte corporelle, à supporter la blessure, l’agonie, la mort”

(201). As we shall see, James Huth’s character is the exact opposite of that image of “virilité” promulgated during the war. Yet, if the war strengthened the image of men, it is also what

gradually participated in the loss of that “virilité” advocated by French society. Audoin-Rouzeau points out a “dévalorisation du fait Guerrier” after the First World War due to the many casualties that the conflict provoked and the development of photography, which spread images of humiliated soldiers who had been physically and mentally injured (Audoin-Rouzeau 203).

Therefore, the context in which men found themselves at the beginning of the twentieth century severely affected the idea of ‘virilité’ that had been raised, which resulted in a social change regarding the difference between sexes. At the same time, women’s rights were increasing, which participated a change that occurred in French society during the second half of the twentieth-century: “c’est dans l’Occident tout entier que va bientôt s’exprimer, au tournant de ces années 1960, théâtre de tant de bouleversements dans la définition des identités sexuées, un malaise dans la part masculine de la civilisation” (7). As a consequence, if masculinity has been in crisis since the beginning of the twentieth century (and actually even before that in the

Romantic movement), the Second World War widened the gap between men and women, affecting their representation of power in cinema. It seems, however, that while the notions of heroism and manliness quite overlap, one difference might be that manliness implies a certain

“puissance sexuelle” while heroes are mainly characterized by their outstanding actions. The direction that I offer to take, in the following pages, is to understand how the Mediterranean Sea has been used to convey the idea of a masculinity in crisis both in Le grand bleu and Brice de

Nice. Brice’s absence of physical prowess, the search for his moral conduct, and Jacques’ repression of sexuality question the notion of “virilité” in order to offer a new definition of what being a man entails.

Narcissist child-men in Le grand bleu and Brice de Nice

If there are some actors who always seem to perform the same type of roles, there are

others who, like Jean Dujardin, manage to embody many different types of characters. As a spy in Michel Hazanavicius’ OSS 117 (2006 and 2009) or as a fallen silent actor in the same director’s film The Artist (2011) or even as a man prone to sex addiction in Les infidèles (2012) to name but a few examples, Jean Dujardin is a daring actor in terms of the variety of personalities he embodies on screen. It is however in a parody (although I shall come back to the use of that term later) of the Californian surfer in James Huth’s Brice de Nice (2005) that the

French actor became especially popular. Although he was already known on the TV screen thanks to the mini-series “Un gars, une fille”, produced by Isabelle Camus and Hélène Jacques, which ran from 1999 through 2003 on France 2, and the famous group called les “Nous c nous”,

Brice de Nice (to be pronounced ‘Braïce de Naïce’ so as to give him the traits of an American surfer) was a true breakthrough role for Dujardin. Originally, Brice’s acute sense of raillery, his taste for getting on people’s cases, his blond hair, and the yellow shirt bearing his name were just part of a few TV sketches popularized by the TV show “Graines de stars” broadcast on the M6 channel before James Huth decided to make a movie adaptation. The expression “J’t’ai cassé!” or “Ça farte?” constantly repeated by Brice became part of the young people’s language at playgrounds. To some extent, Brice influenced a whole generation of young people just like Luc

Besson’s Le grand bleu met with a great success when it came out in the late eighties.

With its multiple intertextual references, Brice de Nice shares many similarities with the

American surfer movie. Indeed, Brice has nothing of the skills of the two talented friends Robert and Mike surfing around the globe in Bruce Brown’s documentary The Endless Summer (1966), nor does he have anything of the rugged and manly appearance of the American Beach party surfers present in films such as Beach Party (1963). As Pablo Dominguez Andersen points out in his article “The Hollywood Beach Party Genre and the Exotification of Youthful White

Masculinity in Early 1960s America”:

The beach party genre formed part of this larger cultural attempt to reinvent hegemonic

white masculinity in the face of this lamented crisis by representing an especially

youthful type of the vigorous male nonconformist and tailoring it specifically to the

desires of teenage audiences. In the figure of their male protagonist, the surfer, the films

established a new type of young white masculinity that functioned as a particularly

youthful corrective critique to the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’s supposed effeminacy.

The surfer as imagined by the beach party films was a natural, rugged, and rebelliously

masculine type, unspoiled by domesticity and conformity. (514)

Brice de Nice borrows many traits from these movies that were popular in the 1960s although, as

I shall demonstrate later, Huth’s character is the exact opposite of the male protagonists usually

featured in these films, certainly as a way to emphasize the crisis of masculinity within French

society. Brice de Nice also makes very explicit references to Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break

(1991) although, as Genette points out in Palimpsestes, this term “parody” has been interpreted

with some confusion. Brice de Nice makes explicit allusions to other films in order to create a

discrepancy between the manly and brave attitude expected from the traditional Californian

surfer and the narcissist and childlike surfer that the main character actually embodies. The

eponymous character of Huth’s film makes obvious references to Kathryn Bigelow’s Point

Break, starring Keanu Reaves as FBI agent who takes surfing lessons in order to arrest famous thief Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). The film originally came out in 1991 and was remade in 2015 by

Ericson Core. The original version scored a wider audience (1,351 132 entries) than its remake, which only registered 524 087 entries. Brice is the exact opposite of Bodhi, whose name I will analyze below. Indeed, Brice has no idea how to surf and lives his life vicariously, reciting the

lines of his favorite character instead of learning how to surf.

In Palimpsestes, Gérard Genette explains the origins and aspects of the parody, a term

that finds its origins in Aristotle’s Poetics. Because of the absence of clarification by Aristotle on

the use of the Greek term “parodia”, except that it qualifies any low action (“basse action”)

treated on the narrative mode (“mode narratif”), Genette offers to redefine the term by

establishing several categories. For Genette, a “sujet vulgaire” (surfing as a matter of fact,

although Genette does not give any explanation as to what a “sujet vulgaire” or “sujet noble”

actually is) treated in a “style vulgaire” (with humour) is just a comedy. Genette explains that a

parody is a “sujet vulgaire” treated in a noble way (30), which is not the case with James Huth’s

film. The only noble subject that might be treated is that of Buddhism, since Bodhi is the

abbreviation of the word “Bodhisattva” and Brice devotes a temple to his favorite movie character. In this case, Brice de Nice is not only a comedy but also what Genette calls a

“travestissement burlesque” (30). Whichever terminology one might eventually decide to adopt, the discrepancy between the dramatic tone used by Kathryn Bigelow and the comic tone used by

James Huth while evoking surfing is a way for Huth to satirize the ideal of masculinity conveyed in Bigelow’s work and surfer movies to a larger extent. The “virile” and masculine surfers interpreted by Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, among the cited examples, are in complete opposition with James Huth’s would-be surfer.

Genette further explains that the function of the different types of parodies he defines

(although he classifies them under different terminology) is to mock the heroic content of the noble actions present in the epic poem (19) and have a satirical function (29). Although the comedy cannot be treated too seriously, one might infer that it still allows for interrogation about masculinity. The question I would like to raise is this: what vision of masculinity is James Huth

trying to instill by referring to Point Break in a comic tone? Furthermore, can we also give much credit to a comedy? According to Phil Powrie “the French comic film has nearly always relied on male incompetence as a source of humour, although clearly it is questionable to what extent such humour is subversive of traditional norms” (11). Although it becomes difficult to figure out to what extent a comedy questions what it mocks, I believe that the presence of many intertextual references to films and psychoanalysis reveal Huth’s intention to deconstruct the traditional heroic, virile image of masculinity that is usually conveyed in films. Moreover, I posit that the main message he advocates is that one can only be a hero if he/she finds oneself and becomes true to oneself. Because of the great number of references to other films, Huth’s idea is to question masculinity and give an image of an imperfect male character at a time when men were facing the pressure of being masculine and virile and could no longer respond to the pressures imposed upon their sex. Phil Powrie makes the claim that this crisis of masculinity occurred in the 1970s (although as we have seen before, according to French anthropologist Jean-Jacques

Courtine it started right after the First World War). For Powrie, “During the 1980s, the crisis of masculinity which has begun in the 1970s with the advent of feminism became more acute, largely due to social factors” (8). Furthermore, according to Powrie the term “crisis” refers to a form of repression: “Men have to repress not only their femininity under the edicts of patriarchal values, but also, under the impact of feminism, their masculinity” (11). The question of repression is what is mainly at stake in Luc Besson’s and James Huth’s film, even though both films belong to different genres. I contend that James Huth’s character reverses the norms associated with gender roles by questioning notions such as sexuality and fatherhood to present the vision of a man who does not correspond to the ideal of perfection that society imposes. Far from being courageous and sexually vigorous, Brice is a man in search of who he is and who

eventually finds happiness in what he enjoys doing.

Brice de Nice also shares several characteristics of a movie that was shot years earlier:

Luc Besson’s Le grand bleu (1988). Although the only scene that might have been a source of

inspiration for James Huth is that of Jacques Mayol’s hallucination, when he sees a gigantic mass

of water crushing him while he is resting onto his bed, the films share some connections in terms

of how their respective filmmakers articulate their idea of masculinity. Although Jacques Mayol

is an accomplished free-diver rather than a loser who dreams of surfing a gigantic wave, his

relationship to the sea and the way it is used to refer to his relationship with his mother, women,

along with his fear of paternity are all relatable to Brice’s experience of the sea, which he

perceives as a substitute mother. While Brice de Nice plays on a comic tone, Le grand bleu

articulates a compelling image of a masculinity in crisis by being more serious and evoking

themes such as death. In her book on the filmmaker, Susan Hayward explains that despite the

success of Besson’s film in theaters, it was not well received at the Cannes Film Festival that

same year. Indeed, Besson was somewhat frowned upon by New-Wave film directors as his films are different in that “Besson makes no claim to being an auteur and refers himself as metteur en scène” (Hayward 2). Le grand bleu is a simple story based on the real life of free- diver Jacques Mayol (played by German actor Jean-Marc Barr) and his friendship with Enzo

Maiorca (Enzo Molinari in the film, played by French actor Jean Reno). The film starts in black and white as a reminiscence of their childhood on a remote Greek island, where both boys were more rivals than friends. Enzo constantly defies Jacques to dive further than him and it is only decades later that Molinari, who has become a famous world champion, decides to reconnect with Mayol to give him a chance to compete against him at another world championship. Their reunion in Sicily and around the Mediterranean offers not only a story about diving but also a

coming-of-age experience for the main character. His friendship with Enzo and his encounter with Johana (Rosanna Arquette) are an occasion for Jacques to learn about women and also about himself. Like Brice, his attraction to the sea reveals a fascinating representation of the construction of male subjectivity and sexuality that stands in opposition with the usually virile and desiring male character.

Both Jacques and Brice can be seen as child-men who live in their own world. While Le

grand bleu focuses on Jacques’ obsession for diving with dolphins, Brice de Nice focuses on the

eponymous character’s obsession to surf a gigantic wave… in the Mediterranean Sea! If Jacques

is constantly seen in the water (whether sea water or the water of the pool), Brice spends his days

trying to surf on the calm sea, waiting to ride the wave that he fantasizes about. When not at the

beach, he organizes “yellow” parties in which all the persons he invites must wear a yellow outfit

(although none of them actually do) and where at some point the guests have to enter into a

“joute verbale” with him, a moment when he faces one of his guests in a raillery contest. From

the very beginning of the film, Brice appears as a narcissist brat who has nothing to do with his

life except watch Point Break and desperately wait for something that will probably never come.

It is undeniable that despite his amusing personality, Brice lives his life vicariously, strongly

identifying himself with Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), his hero and mentor, whose lines he knows by

heart. Also noteworthy is the signification of the name and the allusion to Buddhist theology, as

Bodhi can be seen as the abbreviation of the term Bodhisattva who “was an Enlightened One,

who, through generations of meditation and contemplation, had learned how to escape the

endless cycle of death and resurrection that afflicted the rest of humanity, but who, as an act of

compassion, regularly chose a body in which to be reborn so that he could help others to reach

salvation” (Shahrukh 95). To some extent, Huth’s main character could be seen as the

reincarnation of Bodhi but the wide discrepancy between Brice and who he aspires to be creates this comic effect. Indeed, Brice is far from having reached a knowledge of who he really is and is anything but compassionate.

From the opening scene of the film, Brice is presented as a very eccentric and self- centered character whose nature turns out to be that of a child-man instead of a grown-up, which is also a personality trait that Jacques shares. The latter’s quietness and lack of knowledge concerning women make him akin to a child. Both characters are egocentric, although Brice takes pleasure in making his self-centeredness obvious while Jacques rarely expresses himself and somewhat remains mysterious. During Brice de Nice’s opening credits, the camera twirls and focuses on the eponymous character’s yellow shirt. Brice wears it all the time and the piece of clothing can be seen as his uniform, with his name written on it. The shirt inverts the famous

Nike logo, originally referring to speed and motion, by reversing the swoosh and adding a splash of water so as to make it look like a wave. The logo starts undulating like a real wave, alluding to

Brice’s passion for surf and highlighting the originality of the character he is. Delphine

Chedaleux argues that the color of this shirt (which so owned by Brice in hundreds of models) is a reference to childhood and absence of formed sexuality: it is, she writes, a “couleur enfantine et unisex” (8), which goes back to the “counter-oedipal” idea that Hayward emphasizes in her article on Luc Besson’s film. Indeed, Brice has no relationship with his mother and the one he has with his father goes from conflictual at the beginning of the film, to eventually become nonexistent. Therefore, the choice of this yellow tone also serves to erase the blue/pink colors presently associated with gender and highlights the idea that Brice is a person who is in search of who he is and whose sexuality is not yet affirmed.

Contrary to Brice, Jacques is often seen wearing blue, a color which not only associates

him with a boyish aura but which also irremediably associates him with the sea. The opening scene of Le grand bleu portrays Jacques as a puny child who is under Enzo’s domination, who constantly defies the protagonist to dive deeper in the sea. Enzo is often shot in a low-angle as a way to emphasize his superiority over the protagonist. Jacques is different from Brice in the sense that he rarely talks and prefers solitude to social interactions. Moreover, his slender silhouette, his emaciated face, along with his quietness, show little evolution between his childhood in Greece depicted at the beginning of the film in black and white and the man he has become. To cap it all, Jacques is often told by Enzo what to do, whether it is about diving or about women, which emphasizes his childlike aura and situates him at a pre-oedipal stage.

During the scene at the pool or in the submarine, Enzo offers to give advice to Jacques about

Johana. Jacques’ lack of knowledge about women, to which I shall come back later, along with his refusal to accept paternity at the end of the film, highlight the fact that he is not quite an adult yet. Although different in appearance, Brice and Jacques are thus more similar than what one might believe at first sight.

Although Jacques himself is the opposite of a narcissist, his friend Enzo is very different in that he often wears some night gowns bearing his name on them. Jacques nevertheless remains self-centered as he has very little interaction with other humans and would rather spend his time with dolphins. To some extent, James Huth might have been inspired by the scene when Enzo rescues the foreign divers as, just like him, Brice also loves to have his name tagged on his clothes. Brice’s self-centeredness is also highlighted by the fact that all the objects he possesses recall his peculiar haircut: his toothbrush, his cell phone have a strand of blond hair as if it was a way for the character to market himself through the object he possesses and make himself important while also being nothing but an impersonal brand name. In A General Introduction to

Psychoanalysis, Freud defines narcissism as the way the subject concentrates his sexual impulse towards himself:

the libido, which we find attached to certain objects and which is the expression of a

desire to gain some satisfaction in these objects, can also abandon these objects and set

the ego itself in their place; and gradually this view developed itself more and more

consistently. The name of the utilization of the libido – Narcissism – we borrowed from a

perversion described by P. Näcke, in which an adult individual lavishes upon his own

body all the caresses usually expended only upon a sexual object other than himself.

(422)

Brice’s relationship with his own body and his rejection of sexual experiences with women, as we shall see later, is thus expressed through the objects he surrounds himself by: not only do his toothbrush and cell phone bear a strand of hair, but all the objects that he possesses are yellow

(the sheets of this bed, his night-gown, etc.) to underline the extent of his narcissism. During his daily routine, Brice dutifully listens to his own voice that he has recorded, which emphasizes from the outset that Brice’s world is all about himself and that he has no regard for other people, especially elderly persons (he removes a chair at the café to sit himself, which causes an old man to fall). Even worse, Brice is a misogynist who has no respect for women and has no idea how to treat them. During one of his “Yellow” parties, Brice takes pleasure in criticizing and hurting the opposite sex by telling one of his female friends that the man she is in love with has never had feelings for her. Even if Brice is seen as very hilarious and is surrounded by many people who idolize him, he has no personality of his own. Indeed, he wears the same shirt and pants every day. At the beginning of the film, his maid hands him a plate of Nutella-filled milk rolls (a typical snack that French children enjoy eating after school), which he throws onto the ground

before picking the one that he wants to eat. This gesture reveals his egotistical nature by not even

worrying about the fact that some people in the world might die of hunger. Yet, the yellow shirts

or the snacks that are given to him are all the same. Brice convinces himself of his originality by

picking a new shirt every day and by throwing out Nutella-filled milk rolls as if they were different, when they are clearly not. As a consequence, Brice lives in a world that is different from the world the spectator and the other characters of the film actually perceive. Brice’s narcissism along with Jacques’ self-centeredness derive from the fact that both men have no parental figure to identify with. Both men direct their libido towards themselves as a substitute for what is missing in their life.

Questioning the oedipal model: the sea as the mother

Both Jacques and Brice are deprived of a family. Jacques’ mother left when he was younger and his dad dies under his own eyes, while he is going to fish with his diving bell

(Besson had his own father play the role of Jacques’ father, a mise-en-abyme which could have a lot to say about the filmmaker’s vision of family). Brice does not have a mother either, although it is not quite sure why she is gone, whether she left him and his dad when he was younger or whether she passed away. Brice also “loses” his dad when the latter is arrested for being involved in some shady business. Even before then, Brice and his father have an essentially nonexistent relationship as they are never seen together. The absence of parental figure has an implication on both character’s mental and sexual development along with their relationship to the sea and other characters. In his twenty-first lecture, Freud insists on the oedipal complex and its implication on the development of sexuality in the child. Freud argues that “all perverse tendencies have their roots in childhood” (A General Introduction 320). Although it might not be necessary to re-explain the famous myth of Oedipus, according to Freud “it is easy to see that the

little man wants his mother all to himself, finds his father in the way, becomes restive when the

latter takes upon himself to caress her, and shows his satisfaction when the father goes away or is

absent” (A General Introduction 341). Even though Freud admits that “I do not assert that the

Oedipus complex exhausts all the possible relations which may exist between parents and children” (A General Introduction 217), several limitations can be objected to his argument.

Indeed, how does the subject who has been raised by a single-parent family, such as in the case of Jacques and Brice, construct itself and its sexuality? Does it mean that the subject is forever doomed to remain at the childhood stage without any possible evolution? For Jung, young people who have managed to deal with their past transfer the imagos of their parents to “more suitable figures” (Collected Works 166), meaning that for instance, “the feeling that has clung to the mother now passes to the wife, and the father’s authority passes to respected teachers or superiors or to institutions” (Collected Works 166). As far as the cases of Jacques and Brice are concerned, the film directors confront the spectator with a different situation in which both characters have to face no one else but themselves and remain at a pre-oedipal stage.

The Oedipus complex has been the object of many debates in psychoanalysis. In her book on Besson, Susan Hayward makes the distinction between “counter-oedipal” and “anti-oedipal” by stating that: “To say they are counter-oedipal is to suggest that these films reveal the family and masculinity as being in crisis; to say that they are anti-oedipal is to suggest that these films question the necessity of Oedipus, the union of sexuality and the nuclear family complex” (147).

The difference between the two notions remains somewhat ambiguous as it becomes difficult to understand to what degree a film can become “anti-oedipal”. If I am inclined to think that these two films are “counter-oedipal” because the maternal figure is still somewhat allegorized through the presence of the Mediterranean Sea in both films and this represents the protagonists’ wish to

reconnect with their respective mother, the line between both concepts remains however quite

fine. As Hayward points out, Deleuze and Guattari reject Freud’s argument because they reject

the role of the unconscious and prefer seeing the subject as a “machine désirante.” Indeed,

Deleuze and Guattari write that “Ce que nous mettons en question, c’est l’oedipianisation

forcenée à laquelle la psychanalyse se livre, pratiquement et théoriquement” (L’anti-oedipe 62) and that “Pourtant chaque psychanalyste devrait savoir que, sous Oedipe, à travers Oedipe, derrière Oedipe, c’est aux machines désirantes qu’il a affaire” (L’anti-oedipe 147). Although the point of this chapter is not to defend one position or another, the life of the two main characters underlines a different way to apprehend and question this complex.

In Le grand bleu, Jacques’ father is replaced by the presence of Enzo, his acquaintance since childhood. Although one could argue that uncle Louis can still serve as a parent, he does not work as a model figure as not only is he absent from most of the film, but he also seems to have lost his mental capacity when he is seen diving in his own bathtub. Therefore, Jacques’ evolution remains in the hands of Enzo. Enzo’s role is important because he challenges Jacques to participate in the free-diving competition while also contributing to his sexual education.

Jacques knows nothing about women and tells Enzo he needs to know everything about them right after he has met Johana. As for Brice de Nice, the father figure is also nonexistent. The first appearance of Brice’s father is when he has his son taken by force into his limo car during the

“Yellow” party to give him instructions about a certain business to carry. Bertrand Agostini, whose name will only be revealed through the medium of newspaper headlines, is accompanied by a young blond girl who could be Brice’s sister. Agostini eventually leaves while Brice forgets about the instructions he was just given: too excited to invite more guests at his party, he drops the piece of paper his father handed him to go see his friends. It is only when the police show up

at their house to arrest his dad that they run into each other again, for the second and last time of

the film. No explanation is given to Brice as to why his father is being arrested. The goodbye to

his dad is quite unexpected as the latter tells his son he is nothing but a “con”, an idiot who does

not know anything about life or his business. It is not sure whether Agostini is insulting his son

to prevent him from being arrested or if he absolutely has not the least hope for him. To some

extent, if one wanted to use Freud’s terminology and push this analysis further, one might argue

that Brice is responsible for the symbolic “killing” of his father: his irresponsibility and

carelessness is what leads the latter to prison. Yet, the mother is still absent, which is the reason

why this film is also counter-oedipal. Indeed, it stages the regression of the main character to the

childhood stage as opposed to being an evolution towards adulthood and the realization of his

sexuality.

The absence of his dad forces Brice to connect even more with the sea as a way to reunite

with his family on an unconscious level since the water is, according to Bachelard, always

associated with a representation of the maternal figure. Left alone, Brice has to learn how to

work and make a living for himself, which he will have trouble doing. Therefore, the absence of

parents and the quest for a gigantic wave can be seen as a metaphor for a personal quest and a

reunion with the nuclear family. The sea (la mer) is a way for the main characters to reconnect

with their mother (la mère) but also with themselves. As for the paternal figure, it is replaced by the character played by Patrick Swayze in Point Break, who works as a model for Brice. The

poster of the actor he has fixed on his wall and the temple he makes for him (he has the VHS of

Point Break carefully placed inside a box) show his worship and the displacement from the

actual father to an ideal one. As far as Jacques is concerned, his fondness for the aquatic space is

also a way for him to reunite with his family.

Therefore, if Enzo on one hand and Bodhi on the other hand replace the two missing

paternal figures, the sea works as a substitute for the mothers Jacques and Brice do not have.

While Jacques’ desire to reconnect with his mother is more subtle, James Huth’s character

constantly plays on the ambiguity and the homonymy of the words “mer” and “mère”. This

ambiguity can suggest the lack of maternal figure in his life but it can also serve to mask it: because he wants to present himself as an independent subject who does not need a mother to exist, Brice plays on words to hide the void in his life. During his “Yellow” party, Marjorie

(Delphine Chanéac) and he start dancing in a sexually suggestive yet ridiculous way. Marjorie is curious to get to know Brice better and asks him questions about his parents and his mother, to which he answers: “Ma mère… C’est elle ma mère” while looking at the Mediterranean Sea in the distance. It is clear from the first half of the movie that the sea replaces his maternal figure and that one of the reasons why he is so obsessed by the gigantic wave is because it is a way for him to reconnect with his absent mother. When he works at the restaurant facing the sea, Brice asks one of the customers: “Tu regardes bien ma mèr(e).” The appropriation of the aquatic element thanks to the use of the pronoun “ma” makes the sea his own universe and his only symbolic connection with his family. After each rough period in his life, Brice irremediably goes

back to the beach and is seen in extreme long shot facing the sea or the sea itself is filmed in

extreme long shot to suggest the appeal that it has on the eponymous character. Yet, the calm

water creates a hilarious contrast with his obsession for the gigantic wave. Furthermore, Brice is

often filmed in a high-angle shot as if to suggest the idea that the gigantic wave is about to crush

him.

Essentially, Brice has nothing but the Mediterranean Sea and the city of Nice to identify

himself with. In Espèces d’espaces, Pérec asks the following question: “Qu’est-ce que

s’approprier un lieu? A partir de quand un lieu devient-il vôtre?” (36) In James Huth’s film, the

link between topography and the characters’ names emphasizes the importance of personal

belonging to a geographical space to assert one’s sense of identity and subjectivity. Furthermore,

in his book Psychoanalytic Geographies, Steve Pile argues that “Cities, according to urban social geographers, are concentrations of dreams, fantasies, memories, (un)conscious journeys, play and struggle” (126). The city is therefore the locus where the subject invents itself and where male characters can assert their masculinity. Other characters in the films are connected to places through their names such as Igor from Hossegor, Babacar from Dakar, etc. Brice’s strong attachment to the French Riviera and the city of Nice is emphasized when his road companion

Marius (from Fréjus!) decides that the would-be surfer will participate in a competition in the south west of France: Brice is reluctant to leave as he has been waiting for the wave in Nice for twenty years. To some extent, unlike Napoleon who leaves the island of Corsica and who braves the rough sea, Brice is unable to cut the umbilical cord to his place of birth and is reluctant to grow up and leave the maternal womb as represented by the Mediterranean Sea. During his competition in Hossegor, Brice is afraid to connect with the Atlantic Ocean and is actually scared of the waves: “C’est pas ma mèr(e)” he says to the young Victor as if only the Mediterranean Sea was his landmark. Brice is eventually crushed by a wave and is rescued by some women lifeguards. While being taken out onto the sand, Brice keeps screaming “Elle est où ma mèr(e)?”

Once again, the homonymy challenges the spectator to understand what Brice is referring to, whether it is the Mediterranean Sea, his birth mother or maybe both. His question nevertheless shows him in a more vulnerable position than the one he has during the first part of the film.

After the competition, Brice returns to Nice but has a final conversation with newly found friend

Victor who tells hims that “Y’a pas de swell sur ta mer”, to which Brice answers “Chacun sa

mèr(e).” This line highlights one last time the connection between aquatic space and subjectivity along with the idea that each one of us comes from a different place. While the Atlantic coast can be seen as a form of uprooting, the Mediterranean Sea is the only place where Brice can connect with his own self.

Jacques, Brice and women

Because Jacques and Brice’s only woman is the sea, both turn out to be characters who are asexual or who have no interest in the development of their sexuality. Johana is in charge of

Jacques’ sexual education as the character clearly alludes to his virginity when he and Enzo are by the piano during the opening ceremony of the competition. Although no sex scene appears in

Brice de Nice, Le grand bleu is marked by two important moments of intimacy between Jacques

and his American girlfriend in that they are very revealing of Jacques’ conception of sexuality.

After their first night together (where Johana was on top of him to show that she is in charge of

the sexual act), Jacques leaves their apartment to go swim with the dolphin he has rescued from

the aquatic center. His continued attraction for the sea reveals his lack of interest for sexual

intercourse and his strong attachment to the marine world. Hayward explains that his preference for dolphins is what causes Johana to become obsessed with having a baby. It is, she writes, “a way of holding him to the land” (46) while Jacques is constantly lured by the sea. Laurent Jullier goes even further in that according to him, “Jacques does not really love Johana; he finds sex boring, something of a chore, especially compared to dolphin-riding” (110). Although very straightforward, I believe this statement to be quite accurate. I want to add that Jacques has no interest in sexual pleasure and finds a substitute for sexual life and intimacy in the sea.

Their second intercourse is even more revealing of Jacques’ lack of interest in sex. As they are making love, both the blue light of the room and the motion of the camera, going up and 88

down their legs, reproduce the movement of the waves and translate Jacques’ desire for the saline waters. As he is about to have an orgasm, the camera cross-cuts between an extreme close- up of Jacques’s eyes and an extreme long shot of Jacques swimming naked under the water and catching the camera with his hand. That gesture is very fascinating as it can be interpreted in two different ways: one on hand, it can signify Jacques’ refusal to be seen coming by the spectator.

Indeed, in The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz argues that the spectator identifies with the camera: “And it is true that as he identifies himself as look, the spectator can do no other than to identify with the camera, too, which has looked before him at what he is now looking at” (49).

Metz adds that “Without this identification with the camera certain facts could not be understood, though they are constant ones: the fact, for example, that the spectator is not amazed when the image ‘rotates’ (=a pan) and yet he knows that he has not turned his head” (50).

Jacques’ gesture is therefore a way to control the spectator’s gaze and repress the spectator’s own voyeuristic pleasure. Indeed, as soon as Jacques catches the camera in his hallucination, the film cuts to a shot of he and Johana on the bed after they have made love. Jacques’ gesture can also mean a refusal to see himself climax, as if he was repressing any form of sexuality to the depth of the sea. Furthermore, as Hayward points out, “Jacques’s orgasm in Le grand bleu is visually represented as a hallucination of his immersion in the sea – drowning or copulating with the sea (‘la mer’). Far from wishing to reproduce, Jacques hallucinates his own death in this sequence” (147). I would even add that his hallucination if a wish to return to a fetal stage

(which is the reason why he cannot become a father himself when Johanna subsequently tells him she is pregnant) or even a wish to connect with the mermaids, whom he can only find at the bottom of the ocean. In any event, this scene clearly denotes his wish to leave the land to return to the sea and the opposition between the two spaces highlights the difference between his

desires and Johana’s. Jacques’s repression of sexuality is also apparent in the life of James

Huth’s eponymous character.

Brice’s relationship to other women is ambiguous as he is closer to the sea than to the girls he is constantly surrounded by: although he is extremely self-aware of the image he gives them and always seeks their admiration (such as when he is on the beach in Hossegor and wants to show off his muscles in front of the women lying in the sun), his sexual activity is almost nonexistent in the film except in the dreams he keeps having. Brice’s dreams create an opposition between the life he lives and the one he fantasizes about, making him a twofold character who has not completely found himself yet. In his twentieth lecture, Freud admits that sexuality is a concept that is challenging to define (A General Introduction 313) but he eventually tries to satisfy his audience by claiming that “sexual is something that combines references to the difference between the sexes, to pleasurable excitement and gratification, to the reproductive function, and to the idea of impropriety and the necessity of concealment” (A General

Introduction 313). Even more than Jacques, who still has sexual intercourse, Brice has no interest in the pleasure that can be derived from sexual activity or in its reproductive function.

The half-teenager, half-man surfer dismisses all the attempts to kiss him the girls make. Brice actually never kisses anyone besides the mermaid he fantasizes about. Indeed, neither does he kiss Marjorie whom he invites in his bedroom, nor does he kiss Gladys (Julia Molkhou) yet nicknamed “La reine du kiss”, whom he uses as a surfboard to practice his moves on, a scene that objectifies the girl instead of showing her as a subject of seduction. After dancing with

Marjorie at his party, Brice takes the young lady to his bedroom, who desperately hopes to be kissed by him. When they get there, she finds an army of toys instead of the objects that would normally characterize the bedroom of the typical male hero. The spectator is deceived when

Brice gets closer to her to actually get the remote controller on the bed and turn his TV on to watch Point Break. Marjorie eventually falls asleep and breaks wind, which instead of showing the woman as a desirable person actually shows her bodily function in its most vital parts. To refer to Freud’s argument, Brice perceives sexuality as an idea that must be concealed rather than an activity that can create his excitement.

In both films, women are actually replaced by mermaids and their symbolic function. If mermaids occupy a more central role in Brice de Nice, Le grand bleu also has many references to these creatures of the sea. Although fascinating, Michelet’s chapter on the “sirènes” in his book

La Mer does not refer to the symbolic function of these intriguing amphibians: “Tout ce qui n’était pas dans les formes connues de l’animalité, et tout ce qui, au contraire, approchait de celles de l’homme, passait pour monstre, et on le dépêchait” (256). If Michelet refers to the historical dimensions of mermaids and how they were seen as an object of evil, Beatrice

Phillpotts focuses on their psychoanalytical representation. It is compelling to notice how the mermaids were first seen as an object of evil to eventually become a symbol of the unconscious:

Post-Freudian thought had exposed the legendary fish-tailed seductress as the

personification of the hidden desires of the sexual subconscious, symbolizing primitive

castration anxieties and the return to the amniotic waters of the womb. Firmly

characterized as an element of the unconscious, the mermaid now abandoned her marine

habitat to re-emerge in the irrational dream settings of the Surrealist imagination. (73)

The reference to mermaids in Besson’s film therefore highlights a repressed sexual desire and an unconscious wish to reconnect with the maternal figure. At the beginning of Le grand bleu, the young Jacques (played by Besson’s half-brother), his father (played by Besson’s father) and his uncle are working on the fishing boat. Jacques tries to deter his father from going into the sea as 91

it is not recommended to dive every day, an argument to which his dad answers: “T’inquiète pas.

Quand je suis épuisé, les sirènes m’aident à remonter.” As Jacques’ father is under the sea, his

uncle asks him if he has ever seen a mermaid. Because the young boy does not answer, his uncle

presses him to ask him a question about anything. Jacques’ answer to his uncle’s request is to ask where his mother went, to what Louis answers that “Les femmes, c’est comme ça. Elles sont imprévisibles, comme l’océan.” The parallel between femininity and the sea explains Jacques’

obsession with connecting to the aquatic element: it is a way for him to recreate bonds with his

absent mother and his lost father, who dies later on in the same scene.

When in Peru (although the scene was actually shot in the French Alps), Jacques asks

Johana if she was under the water. The diver makes a comparison between her face and the

appearance of the mermaid. Therefore, to Jacques women are associated with a mysterious aura,

as if they were creatures that could not be defined or understood and as if the union with a

woman was only possible at a certain depth under the water. A whole discussion on the

mermaids follows later on in the film when Johana, who has returned to New York, phones

Jacques and asks him to tell her a story. Jacques narrates what it is like to live among mermaids:

Tu les sens au fond de la mer si loin. Si loin que le bleu n’existe plus. Là où le ciel n’est

plus qu’un souvenir. Une fois que tu es là, dans le silence, tu y restes. Et si tu décides que

tu veux mourir pour elles, rester avec elles pour l’éternité, alors elles viennent vers toi et

jugent l’amour que tu leur portes. S’il est sincère, s’il est pur, et si tu leur plais, alors elles

t’emmèneront pour toujours.

That reference to the mermaids as being the only judge of love illustrates Jacques’ inability to love a woman on land, which is why his relationship with Johana is doomed to fail from the outset. His representation of the ideal woman is actually that of a mystic creature. During that 92

phone scene, the background behind each character (the city for Johana and the glittering sea for

Jacques) further illustrates the opposition between the land and the sea and the impossibility of

both characters to ever be reunited in the same space.

Water and dreams

Jacques consciously refers to mermaids whereas Brice only sees them in his dreams.

Jacques and Brice’s repressed desires find their mode of expression in the nocturnal activity of their unconscious. Brice’s absence of sexual activity finds its repercussion in his dreams, which are quite significant in terms of revealing more about his sexual identity. In A General

Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud divides his lectures into three parts respectively titled: the

“Psychology of errors”, “Dreams” and “A general theory of the neuroses.” After an introduction on the reasons why psychoanalysis is not yet completely accepted as a discipline because the activity of the mind and its symptoms are more challenging to observe for the doctor than any physical effect, Freud tries to define the dream by explaining that while the subject is asleep, the mind responds to different types of stimuli that can be either external or somatic. It is challenging to cure a patient based on what they tell from their dream because not only is it difficult to remember a dream properly with all its details, but it is also hard to find the right symbolism and meaning attached to them. Indeed, “the dream remembered is not the real thing at all, but a distorted substitute which, by calling up other substitute-ideas, provides us with a means of approaching the thought proper, or bringing into consciousness thoughts underlying the dream” (121). If Freud believes that all dreams’ symbols can be interpreted, he nevertheless admits a gap in his technique in the sense that there is a distortion in dreams due to censorship.

Furthermore, defining symbols is arduous: although they are images derived from myths and fairy tales, Freud admits that “we cannot at present assign quite definite limits to our conception

of a symbol; for it tends to merge into substitution, representation, etc., and even approaches closely to allusion” (159). In his tenth lecture, the psychoanalyst however goes on to explain that most symbols in dreams are of a sexual nature, an argument which might be easily contested because of its restrictive nature and its elusive nature of the patient’s personal history. If once again Freud claims that it is an argument hard to account for (174), it is however quite obvious that Brice’s dreams correlate with his libido. To some extent, the absence of sexual intercourse with persons from the other sex constitutes what Freud calls the “repressed” and finds its mode of expression in Brice’s unconscious, which is unleashed during his sleep.

Three dreams appear in James Huth’s film. After the opening scene in which the would- be surfer is seen in a high-angle shot on the beach where he is doing some Tai Chi exercises as if he was in complete harmony with nature, the camera cuts to the generic and then to a medium close-up of his face while he is sleeping. Water is dripping onto him from the ceiling (which is a scene very similar to that of Jacques’ dream) and a gigantic wave appears in his dream, which is about to crush him. The wave occupies most of the right side of the frame so as to translate the character’s powerlessness with respect to the aquatic space and his desire to ever be like one of the surfers of his favorite movie, who can ride huge waves with prowess. The camera cuts to a long shot of a mermaid enclosed in the gigantic wave, swimming in all the directions, moaning and making suggestive poses so as to lure him. Therefore, the presence of the mermaid in Brice’s dream can symbolize several things: his repressed sexuality, his fear of not being a “real” man

(that is to say his fear of castration) and also his unconscious wish to reconnect with his absent mother. Eventually, the mermaid swims out of the water to kiss Brice furtively. The passage from the interior to the exterior is thought-provoking because it connects both environments together and refers to the mermaid’s appropriation of both spaces while Brice is meant to stay on

land at the moment. Not only does it suggest Brice’s appeals for water but it can also be seen as a

metaphor for the penetration, as the mermaid goes from the inside of the water to the

environment of Brice’s bedroom. The mermaid, with whom Brice has no conversation,

eventually says “Viens!” which can be twofold: on one hand, it can suggest the mermaid’s

invitation to follow him in the water and on the other hand, it can also be a reference to her

invitation to have an orgasm. The mermaid retreats into the sea, moaning and screaming, while

the gigantic wave crashes onto Brice, the close-up on the foam working as a metaphor for the

sexual climax. Brice wakes up, looking overwhelmed by the dream he just had, with a distorted

facial expression translating his intense sexual pleasure. He lifts his sheet to take a look at his

lower member, intrigued by what just happened to him. This first dream therefore offers a

compelling parallel between the water present in his dream and his sexual apprenticeship:

clearly, the scene is an allusion to wet dreams, which definitely shows Brice at a latency stage

and presents the depth of the sea as what encapsulates his unconscious desires. A cut to his alarm

clock follows and Brice starts his daily routine, putting his clothes in a very methodic way and

rehearsing his movement of “Casse” before heading to the beach.

The second dream appears after Brice has invited Marjorie into his bedroom. The young

lady falls asleep whereas Brice is reciting the line of his favorite movie, which he is watching

again. At the moment when Brice says “T’es indomptable”, which is what he aspires to be in life,

the camera cuts and zooms onto his shirt. The swoosh logo twirls and the camera cuts to a close- up of Brice and the mermaid, kissing each other. This time, his interaction with the mermaid is more participatory as Brice licks her face and her nose ardently. Once again, the mermaid pulls back into the water screaming and moaning before the gigantic wave crashes onto him and the camera focuses on the white foam, as if the mermaid was the one performing the sexual act

herself. The camera cuts to the painting of the giant wave hanging above his bed, which strengthens his obsession for the aquatic space, and then to Brice’s face: his reaction is the same as the night before but Marjorie seems to ignore that scene as she is still sleeping.

Nevertheless, the most fascinating dream is by far the third and last one, which shows a clear evolution in Brice’s sexual coming-of-age, although it is still part of his unconscious and has not happened in real life yet. After stealing money from the bank, Brice takes a skateboard and is dragged by a guy on a motorcycle. Both eventually end up crashing into a wall onto which a poster of a paradisiacal island is fixed. The camera cuts to a shot of the skateboard and the motorcycle drowning into the sea, once again drawing an intriguing parallel between exterior and interior, as if Brice was willing to enter a space he has no access to, that is to say as if he was constantly drawn towards the realization of his repressed and unconscious sexual desires by entering into the water. The same mermaid of the two previous dreams comes to him and starts kissing him, while they are both under water. The mermaid eventually screams, suggesting that they have made love and that Brice has given her pleasure, although the sexual act is not shown to the spectator so as to infer that Brice’s sexuality is still somewhat repressed, just like Jacques’.

The camera cuts to the couple lying onto Brice’s bed, floating like a raft in the middle of the ocean. For Foucault, “le bateau, c’est un morceau flottant d’espace, un lieu sans lieu, qui vit par lui-même, qui est fermé sur soi et qui est livré en même temps à l’infini de la mer” (19).

Moreover, Foucault qualifies the boat as an “hétérotopie par excellence” (19). The term

“hétérotopie” implies that it is a “contre-emplacement” that is to say they are some “sortes d'utopies effectivement réalisées dans lesquelles les emplacements réels, tous les autres emplacements réels que l'on peut trouver à l'intérieur de la culture sont à la fois représentés, contestés et inversés, des sortes de lieux qui sont hors de tous les lieux, bien que pourtant ils

soient effectivement localisables” (15). A cemetery, for instance, is a type of heterotopia. To some extent, the floating bed where Brice and Chantal the mermaid are is a form of heterotopia that is in opposition or contrast with his bedroom. The floating bed is used to confront Brice with his repressed sexuality that has not happened with Marjorie in his actual bedroom. In this third dream, the scales of the mermaid are changing color because, as she points out, they have just made love. This scene shows that male sexuality is regimented by the presence of the opposite sex. It becomes an object of control and man is no longer master of his desires. Chantal

(Alexandra Lamy), whose name is anything but seductive (maybe as a way to mock Brice’s attraction and change the image of the seductress), even tells him that he is the one who will have to carry their baby since, like for seahorses, the male is the one who becomes pregnant. On a psychoanalytic and scientific point of view, the gender roles are reversed in this film to suggest the increase of female power versus the declining of masculine power and independence, who becomes encumbered by pregnancy. Brice even tries to offend Chantal (“ça marche aussi avec les sirènes!”), underlying once again his refusal to be at the adult stage and to procreate.

Offended by his sarcasm, Chantal tries to leave but Brice keeps pulling on her tail to prevent her from going back into the water. Brice stands up on his bed while still talking to Chantal, who complains about how cold the water is while Marius also climbs onto the bed, wearing his hospital gown. This is a very telling moment in that Brice’s female fantasy illustrated by the presence of the mermaid in his bed is replaced by the presence of his road companion.

Eventually, the camera cuts to Marius’ face, trying to ask him for the remote controller in their hospital room. Brice’s bed is no longer a love bed lost in the middle of the ocean but a hospital bed in which he is lying and handcuffed. The passage from the two beds is ironic because if

Brice is attracted to the mermaid, he however spends most of his time with his male friend. The

absence of sexual scene and the arrival of Marius also highlights the presence of homoeroticism.

To some extent, Jacques also has to repress his desire, but a desire for the sea instead of a sexual phantasy when he is with Johana. She is the reason why he is constantly pulled back to the land, although his wish is to live in harmony among dolphins and to die in the heart of the sea. After he has lost Enzo and returned his dear friend’s body into the sea, Jacques goes to sleep. A few moments later, the diver has a dream or a hallucination. A high-angle shot shows

Jacques lying on his bed, as if he was being watched by some deity. The camera cuts to his face and his eyes wide open. Jacques looks at the ceiling where a superimposition of the ceiling and water takes place. The atmosphere becomes more mysterious as the rhythm of the soundtrack accelerates, making the atmosphere more anxiety-provoking. The light of the bedroom becomes blue so as to suggest that he is totally immersed in the sea. The camera focuses on the ceiling (an image that is used by James Huth when Brice has his first dream and water drips on his forehead) and slowly zooms in on Jacques. His face seems intrigued and captivated by the mass of water descending upon him. The frame is then divided into two parts: on the upper part, the surface of the sea and the lower part, Jacques’ bed. Jacques raises his hand in order to catch the water and be totally immersed by it. While recalling the shooting of his film, Luc Besson explained how that scene was made: “Le trucage se fera en direct. En fait, la chambre est montée à l’envers et descend, à l’aide d’une grue, dans la piscine. Jean-Marc a prêté son corps pour faire une empreinte en résine. Il devra donc se mettre au lit, en passant par le plafond. Il ne nous reste plus qu’à régler la machine à vagues et à fixer les caméras ‘à l’envers’” (62). This revelation about the technique used shows the filmmaker’s interest for realism and a willingness to make water omnipresent in his film. Eventually, when Jacques is immersed by the water, the camera twirls and offers a series of underwater shots of dolphins swimming together while the music becomes

much softer and lively so as to suggest that Jacques has reached the space where he is supposed

to live in, which is amid dolphins (here again, Besson wanted to use as little artifice as possible

and filmed the scene himself thanks to a torpedo-camera). Jacques is no longer seen in the frame, which might suggest that he has become a dolphin swimming among the other ones. This dream or hallucination reinforces the appeal that the sea exerts upon the character. When Jacques wakes

up, his nose and ears are bleeding, alarming Johana. Although he should stay in bed, Jacques gets

up and decides to go diving in the middle of the night, not listening to his girlfriend begging him

not to leave.

The sea as the preferred space for homosocial bonding: the case of Enzo and Marius

Jacques’ refusal to be tied to a serious relationship that would force him to remain on land finds its way-out at sea when he swims with the dolphins and through his friendship with Enzo.

As for Brice, the surfer’s absence of a girlfriend until he finally meets Alice also finds a

substitute in his relationship with the sea and in his friendship with Marius. The sea comes into

play in that it is a privileged space for the expression of the main characters’ homosocial

bonding. It is a space where women do not have access to in Le grand bleu and where women

are excluded until men have finally accepted themselves in Brice de Nice. Both Enzo and Marius

are important characters and the relationship that Jacques and Brice respectively have with them

remains ambiguous, all the more so seawater is often associated with sexuality and femininity.

Without necessarily speaking of homosexuality, which Freud horrifyingly defines as “this one

fateful peculiarity” (A General Introduction 313), since there is no sexual relationship between

the male characters, the term “homosocial desire” coined by Eve Sedgwick might be more

appropriate to characterize male friendship in both Le grand bleu and Brice de Nice. As

Sedgwick points out, the term “homosocial” is in itself ambiguous:

‘Homosocial desire’, to begin with, is a kind of oxymoron. ‘Homosocial’ is a word

occasionally used in history and social sciences, where it describes social bonds between

persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with

‘homosexual’, and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from ‘homosexual.’ In

fact, it is applied to such activities as ‘male bonding’, which may, as in our society, be

characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality. (1)

Therefore, while the dichotomy “homosocial” and “homosexual” is less thorough for women,

Sedgwick argues that patriarchal relationships could not be implemented within society if they

were not based on homophobia. The need to differentiate the two terms came from men’s fear to

be associated with homosexuals, which Freud negatively defines as “perverts” (A General

Introduction 313). As a consequence, the term “homosocial” still remains ambiguous: while it

strives to distinguish itself from the term “homosexual”, it still suggests an equivocal relationship

to male sexuality. In any event, it serves to illustrate the strong attachment that two persons of

the same sex feel towards one another without any erotic attachment.

The homosocial bonding is even more ambiguous in the two films mentioned as the

presence of women is excluded from the circle of friendship and both Jacques and Brice are not

at ease with their sexuality with the opposite sex. Enzo is a very narcissistic figure who cannot

seem to manage to be involved in a long-term relationship with anyone but his mother, who

constantly watches how much pasta he eats and what other women he spends his time with. If they are at first portrayed as rivals during their childhood, Jacques and Enzo’s relationship grows stronger after Enzo has finally become a champion and is not afraid to be surpassed by his long- term friend anymore. Enzo shows his deep affection for his friend by challenging him and participating in the theoretical aspect of Jacques’ sexual education.

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However, their complicity grows fonder when he and Jacques are under the water together. Three scenes appear as important in the evolution of their friendship: the scene at the pool, the scene in the submarine, and finally the moment when after a diving accident Enzo asks his friend to return his body to the sea. The first moment of homosocial bonding between the two corresponds to the scene when both friends dive into the swimming pool of the hotel where they are staying, right after Jacques has asked Enzo to tell him everything there is to know about women. Seen in a long shot, the blueness of the water contrasts with Enzo’s white tuxedo and

Jacques’ black tuxedo. The two men open a bottle of champagne and start raising their glass to the competition that will start shortly. The pool, with its delimited edges, and the passage from outside the water to inside the water recreates a secluded space where the two friends can express their fondness for each other while still being under the gaze of the other hotel guests. Johana attempts to take a closer look at the ongoing scene with a pair of goggles that she borrows but she eventually falls into the water and both Jacques and Enzo are taken away from the pool. This comic scene serves to present the woman as an outsider and suggests that she cannot access the aquatic space that the two male friends belong to. If the water of the pool represents a maternal womb, it therefore serves to suggest the brotherly love between the two characters, while nonetheless emphasizing the ambiguity of their relationship as the pool becomes a space reserved for homosocial bonding.

The submarine, like the pool, becomes the privileged space where both friends can understand each other without having to explain anything or talk much to each other. During their descent, Enzo asks Jacques if he is still thinking about “cette américaine” as he is referring to Johana, and tells him that he should think about someone else because there are many women on earth. In this scene, Jacques’ lack of character and manliness is replaced by Enzo’s, who tries

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to emphasize his masculinity even more by making a speech about how unimportant women are and by offering him alcohol. His manliness is reinforced by the low-angle shot he is filmed in, giving him an impression of grandeur and power. In other words, Enzo takes pride in embodying the manly guy that Jacques is not. Enzo pours some alcohol onto Jacques’ finger and asks him to suck the liquid (which could be seen as homoerotic all the more so we know that Enzo is unable to have a serious and long-lasting relationship with women) although doing such a thing with the pressure of the water above them can be extremely dangerous. Both Jacques and Enzo become quickly intoxicated despite the little quantity of alcohol that they have swallowed and the two friends start dancing hand in hand while they are out of the submarine. Here again, the aquatic space is the privileged spot for a close intimacy between the two men. Although this scene is not erotic in the strict sense of the term, their relationship is presented as more intimate.

Additionally, both seem to be part of a world only they can understand and have access to.

The final underwater scene that unites both friends takes place during the competition.

Jacques advises his friend Enzo not to dive as challenging his record might be too dangerous.

After Enzo decides to dive, the camera films Jacques in a low-angle shot, so as to increase the distance between his friend, who is in the sea, and his position outside the water. A cross-cutting between Jacques’ face and the surface of the water, where a flashback appears to remind him of his father’s loss (scene that we see at the beginning of the film) serves to express Jacques’ worry about losing his friend. Jacques eventually goes under the water to catch his friend’s body and bring him back to the surface. An alarm goes off to signal the diving accident. Despite the staff’s willingness to help, Jacques wants to be left alone with his friend, whose head is lying on his knees. Enzo tells him that “On est bien mieux tout au fond’ and asks Jacques to bring him back.

Although at first Jacques refuses to lose his friend, he eventually brings him back into the sea.

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An extreme long shot of Enzo’s body, sinking into the depths of the Mediterranean Sea, signals the separation of the two friends and foreshadows Jacques’ suicide during the very last scene of the film. As a consequence, these three scenes show that it is this obvious that, in Le grand bleu, water is the preferred space for male friendship and can be a synonym of some homoerotic tension between them. It is also the place of ambiguity as women are often rejected by the two characters to favor their friendship.

Homosocial bonding is also at the core of Brice de Nice, notably represented through the friendship that the eponymous character has with Marius. The latter appears as an intriguing case who defies the beauty canon. Although he is not the main character of the film, his presence is important in that it underlines a vision of masculinity and manliness that is far from the representation of the typical male hero usually supposed to convey an ideal of moral and physical strength. Furthermore, like in many road movies, his function is to help Brice accomplish himself and realize his dream, while also making his own self-discovery and acceptance. Just like Brice who does not know how to surf and who ends up alone and miserable,

Marius is considered an anti-hero because of his physical characteristics. When both of them arrive in Hossegor, Marius tells Brice that the reason why he wants him to participate in the surf competition and win some money is because he needs a foot surgery. Brice starts laughing, not being sure why one would want that. In order to challenge Brice’s skepticism, Marius removes his socks and a close-up reveals his deformed feet: instead of having five toes, Marius actually has one big toe. The deformity of his two gigantic toes as opposed to any other body part reveals once again the idea that male sexuality is in change or in crisis. Indeed, feet are often perceived as an erogenous and fetishist zone of the body. When referring to “deviant” forms of sexuality,

Freud explains that there are some people who “have given up altogether the genital organs as

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object; and, instead, have exalted some other part of the body to serve as the object of desire, a woman’s breast, foot or plait of hair” (A General Introduction 314). Jung explains more clearly that “The foot has a notoriously phallic significance” (Collected Works 83). The scene in James

Huth’s film emphasizes a transfer from the actual male organ to the deformed feet as a way to portray a masculinity in crisis. By embodying a character whose physical characteristics go against the traditional beauty code, and especially that of the “natural, rugged, and rebelliously masculine type” (Andersen 514) of the American beach party movie, Marius is far from embodying a heroic figure. When showing his giant foot, it is not so much his body characteristic that poses a problem but more the fact that Marius shamefully admits that he has never been able to undress himself in front of a woman. Like Brice, Marius is suspected to be a virgin who has no experience with the opposite sex.

Although Marius does not have any interaction with water, except for when he is on the floating bed in Brice’s third dream, his presence is what pushes Brice to test the aquatic element.

Besides, his interaction with water is non-existent because, unlike Brice, he is not in search of a mother or of a nuclear family. Marius is already aware of the absence of his sexual life as he knows that the problem is not an unconscious one but comes from his physical deformity.

Therefore, while Brice represses his sexuality and only has intercourse in dreams (although the censorship in his dream does not allow him or the spectator to watch the act), Marius only wants to be able to live his sexuality without his handicap. The scene under the tent could almost be compared to the “freak shows” that were famous in the nineteenth-century and that ceased to be a form of entertainment after the First World War. As Jean-Jacques Courtine explains, “Le développement entre les deux guerres de la pensée du handicap a inscrit ce dernier dans un univers de sensibilités et de pratiques qui interdisent désormais d’en faire l’objet d’un spectacle”

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(252). Yet, if Courtine talks about an “effort d’inattention calculée du handicap” (252) in that any reference to any type of deformity should be consciously avoided, James Huth does quite the opposite by showing explicitly Marius’ distorted feet. The idea behind that scene is to convey a message of self-acceptance that men should embrace thanks to their difference.

The scene under the tent is voyeuristic, as the spectator and Brice both become witnesses of Marius’ revelation, even more so when Marius plays with his feet on the surfboard and makes a demonstration of his skills in front of Brice. Marius shows his feet just like he could show his male organ and the scene becomes symptomatic of a homoerotic tension between the characters.

Despite his deformity, Marius eventually becomes an object of female desire. His self-realization precedes Brice’s and is what eventually enables the latter to become himself. After stealing a surf for Brice, Jeanne (the sales assistant at the surf shop) decides to seek revenge and use Marius to fulfill all her wishes. She gives him an ultimatum and orders him to do whatever she wants or else she will report him to the police. Marius accepts to do her a favor and ends up pulling her boat along the harbor, while she is casually reading on the deck of her sailing ship. The camera does a close-up of his bottom and lower back, suggesting that Marius is under female gaze and is the object of potential sexual satisfaction. The scene recalls scenes of slavery as Marius finds himself under complete female domination and does not have a word to say. However, Marius and Jeanne’s relationships evolves when she invites him to follow him below deck. Scared that he will have to show his feet (and maybe more than that), Marius jumps overboard giving some lame excuse. It is Brice who explains to Jeanne the reasons of his friend’s behavior. Later on,

Marius and she both meet on the beach, which becomes the locus of a pseudo-erotic scene.

Marius, lying on the sand, lets Jeanne remove his socks so that she can take a look at his feet.

The woman slowly removes his socks, biting her lips so as to suggest that she is sexually aroused

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by what she is to uncover. After caressing his feet, she eventually reveals her own secret: she too has some type of deformity and happens to have enormous ears. Although these deformities have to be seen as purposeful exaggerations, the scene at the beach challenges expectations towards physical codes. Furthermore, the underlying message is that man can only find his soulmate once he has accepted his own difference and if he is true to himself. It is because Marius and Jeanne share some common points and have accepted who they are that they can be together and sail around the world. To some extent, Marius’ love story with Jeanne foresees the one between

Brice and Alice. Because Brice has not realized who he is yet, he still has some things to learn about himself before surfing his giant wave and finding his soulmate.

Jacques and Brice’s self-realization

Brice’s obsession with the giant wave is constantly challenged by the remarks of his friends, whether it is at the café, where one of them asks him “Et ta vague?” to which Brice uses a plethora of English technical terms to mask his denial: “Pas ce matin, y a pas de swell. Le vent souffle on-shore, c’est mort”, or later on during the yellow party when Marjorie dares to defy him by asking, “Je me demandais tout à l’heure… Quel genre de vague tu peux surfer en

Mediterranée?” Brice takes a very melancholic tone and answers: “Mon genre de vague. Le genre de vague qui ne te laisse pas le choix.” Brice denies that he cannot surf but also that what he is looking for will never occur in real life. Eventually, after the competition in Hossegor which has caused him to almost drown, Brice goes to the beach by himself and starts crying. He is seen in extreme long shot, raising his arms to the sky and screaming that he is nothing but a loser. The immensity of the beachscape translates his powerlessness and his loneliness. The would-be surfer lets himself fall and roll down a sand hill before he realizes that Bhodi is standing on the beach observing him. His encounter with his mentor allows Brice to become true

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to himself for the first time since the beginning of the movie: “Ça fait vingt ans que j’me prends

pour un surfeur. J’suis pas un surfeur. J’suis un flotteur.” Bodhi tells him that he should live his dreams instead of dreaming his life, and then admits that Brice will probably be a surfer in a different life. Bodhi makes the arm movement that usually Brice uses to make fun of people, which reverses the roles and translates Brice’s absence of control over the situation. If Marius had not brought Brice to the ocean, Brice would probably never have had that moment of lucidity.

After he has left the west coast, Brice is found working for the “travaux publics” and collects trash on the beach in Nice. He has given up his yellow uniform for the blue one, as a way to let go of his obsession and to admit that he might never be the surfer he has always aspired to be. It is actually when he no longer expects the giant wave to occur in Nice that his dream comes true. While on the beach where he is seen at the very beginning of the film, Brice finds a surfboard on the edge of the water, which happens to be similar to Bodhi’s. The extradiegetic sound conveys a particular ceremonial and grave atmosphere to the scene. Brice picks up the board and looks at the sea: a gigantic wave is forming itself off the coast. The camera cuts to an extreme long shot of Brice surfing a giant wave and screaming. Although the scene is absolutely not realistic because of the sudden change of weather and the fact that the spectator knows he cannot surf, this moment is an allusion to Brice’s self-realization. The off- screen sound of the thunder also serves to convey a mythical dimension to the scene, as if Brice had suddenly become the reincarnation of Bodhi. This paradox between his ridiculous portrait during the film and his success at the end suggests a redefinition of the typical male hero. A series of underwater shots recalls the ones he saw in his dreams: Brice has been crashed by the wave after being able to surf it. The camera cuts to a medium close-up of Brice’s face, who is

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lying on the beach, parallel to the edge of the water. The camera zooms out and Brice is seen in

an extreme long shot in a high-angle, as if he was being watched by the wave or by some deity.

A young woman runs towards him to rescue him, asking him if he has seen the giant wave. Brice

opens his eyes and asks her if she is Chantal, the mermaid he has seen in his dreams. While their

two faces are seen in a close-up, the young blond girl tells him that her name is Alice (also

played by Alexandra Lamy) and not Chantal. When they stand up, a medium shot of the two

characters shows that she is wearing exactly the same uniform as Brice. Alice has a pair of black

shorts and the same yellow shirt with her name written on it. The difference is that the wave

symbol is not filled with color and that instead of a splash of water she has a star. Both t-shirts actually complete each other. The homonymy of their names and the fact that she likes to be called “Alaïce de Naïce” reveals a perfect match between the two characters.

Both films, Le grand bleu and Brice de Nice, show male characters who are repressing their sexuality and who do not want to become fathers. During the final generic of James Huth’s film, Brice is pregnant (as if he had been knocked up by the mermaid in his dream) and he and

Alice decide to call their future child “Denis” so that the end of his name can rhyme with the name Nice (“Denis de Nice”). The final credits suggests that the biological roles about maternity and paternity are reversed, a new redistribution of roles that also questions the roles each sex

plays within society. In Le grand bleu, fatherhood is rejected by Jacques. Hayward argues that

“By drowning, Jacques rejects the phallus (its function) and becomes, similarly, a desiring-

machine without organs” (162). Moreover, “The father is dead from the beginning of Le grand bleu and his death so traumatizes the young Jacques that he seeks every means to avoid reproducing patriarchy” (162). Therefore, while Brice accepts to become a father (although he does not seem to have much choice), Jacques realizes that he needs to return to the sea and that

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his attraction to the depth of the Mediterranean is stronger than his love for Johana. Eventually,

Jacques refuses the role of a father that Johana is trying to bestow on him and hardly has any

reaction when she tells him that she is expecting their child. During the last seconds of the film,

the camera films Jacques in a medium shot, extending his arm to follow a dolphin, both

eventually sinking into the darkness of the sea before the screen fades to black. Jacques makes

the decision to commit suicide (although it is only hinted at) rather than accepting to become a

father and maybe taking the risk of reproducing the same familial pattern that he knows.

In conclusion, the aim of the present chapter was to understand the compelling relationship between the Mediterranean space, the body, and the construction of male

subjectivity. Through a psychoanalytic reading of Le grand bleu and Brice de Nice, I have

demonstrated that the Mediterranean Sea is an ambivalent space that also illustrates the

challenges of the male gender. While Abel Gance and Jacques-Yves Cousteau consider the sea

as a space of control and male power in that Napoleon and the Captain can show their strength

and open the spectator’s horizon onto the underwater world, Luc Besson and James Huth have

shown that masculinity has also been in crisis during the second half of the twentieth century.

The presence of water in Besson’s film enables an insightful illustration of the relationships

between sons and the nuclear family, between man and the opposite sex. Used as a symbol of a

repressed sexuality, the sea in Le grand bleu reveals a new conception of manhood which is far

from the manly typical hero usually advocated by films. Indeed, Jacques prefers committing

suicide rather than living on land with Johana and becoming a father. Instead of constructing a

family life that he never had, Jacques returns to the sea as a way to reconnect with his nuclear

family and become a dolphin. As for Brice de Nice, although it is a comedy, too many references

to other films and reflections on sexuality abound to not consider this film as a questioning of

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man’s role within society. Huth’s film also uses the sea as a symbol of a repressed sexuality but

goes further by reversing sexual and biological expectations: it is the woman who is in charge of

the man’s sexual education and it is the man who becomes pregnant. Therefore, although they

are different in tone, Le grand bleu and Brice de Nice echo one another by using the sea as a way to illustrate male unconscious and question what being a man in French society implies.

Homosocial bonding is also at stake in these two films, where the sea becomes a privileged space

for the interaction between men in a context where homosexuality becomes more open and

accepted. There has therefore been a shift from the representation of men seeing women as

objects of desire to the representation of men as agents repressing their desires.

In the final chapter of this dissertation, I examine two other films: Jean-Luc Godard’s

Pierrot le fou (1965) and Merzak Allouache’s Harragas (2009). Although these two films are

also very different from eachother, as the former belongs to the New Wave movement while the

latter gives an account (although fictitious) of the migrant crisis currently occurring in the

Mediterranean basin, I make the claim that both use the sea to crystalize the protagonists’

rejection of their own society and that the Mediterranean becomes a threshold between society

and the self that eventually leads to death, therefore inviting the spectator to reconsider the

mythological and sensual dimensions of the aquatic space as presented in French film in the

1950s. While Pierrot le fou deals with the madness and anti-conformism of Godard’s anti-hero,

who is searching for himself throughout France until he cannot go further than the seaside,

Harragas depicts the struggles of young Algerians who want to cross the Mediterranean Sea

hoping to find better living conditions in Europe. In both cases, one dies by the sea or at sea, the

Mediterranean therefore becoming a tombstone as opposed to being the place favorable to love-

making and expression of sexual desires and hidden impulses as this is the case in Besson’s and

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Huth’s films. I therefore contend that Pierrot le fou and Harragas illustrate how political and social changes in the post Algerian war of independence era have shaped the representation of the Mediterranean Sea and how these realities participate, to use Mircea Eliade’s expression, in its “demythicization”.

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Chapter 3

“Poussée vers l’eau-delà” or the sea as a threshold between society and the ego ideal in

Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) and Merzak Allouache’s Harragas (2009)

“Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer ! La mer est ton miroir ; tu contemples ton âme” Charles Baudelaire, “L’homme et la mer”

While the two previous chapters of this dissertation concentrate on water as a symbol of

femininity, sexuality, repressed male desires and fears of exemplifying a masculinity in crisis, I

now wish to shift our attention to the representation of the Mediterranean Sea as a threshold

between society and the ego ideal in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) and Merzak

Allouache’s Harragas (2009). Although belonging to two different filmic movements (one to the

New Wave and the other to what is currently defined as migrant cinema), these two films

actually share several similarities in that they both stage their protagonists’ journey towards the

sea or at sea in order to search for themselves or acquire a new identity. In her conference

“Réflexions sur l’étranger” held at the Collège des Bernardins in October 2014, Julia Kristeva

qualifies the departure of the migrant as a “poussée vers l’au-delà” (4’48), a feeling of impulse that pushes the migrant to leave their native country in order to find a new identity. Although

Ferdinand is not a migrant, he leaves the French capital in search of who he is and goes to the seaside to find his true self and possibly the essence of life. According to Tom Conley, “Pierrot

can be seen as a variation of the road movie where it invests theological inflection in that it 112

implies to be a spiritual itinerary” (A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard 189). In Godard’s film, the sea therefore encapsulates Pierrot’s search for himself within a society that he rejects. As for

Allouache’s characters, Imène, Nasser, and Rachid cross the Mediterranean and become westernized in order to better adapt to the new life that they are hoping to build once they have reached the other side. As I will explain, most characters of Allouache’s film undergo a physical transformation before and during the journey as a way to assimilate to the new selves they are aspiring to become. Thus, the two films articulate a compelling dichotomy between the body and the sea as a way to redefine questions about identity formation. If there is a relation of distance between Pierrot and the sea as he never crosses it, and a relation of immanence between

Allouache’s characters and the Mediterranean, who seem powerless with respect to its immensity, I suggest to rephrase Kristeva’s expression as “poussée vers l’eau-delà” instead of

“au-delà” so as to emphasize the role of water in the spiritual journey undertaken by the burners on one side, who leave their old selves to start a new life, and Ferdinand on the other side.

Therefore, unlike the first chapter of this dissertation, which demonstrated the mythological tendencies attached to the Mediterranean Sea, and the second chapter, which focused on male fears towards castration, the two films of this chapter also contribute to shaping the “mare nostrum” as a space of inner conflicts and survival that goes beyond gender relations as opposed to being solely a symbol for the unconscious desires between men and women or a symbol for a repressed sexuality. The two filmmakers use the sea as a space where psychical and social conflicts are projected while being embedded in particular social and political contexts: the end of the Franco-Algerian war as far as Pierrot le fou is concerned and the migrant crisis triggered by poor socio-economic conditions when it comes to Harragas. The interaction between the characters’ bodies and the sea (such as bathing and swimming) ceases to be a sensual experience

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to become the receptacle of inner fears and hopes. The presence of the sea goes beyond the allegory of femininity and sexuality in order to express the rejection of society. As I will demonstrate, in Pierrot le fou the overwhelming aquatic space encapsulates Pierrot’s anti- conformism, who despises everything about modern society such as consumerism, advertising, and wars. Neverheless, Pierrot’s spiritual journey is put to an end with the liminality of the aquatic space, which is never crossed. The last shot of Pierrot le fou, to which I shall come back, terminates the eponymous character’s wanderings throughout France. The sea is also a space of momentary transgression and transformation in the sense that the characters present in

Allouache’s film inhabit the aquatic space after leaving Algeria and are called burners as a way to suggest the erasure of their past to become new persons. While Hakim Abderrezak writes that

“One could argue that the blue sea” of the film’s DVD cover “is a romanticized symbol of hope”

(157) that eventually leads to death, I push this analysis further and posit that the sea actually represents the characters’ possibility to become the Other. To some extent, Harragas is in line with Pierrot le fou in that both films participate in the “demythicization” (to use Eliade’s expression) of the Mediterranean as the aquatic space is used to become a reflector of the changing social and governing body that is being dismissed by all the protagonists. According to

Eliade, “Through culture, a desacralized religious universe and a demythicized mythology formed and nourished Western civilization that has succeeded in becoming exemplary” (157). As mentioned in the first chapter, the emergence of books contributed to the demythicization of some myths. Instead of presenting the myth of the Greek hero crossing the sea and facing the natural elements fearlessly, Godard and Allouache use the Mediterranean Sea as a space of struggle and death. I now would like to develop these arguments in further detail, by considering respectively the themes of the rejection of/by society in both films (and more particularly the

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concept of liminality in Pierrot le fou and that of transgression in Harragas), before concluding

with the idea of disillusionment and of death drive, all of which have an intrinsic relationship to

the presence of aquatic space, namely the Mediterranean Sea.

The sea as a threshold between Ferdinand’s outside and internal worlds

While speaking about his own film Pierrot le fou, famous French New Wave director

Jean-Luc Godard explained that “you can say that Pierrot is not really a film. It is an attempt at

cinema. And the cinema, by forcing reality to unfold itself, reminds us that we must attempt to

live” (Jean-Luc Godard 244). This intricate relationship between cinema on one side and reality

on the other side along with the filmmaker’s use of seascape somewhat sheds light onto the

reasons why Pierrot le fou is like no other film that Godard himself or other directors have made.

Furthermore, as Ludovic Cortade contends, “Le mépris (Contempt) is the first film of Godard to set forth the terms of his desire to rediscover a unity between body and landscape” (156), which is to a certain extent what the director does with Pierrot, therefore explaining why it is different from his previous films. Instead of leaving the south of France to reach the capital (A bout de soufflé, 1960), Godard’s protagonist (Jean-Paul Belmondo) finds refuge by the sea after crossing countryside and riverscapes, therefore portraying the Mediterranean as the final stop motivated by a rejection of society. Although it could easily be interpreted as incoherent to the inexperienced viewer, the plot of Godard’s ninth film actually defies the conventions of cinema so as to emphasize the idea that not everything in life has a meaning. In order to appreciate

Godard’s film, one must go beyond any rational explanation and engage in the experience provided by the filmmaker who reminds us that “we must attempt to live”, that is to say that we might have to put aside any logical form of reasoning to experience life as it presents itself.

Moreover, Godard’s intention while shooting the film was to take example from Romantic

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literature. In Godard par Godard, the film director explains that “J’ai eu envie, au lieu du couple

de Lolita ou de La Chienne, de tourner l’histoire du dernier couple romantique, les derniers

descendants de La Nouvelle Héloïse, de Werther, et de Hermann et Dorothée” (107), which

explains the importance of nature and that of the Mediterranean seascapes in his film. Indeed,

nature was a way to allegorize inner feelings and was always a reflector of the characters’

thoughts and emotions. Although Godard admitted that Pierrot le fou “est un film complètement

inconscient” (110), he admitted that its main subject is the sea (112), hence the importance of the connection between the main character and the aquatic space as a way to illustrate his inner conflict.

Therefore, the complexities and richness of Godard’s films and Pierrot le fou in particular also lie in the presence of intertextuality. Indeed, the director’s passion for cinema, literature, language, and to a larger extent arts, is often at stake in his works, an intertextuality that enables the questioning of the reality of life through multiple mediums. As we shall see, Ferdinand himself is very invested in reading and writing, and that from the opening scene of the film when he is seen reading Elie Faure’s Histoire de l’art, two passions which he hopes will bring him closer to the essence of life. Godard’s film is undoubtedly very different from the other film I explore in this chapter, in the sense that instead of providing the spectator with a portrait of a bourgeois protagonist and his intellectual “malaise”, Allouache confronts the spectator with the harsh reality of those who have no resources to survive in their home country and who therefore become migrants.

Before entering into a more in-depth analysis of the presence of the sea as the rejection of societal norms and more specifically as a mirror of Pierrot’s spiritual journey, the titles of the films themselves exhort the spectator to ponder over the protagonists’ inner and mental states.

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The name “le fou” in Pierrot le fou puts emphasis on the eponymous character’s mental state and announces from the outset his inability to live a conformist life. In his Ecrits, Lacan attempts at giving a definition of madness:

le fou veut imposer la loi de son coeur à ce qui lui apparaît comme le désordre du monde,

entreprise ‘insensée’, - mais non pas qu’elle est un défaut d’adaptation à la vie, formule

qu’on entend souvent dans nos milieux, encore que la moindre réflexion sur notre

expérience doive nous en montrer la déshonorante inanité – entreprise insensée, dis-je

donc, en ceci plutôt que le sujet ne se reconnaît pas dans ce désordre du monde la

manifestation même de son être actuel, et ce qu’il ressent comme loi de son cœur, n’est

que l’image inversée, autant que virtuelle, de ce même être. Il le méconnaît donc

doublement, et précisément pour en dédoubler l’actualité et la virtualité. (172)

Therefore, unlike what is usually commonly accepted, the mad person is not unable to live within society but actually feels a discrepancy between the way he perceives himself as a subject and what the world outside of him presents. The presence of water and that of the seascape is of particular importance in Godard’s film as it illustrates the division between Ferdinand and the society he evolves in. Ferdinand Griffon leaves everything behind himself, his wife, their children along with a comfortable lifestyle, to go to southern France with Marianne Renoir

(Anna Karina), where he attempts to write. Furthermore, the constant arguments between him and Marianne about his name (she calls him Pierrot, which tends to exasperate him) also announces the character’s duality or divided self, which is in turn allegorized thanks to the presence of water. Although Ferdinand’s intentions are never clearly explicitly stated in that we do not quite know what he is after or who he really wants to become, the seaside represents an end to his wanderings and the quest for an ideal since he cannot go further than the limits

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imposed by the aquatic space.

The main reason that pushes Ferdinand to flee to the south is his incomprehension of

France’s ongoing political context. Indeed, the Franco-Algerian conflict inevitably affected

French society and left its imprint on the films under study. To that end, Godard’s film has more

to offer than the mere narrative of the escape of Ferdinand and Marianne from the capital to

southern France. The plot of the film takes the spectator beyond that journey in order to offer a

genuine reflection on French society at the time the film was shot. Although Guy Austin argues

that “Precisely because the colonial wars fought in Algeria and Indochina proved so traumatic,

they remained taboo, practically absent from the French cinema of the period” (28), many

references to the Franco-Algerian conflict along with the notion of American imperialism and

the ongoing tensions between the United States and Vietnam are actually disseminated

throughout the plot of Pierrot le fou and are one of the main motivations to the characters’

roving. For instance, the allusions to the Algerian War of Independence are present from the

outset when Ferdinand leaves the cocktail party with Marianne, his children’s baby-sitter (with whom he had an affair in the past), and both discuss her brother’s occupation while on their way to an unknown destination. Marianne admits that her sibling is involved in arms trafficking but remains very imprecise as to what his occupation actually entails. “C’est quoi son traffic exactement?” Ferdinand asks later. “Oh, des trucs en Afrique… Angola… Congo” Marianne answers vaguely. Additionally, several weapons are found in the first apartment where Marianne and Ferdinand stay at and the spectator can notice the inscription OASis onto one of the walls.

This sign is quite ironic: Godard once again plays on words while the three main letters of the word OASis stand out in red capital letters as a clear reference to the “Organisation Armée

Secrète”, which was an organization striving to threaten Algerians and French intellectuals who

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were in favor of the independence. Obviously, this inscription is meant to be ironic as it plays with the French word “oasis”, which is supposed to evoke the idea of a refuge and peaceful place, whereas the violent actions led by the OAS had nothing of the sort. As a consequence, those subtle references establish a division between Marianne and Ferdinand on one side, and what they perceive as a flawed society on the other side, which is also a parallel shared by filmmaker Merzak Allouache in his film Harragas. The couple’s escape towards the south and the remoteness of their beach shack offers them a shelter far from this tense post-war political context.

Undeniably, the Mediterranean Sea is what occupies most of the film’s cinematic landscape in Godard’s and Allouache’s works so as to emphasize the discrepancy between the characters’ inner and outer worlds. The allegory of the sea as a rejection of society is first illustrated when the duo Ferdinand/Marianne arrive near the little town of Hyères and Ferdinand drives their car into the sea as a way to reject consumerism by refusing to use it. Not only is it a way to strip himself of any possessions, but it is also a way to demonstrate his unwillingness to follow a straight line in life (since he cannot follow the road) on top of a way to erase their past

(everything will disappear in the heart of the sea) and adopt a new identity. At the beginning of their stay in the south of France, the sea is therefore a chance for them to start over and to potentially find a meaning to their life. According to Freud, “Birth is almost regularly represented by some reference to water; either one plunges into the water or climbs out of it, or rescues someone from the water, or is himself rescued from it, i.e., there is a mother-relation to the person” (Interpretation of Dreams 125). Therefore, the aforementioned scene can be interpreted as a rebirth of the two characters, who have left everything behind them in order to find who they actually are. Although Freud mentions a “mother-relation” to the person, the

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maternal figures are absent from the film, as if to suggest that the ideal that Ferdinand is looking

for might be to reconnect with his mother. Although it is hard to assess what he is actually

looking for, besides maybe the very essence of life, Ferdinand feels a strong repudiation towards

the world he is leaving. For instance, on their way to the south Ferdinand says to Marianne that

“De toutes façons c’était le moment de quitter ce monde dégueulasse et pourri”, which clearly

indicates their rejection of society and presents the Mediterranean Sea as an opportunity to start a

new life. The neon sign “Riviera” in one of the bars they go has only the three letters “vie” lit up,

which suggests the idea that the location represents a chance to start over.

The aquatic space is also used by Godard as a way to allegorize and criticize the ongoing political context of the film’s shooting. During the couple’s stay on the Riviera, the aquatic element is presented as a mirror of the Vietnam War and American imperialism. In order to make money, Marianne and Ferdinand perform a little skit in front of a group of American sailors and decide to put aside their communist aspirations to improvise a play that their audience might enjoy: “ça fait rien, on va changer de politique” Ferdinand even says to Marianne, implying that he is ready to adopt a new politics just to make ends meet. Although a few minutes before the arrival of the Americans Ferdinand and Marianne are seen drawing portraits of Mao and Fidel onto the ground, two political emblems whom they perceive as “les champions de la liberté” (as Ferdinand writes in his journal), both Ferdinand and Marianne eventually decide to embody the opposite parties that their idols represent so as to be seen under a positive light by the public they are performing for. In order to embody their characters, Ferdinand borrows out of the blue a naval uniform while Marianne wears a conical hat, her face painted in bright yellow so as to exaggerate the traits of the Vietnamese and highlight the racism that these populations undergo. During their performance, Ferdinand lights some matches to set the sea in front of them

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on fire as a reference to the bombings and attacks caused by Americans. A close-up of burnt matches floating on the surface of the turquoise Mediterranean Sea (to symbolize burnt corpses or torpedoed ships) along with the extradiegetic sound of shelling reinforce the illusion that the conflict is occurring under their audience’s gaze while also giving access to Ferdinand’s imagination. The sea is used as a stage to represent the war taking place in Vietnam and becomes a locus where cultures confront themselves; it is a threshold where conflicts occur and where injustice and political opinions are rejected. Besides, Ferdinand’s inability to speak English along with Marianne’s gibberish not only denote their despise for American imperialism and domination at sea but also the lack of mutual understanding between countries and the prejudices some can be victim of.

Essentially, while the film is based on a series of oppositions and denunciations, the seascape is used by Godard as an allegory of the social and political context during which Pierrot was shot. As a border that is never crossed, unlike in Harragas, the sea becomes the final resting place of the couple. Furthermore, the isolation of the seaside enables the characters (especially

Ferdinand) to identify themselves with the characters of various adventure novels, therefore feeding Marianne and Ferdinand’s imagination and widening the gap between social reality on one side and their ideal aspirations on the other. If Ferdinand explains to Marianne that they will both start existing (“On existera” he says as they are leaving the French capital), the use of the future tense and the verb “exister” highlight the fact that they are not quite themselves yet.

Nevertheless, the new lifestyle they adopt does not seem to suit Marianne and provokes a definite rupture between the two, who will only find each other again through death. As a consequence, Godard’s film stage the discrepancy between the actual life of the characters and the one they are seeking. In his work The Ego and the Id, Freud argues that most mental conflicts

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originate from a gap between the impulses of the ideal-ego-ideal (or super-ego, as both are

interchangeable) and what the ego actually does:

The ego ideal is therefore the heir of the Oedipus complex, and thus it is also the

expression of the most powerful impulses and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the

id. By setting up this ego ideal, the ego has mastered the Oedipus complex and at the

same time placed itself in subjection with the id. Whereas the ego is essentially the

representative of the external world, of reality, the super-ego stands in contrast to it as the

representative of the internal world, of the id. Conflicts between the ego and the ideal

will, as we are now prepared to find, ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real

and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world. (32)

Essentially, the discrepancy between the life that Ferdinand rejects and the meaning of life he is seeking, that is to say the gap between his external world and his internal world, is what pushes

Godard’s protagonist to explore France’s territory until he cannot go further than the limits imposed by the sea. It is also what motivates Allouache’s characters to cross the Mediterranean and make the sea a transformative space. As I will demonstrate in the second part of this chapter, while the sea is a threshold seen from a distance in Pierrot le fou, that threshold is crossed in

Harragas.

If borders are said to be both natural, such as rivers, fields, the sea, etc., and political in the sense that they are the product of society and are used to implement regulations between countries, borders can also be invested with a metaphorical function: indeed, the term border

“refers not only to territorial divisions between nations and invisible lines separating classes, genders and races in a society but also to the rim around a piece of sewing, the edge of a printed text (…) and so on” (Altkink and Gemie 11). Therefore, borders can also signify any type of 122

demarcation between objects, feelings, states, etc. and the distinction between visible and

invisible borders that is at stake in the two films under study. Indeed, different from geographical

borders, invisible borders can be social, economic and refer to any discrepancy within a given

population. While attempting to define what borders are, Régis Debray insists that there are

geographical but also metaphorical borders and abstract ones: “s’il n’y a pas de frontière pour

toujours, il y a toujours une ultime frontière. Entre la vie et la mort, par exemple” (46). That thin

line between life and death that Debray refers to can be seen as a border, a boundary that is not

visible but that is constant for everyone. Godard’s film is fundamentally based on a series of

abstract oppositions that are the main motives for the characters’ wanderings. The sea eventually

represents the opposition between life (a life Ferdinand cannot tolerate) and death (which is the

only form of solace the eponymous character can find). Pierrot le fou is built around a clear

division between the worlds the protagonist lives in and the one he fantasizes about.

From a psychoanalytical standpoint however, the term border can suggest a discrepancy

between the way the subject perceives himself and the way the subject perceives the society

within which he lives. In his Ecrits, Lacan points out that “The Other is the locus in which is

situated the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made present of the subject – it

is the field of that living being in which the subject has to appear. And I said that it was on the

side of this living being, called to subjectivity, that the drive is essentially manifested” (203). In

other words, the interaction between the subject and the Other is the main reason for alienation

as the subject depends in his interaction with the Other to define who he is. Lacan stresses the

fact that “One has to admit that there is a lot of this alienation about nowadays. Whatever one

does, one is always a bit more alienated, whether in economics, politics, psycho-pathology, aesthetics, and so on” (210). As mentioned above, Godard’s and Allouache’s films show

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characters who are alienated from society. The sea allegorizes this discrepancy and is used as a mirror of the character’s selves.

Ferdinand’s madness and his inability to lead a conformist life is thus mainly illustrated by the representation of spaces and places and the presence of geographical borders, which play a predominant function in Pierrot le fou. In Godard’s film, the two protagonists are seen wandering around France: several types of landscapes and seascapes appear in the background as a reflection of that inner search and as a mirror of their selves. The sea is therefore the final resting place for the couple because, on a geographical point of view, they cannot go further than the limits imposed by the aquatic element. In Cartographic Cinema, Tom Conley points out that

“Maps appear in most of the movies we see. Even if a film does not display a map as such, by nature it bears an implicit relation with cartography. A map we see in a film may concern locale, if the film is a documentary, or, if it tells a story, an itinerary” (1). While maps are what constitute both films, the itinerary that Ferdinand and Marianne take is somewhat chaotic and at first seems aimless. Indeed, the couple is seen stealing cars along the way from the capital to the south, driving through different types of landscapes and running through fields. Yet, to some extent their wanderings give a compelling portrait of France’s geography before reaching the shores of the Mediterranean Sea (the films was shot in the area of Toulon and the island of

Porquerolles) as their itinerary is followed throughout every step. An extreme long shot reveals

Marianne and Ferdinand walking through forests and walking across a river bed after setting their car on fire before eventually settling in a remote little beach shack. When Ferdinand and

Marianne Ferdinand’s voice-over explain that “Nous traversâmes la France,” “Comme des apparences, comme un miroirˮ Marianne adds, as if they were devoid of any life and in search of themselves. Ferdinand and Marianne embark on a “tour de France” that leaves from the capital to

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the southern part of the country and which allows them to discover different places, cross various

geographical borders and most importantly learn about themselves, both individually and as a

couple.

Ferdinand’s unwillingness to live with respect to social conventions is emphasized by the discrepancy between life and literature or reality and fantasy, which is made clear thanks to the presence of various literary references. It is the presence of the aquatic space that enables all of those literary references that Ferdinand makes, as if water was triggering his imagination and allowing him to embody different types of characters. According to Isabelle Vanderschelden, the

intertextuality in Godard’s film “suggests a constant struggle between classical culture and

modernity which corresponds to an aesthetic trend of New Wave cinema” (54). According to the

scholar, the many literary references interwoven in Godard’s film serve to highlight the transition

from two different time periods and mark an opposition between classicism and modernity, an

opposition that is at stake in the protagonist’s life, who rejects American imperialism and

consumption in general. Essentially, Ferdinand takes refuge in reading and writing because he

has difficulties accepting the reality that surrounds him. The book by Elie Faure that Ferdinand is

seen reading in the opening scene portrays him as an intellectual from the outset, but who turns

out to become a person who lives his life vicariously and for whom the sea represents the

ultimate refuge. Although I have suggested earlier that the different name the character is given

by Marianne underline his duality, the name “Ferdinand” can also be a literary allusion. It is

indeed tempting to infer that the protagonist’s name is a direct reference to French writer Louis-

Ferdinand Céline, who wrote Voyage au bout de la nuit and whose main character is also an anti-

conformist. However, it is also important to note that “Pierrot le fou was the name of a famous

French gangster of the time and also the name of the King of Spain during the inquisition”

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(Erhenstein 225), which adds to the complexity of the characters and portrays him as an outcast.

As far as the name of his road companion is concerned, “Marianne” reveals a close tie to France:

as we saw in the previous chapter with Brigitte Bardot, Marianne is the name given to France’s

national symbol, although the “Marianne” played by Godard’s muse emanates a different type of

sensuality than the one embodied by Juliette in Vadim’s film in the sense that she is not

compared to a goddess and does not have the mythical aura that Bardot has. Marianne in Pierrot

could be seen as a new embodiment of femininity that France is in search for. Vanderschelden

explains that Anna Karina, who was no longer Godard’s wife at the time that Pierrot le fou was

shot, became an “incarnation of womanhood between 1960 and 1967” (51) although it is not

quite sure which qualities intrinsic to her femininity the author thinks allowed her to embody the

essence of the French woman. Nevertheless, both Ferdinand and Marianne can be seen from the

beginning as representatives of France’s youth, a youth who has lost its bearings and that was in

search of a better life after the Algerian independence. Moreover, the different possible

references imply that Ferdinand has no stable identity and that, as mentioned earlier, his

wanderings throughout France’s territory are a way to search for his inner world.

If it is easy to refer to Céline’s novel when it comes to studying Godard’s film, other literary allusions are nonetheless present in Pierrot le fou in order to emphasize the discrepancy between the life that Ferdinand actually has and the one he wants to live. As Erhenstein points out:

Ferdinand and Marianne haven’t got a penny to their names, but after crossing through

rivers and trees, they come to a café where Ferdinand gets money entertaining tourists

with stories of William of Orange and legends of the past. Marianne reminds Ferdinand

that he, like Poe’s ‘William Wilson’, can never run away from himself. But Ferdinand

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already knows this to be true, as he knows himself to be at last completely liberated. It is

a running toward rather than away. (225)

Incidentally, the journey across France undertaken by Ferdinand and Marianne is thus not only a

sign of rejection of society but also a journey towards self-discovery and the quest of the idealized other. According to Kaja Silverman, idealization is an unavoidable constituent of psychic life. She adds that “human existence would be intolerable without ideality” (40), which explains the reasons why Ferdinand cannot tolerate the conformist life that he leads with his wife and his children. Silverman goes on to explain that through idealization one becomes the subject of lack and that “idealization is something we cannot do without because under the right circumstances it facilitates not so much rivalrous as loving identifications – because it alone makes possible a genuine relation to the other”(40). This identification that Ferdinand constantly establishes comes to a stop once he and Marianne have reached the seaside. By identifying with many characters, Ferdinand actually identifies with no one. If the sea works as a mirror of his soul, coming to the seaside makes him realize that he is nothing or no one of importance.

This ‘running toward’ mentioned by Erhenstein is also especially illustrated by

Ferdinand’s explicit identification with several famous literary characters, which participate in

the protagonist self-discovery and illustrate his need to identify to the imagined Other in order to

find himself. Before reaching their beach shack, Marianne asks Ferdinand where they are going,

to which he answers “Vers l’île mystérieurse, comme les enfants du Capitaine Grant”, a reply

that expliciely alludes to Jules Verne’s novel L’île mystérieuse. The sea is a way for Ferdinand to

fulfill his desire to live his life like one of the characters of a famous adventure novel. Another

allusion to literature comes up when Marianne admonishes Ferdinand to hurry up: “Tu te

grouilles, Paul!” to what Ferdinand answers “Ta gueule, Virginie!” Both Marianne and

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Ferdinand imagine themselves as the eponymous characters of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel

Paul et Virginie, a reference that ironically foreshadows the death of Godard’s anti-heroes since the characters of the eighteenth-century French writer find death at the end of his novel (Virginie dies caught up in a storm as the ship she is on is reaching the shores of the Ile de France, while

Paul dies later on the island under the weight of his sorrow). The comparisons to literature establish a clear division between reality and fiction, continuing to emphasize the main characters’ mental alienation or his impossibility to live within society. This division between the real world and the imagined one finds its mode of realization once Marianne and Ferdinand reach the seaside. Despite the idealistic vision of the south of France conveyed by films explained in the first chapter, their life in the south of France is nothing but the opposite of paradisiac as it makes them drift away from each other. Brody adds that “Yet their brief time together, in isolation at a wild seaside, is the crowning moment in Ferdinand’s romantic dream of life and art coexisting” (246). Unfortunately, not only is the sea a border between Ferdinand’s ego and ideal, but it is also a threshold between the couple. Their stay at the beach shack represents their culminating moment of symbiosis before they start drifting apart.

While Ferdinand seems to have found a way to fulfill his wish to write about life and often writes in his diary while contemplating the sea, Marianne’s desires diverge from those of her companion. One of the most memorable scenes of Pierrot le fou corresponds to the moment when Marianne is filmed in extreme long shot walking along the shoreline, chanting “Qu’est-ce

que j’peux faire? J’sais pas quoi faire!” The frame is divided into two parts: the white sand of the

beach on one side and the turquoise water on the other side, while Marianne is walking barefoot

between the two. This long take implies that the young woman is caught up between two worlds

and has not found herself yet. On the contrary, Ferdinand is sitting on a pier, a parrot on his

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shoulder. The understated reference to Robinson Crusoe momentarily pinpoints a perfect

harmony between the character and the natural elements he is surrounded by and creates a bigger

discrepancy between his and Marianne’ expectations of their lives. Contrary to Bardot who is

seen emerging from the water like Botticelli’s representation of the Roman Goddess Venus,

Marianne appears stuck in limbo. The absence of interaction with water suggests that what is at

stake is not the female body and the eroticization of the seascape, but the meaning and the very essence of life. As for Ferdinand, he still seems to be identifying with a famous writer, which once again exemplifies his identification with someone he is not but whom he aspires to be.

Eventually, the sea becomes a symbol of disillusion and death. If the sea has been present at other crucial moments in Godard’s film, it is however in the final scene that marine waters essentially epitomize madness and are used as a threshold between life and death. As Alain

Bergala points out in his article on Godard’s films and the presence of borders, “Dans les deux films méditerranéens du Godard des années 1960, Le mépris et Pierrot le fou, la frontière eau- terre devient le lieu du changement d’état radical, le passage de la vie à la mort” (148). However, this argument remains quite succinct and I want to emphasize the fact that the sea is used to reflect Pierrot’s death drive along with his refusal to live within society. Kristeva explains in her conference “Réflexions sur l’étranger” that the death drive emerges when the subject faces a

“vide d’idéalité” that is to say when the subject eventually has no one or no ideal to identify to

(31’22). Furthermore, the extreme long shot of the Mediterranean Sea as the last image of the film also recalls the “Oceanic feeling” brought up by Freud’s close friend Romain Rolland, a concept that Freud himself tried to develop in Civilization and its Discontents. Following the reading of Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, Romain Rolland wrote to his friend that although he agreed with his main argument of religion as an illusion, according to him the psychoanalyst

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had failed to explain the religious feeling that man has within him. While the purpose of his work

is to concentrate on man’s eternal dissatisfaction within society, Freud remained concerned about

answering his friend’s objection. The concept “oceanic feeling” actually occupies the very first

pages of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and is an insightful starting-point to explain

man’s position with respect to the environment he occupies:

It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity,” a feeling as of

something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic.’ This feeling, he adds, is a purely

subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings no assurance of personal immortality, but

it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and

religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted

by them. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic

feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion. (11)

In other words, the limitlessness of the ocean was used as a metaphor to explain religious feeling, that is to say the feeling of eternity that some men perceive within themselves. As a very rational psychoanalyst, Freud found it challenging to give an explanation to that feeling that Rolland required to enlighten him on. Freud could only say that “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings” (11). The psychoanalyst eventually argues that this oceanic feeling is a feeling of completeness with the world: “it is a feeling of indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (11). Therefore in Pierrot le fou, Ferdinand’s inability to be one with the world that surrounds him and his constant dissatisfaction translates the absence of “Oceanic feeling” within him. Furthermore, his death in front of the sea as opposed to a death within the aquatic space translates the impossibility for him to be in perfect symbiosis with nature. Death in front of the Mediterranean Sea puts an end to the

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search of his ideal and presents the sea as a liminal space between Ferdinand’s outside world and inner world. In other words, his lack of sensation of eternity and the absence of communion with nature is what pushes him to end his life. Indeed, Freud explains that “only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life” (24). Since he has no specific purpose in life, Ferdinand is deprived of this oceanic feeling that the psychoanalyst tries to define. Freud adds that “[t]he origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness” (21). To some extent, Ferdinand’s death instinct derives from his inability to connect with this religious feeling brought up by Freud and from a feeling of insecurity in general, although it is hard to identify where this feeling origins from in Ferdinand’s life.

If as mentioned before Freud sees water as a symbol of birth, this interpretation varies for

Bachelard who demonstrates that the presence of the sea in literature is ambivalent in that it can also be interpreted as a symbol of death: “Water, the substance of life, is also the substance of death” (72). Quoting Jung, Bachelard argues that dying within water can be seen as a return to the maternal womb. In the third chapter of Water and Dreams, Bachelard does a survey of

French literature in order to emphasize the “Charon complex” that some writers have. The philosopher describes this complex as “not very forceful; the image has faded a great deal by now. To many educated minds, it has suffered the fate of all too many references to a dead literature. It is nothing more than a symbol. But its weakness and its lack of color are, all in all, advantages, for they make us feel that culture and nature can, after all, coincide” (76). Therefore, water serves to underscore the idea of death as a journey, not an end in itself. Bachelard goes on to explain that “a farewell at the water’s edge is the most heartrending and, at the same time, the most literary of all farewell” (75). Death by the water is thus a literary topos that both Godard and Allouache resort to. Indeed, the sea as a place of death chosen by Ferdinand, who decides to

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die by the sea in order to reach eternity. It is also the place where many migrants perish as exemplified in Harragas.

While offering to give a psychology of water in literary works, Bachelard also explains that the liquid element is used by authors to exemplify the end of life and its aftermath: “to disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become a part of depth or infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water” (12). The parallel between the aesthetic of water and infinity is at stake in the last minutes of Godard’s film, when

Ferdinand decides to put an end to his life while facing the immense Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, towards the end of Pierrot le fou the sea occupies a more significant symbolic function and a more imposing place on the screen that foreshadows the death of the two anti-heroes. After having lost sight of each other, both Marianne and Ferdinand reunite on Toulon’s harbor.

Marianne (who is wearing a white shirt, blue pants and red sweater to remind the spectator of the colors of the French flag and insinuate that Marianne is an allegory of France) leaves Ferdinand, who eventually meets them on an island located off the shore of the naval town of Toulon. As soon as Ferdinand arrives on the island, he kills the man who has taken Marianne with him and also stabs the young woman for no apparent reason if not jealousy. Out of despair and maybe at a loss as to what to do, Ferdinand paints his face in blue and walks to the top of the cliff facing the sea with two bundles of dynamite wrapped around his head, ready to blow himself up. The blue color on his face might also be another intertextual reference (Yves Klein’s monochrome?) or might even echo the blue of the sea, as if Ferdinand was preparing himself to spiritually reach the other side represented by the Mediterranean (as a matter of fact, death). This scene seems absurd not only because of Ferdinand’s face but also because of the screams he makes. Consequently, that sequence represents the character’s madness at its climax, as if he was no longer a man but

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was reduced to his most animal instincts. To some extent, Ferdinand embodies a man who no

longer belongs to himself and who can only find some solace dying by the sea.

Ferdinand realizes only too late the stupidity of his act and desperately tries to prevent the explosion from happening, without any success. The last shot of the film is a pan from the black smoke arising from the cliff to the immensity of the sea. The camera films the glittering sea under the sun in an extreme long shot while the voice-over of Marianne and Ferdinand are reciting lines of Rimbaud’s L’Eternité: “Elle est retrouvée. / Quoi? / L’éternité? C’est la mer allée / Avec le soleil”. The poem reunites the two characters one last time. By giving an extreme long shot of the Mediterranean Sea as the last shot of his film, Godard emphasizes the idea that the sea is akin to eternity. The fact that the sea is always filmed from a distance and is never crossed recalls Bachelard’s concept that “Close-in water takes death into its bosom. Water makes death elemental. Water dies with the dead in its substance. Water is then a substantial nothingness. No one can go further than this. For certain souls, water is the matter of despair”

(92). Essentially, the sea in Pierrot le fou is the only solace to Ferdinand’s insignificant life. It is the resting place of a character who is at a loss with himself and who has not found any sort of comfort anywhere but in death. The extreme long shot of the sun reflecting itself on the sea establishes a border between the life that Ferdinand is desperately seeking and the one he had. It is also only through death that the two characters can reunite and find a form of harmony, revealing somewhat the pessimistic idea that their life together on earth is impossible.

As mentioned in the introduction, the characters of Allouache’s film also undergo a journey towards self-discovery and the possible acquisition of a new identity. Although the

Mediterranean Sea also represents a threshold between society and the self, instead of being portrayed as a distant frontier between reality and hopes like in Pierrot le fou, the Mediterranean

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Sea in Harragas becomes a space that is lived and experienced. Additionally, according to

Amadou and Modigan, “Even though many recent films touch on the topic of migration and the living conditions of the migrants who have successfully made it to Europe, few depict the treacherous voyage the way Harragas and La pirogue do” and that both films “stand out in the way they capture so sharply, albeit partly in fiction, the emotion-filled treachery of crossing the

Mediterranean Sea in a fishing boat” (782). I would like to add to that statement that unlike other

French films about clandestine movements such as Philippe Lioret’s Welcome (2009) or Aki

Kaurismaki’s Le Havre (2011), both set in the Atlantic, Harragas focuses on the transformative power of water and how it operates as a transition between the old and the new self of the beings in flux. Allouache’s film also offers to reconsider the way historical and social changes have been shaping the Mediterranean Sea differently, that is to say as a space of contestation rather than a space favorable to the expression of conscious or unconscious sexual desires.

The sea as a transformative space in Harragas

Especially known for his films such as Omar Gatlato (1976) Bab El-Oued City (1994),

Salut Cousin! (1996), and Chouchou (2002), which narrates the story of an Algerian immigrant who comes to live in France as a transvestite, Merzak Allouache’s filmography highlights a wish to constantly evoke the hybridity of his characters, whether it is cultural or sexual. Allouache is mainly concerned with the duality of persons who are torn between two cultures, that of their country of origin and that of their country of adoption or assimilation. One of the Algerian director’s filmic signatures is to examine masculinity, often explicitly in relationship to transgender identity and homosexuality. Indeed, his films “falsify a deep-rooted mythology of masculinity created by both colonialists and Islamist ideologies” (Khalil 68). The hybridity of his characters is also at stake in the sense that not only does Allouache shoot his films on both sides

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of the Mediterranean (that is to say both in Algeria and in France), but his films’ narratives are

also imbued with the notion of emigration, which is why the director is often characterized as a

“cinéaste de passage” who constantly ties the links between Algeria and France. As Marianne

Durand points out, “One could argue, then, that this sea is France’s southern border and

Algeria’s northern limit” (70). Therefore, the sea in Allouache’s films and Harragas in particular

is a border which is in constant flux. According to Hakim Abderrezak, “the sea is portrayed

ironically as a body of interrupted flow” (18). Allouache pushes the borders politically

implemented to essentially portray the Mediterranean Sea as a valve, a threshold which crossing

is what allows his characters to adopt a new fixed identity. This idea of transformation is at stake

in the film under study, although the sea eventually ends up being synonymous with death for

some of the characters and synonymous with return to the homeland for some others.

Consequently, although Pierrot le fou and Harragas can seem quite different at first sight, both emphasize a discourse on the notion of abstract and physical borders represented by the Mediterranean Sea while taking place in a particularly tense political context. Whereas

Godard shot Pierrot when the conflict between France and Algeria had been over for only a year,

Allouache’s work took a more serious (or I should say more dramatic) and current turn than the ideas questioned in his aforementioned comedies as he wanted to report and fictionalize the life of Algerian migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Nevertheless, the notion of masculinity is still explored: Nasser and Rachid, two of the main characters of Harragas, are indeed portrayed as survivors of the sea whose physical strength enable the crossing of the

Mediterranean by swimming. If as Bachelard argues “A being dedicated to water is a being in flux” (6) and water is essentially presented as a return to the womb, I make the claim that

Allouache uses the sea to not only illustrate the character’s physical experience during the

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crossing but also to suggest the idea that the migrant’s journey is that of a temporary rebirth that

requires to leave one’s identity behind to assimilate to a new culture.

The rejection of and by society is therefore also at stake in Merzak Allouache’s film, which narrates the story of three Algerian friends Rachid, Imène, and Nasser (played respectively by Nabil Asli, Lamia Boussekine, and Seddik Benyagoub) who live in the Algerian

city of Mostaganem, located two hundred kilometers away from the Spanish coast. Tired of

living a miserable life in Algeria, the three friends decide to embark on a skiff to Spain with

other migrants in order to reach France. Nothing but the sea separates their life in Algeria from

the life they are hoping to live in Europe. Although a fictional work, this story is deeply rooted

within the lives of the real “Harragas,” those who have no other choice but to cross the

Mediterranean to find better living conditions, since the film is eventually dedicated to them. The

decisions to cross over is also provoked by the loss of their friend Omar (Yassine Naceur) who

decided to kill himself as he did not see any other alternative to the miserable life he leads in his

country. From the outset, the question of choice is therefore limited: staying in Algeria implies

living poorly and attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea is very risky. Allouache’s characters

are doomed to live the life they have and the sea is nothing but a place onto which Rachid,

Imène, and Nasser can project their illusions and hopes of better living conditions.

Unlike Pierrot le fou, whose plot at first lacks a clear direction, the plot of Allouache’s film can be divided into three parts. The first part corresponds to the idealization of the other side and of the European. It questions the notion of citizenship and the political and juridical paradox of the status of the foreigner that Julia Kristeva points out in the same conference mentioned earlier. According to Kristeva, there is a paradox in that the law seems to question whether one can be a man without being a citizen: “Peut-on être un homme sans être citoyen?”, the

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psychoanalyst asks as she is referring to the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.

The first part of Allouache’s film also concentrates on the mental and physical preparation that goes before the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, which lasts for the first half of the film’s duration. As Julia Kristeva points out in her conference: “Il ne reste à l’étranger qu’une seule solution: le chemin” (4’07) before adding that “l’étranger est toujours prêt à fuir, prendre des bateaux pour la Méditerranée” (4’15) because he is deprived of a fixed identity. While the first part of the film is a projection of the characters upon the other side, the second part of Harragas concentrates on crossing the threshold that the sea represents, with all its difficulties and obstacles that it imposes upon the characters. As Kristeva points out, “l’étranger” is not afraid of obstacles, as he is driven by his willingness to become someone with a fixed identity, an idea that is echoed in Allouache’s film. Eventually, the third part of the film explores Rachid’s assimilation as the Other, that is to say the European, while also pondering over the disillusionment of the three friends or the moment of arrival on the coast of Spain where reality eventually clashes with their hopes and dreams. This part is probably the shortest one of the film so as to concentrate on the efforts of the characters to cross the sea and emphasize their disillusionment. Besides Omar’s poignant death presented in the opening scene, the film does not give the spectator many details as to the reasons that motivate the characters to leave everything behind themselves. One might obviously assume that poverty and a lack of job opportunities are the main triggers, but their living conditions are hardly represented in the film. Essentially, the fear surrounding the crossing of the sea and the idealization of the other side is what the film focuses on, making the aquatic element one of the main characters of Allouache’s story.

Both the characters of Godard’s film and Allouache’s film are characterized by their duality. While Ferdinand’s madness is particularly emphasized by the film’s title, it is the notion

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of rebirth in Allouache’s film that is emphasized in the title thanks to the choice of the term

“Harragas” by Merzak Allouache, which can be translated as “burners.” Lovato explains the

origins of the terminology:

A plural noun derived from the Arabic radical h-r-q, the term harraga literally means the

“burners,” alluding to clandestine travelers’ burning of their documents to avoid

recognition by the authorities of the countries to which they intend to migrate. The term

also denotes their “burning” of the past, leaving behind the reality of their home country.

The final s of the film’s title is creatively added by the director, probably in order to

emphasize the plurality connoted by the term. (102)

Therefore, the term “Harragas” is largely used to refer to those who burn their identity papers once they have left their native country to reach the shores of Europe. The idea of burning one’s papers to become another person emphasized by Allouache’s title presents the sea as a transformative space. Just like the sea materializes Pierrot’s divided self in Godard’s film, the sea in Harragas is therefore a locus where one ceases to be who they are, in order to become the

Other, the person who is idealized or that they have to be if they want to be assimilated to their new country.

The relation to the Other is of paramount importance in the new definition of the self that all of the protagonists are seeking. Lacan considers alienation in terms of the relation between the subject and the other and defines the term “alienation” by using another term, “vel” which

“condemns the subject to appearing only in that division which, it seems to me, I have just articulated insufficiently by saying that, if it appears on one side as meaning produced by the signifier, it appears on the other as aphanasis” (210) or what Lacan also calls “disappearance.”

The essence of Lacan’s argument is that the Subject and the Other interact with one another, 138

necessarily creating a zone of “non-meaning” in which one of the two disappears, somewhat

loses himself. The Other becomes essential in the definition of the subject’s identity.

Additionally, as Kristeva remarks, Freud explains that the foreigner awakens some fears because

of the similarities (what Freud calls “the uncanny”) between the self and the Other. This mirror effect is, according to Kristeva, necessary to constitute our identity, an argument that finds echoes in Harragas. Whether one tends to favor a Freudian approach or a Lacanian one, both

Godard and Allouache use the sea’s aesthetics so as to exemplify their characters’ divided selves or the opposition between their interiority and what they project onto the outside world, that is to say this “Other” whom they aspire to be.

From the outset, the rejection of society in Harragas is exemplified by the opposition between cityscape and seascape. This opposition between the oppressive city and the immensity of the aquatic space presents the sea as a border whose crossing can only lead to better living conditions. The first image of Harragas is actually one of Omar’s feet (Yassine Naceur) hanging, while the off-screen diegetic sound of the waves can be heard so as to suggest the power of the aquatic element. From the very first seconds, Allouache’s film implies that any attempt to cross the sea will lead to death. Rachid’s voice-over explains that the feet that the spectator sees are those of his best friend, who previously attempted to cross the Mediterranean without any success. Another voice-over, this time that of the late Omar who has written a letter to his sister, explains that “Si je pars, je meurs. Si je ne pars pas, je meurs. Alors, je pars sans partir et je meurs.” From the beginning, even though no clear account of their respective lives is given, it is however possible to have a sense of their feeling of oppression and inability to escape their living conditions. Omar hung himself because he knew that staying meant to lead a miserable life and that leaving would be either dangerous (cause his death) or would lead him to

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being arrested and deported back to Algeria. The feeling of oppression as opposed to the immensity of the sea and the ideal of freedom that it represents is also rendered through the way the city of Mostaganem is filmed. After showing Omar’s feet, the camera does a jump cut to show a gathering of men who appear to be bargaining. That scene is followed by a cut to several medium shots of the block of buildings, putting emphasis on the satellite dishes that dominate the cityscape. Antoni Muntadas’ documentary Fear/Miedo (2007) explains that the satellite dishes are a sign of westernization. Indeed, their significant number suggests the importance of the surrounding countries and the broadcasting of culture, which somewhat abolishes the cultural and geographical borders between Algeria and nearby states. The presence of the satellite dishes remains nonetheless ironic: if the cultural frontiers are no longer implemented in a strict way, crossing the physical borders (as a matter of fact, the sea) remains perilous. Therefore, the contiguity of the buildings and the effervescence of the city jarringly contrast with the openness of the sea.

Furthermore, when Imène takes a taxi to meet with Nasser, she removes her headscarf as a symbol of freedom and liberation from what her religion imposes upon her femininity. The young woman walks towards the beach, her hair in the wind as if she was liberated from the constraints that are forced upon her gender and as if she was already preparing herself to become westernized. An extreme long shot shows Nasser standing on the edge of the water, while Imène is walking towards him. His gaze seems to be concerned about the unknown that lies behind the sea’s horizon, a moment which illustrates the social changes imposed on the beachscape: “The beach has changed status in some of the latest North African literary and cinematic productions.

It is no longer a place of leisure and pleasure. Instead, it is a site where characters go to look beyond” (Abderrezak 149). To some extent, unlike in Roger Vadim’s and Eric Rohmer’s films,

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the sea is no longer associated with sexual impulses, femininity, and repressed masculinity as it is the case in Luc Besson’s and James Huth’s films, but it encapsulates the characters’ desires of a new and better life and their willingness to become the Other. Despite the dangers that going at sea might represent, Imène declares that she is also ready to leave. In that scene, the couple eventually stands on the porch of a beach shack, facing the sea together as if they were facing their future and the challenges that come with it.

As far as Allouache’s film is concerned, references to literature are less of a preoccupation for the characters, for whom leaving becomes a matter of life and death. Part of the film’s plot focuses on the mental preparation of the characters, who are about to leave

Algeria. The sadness of Imène and her mother along with the sadness of Nasser’s father contrast with the indifferent attitude of Hassan, who spends his money at a dancing bar where he is seen kissing various women and being carefree. The scene at the bar creates a discrepancy between the anxiety provoked by the departure and the leisurely life that Hassan leads. Despite his nonchalant behavior, Hassan (who is clearly taking advantage of the migrants who pay him to use his boat) seems to have a certain knowledge of the life in Europe and warns the “brûleurs” of the harsh reality they should expect once they arrive on the other side. As he gives food to the

“brûleurs”, one of them complains about the quality of the food Hassan has provided them with and says that “Ce sera mieux de l’autre côté,” to which Hassan replies that Black people are not welcomed in Europe. That discussion in Harragas is important in that it reflects the opposition between the idealized vision that the migrants have of Europe and the harsh reality that they find there but that they have to deny in order to cross the Mediterranean. Kristeva argues that “ce qu’il cherche, c’est un territoire invisible et promis, ce pays qui n’existe pas, mais qu’il porte dans son rêve, et qu’il faut bien appeler un au-delà” (4’32). The idealization of the other side is

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also emphasized by one of the scenes taking place at sea. Right after losing two of their

passengers (Hakim and the ex-policeman), the remaining ones see a leisure boat coming out

from nowhere. Rachid admires a young woman standing against the rail, sipping a cocktail.

Rachid starts imagining what perfumes she is wearing and seems totally seduced by her.

According to Fofana and Modigan, “The fact that he knows even the perfume brand she is

wearing just from smelling it may be a fantastic creation of his imagination, but it is triggered by

overwhelming and incessant exposure among his peers to images that make them dream of such

reality and create in their minds the false impression of what living in the West looks like” (786).

Rachid’s vision reinforces the dichotomy between his country and Europe, and highlights his fascination for the West.

The fact that Hassan is killed by one of the migrants (Mustapha, played by Samir El

Hakim) before the burners get on the boat suggests the condemnation of any attempt to disillusion the migrants. It also highlights the fact that migration is a business for some men while this type of activity is frowned upon by others. Before going to sea, tensions are rising among the characters. In that sense, the sea can be perceived as the protagonist of Allouache’s film and which decides the others’ fate. While the tensions are rising because of the wait due to the state of the sea, a moment of respite arrives. One of the “brûleurs” uses a swing on the edge of the water, provoking the hilarity of his companions. Unfortunately, this moment of respite is only very brief as the reality of their situation catches with them. A moment later, a series of close-ups focuses on the faces of the migrants contemplating the sea. The gravity of the scene can only suggest the fear and the anxiety provoked by their upcoming departure. A deep focus shot shows the sea in the distance while the camera films one of the “brûleurs” through the window of the beach sack: he is smoking on the patio, facing the immensity of the sea as if it

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was an unsurmountable obstacle. The colors of the seascapes and the shades of grey suggest that the forecast is not favorable yet for the departure and that one of the main obstacles that the migrants might face during their journey might be the weather. Contrary to the high-key lighting in Vadim’s and Godard’s film, this shot underlines the willingness to portray the Mediterranean

Sea as a space of struggle rather than a sensual place.

While the sea as a border is a common trait of Pierrot le fou and Harragas, the connection between body and geography is what somewhat differentiates them. As mentioned in the previous section, the sea allegorizes the rejection of and by society that the characters are living. However, what distinguishes Pierrot from Harragas is the change from being a place seen from a distance in Godard’s film while it is conceived as a transformative space in

Allouache’s. As a consequence, in the two films under study the sea represents both a metaphorical and a physical border, one that is seen from a distance while the other is actually questioned and crossed by the characters of Allouache’s film, which can be further understood according to Michel de Certeau’s distinction between “lieu” and “espace”. In L’invention du quotidien, de Certeau makes the distinction between “place” and “space” and explains the difference between the two. While the “lieu” “implique une indication de stabilité (208), an

“espace” is characterized by “l’ensemble des mouvements qui s’y déploient” (208). Motion is thus what characterizes a space as opposed to a place. For instance, a building might be seen as a place. Once it is lived and inhabited, it becomes a space. De Certeau also emphasizes the interchangeability of the two notions as ‟Les récits effectuent donc un travail qui, incessamment, transforment des lieux en espaces et des espaces en lieuxˮ (210), which is exactly what

Allouache does in Harragas. Instead of showing the sea from a distant perspective, Allouache reveals that it becomes a space that is inhabited as the characters and the sea momentarily

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become one. To use Bachelard’s expression, the sea becomes an “espace vécu”. Indeed, in

Poétique de l’espace, Bachelard explains that “L’espace saisi par l’imagination ne peut rester

l’espace indifférent livré à la mesure et à la réflexion du géomètre. Il est vécu. Et il est vécu, non

pas dans sa positivité, mais avec toutes les partialités de l’imagination” (27). The connection

between aquatic space and the characters of the film therefore become one common thing.

Moreover, De Certeau asserts that “Lieu tiers, jeu d’intéractions et d’entre-vues, la frontière est comme un vide, sym-bole narratif d’échanges et de rencontres” (223). The way Allouache presents the sea in Harragas is far from being a space devoid of any human interaction. As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, the characters and the sea are intertwined in order to reveal a critical perspective on the notion of borders and to push their liminality. It becomes a transformative space for the characters who are trying to become the Other that Lacan refers to in his Ecrits. This transformative space also answers Kristeva’s notion of “besoin d’idéalité”

(30’04). Kristeva explains that, whether it is conscious or unconscious, the desire to be part of a nation can push towards the Other, who is idealized. Although at the beginning of the film the sea is always perceived in the background, it starts having a paramount importance when the characters decide to cross it.

Additionally, in Water and Dreams, Bachelard discusses the transformative power of

water and writes that “water is also a type of destiny that is no longer simply the vain destiny of

fleeting images and a never-ending dream but an essential destiny that endlessly changed the

substance of the being” (6). Therefore, the immensity of the aquatic space that is in front of the

group of harragas is perceived as an element that is going to change them and transform their

identity to help them become the idealized Other that they have in mind. Although Nasser does

not seem to agree with her plans to leave with all of the men supposed to embark on the small

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boat, Imène declares “C’est ce qu’on verra.” At that moment, the camera cuts to show the sea

raging against the rocks, as if to suggest the upcoming difficulties that the crossing represents. A

ship in the background contrasts with the one upon which the smuggler Hassan (Okacha Touita),

who is ironically nicknamed “mal de mer,” is letting the migrants embark. From the outset, the

sea allegorizes the idealized life that the characters are seeking while also allegorizing the

dangers that leaving their current life represents. The sea is portrayed as an ambivalent space

where rebirth and death might both be possible.

Therefore, Allouache portrays the Mediterranean as a space of struggle, a site of death

rather than an idyllic touristic location and pushes the geographical boundaries. As Hakim

Abderrezak points out, “We are shown that the borders of Europe do not start on land, but rather

in the waters of the Mediterranean” (233). The crossing of the sea represents the assimilation to a

new country and the adoption of a new identity. However, the idealization of the characters soon

gives way to the disillusion. The group of harragas leaves at night so as not to be discovered by the coast guards. An extreme long shot reveals the skiff sinking into the darkness, which creates a feeling of fear and oppression as it is impossible to know what they are going to face during their journey. Like in an adventure novel, with the exception that it actually depicts the sad reality of the migrant crisis, the characters have to face many obstacles. The first obstacle is to avoid the coast guard. The second obstacle is the feeling of helplessness towards the immensity of the sea while the crossing should take twelve hours, which seems like an eternity for the men and the only woman on board the small boat. The long passing of time during the crossing is suggested by the use of several dissolves: the transition from night to day is very slow and the amount of time it takes for the “brûleurs” who are navigating towards Europe seems like an eternity to all of them. Rachid’s voice-over also emphasizes the boredom of the passengers:

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“Quand on traverse, on s’ennuie.” This remarks shows that the characters are not here to be in

symbiosis with nature. On the contrary, the sea is a liquid element that they fear and that might

take their life away. There is nothing but the sky and the aquatic element for them to

contemplate, with the hope that no incident will occur at sea. Nasser’s voice-over explains that

“Quand on est perdu en mer, la seule peur c’est de se retrouver par hasard en Algérie”--as if it was the only danger that they could face would be to return to their point of departure. While the myth of the return is a topos of Carribean literature (and especially Césaire), in Harragas the return to the native land is dreaded by the characters who are ready to erase their origins to assimilate to a new culture. Even Mustapha the policeman lets his emotions go with respect to the imposing presence of the sea: “Putain l’angoisse, toute cette eau autour. C’est encore pire si on pense à ce qu’il y a dessous.ˮ A medium shot of his profile with the sea in the background implies the idea that he feels trapped by the imposing seascape and the unknowability of the underwater world. The skiff is also often filmed under different angles and often crosses the screen to suggest the lapsing of time and the monotony of their days, as if after being trapped in

Algeria they were trapped by the sea. Later on, Nasser realizes that the compass he was given at the beginning of the film is not working properly and that they are actually drifting away, which provokes the policeman’s rage. Furthermore, a close-up on the engine on the night of their departure foreshadows the idea that it might break down, which is what eventually happens towards the end of the film, when the policeman asks Rachid to go faster, exhilarated at the thought of being so close to the European shores. Mustapha fires several shots, which causes

Hakim and himself to argue and fall overboard. Since neither one of them can swim, both drown, making them the two losses of the trip (another migrant also falls overboard towards the end of the film, drowning under the desperate calls of his friends. A close-up focuses on the surface of

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the water to suggest the idea that the sea is encapsulating the corpse of the man who has fallen and that it might actually also contain many other corpses). Their screams of joy at the thought of setting foot on firm land have been forever locked away by the sea. More obstacles result from the engine being broken down. Indeed, there are no paddles onboard the small boat and most of the “brûleurs” do not know how to swim. One of them even cries out: “Comment on saurait nager? On vient du Sahara! On a jamais vu la mer”. The inability for them to reach the Spanish coast when they are almost there creates an indescribable frustration.

Although very gripping as a whole, one of the most powerful scene of Allouache’s film corresponds to the moment when Rachid, later on followed by Nasser and Imène, decides to swim across the sea to reach the shore. Rachid dives into the turquoise water with his clothes on as the engine of the boat has broken down. It is compelling to notice how the colors of the film have changed as opposed to the moment when the characters were back in Algeria. The different shades of grey are opposed to the blue sky and the glittering sea under the Mediterranean sun almost make their final destination akin to a paradise, a paradise nevertheless tainted by the risk of being caught up by the coast guard or immigration services. A very thought-provoking comparison could be established here between the representation of the sea in Vadim and

Rohmer’s films and Allouache’s. As explained in the first chapter, the Mediterranean Sea became a mythical place thanks to the presence of Bardot in films. By referring to mythology, the directors she worked with contributed to making the Mediterranean akin to a modern myth. A scene comparison of Antoine and Juliette swimming in the water on one side and Nasser and

Imène swimming on the other side reveals the shift that has occurred in the allegorical function of the sea. Both make one with the border that they are crossing, recalling Regis Debray’s definition of the term border in Eloge des frontières: “A quoi sert la frontière, en définitive? A

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faire corps” (61), therefore emphasizing the immanence between the natural element and the

human body. While Antoine and Juliette’s bodies are revealed in a sensual way by the camera

and Brigitte Bardot is remembered for the very cult beach scene in which she embodies an image

of femininity that was liberated from social conventions, Nasser and Imène have nothing of the

sexy and glamorous couple conveyed by the other one in Vadim’s film. To start with, both wear

turtle neck sweaters and Nasser even carries a backpack with him that contains personal

belongings. Therefore, instead of being stripped of their possessions and having a direct contact

between their bodies and the saline water, the young friends carry with them a past, a story that

they will not be completely able to get rid of.

It is however through the character of Rachid that the transformative power of the sea is

best exemplified and exacerbated. Even though Imène has removed her headscarf before leaving

Algeria as a sign of contestation against religious oppression, and Hakim (who is thought to be a

religious fundamentalist) has traded his religious clothes for sport clothes as a sign of

assimilation to the West, Rachid’s metamorphosis is even more telling of the transformative power of water that Bachelard mentions in his work. While Ferdinand only contemplates the sea from a distance, projecting an ideal onto the aquatic space, the preparation for the crossing of the

Mediterranean Sea intensifies itself as Rachid is filmed wrapping a plastic bag around his chest, which probably contains money and other valuable objects that will allow him to start his new life once he has reached the shores of Europe. It is not until the end of the film that the spectator will be able to find out what is in the bag. In the meantime, his little brothers are sitting next to each other on the sofa of their apartment’s living room, looking at him with both admiration and sadness. To some extent, Rachid demythicizes the story of Ulysses, preparing himself for an adventure that will have him arrested. Sadly, migrants are not seen as heroes once they have

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arrived at their final destination and Rachid’s fate will not be luckier than most of the migrants

who are caught and taken to detention camps. Ironically during that scene, the off-screen diegetic sound of a French TV journalist who is talking about AIDS contrasts with the ongoing action within the room. Her report on the devastating effects of the disease shows a discrepancy between the different people around the globe who are not preoccupied by the same issues and it emphasizes the gravity of Rachid’s situation—he is not the least concerned about his sexuality at the moment. That scene is very compelling in that it gives a vision of masculinity that is endangered and that focuses on survival rather than sexuality. The myth of the passage and of the other side is what motivates the characters’ actions throughout the entire film. As said earlier, the hope that the living conditions in Europe might be better than the ones that their home country offers them is what pushes Allouache’s characters to cross the Mediterranean. However, this idea of a better life is nothing but a myth in the sense that the reality that the three friends encounter is everything that they fear as all of them end up being caught by the police and sent back home.

The scene before Rachid’s arrest illustrates the transformation linked to the idealization of the other and the character’s alignment with the European. After he has swam across the sea to reach the shore, a close-up focuses on Rachid’s feet, treading upon the European ground for the first time. This image is quite significant in that the intricate relationship between his body and the sand suggests a new territoriality of the character, the idea of a new beginning and the acquisition of a new identity, that of the idealized European. Rachid opens his plastic bag taped around his chest and takes a few clothes out. He also has taken a brush and what seems to be gel in order to polish his appearance. As Rachid is getting cleaned up, the scene is insightful in that

he ceases to be a migrant in search of his identity and his new life in order to become the

idealized “Other”. Furthermore, the character erases all traces of Algerian identity by wearing a

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Catholic cross around his neck, which renders the metamorphosis undergone by the crossing of

the sea even more blatant. As Mireille Rossello points out on her article “Dissident or

Conformist Passing: Merzak Allouache’s Chouchou,” the term “passing” implies a

transformation of one’s physical traits and appearance with the idea that the characteristics of the

white person are preferred:

In the context of racialized relationships, in an American or South African context, for

example, passing (as white) means that a member of the discriminated group strategically

edits his or her appearance to take advantage of the different privileges that the dominant

has attached to this particular identity. Whether the passing is the result of deliberate

physical transformation or a misreading that the subject who passes does not welcome, it

can be argued that white supremacy is reinforced rather than questioned. (3)

Rosello’s argument on the supremacy of some culture over others is exemplified in that scene as in Rachid’s mind, being assimilated to the Europeans means erasing any trace of his religious faith: the cross, the fancy clothes that he wears are signs of his mental representation of westernization. Therefore, the sea can be seen as a place of metamorphosis that erases the past. It is also a place of transition towards the adoption of a new identity. After a series of cuts between

Rachid and his two friends, the camera does a close-up and tilts up his legs. The off-screen diegetic sound of the walkie-talkie implies that he is not alone and that he has been arrested by coast guards. He is indeed hand-cuffed and is seen crying. His voice-over explains that Nasser and he met later at a detention camp while Imène has been sent back to Algeria. However powerful the transformation is, it is only momentary.

In Harragas, the sea and the ship are also depicted as a symbol of death. The failure of

the character’s plan is somewhat foreseen from the beginning as high-angle shots are often used 150

to film what the crew is doing to get ready before the departure. This technique implies the idea that an illegal operation is ongoing and also foreshadows one of the very last shots of the film, when two police officers are seen in low angle standing on the top of a cliff, observing Nasser and Imène resting on the beach before being arrested. Before they reach the shore, the boat becomes a place of confidence and sharing to somewhat reflect a small society or a living microcosm, as Michel de Certeau argues. The author of L’invention du quotidien particularly insists upon the opposition between the movement of the train, which he compares to a ship, and the surrounding natural elements, while also arguing that this mode of transportation offers a parenthesis in the life of those who are onboard. The cars of the train and the cabins of the ship in which people are waiting while traveling are both compared to the cells of a prison, where rules and regulations have already been implemented: “Une bulle du pouvoir panoptique et classificateur, un module de l’enfermement qui rend possible la production d’un ordre, une insularité close et autonome, voilà ce qui peut traverser l’espace et se rendre indépendant des enracinements locaux” (199). As a consequence, the object in motion sets its own order and is seen as an opposition to the land-based power. Referring to the journey of the ship, de Certeau adds that it is a “Moment étrange où une société fabrique des spectateurs et transgresseurs d’espace” (199), an argument which can unhesitatingly be applied to Harragas. Indeed, people of different skin colors, religious beliefs and gender compose the crew of on the ship that is navigating through the “espace” that the aquatic element represents. The Harragas are the

“transgresseurs d’espace” that de Certeau refers to, although this transgression is only momentary. Even the policeman openly divides the members of the boat: “les ploucs” on one hand and the “fils à papa” on the other hand, because Rachid, Nasser, and Imène are able to speak French and are thus perceived as more educated and assimilated to Western culture.

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Hakim is undoubtedly the most distant and intriguing character, whose outfit makes him akin to

a potential fundamentalist (Imène explains that she refused to marry him in the past and that

Hakim became more secluded and was no longer friends with Rachid and Nasser). In other

words, the ship becomes the locus of reunion, where people who would not normally interact

with one another are forced to cohabit and talk to each other. To some extent, the ship

paradoxically creates a division between different groups of persons while they are themselves

trying to abolish the division between their country of departure and that of their country of

arrival. Although he isolates himself from the rest of the group, Hakim intervenes in person to

defend his previous friends against the policeman, who is often infuriated.

Nevertheless, the symbolic function of the ship remains ironic. While it is supposed to

transport the characters to a better life, it is actually what brings some to death. Therefore, the

ship is an ambivalent place in that brings a new dynamic to the group while also provoking some

migrants’ death. Bachelard evokes the image of the boat in literature to argue that “all the

mysterious boats founds so abundantly in novels about the sea participate in the ship of the dead.

The reader may be fairly certain that the novelist who uses them has a more or less hidden

Charon complex” (78). Therefore, the image of the ship is mean to work as an allegory of death.

In Allouache’s film, several migrants lose their life in the heart of the sea. The ship represents

death as it establishes a division between those who know how to swim and those who some

from the Sahara and who have never seen the sea.

The series of cross-cutting between the three groups (the migrants on the boat, Rachid swimming by himself, Nasser and Imène swimming together) is followed by a shot of Nasser and Imène who finally arrive on a beach, exhausted by their unsurmountable physical effort. The extreme long shot of the couple swimming towards the beach shows nothing but the sea (the sky

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and the beach are not seen yet so as to express their loneliness with respect to the aquatic

element). This shot also allows the spectator to enjoy the seascape: the turquoise water now

dominates the screen, as opposed to the grey and rough sea that the characters had when leaving

Mostaganem. The white sand, blue sky, and the singing of the birds almost make the place

appear as a vacation spot where the two friends are coming to rest. Unfortunately, the place is

nothing of the sort for the characters of the film. Allouache willingly plays on the ambiguity of

the situation by using the water as a symbol of duality. Indeed, while Nasser and Imène are

laying on the beach, the camera films them from behind, their faces reflecting onto a paddle as a

symbol of hybridity. Imène and Nasser have left their country of origin to adopt a new identity,

but the presence of water on the beach can also suggest the difficulty of their condition: instead

of being a resting place, the beach ends their hopes to have a better life as they are caught by

police officers. While the couple is resting on the beach, an extreme long high angle shot films

the two persons, suggesting that they are being watched. A few minutes later, a low-angle shot of the cliff reveals two figures dressed in black, standing out from the blue sky: Nasser and Imène are about to be arrested, which puts an end to their journey and quest for their new selves.

The last image of the film is a shot of the migrants left on the boat while Rachid’s voice- over explains that he wishes this life to no one and that this is the reason why he wanted to tell this story, using the pronoun “vous” for the first time in order to better grasp the spectator’s attention. The image of the migrant boat as the last one of the film infers that this situation does not only apply to the characters of the film but to unfortunately thousands of people who are trying to leave their country of origin. It also recalls Bachelard’s assumption that the boat is a symbol of death. Furthermore, towards the end of Harragas the camera films some men walking in the streets in Algeria. This image is reminiscent of the beginning of the film and translates the

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impossibility to completely escape the city. To some extent, the story goes from the city to the sea and then back to the city: the circle is achieved and there is no hope for anyone to flee from the social conditions imposed by Algerian society on one side and the absence of help provided to migrants on the other side. The only options for migrants are either to stay where they are or to risk their lives, which goes back to what Omar was explaining in his letter to his sister. At the end of the film, a series of intertitles gives an account of the ongoing situation in the

Mediterranean: “De 1988 à Février 2009 pas moins de 13444 migrants sont morts aux frontières de l’Europe, dont 5182 disparus en mer.” Allouache gives a number of people who have lost their life at sea and adds that “Ce film est dedié à tous les harragas disparus en mer.” Throughout his film, the director demonstrates the impossibility- or at least the difficulties - to cross the sea.

The sea is a border but the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side for those who attempt to cross it. Although not a documentary, Allouache’s work is meant to denounce several forms of injustice: that of not being born at the right place at the right time and the fact that very little is done on the side of authorities to help those migrants.

Mapping the mind

To go back to the verses of Baudelaire’s poem presented in the epigraph of this chapter, I have demonstrated that in both Godard’s and Allouache’s films, the sea works as a mirror of the mind and of the character’s inner states. The aquatic space is used as a map of the ego, which boundaries are, according to Freud who wrote Civilization and its Discontents, in constant flux

(13). Unlike the previous chapter, which presented the sea as a symbol of male repressed sexuality in Besson’s and Huth’s film, the Mediterranean Sea is also an allegory of the topography of the mind presented by Freud and serves as a demarcation or border between the ego, the id and the super-ego or ego ideal that goes beyond gender relations. The ego is

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represented in the two films under study by the characters’ conscious representation of the world,

that is to say their rejection of society while the id and the super-ego are represented by their identification to the other. The Mediterranean Sea is a space of projection and idealization of the other, which both Ferdinand and Allouache’s characters aspire to become, although in

Ferdinand’s case it is not sure who or what he is trying to become. Therefore, although Godard’s film and Allouache’s are very different in that they were shot at two different time periods, belong to different genres and have different narratives, they are also very similar in that both portray the journey of characters who are trying to search for themselves in a context that oppresses them. Alienation from society is what pushes Ferdinand/Pierrot on one side, Rachid,

Imène and Nasser on the other side to either seek refuge by the sea or cross it to find a better life.

The sea becomes an allegory of alienation from society, of the idealized other and materializes the discrepancy between who they are and what they are looking for. On one hand, Ferdinand aspires to find the essence of life and on the other hand, the three friends in Harragas want nothing but better living conditions. Essentially, the sea can also be seen as an allegory of death.

While dying by the sea, Ferdinand tries to reach a form of eternity that he does not have in the life he is escaping from and his frustration and absence of clear identification is what leaves room for his death instinct to express itself. As for Allouache’s protagonists, they try to redefine themselves by embarking on a journey across the sea. If the return to the sea is often assimilated to the return to the mother’s womb, as psychoanalysts have suggested, in Harragas the sea enables the temporary acquisition of a new identity and the transition from the old self to the new self. Films about migrants have been offering several perspectives related to the ongoing crisis as borders are more often contested and crossed. Nevertheless, what all these films have in common is that the sea becomes the central character around which the plots are articulated and it

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represents the mind while also portraying the Mediterranean as a reflector of social changes. No longer embedded with this mythical dimension that Bardot contributed to in her films, directors have been using the Mediterranean to tackle political and historical issues.

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Conclusion: Seascapes beyond France and the Mediterranean

This dissertation has demonstrated that the study of the presence of the Mediterranean

Sea in contemporary French cinema enables a deeper understanding of the construction and

representation of femininity, masculinity, and otherness in French society. I have not tried to

claim that films set in other types of landscapes do not raise these concerns, but rather to assess

the importance of the seascape as it allows a deeper understanding of these aspects through the

allegorical functions that Bachelard, Freud, and Jung give to water. Far from being just a

backdrop, the Mediterranean Sea allows questioning of 20th and 21st Century French identity.

Chapter one has proven that while the female characters played by Bardot are objectified and

submitted to the male gaze, their sensual representation along with the haptic sensations

conveyed in the films she appears in have enabled a mythologizing of the Mediterranean and

promote it as a sensual paradise. Unlike the beautiful Grace Kelly who, in Hitchcock’s To Catch

a Thief (1955) had contributed to the glamorization of the Riviera on the international scale thanks to her beauty, her elegance, her aristocratic aura, and also the glamourous couple she

forms with Cary Grant (not to mention her eventual marriage to Prince Rainier), the connection

between Bardot’s body on one hand and the seascape on the other significantly eroticized the

region in public awareness and created an intrinsic connection between topography and gender:

the Mediterranean Sea is Bardot and Bardot is the Mediterranean Sea. Although the actress also

played in many films that did not necessarily imply the presence of the Mediterranean seascape,

what connects the first films in which the Mediterranean Sea has a function other than that of a

backdrop isthe presence of this star. I concluded this chapter with a brief consideration of Eric 157

Rohmer’s La collectionneuse (1967), in order to show how the filmmaker’s particular maritime aesthetic has enabled a shift from the representation of the aquatic space as exclusively feminine to the representation of the aquatic space as being experienced by the male figure, therefore challenging Bachelard’s assumption that water is essentially linked to femininity. Unable to have

Haydée as part of his own collection, Adrien dedicates his attention to the examination of the beauty of the sea. The different close-ups of the water become the only collection that he can possess, therefore transferring his heterosexual desire from his friend onto the sea and becoming one with the aquatic element. Additionally, the character played by Haydée embodies a different type of femininity than the sensual aura that emanates from Bardot and illustrates the ambivalent relationship that New-Wave directors had with the icon. If two years earlier Godard had Bardot star in Le mépris, Rohmer offers a new vision of femininity as woman becomes in charge of her own sexuality and independent from male domination. Indeed, la “collectionneuse” cannot be part of anyone’s personal collection. The director’s focus on the sea also helps depict the shifts occurring between male and female relations in French society. By concentrating onto the sea’s aesthetic, Rohmer makes the claim that woman is no longer objectified but becomes invested with an agency of her own.

Adrien’s attraction to water led me to consider the representation of masculinity throughout the interaction between male characters and the Mediterranean Sea. As I demonstrated in the second chapter, the glamorous vision that the Mediterranean Sea had benefitted from in the 1950s started to shift with the increase in women’s rights and that of the masculinity crisis. Although still used as an allegory of femininity and motherhood, the

Mediterranean Sea, when used in relation to male characters, has enabled the portrayal of male fears about castration and their loss of power with respect to the opposite sex. Two films

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particularly responded to the concerns of masculinity in crisis: Luc Besson’s Le grand bleu

(1988) and James Huth’s Brice de Nice (2005). Far from being heroic figures like Cousteau or

Napoleon, the characters of Jacques Mayol and Brice embody a transition from the use of the maritime space as one of masculine conquest to the use of the maritime space as a locus of fears and struggles. Between a free-diver lured by the sea and a would-be surfer obsessed with surfing

a gigantic wave in the Mediterranean Sea, both Besson’s and Huth’s films draw a compelling

parallel between a more vulnerable representation of masculinity and a reversal of gendered

stereotypes: it is the woman who becomes in control and who is in charge of the male’s sexual

education. The two protagonists’ recurrent dreams of the sea and mermaids, coupled with their

lack of interest for the sexual act move these films away from the typical masculine and virile

hero. Despite the fact that masculinity always seems to have been in crisis (French historian

Jean-Jacques Courtine argues that it started after the First World War and was amplified after the second world conflict while Phil Powrie argues that the crisis of masculinity started in the

1970s), both films illustrate the difficulties that are bound with the masculine sex. While the

crisis of masculinity of the aftermath of the First World War is mainly characterized by “une

vulnérabilité corporelle nouvelle” (Courtine 203) because of the numerous casualties and

photographs of injured soldiers conveyed after the conflict, the crisis of masculinity of the 1980s

differs from earlier in that it raises question about man’s sexuality, fatherhood and role with

regard to the opposite sex after the female emancipation that resulted from the 1968 social

revolution. Indeed, “the increase of women at work had an impact on the nature of couple

relationships and sex roles” that was relevant to the 1980s (Powrie 9). Not only had men to

repress their feminity, but unlike before they also had to repress their masculinity.9 Although

9 « social changes, in particular those consequent upon feminism, have caused men to repress traditionally masculine traits without anything to replace them, hence the crisis of masculinity.” (Powrie 11) 159

treating this issue under different tones, the shared similarities between Le grand bleu and Brice

de Nice revealed the Mediterranean Sea as a space of questioning and repositioning for men

within French society.

Eventually, I offered to explore the sea beyond gender divisions in the third chapter in order to focus on the notion of idealized other and identity in flux. In Godard’s and Allouache’s

films, the protagonists undertake a spiritual and physical journey towards the sea in order to find

their true self or in the hope to acquire a new identity. Although very different as they belong to two filmic genres and movements, both films stage a rejection of social values and present the

Mediterranean Sea as a way for the characters to become who they aspire to be. Particularly marked by the Algerian War of Independence that ended a year before Pierrot le fou, and the

migratory flux departing from North Africa in Harragas, the sea has become a permeable

frontier, a threshold between society and the ideal representation of the self that has allowed to

push the limits of identity. In the former, the sea is used as a frontier between Pierrot’s real and

imaginary life, nourished by his multiple intertextual references. In short, the Mediterranean

encapsulates Pierrot’s unfulfilled desires. It represents Pierrot’s search for a meaning to life, a

way to connect with himself, while also reminding him of the impossibility of finding out who

he actually is. The last shot of the film highlights the dichotomy between his inner self and the

outside world. In Allouache’s film, the sea is a frontier that is lived and experienced. Moreover,

the Mediterranean Sea is a transformative space that momentarily changes those who cross it. It

allows Allouache’s characters to become the other: Imène removes her headscarf, Hakim no

longer wears his religious robe, and Rachid eventually wears a Christian cross around his neck.

Allouache’s protagonists literally adopt a western look before treading upon the European shore as a way to anticipate the new identity they will acquire once they start their new life. Although

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migrant films are not necessarily about becoming the Other but mostly about improving one’sliving conditions, this film’s particular focus on the aquatic space highlights the transformative power of the Mediterranean Sea. Its overwhelming presence allows for questioning the idea of fixed identity that Kristeva mentions in her conference on the status of foreigners. In both films, the sea ends up being synonymous with death.

Therefore, the Mediterranean Sea can be seen as a map of the mind onto which inner desires are projected. Since the sea is the preferred space where bodies can be unveiled and since it is generally used as a symbol of the unconscious, motherhood, femininity, and sexuality, the films under study have allowed us to consider gender relations and identity. It has also enabled us to bring to the fore a different vision of the Mediterranean, one which is not just a place of trade and migration as had been demonstrated in the studies mentioned in the introduction. The

Mediterranean Sea is an ambivalent space where mythical representation of the female body and identity crisis stand alongside. If the Mediterranean had been idealized by painters from the impressionist movement as well as writers and filmmakers, it is also a space onto which inner struggles are transferred. The examination of the films in this corpus reveal that the

Mediterranean is no longer solely the glamourous, sensual place that it used to be but that its representation has shifted to become more vulnerable, in particularly tense political and social time. In a context of globalization marked by “intensification of the movement accross borders of capital, goods, information and labour” (Tarr 1), Carrie Tarr argues that the question of the

“national” has been significantly challenged, explaining the emergence of a scholarship on transnational cinema over the past twenty years (2). Moreover, because bounderies and frontiers are constantly questioned and pushed back, the sea has recently become more central to the films’ narratives, becoming very often of the protagonists. This thus leads us to wonder to what

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extent other countries surrounding the Mediterranean basin have been responding to these social and political changes and how these changes have been screened. I therefore would like to end this conclusion by raising the following questions: how have other countries surrounding the

Mediterranean basin used the aquatic space to portray, contest or question their national identity?

Is this relation to the Mediterranean Sea specific to France?

Although Italian cinema was mentioned in the introduction of this dissertation, notably through the reading of Elena Past’s articles (“Islands Hopping” and “Life Aquatic”), it was mainly in relation to the emergence of migrant cinema. Films about migratory movements are characterized by an imposing presence of the sea, which is often seen as an intrinsic part of the inhabitants who live nearby. Fiona Handyside briefly tackles the presence of the beach in Italian cinema in her introduction and argues that on top of being an “auteurist/autobiographical sign”

(64/83), the beach in Fellini’s works “soon acquires other, deeper, richer meanings, associated with memories and dreams and gesturing towards the atemporal, vertical nature of memory”

(64/83). She subsequently adds that while Fellini uses the beach in a metaphorical way, the beach in Italian cinema and in comedies in particular articulates a critique of modernity, although

Handyside does not give more detail about what she actually implies. Antonioni’s L’avventura

(1960) uses the Mediterranean to emphasize the ambiguity of human relationships and the characters’ duplicity (Claudia becomes Sandro’s lover after Anna has disappeared at sea).

Gender relations are also at stake while the group is at sea (Claudia and Anna have an intimate moment in the cabin of the ship, where Claudia rubs Anna’s back with sunscreen, therefore highlighting the ambiguity of their relation). Consequently, the sea can be used as a symbol of the repression of homoerotic desire and to represent death drive (Claudia and Sandro both wish

Anna will not come back), which does not imply much difference in the way both French and

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Italian cinemas shape the Mediterranean.

The questions raised by Spanish cinema and the way it has shaped the Mediterranean are very different from the ones considered until now. One of the clearest examples of how the

Mediterranean Sea is invested with an allegorical function is Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea

Inside (2004), based on the real story of Ramón Sampedro, a former sailor who becomes paralyzed after diving into shallow water. Although the whole narrative is situated in the protagonist’s bedroom, the film articulates a compelling tension between Ramón’s feeling of imprisonment and his wish to return to the sea through dreams and flashbacks, a place which he associates with freedom. The Mediterranean Sea is actually an ambivalent space which causes him to have his body disabled while at the same time representing, through the power of his imagination, the possibility to reconnect with his masculinity. For instance, he imagines flying to the beach to kiss Julia, a journalist who also happens to suffer from some grave illness.

Therefore, the sea in Amenábar’s film encapsulates male desires about a return to a free sexuality, free movement, while at the same time being the cause of the physical impairment. For

Victoria Rivera-Cordero, “Ramón’s choice to die is both a rejection of his disabled state and a desire to return to an idealized wholeness, which he posits as more authentic by explicitly stating that life in his current state is not dignified nor worth living” (122). Expanding from Le grand bleu and Brice de Nice, which both depict a masculinity in crisis, The Sea Inside draws a very intriguing parallel between the Mediterranean Sea and the disabled body to raise political and ethical questions, as the protagonist eventually chooses euthanasia over his oppressive condition.

The theme of disability and the sea is of course not just specific to Spanish cinema as it is also present in Julian Schnabel’s Le scaphandre et le papillon, shot in 2006 (although it is set on the Atlantic coast and was shot by an American director) and Jacques Audiard’s De Rouille et

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d’Os (2012). In Audiard’s film, Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) has her two legs amputated after an accident at the aquatic center of Antibes where she works. She asks her friend Ali (whom she met at a nightclub) to take her to the beach where she is seen swimming, glistening onto the surface of the water like a sea creature while her wounded thighs loom out from the water. This compelling shot of the character raises questions about ability/disability but also manages to redefine beauty. Through the idyll between Stephanie and Ali, the Mediterranean Sea is no longer about Bardot coming out from the sea as the Venus depicted by Boticelli, but it is about suggesting new types of aesthetic codes.

As a consequence, if concerns about disability and beauty are relevant to the

Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and are also prevalent in various countries surrounding the

Mediterranean basin, the appear of the Mediterranean Sea has significantly transformed since the

1950s. To some extent, the Mediterranean Sea has been demysticized to encompass new codes about the body and beauty. Furthermore, instead of being necessarily tied to French identity and emphasizing a willingness to recreate the south of France as a mythological space (as was the case with Bardot on the beach), the varying ways in which the Mediterranean has recently been screened illustrate social and historical modern changes that are common to other countries. This uniformisation of the aquatic space reveals the shift that has occurred in the status of the

Mediterranean Sea as a mythical space.

Additionally, other genres like horror and science-fiction have tackled the connection between the body and the sea to push the questioning of these notions (beauty, sexuality, gender relations) further and allegorize social and modern changes in a defiant way. More recently,

Lucille Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution (2015) set on the Brittany coast (although it was actually shot in the Canaries islands for budget and climate reasons), also alludes to the question of disability

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and the sea insofar as the aquatic space, of which the director offers stunning underwater shots, is

used to investigate and redefine the origins of human creation, birth, and pregnancy in particular.

Unlike her first film Innocence (2004), which is set in an orphanage with women and little girls

as the only characters, Evolution takes place in a hospital by the sea. In Evolution, little boys and

their mothers are the only characters, therefore creating an oppressive and unsettling atmosphere.

Nicolas, the protagonist, is given medicine as well as another non-identifiable mixture every day by his mother. Fluids are present everywhere in Hadzihalilovic’s film under different forms: the drops he has to inhale every day, the blood running from his nose, the injection he is given, without forgetting the overwhelming presence of the sea. Interestingly, Nicolas’ disability is never revealed and the nurses of the hospital use his body as a site of experimentation-- heundergoes various surgeries (at one point Nicolas is seen in a water tank with two embryos growing out of his body). One evening, the little boy goes out to the beach where he observes the women of the hospital naked and lying onto the sand in the shape of a starfish. The plot gets more unsettling as one of the nurses (Stella, whose name derives from the Latin word meaning

“star” and emphasizes the lure of the sea by referring to the starfish that the little boy finds at the beginning of the film) and Nicolas kiss each other inside the water of the ocean. Nicolas ends up on a raft, reaching an unknown city at night. Hadzihalilovic’s film therefore constructs a very compelling parallel between water, motherhood, and sexuality, which defies moral codes as the relationship between Stella and Nicolas is of an incestuous nature. Hadzihalilovic goes further by pushing the limits of what is ethically acceptable to question the origins of creation and the laws that rule interpersonal relationships (this is not to say that Hadzihalilovic implies that mothers should have sexual relationships with their son, but that she is very interested in the question of pregnancy and tries to investigate how different relationships would be if, like seahorses, men

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were the bearers of future life).

On the international scale, the recent release of Mexican director Guillermo’s del Torro’s

The Shape of Water (2017) uses the liquid element to challenge conventions and broaden the scope of what is usually morally and socially accepted. In Del Torro’s film Elisa, a mute young

girl who works as a cleaning agent in a research center, falls in love with an amphibious creature

who is imprisonned in a water tank. Although the film is also invested with a political dimension

(it is supposed to take place during the cold war era, which can be seen as a mise-en-abyme of the current political context between the United States and Russia), the film depicts the hybridity of the relationship between Elisa and her amphibious lover. Eventually, Elisa returns to the heart of the sea with her newly-found love, as a rejection of the life that she cannot have on land. Del

Torro’s film is not that original (Thomas Salvador’s Vincent Has No Scales (2015) also explores the question of gender hybridity), but nevertheless contributes to perpetuating the imagery of water as a redefinition of interpersonal and sexual relationships (particularly in underwater shots of Elisa and the beast making love in her bathroom).

Although there would be more to say about the parallel between the maimed or hybrid body and the sea, the aforementioned films reveal that the representation of the sea and the ocean is no longer tied to the promotion of a national identity but that it has been invested with a homogenous dimension to raise questions about humanity in general. The films mentioned above use the depth of the sea and the ocean to contest physical and ethical norms and offer new ways to consider physical, sexual, and social differences. If the representation of the sea in films is always symptomatic of a specific context, then Cousteau’s so-called “silent” world leaves many more possibilities for film directors to explore. The unknown of the depths that lie below the surface of the water is indeed the perfect ground for filmmakers to question and reinvent human

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existence. The sea, an allegory of the mind and the unconscious, provides fertile ground to project new fears, hopes, and desires in an ever-changing world.

167

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