‘No health without hygiene’ would seem an admirable sentiment for plombiers parisiens were it not for the paradox spawned by a nation of hypochondriacs fixated on the former at the expense of the latter, if Michael Haneke’s movie, Amour (2012), is to be believed.
Plumbing the Depths.
These thoughts are prompted by a scene in this Austro-French film where its principals – an elderly couple (Georges, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Anne, Emmanuelle Riva), prisoners of the infirmities of old age and of a neglected period Paris apartment in concurrent decline – lament the scarcity of Parisian plumbers and their chronic tardiness. Witness these exchanges . . . specifically the key passage spoken by Georges:‘Les Frodon, ils ont attendu trois jours quand leurs toilettes étaient bouchées . . . Pas franchement agréable.’
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GEORGES
You can depend on that guy. GEORGES
ANNE
I hope so. The last time, he kept us waiting for ages, if you remember.
GEORGES
(laughs while acquiescing)Yes, that’s true . . . If I call a
regular professional, we’ll still be
waiting in two months time.
ANNE
(more to herself)Really?
GEORGES
The Frodons waited three days when their toilet was blocked.
Frankly not pleasant.
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‘The Frodons waited three days when their toilet was blocked. Frankly not pleasant.’Here is the significant text that, in my view, contains within it the key to decrypting the central puzzle of this Austrian writer-director’s film à clef: the choice of national stereotypes as lay figures to satisfy the compositional aesthetic of satirised bourgeois French film-making, i.e. 2 x cultured elders to embody ageing salon gauchistes; and a supporting cast of 1 x understanding wife of an adulterer à la Buñuel; 1 x pert unconscionable care nurse à la Clouzot; . . . not forgetting the vox populi represented by 2 x potentially manipulative grippe-sou menials à la Chabrol (a genial caretaker of the apartment building whose shirking wife’s ‘maladie’ suggests a valetudinarianism supportive of the Tendance Hypocondriaque towards which the cynical British critic believes the French nation is unfailingly predisposed).*
Let’s be clear, the formative years of Trintignant and Riva, both octogenarians, were experienced in a France governed by the Front populaire, under which for the first time all French workers were guaranteed a two week paid vacation, a revolutionary boost to employee benefits that also included the 40-hour week, in effect a socialist Bill of Rights that demarcated the French ideological comfort-zone out of which France has since never strayed.
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The Polish plumber is in trouble with his piping. |
Plombiers de tous les pays, unissez-vous!
In this context, the intention behind the Austrian satirist’s characterisation of the complacent/complaisant petite haute bourgeoisie becomes clear, for even when Georges is inconvenienced by the indifference of dilatory workmen (If I call a regular professional, we’ll still be waiting in two months time) he is obliged by France’s socio-Marxist legacy to sentimentally indulge their excesses and, apparently, pledge solidarity with any confraternity of slackers he may encounter.There is a nudge here, surely, towards the notorious ‘Polish Plumber’ controversy of 2005 (Haneke’s screenplay for Amour was in development from as early as 1992), which exposed the resentful closed shop mentality of France’s entrenched ingénieurs sanitaires, ridiculed by francophone detractors who sought to ape the Communist Manifesto by mischievously proclaiming: ‘Plumbers of all countries, unite!’
So I continue to speculate thusly: Has Haneke’s Amour, therefore, a secret agenda to mock France’s labour protectionism? Through jaundiced Austrian eyes is this neo-Poujadism seen to be an absurd travesty of the workers’ paradise proselytised by the Comintern? Indeed, does Haneke decry France’s ring-fenced faux stakhanoviste entitlements as unearned by the lineal descendants of the Popular Front, and does he deplore the revival of such a self-serving partisanship – of a kind that once fomented the vicious internecine strife of a riven France under Nazi Occupation – now it’s seen to be expended on the vilification of Polish incursionist plumbers?
Of course, such an interpretation may be the sour grapes of a wary Brit . . . and yet . . . and yet . . . read on . . . there is more to Haneke’s Austro-French commentaries in Amour than the following simple words superficially convey . . .
‘Les Frodon, ils ont attendu trois jours quand leurs toilettes étaient bouchées . . . Pas franchement agréable.’
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An Excremental Blockage is Frankly Not Pleasant . . . the Turbid Conduits of French Thought.
And it’s unpleasant, too, and mean-spirited to shiftily introduce into a supposedly sober screenplay the jejunity of taking potshots at that crucible of iconoclastic French Cinema, Cahiers du cinéma, whose editor-in-chief, appointed 2003, is Jean-Michel Frodon (pseudonym adopted from Frodo of Lord of the Rings).I do not believe my dark suspicions are ill-founded. You tell me. What other meaning can be attached to ‘Les Frodon’ unless, specifically, the scatological reference is to a certain costiveness now observable in the pioneering journal of the Nouvelle Vague of French cinema, whose alumni includes Claude Chabrol, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut and Roger Vadim, all New Wave auteurs who have directed Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in films regarded as far in the vanguard of global cinematic style.
To my mind, it’s almost as if Haneke is stating pedagogically that the French currently need a Refresher Course in avant-garde movie-making and that Amour is his Exercise in Style à la Queneau, a disparaging approach that, in my view, undermines the gravity of his subject matter.
Even his parodying of Intellectualisme Français is diminished by the fatuity of his characters’ expressions of apatheistic existential malaise. (Perhaps Haneke is sardonically remembering that Albert Camus permitted his seminal novel, L’Étranger, to be published in occupied Paris under German censorship, a contra-philosophical decision that still sparks controversy.)
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| Existential fatuities. Georges: Things will go on as they have done up until now. They'll go from bad to worse. Things will go on, and then one day it will all be over. |
I even go so far as to question, given Haneke’s subversive agenda, whether this pseudo-existential babble is just another smirking allusion – like his condemnation of French plumbers and their time-keeping by statute – to the essential blockage in the turbid conduits of French thought, never mind the state of French drains.
In other words, is this Austrian asking, seventy-five years after the Occupation of Paris, ‘Have the French truly put their house in order?’
And is Haneke answering a resounding No?
*According to data from France, 13 percent of the French nation are afraid of suffering from disease in the absence of any signs or symptoms. Similarly, 32 percent of respondents have a persistent unfounded anxiety when certain signs or symptoms concern them. Government figures reveal that, annually, the French consume more medicine per head than any other country in Europe, astonishingly, at a cost 75 percent higher than the total NHS bill for prescription medicines in Great Britain.
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See also:
In other words, is this Austrian asking, seventy-five years after the Occupation of Paris, ‘Have the French truly put their house in order?’
And is Haneke answering a resounding No?
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*According to data from France, 13 percent of the French nation are afraid of suffering from disease in the absence of any signs or symptoms. Similarly, 32 percent of respondents have a persistent unfounded anxiety when certain signs or symptoms concern them. Government figures reveal that, annually, the French consume more medicine per head than any other country in Europe, astonishingly, at a cost 75 percent higher than the total NHS bill for prescription medicines in Great Britain.
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UK STOP PRESS : French baker fined for working overtime.
Dateline — Lusigny-sur-Barse — March 14 2018 : A French baker has been fined 3,000 Euros for keeping his business open seven days a week. The baker refuses to pay the penalty and is supported by the town mayor. ‘France has a traditionally strict attitude towards work, upholding the 35-hour working week, and informally guaranteeing long breaks for lunch and the whole of August off . . . In 1995, legislation was passed guaranteeing bakers a minimum five weeks off every year, but town halls are still allowed to regulate opening hours. In Paris, for example, bakeries are split into two selected groups — one that can close in July, and another that closes in August. Such a division is, however, much harder to enforce in countryside areas such as the one around Lusigny-sur-Barse, which has a population of less than 2000.’
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Horror of a Forty-Hour Week like being punched in the stomach.
In Laurent Binet’s hybrid history-as-postmodernist-infranovel (?), HHhH, 2009, centred on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, Binet admits the legacy he and his own generation have inherited from the Popular Front of 1936.
Writing, unconsciously (it seems to me), in the manner of a Chauvinist Lothario, proud of his gauchiste Sorbonne credentials, he describes a ‘gorgeous’ French interlocutor: ‘[She is] the daughter of Communists, like us all.’
In a similar perspective, from l’intellectuel rive gauche, Binet also writes:
On August 21, 1938, Edouard Daladier, the French council president, gives an edifying speech on the radio:
Faced with authoritarian states who are arming and equipping themselves with no regard to the length of the working week, alongside democratic states who are striving to regain their prosperity and ensure their safety with a forty-eight-hour week, why should France — both more impoverished and more threatened — delay making the decisions on which our future depends? As long as the international situation remains so delicate, we must work more than forty hours per week, and as much as forty-eight hours in businesses linked to national defence.Reading this transcription, I was reminded that putting the French back to work was the French right’s eternal fantasy. I was deeply shocked that these elitist reactionaries, understanding so little the true nature of the situation, would use the Sudeten crisis to settle their scores with the Popular Front. Bear in mind that in 1938, the editorials of the bourgeois newspapers shamelessly stigmatized those workers whose only concern was enjoying their paid holidays. Just in time, however, my father reminded me that Daladier was a radical Socialist, and thus part of the Popular Front. I’ve just checked this, and staggeringly, it’s true: Daladier was the defence minister in Leon Blum’s government! I feel like I've been punched in the stomach. I can hardly bear to tell the story: Daladier, former defence minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defence not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week — one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. At this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art.
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Eton versus Marlborough
See also:
Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’
Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html
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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes.
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
