Philippe Garrel- La naissance de l'amour (1993)

Two middle-aged artistes provide the focus of this drama filmed in black and white. The story is set in Paris around the time of the Gulf War. Paul is an actor leading a drab directionless existence. He has an affair with Ulrika, a woman half his age. His wife, with whom he constantly argues, is pregnant with their second child. He does not interact much with his teenage son. Much of the film centers around the emptiness of his life.

Paul vive con su mujer, Fanchon, que está embarazada, y su hijo adolescente. Tiene una amante, Ulrika, de la que está enamorado y por la que sería capaz de abandonar su hogar. Pero Ulrika, marcada por tortuosas relaciones anteriores, no le corresponde. A Marcus, amigo de Paul, tampoco le van bien las cosas. Acaba de ser abandonado por su compañera, que se ha marchado a Roma con otro hombre.

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A dispassionate and bedraggled middle-aged actor named Paul (Lou Castel) bids a polite farewell to the lady of the house, Hélène (Dominique Reymond) before setting out into the street, accompanied by his solemn and equally impassive host Markus (Jean-Pierre Léaud) to the local convenience store to purchase a pack of cigarettes before saying goodbye to his old friend for the evening. Seeking to break the pensive silence of their evening walk, Paul steers their idle conversation into a conduit for personal reflection on Markus' seemingly life-altering moment when he first met Hélène, a question that Markus - perhaps betraying an insecurity over the tenuous state of his relationship with her - responds to the question with initial, guarded skepticism, before proceeding to tell the genial anecdote of Hélène's forwardness in her suggestive, inviting remark that had serve to validate their coy, thinly veiled pursuit of mutual seduction during their second encounter.

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However, a succeeding conversation between the couple reveals Hélène's increasing apathy towards the cultivation of their relationship as Markus attempts to elicit a validation of her love for him to no avail, disguising their failed, awkward intimacy through the mundane rituals of the kitchen and random comments about the war. The inquiry similarly proves to be a reflection of Paul's emotional ambivalence towards his own relationships with women as he spends the night with his lover Ulrika's (Johanna Ter Steege) at an anonymous hotel, listening abstractly (but with feigned, obligatory post-coital attentiveness) as she recounts her traumatic and ultimately ill-fated affair with a troubled, aimless German lover whose compounding addiction and sentimental passiveness inevitably led to a complete psychological break with reality. Reluctantly parting early one morning near a train station, Ulrika concedes that Paul's continued marriage to Fanchon (Marie-Paule Laval) prevents her from giving into the relationship completely. A subsequent evening encounter between Paul and Fanchon - now pregnant with their second child - for a pre-arranged meeting at a café mirrors Markus' earlier entreaties to Hélène, as she repeatedly asks Paul if he loves her, and instead, receives an evasive, hollow reassurance of a conceptually abstract, generic love for their growing family. Proceeding in truncated, excerpted brief encounters, the film captures the quiet tragedy of irresolution and inarticulable longing that pervades Paul and Markus' unfulfilled relationships.

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Philippe Garrel presents an elegantly spare, lucidly eloquent, and captivating fractured tale of displaced idealism, spiritual resignation, and emotional inertia in The Birth of Love. Using extended, extreme close-ups that visually isolate the characters from their environment and also serve to reinforce their intimate, yet emotionally dissociated encounters, the film illustrates the ambiguous and indeterminate structure of Paul and Markus' lives as they struggle to reconcile with an idle intellectualism that has replaced their once determined, youthful idealism (note that the tangential references to the first Gulf War - particularly during the birth of Paul's daughter - establish, not only a contemporary context for the film, but also provide insight into the characters' melancholic impotence over their defeated ideology, a sentiment that similar pervades the lives of the settled, domesticated former revolutionaries of Alain Tanner's Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000).

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Garrel further incorporates fragmentation through episodically parallel, narrative ellipses alternating between Paul and Markus' perspectives that obscure temporality and metaphorically reflect their own existential placement and interconnection within the chaos of the world around them. It is this search to return to the purity of a cherished ideal - the titular "birth of love" - that invariably propels the characters' estranged relationships and meaningless, self-involved attempts to find unconditional love: a longing to overcome the complacency of aging and familiar comfort in order to recapture the passion of an inspired and uncompromised raison d'être. filmref.com

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Dos amigos, Paul (Lou Castel) y Marcus (Jean-Pierre Léaud), se cuestionan el origen del amor al hilo de sus experiencias emocionales. Paul, que es actor, desearía permanecer junto a Ulrika (Johanna ter Steege), su amante, pero ella no le puede corresponder plenamente por el recuerdo traumático de un amor pasado. Así, Paul vuelve junto a su mujer, Fanchon (Marie-Paule Laval), a punto de tener su segundo hijo. Paul ama a sus hijos pero no sabe comportarse como padre ni como marido. La convivencia familiar es insoportable y Paul siente la necesidad de huir. Por su parte, Marcus es un diletante que ejerce de escritor ocasional. Ama a su compañera, Hélène (Dominique Reymond), pero ésta le abandona y queda solo y atrapado por los celos. Marcus quiere recuperar a Hélène. Paul no quiere perder a sus hijos. Ambos entrarán en una deriva física y emocional que les llevará de vuelta a los misterios del amor. Y todo ello en el contexto de las calles de París, atravesadas por los fantasmas melancólicos del pasado, y con la primera guerra de Irak como fondo.

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Pocos cineastas como Philippe Garrel han hecho de sus películas verdaderos diarios íntimos donde plasmar no sólo sus obsesiones sino también el desencanto generacional que los persigue. En La naissance de l’amour, con dos figuras no menos identificables con el espíritu de una generación (cinematográfica), Jean-Pierre Léaud y Lou Castel, la historia deviene crónica de una realidad personal y el relato su cristalización como espejo. El film expone los hechos, con mayor o menor carga autobiográfica, para hacer de la enunciación una crónica personal en presente. Los avatares sentimentales de Marcus (Jean-Pierre Léaud) y Paul (Lou Castel) configuran un itinerario en el que la presencia del director se materializa en el cuerpo de sus actores. Bien podría decirse que el amor, el cansancio, la soledad, la tristeza y lo cotidiano en fin, no pertenecen únicamente a los personajes sino también a quien los pone en escena. Así pues, más allá del cripticismo poético que encierra la obra de un Garrel enfurecido en los 60 y 70, su filmografía más reciente evidencia algo que en años anteriores estaba supeditado a la radicalidad de la puesta en escena: la (re)presentación de los sentimientos. A partir del cuerpo de sus actores, Garrel exterioriza de forma diáfana y clásica, por qué no decirlo, no sólo sus angustias y emociones sino también el sentimiento propio de toda una generación. El valor de La naissance de l’amour se consolida en devenir espejo de una realidad personal y colectiva. El valor de Garrel radica en su capacidad para comunicar serenamente las obsesiones y los sueños que todos, alguna vez, hemos tenido. Enrique Aguilar, contrapicado.net

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Script/Guión: Philippe Garrel, Marc Cholodenko, Muriel Cerf
Cinematography/Fotografía: Raoul Coutard
Editing/Montaje: Sophie Coussein, Yann Dedet, Nathalie Hubert, Alexandra Strauss
Music/Música: John Cale
Cast/Reparto: Lou Castel, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Johanna Ter Steege, Dominique Reymond, Marie-Paule Laval