Séparation, La

La Séparation, directed by Christian Vincent from a screenplay written
by himself and Dan Franck, tells the story of the unraveling of a marriage,
except that it is not a marriage. Pierre (Daniel Auteuil), a book illustrator,
and Anne (Isabelle Huppert), who is some kind of professional or businesswoman,
have lived together for years, and they have a fifteen-month-old son called
Loulou (Louis Vincent) on whom Pierre dotes. Periodically during the film the
point of view shifts to that of Pierre as he tries to record on a videocamera
whose operation he has not quite mastered
Loulou’s sleeping, eating or playing.
In fact, the film begins with videocam shots of clothes and unfamiliar body
parts and Pierre muttering under his breath, Comment ce marche? or “How
does this thing work?”

Neither Pierre nor Anne know how to make the relationship work either. We
commence our observation of it at the point where things have already started to
go wrong. Anne withdraws her hand in irritation at the cinema when Pierre tries
to caress it. She can barely suppress her impatience to be gone when he urges
her to linger over a lunch — an occasion already looking like a rare event
when once it was so common. Before long she comes out and tells him, as they are
leaving a party one evening: “I think
I fell in love with someone.” Pierre
is the sort of person who doesn’t
react to things right away. He absorbs this information like a python swallowing
a camel — so of course its lumpy outlines are clearly visible beneath the
surface. He drives Anne home on his motorcycle, and the image of the two of them
speeding through the night, Anne clinging to
Pierre’s back while Pierre
contemplates the misery his life is about to become is a memorable one.

What is curious to me about this film is that Vincent specifies that Pierre
and Anne are unmarried without making anything much out of the information. They
are close friends with another couple, Victor (Jérôme Deschamps)
and Claire (Karin Viard) who are also unmarried and who serve are confidants and
counselors to their troubled friends. When we first meet them, they are dining
with Pierre and Anne in a restaurant and reminiscing about the good old days of
demonstrations and sit-ins. Victor asks Pierre about the
Workers’ Feasts at which radical young
men could often hope to pick up willing girls of the movement, but Pierre
appears embarrassed and said that he never went to them. One strains to catch in
these echoes of youthful radicalism some hint of what is happening now to two
people whose union is unblessed by church or state, but if they are there at all
they are too muted to be heard. Late in the film the announcement by Victor and
Claire that they are, after all these years, planning to get married
precipitates the final crisis of
Pierre’s and
Anne’s relationship.

The best moments in the picture come in more or less detached observation of
the way love dies. Just after Anne’s
bombshell, for instance, she seems unnaturally interested in how Pierre is
reacting to the news, as if she is both fascinated and appalled by what she has
done. He says it has not sunk in yet. She then asks him what he thought when she
first told him. He says he didn’t
think anything. It seemed unreal. He felt as if he were dreaming. Then he asks
her “What did I do
wrong?” She says nothing and then
amends it a bit: nothing big, just a lot of little things. Maybe we
didn’t talk enough. She had too high
expectations of him. Anyway, she has now met someone who listens to her, who is
interested in her — and who, although she doesn’t say this, holds out to her
romantic love’s ancient promise “to solve and satisfy and set unchangeably in
order” (as Philip Larkin says).

But in spite of all she doesn’t
want Pierre to be sad. “I
didn’t want to hurt
you.”

It’s all too sadly true, I’m afraid, as anyone will recognize who has been
through it. As the relationship continues in its death throes, Pierre tells
Victor how he is most disturbed by the fact that during the last fortnight Anne
has not been nagging as usual.
“Normally we bicker all the time,” he
says miserably. “I’m not crucial to
her. That’s what
hurts.” His friend, with amazing
insensitivity, indulges in a radical fantasy about prehistory when
“people used to mate as they
liked” and tells Pierre that it would
be better for him if Anne sleeps with
“ce
type” — this guy, which is all the
lover is ever known as (he never appears) — right away so that they can find
out as soon as possible if the relationship is merely physical. Later Pierre
asks her why she is being so nice after her earlier impatience and irritation.
“Since you met that guy,
you’re been sweet to
me,” he says, puzzled.

“Bastard!”
she replies.

The psychology seems right but too pessimistic. Anne quotes a graffito she
saw in a lavatory which said: “In a
couple, one suffers and one is bored.”
Underneath it someone had written:
“And vice
versa.” Pierre counters with the
proverb: “Never two without
three.” But such banal folk-wisdom is
uncomfortably close to all that the movie has to offer.