Cinema: A Piece of Truth

UNE PARTIE DE PLAISIR

Directed by CLAUDE CHABROL

Screenplay by PAUL GEGAUFF

He is an intellectual—precise occupation unspecified—whose handsome face is marred by the arrogant and spoiled curve of his mouth. She is pretty in a sensible sort of way. They have the obligatory child. When we meet them they are enjoying a walk on an offshore island. That evening, in their tasteful country home, he admits to having some affairs—no more significant to him, he says, than a cigarette or a drink—and suggests that she might take casual pleasure in such shenanigans. Mr. Wonderful! He is clearly convinced that his wife could not possibly find anyone with wit and style to match his own.

But of course she does—a younger intellectual even more half-baked than her husband. Or maybe it is just that freedom from her husband’s endless absorption with himself is its own reward. In any event, he finds her infidelity less easy to take than he had imagined. He responds with a sort of obsessive nagging that fails to mask a mounting rage. It could not be better calculated to drive her still farther from him. The result, finally, is separation, new marriages and, in a sudden burst of startling savagery, a beating of his former mate that is so severe that he is given a jail term.

Claude Chabrol’s brilliant film (in translation, A Piece of Pleasure) is not to be understood as a triangle à la mode. It is not about love or even about the ways we contrive to squander it. Nor is it to be read as a women’s lib tract. Rather, the film examines the psychology of marital separation, to show us as no movie ever has some of the mental states one must endure in this increasingly common condition.

What is fascinating is to see a man who is introduced as almost a parody of the chauvinistic mode brought to a near-adolescent state in which increasingly erratic behavior is determined by vio lent waves of emotion that he cannot comprehend, let alone control. At one point he is found trying to enlist his child (no more than six or seven years old) to plead the cause of reconciliation with her mother. A moment later he is marrying a vaguely pleasant young English woman, and a moment after that he is arranging to meet his former wife accidentally in the street so he can beg her to take him back.

Separated State. This he does very badly, passionately pointing out that the reason he must have her is so he can turn his unceasing inner monologue about their situation into a dia logue. She replies — accurately — that his problem has always been that he can only see her as an extension of himself. Shortly thereafter he is trying to enlist her lover to plead his cause. After which he nearly beats her to death. After which he is discovered in jail, still fantasizing reconciliation.

He is a thoroughly unpleasant fel low, yet somehow engaging. One can not help responding to his pain or fail to understand that his desperate distortions of reality are necessary to some one in his condition. Marital bust-ups are one of the banalities of our time. Une Partie de Plaisir suggests persuasively that the root cause of the break down of a relationship is self-absorption, the failure of one party or the other to open himself or herself to the other’s needs. The film also shows, devastatingly, how in the separated state, the aggrieved parties cannot seem to help bringing out the worst in each other.

A movie that conveys this information with brutal specificity is not “a piece of pleasure.” But Director Chabrol has never been cooler or less self-conscious stylistically. The husband is acutely played by Screenwriter Gegauff, whose own wife Danielle is excellent as the woman. What Une Partie de Plaisir offers is a discomfiting piece of truth — and therefore it deserves the widest possible audience.

Richard Schickel