The Rendez-Vous wraps up with a meditation on the Freudian paradigm: what do women want? With apologies to the doctor and to that grand gap-toothed Chaucerian dame, I must ask, is it only French men who really care? On these shores the question is for television women, a conceit for Carrie Bradshaw, fodder for Desperate Housewives. But look at Flaubert and his Emma, why does the story end in tragedy?
In a post-feminist era, it doesn’t have to, but that resolution eases neither pain—nor the intensity of pleasure.
At a luncheon celebrating the French movie directors at the restaurant Bette in Chelsea, I ran into Benoit Jacquot whose new film (opening in late spring) The Untouchable, is about an actress in Paris who travels to India in search of her father. (Now there’s a Freudian pursuit!) The film’s debut in New York seems to dovetail with an interest in things Indian at large, evidenced at ABC Carpet featuring programs in yoga and meditation amidst the commerce of colorful silks, and the opening of Mira Nair’s excellent movie of the popular novel The Namesake, about immigrants from her country to Queens. While Nair’s India focuses on the details of family rituals, an insider’s view, Benoit’s India embodies a mystery map of psychic interiors, an outsider’s attempt to penetrate its “heart of darkness.” The name Untouchable of course refers to a caste in India’s rigid social hierarchy, and serves as a metaphor for an emotional state. As in his last film, A Toute Suite, also starring the luminous Isild Le Besco, Jacquot images the inner journey in terms of travel, in that movie’s case, Tangier.
Regina: I have a fantasy that you make you make your films dependent on the most exotic locations--where you want to go.
Benoit: No just the opposite. I choose the woman and then see what journey we can make together. It was Isild last time and this. In my new film it is Isabelle Huppert.
Regina: What is it like working with her?
Benoit: We made five films together. We don’t have to talk. In France we say, we are cousin/cousine.
Regina: So what is the new movie about?
Benoit: A woman sees something and knows she must change her life immediately and totally. Men don’t understand this aspect of women. They don’t want to understand it.
Regina: Yes for women that is a daily occurrence. Does the woman suffer or embrace it?
Benoit: She suffers but she knows she must do it--leave everything behind.
Regina: So where does the journey take her—and us?
Benoit: She journeys north through Belgium and then to Germany and eventually she goes down to Ischia, one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Regina: Aha! I knew it! My fantasy exactly!
Regina Weinreich
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