Passion Simple

“Since last September, all I’ve done is wait for a man,” says Hélène (Laetitia Dosch).

She’s having an affair with Aleksandr Svitsine (Sergei Polunin)—a spy posing as a diplomat at the Russian consulate in Paris.  Why would he tell her?  But never mind.

After taking in a showing of Resnais’ HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, with a friend (Caroline Ducey), Hélène says of the two leads—Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada—she prefers the man.

“Why him and not her?” asks the friend.

Hélène replies, “It’s like any other film.  A beautiful, desired woman for whom it’s normal.  It’s a male fantasy.  Some women are never loved, even that beautiful.  And less beautiful women who deserve love stay invisible.”

A recently divorced graduate lecturer, she’s preparing a thesis on English author Aphra Behn, arguably the first woman to earn a living as a writer. Described in Hélène’s thesis as a “chronicler of the forgotten”, Behn also doubled as a spy in Charles II’s regime.

Preoccupied with her affair, Hélène’s life unravels.  She stops writing her thesis, forgets to look after her son.  Like the man in Christos Nikou’s APPLE, her mind is constantly elsewhere.  On the train to work she daydreams of Aleksandr, remembering every detail of his various tattoos including a Pagan kolovrat—a hooked wheel that said to represent strength against political and religious enemies, and the grim reaper, whose scythe resembles the spokes of the wheel.  She thinks these may be prison tattoos, attracted to the mystique.

“Fucking with you is so good,” he says in English.  The idiomatic meaning is not lost on us.  He shows up when he wants, uses her, tells her what to wear, gets angry, leaves.  Yet, she keeps putting up with him.  She’s becoming like the one-dimensional characters of whom she’s so critical.  But that’s Hélène’s flaw, not the film’s.

The story, adapted from Annie Ernaux’s 1991 novel, bears some of the typical conceits:  the reference to Resnais; the self-insert as an author; Hélène seeing a woman at the grocery store picking up the same kind of shoddy romance novels she reads, maybe wondering if she too clings to an emotionally-detached lover.

But where it departs is in the nuanced performances of Dosch and Polunin, who, once writer/director Danielle Arbid stops beating us in the head with sex scene after sex scene—imagine Godard’s Patricia telling Michel, “I kept fucking you to see if I’d keep fucking you”—give us glimpses of longing.  Aleksandr must be off to a new assignment.  Why tell her about vacationing with his wife at Lake Baikal if sex were purely all that interested him.

Good characters seldom possess perfectly rational trains of thought.  But PASSION SIMPLE falters by displaying only the outlines of disarray.   We don’t see, for any meaningful length, how it affects her work beyond a line of dialogue to her psychiatrist about failing to finish her thesis.  We don’t know anything about the (presumably) ex-husband who comes to look after the son she, in her forgetfulness, almost backs over with her car.

The film skips the formalities of, you know, a story arc, and leaps straight to the ending.  It’s like Mike Leigh’s ANOTHER YEAR without the year.  Eight months after absent-mindedly tripping off to Moscow for a weekend (on a lit. professor’s salary!), Hélène magically has her life together.  She credits Aleksandr for being the catalyst whose abrupt disappearance made her see, “The limit of what I am capable of.”

If the point of the movie was an answer to the New Wave reductionist portrayals of women, the shrewder response would’ve begun with Aleksandr leaving—focusing entirely on how Hélène recovers.  Relationships are complicated.  People are complicated.  But PASSION SIMPLE is perhaps too simple.

PASSION SIMPLE is currently screening at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival.