There is a moment in a 1998 episode of the French documentary series “Cinéastes de notre temps” that I always think of whenever I’m thinking about the filmmaker Philippe Garrel. The interviewer, from behind the camera, asks his first question: “What is cinema?” Garrel, spottingly making eye contact, dryly responds: “Why do you ask me?”
The interviewer presses once more: “What is cinema?”
“Why do you ask me?” Garrel responds, refusing to meet eye contact. The interviewer, pressed, asks again: “What is cinema?” The silence is uncomfortable. “It’s a way of making a living,” Garrel finally answers, “if you believe you are different when you are young.” The interviewer decides on a different approach. “Is cinema the art of survival?” Garrel is quicker this time. “Yes, because the camera can also protect you.” He unnervingly looks almost directly at the camera, and in turn the viewer. “Behind a camera you are safe.”
It’s a small moment that would typically go unnoticed, but one that has always rattled around my brain and I find is useful in thinking and writing about Garrel’s films, which are amazingly consistent but very hard to describe. Over the course of 30 films — his latest, “Jealousy,” opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on August 15 — Garrel has constructed an aesthetic of fleeting moments, personal and unvarnished yet shaped and protected by the structures of narrative cinema. Dave Kehr, writing in the New York Times in 2009, aptly described Garrel’s films as “attempts to seize a sloppy, unmediated reality,” with performances that contain “a raw, unmodulated quality, as if everyone were simply pouring out their thoughts and feelings.” The result is a hovering tone of melancholy, sometimes awkward and stumbling but always moving in the smallest, most unnoticeable ways.
“Jealousy” opens with its most dramatic moment right at the beginning. Louis (played by the director’s son, Louis Garrel), a struggling theater actor, leaves his wife and young daughter. There isn’t an explosion of emotion, crying or pleading. He simply says he can’t be there anymore and he isn’t. He moves in to a small apartment with Claudia (Anna Mouglalis), a talented actress who has been having difficulty getting the roles she desires. The film charts the oscillation and eventual disillusionment of their relationship and the despair that follows.
Garrel is open about the film’s biographical roots. The main character is based on his father, the actor Maurice Garrel, who left their family when Philippe was very young. The main actor is his son, and his daughter has a small but crucial role, playing the sister in the film of her actual brother. Their names have not been changed. In addition, Caroline Deruas, Garrel’s wife, co-wrote the script. It’s a family affair, a group therapy session that attempts to reconcile their own deeply felt and uncomfortable truths. By expunging the fine line between art and life, they cement the bonds between them.
The results aren’t solipsistic. “Jealousy,” like so much of Garrel’s work, is handled so tenderly that its intimacy doesn’t feel like intrusion. You’re not watching but feeling what is on screen, each scene unfolding not like a grand opera — all dramatic peaks and valleys — but a piano balled, simple and elegant with depths of emotion welling up below the surface.
