After directing a series of films concerning morality and the justice system, André Cayatte made a pair of features in 1964: Francoise and its counterpart Jean-Marc, both bearing the subtitle Anatomy of a Marriage. Each film is devoted to presenting the respective experiences of each half of the eponymous young couple through their first encounter, their marriage, and its ultimate dissolution. Designed to be watched together but in no particular order, Cayatte’s presentation of these two narratives as entirely separate films underscore his attentiveness to the potential distortions of one-sided discourse. He is so attentive to this fact that in giving each character their own film he gives them their own opportunity to “state their case,” largely through voice-over, regarding the breakdown of their relationship. Transforming the cinematic experience into that of a courtroom drama, he invites the audience to formulate their own conclusions, with the title-cards providing the injunction: “Who is guilty? You decide!”
The films are invariably described as telling the same story from the other’s perspective; however, this is not the case. The two films describe two different, if somewhat overlapping, narratives. Sometimes the couple experience events together, differently; sometimes, they narrate episodes otherwise unremarked on by the other. Beyond functioning to throw into question the reliability of each character, this inconsistency elevates the film’s exploration of the slippages in memory and divergences in discourse that can render recollections of events experienced by the same people utterly unalike into a thesis about the fundamental unknowability of our own subjectivities in the face of another. Those responsible for authoring the English translation should have landed on “autopsy” rather than “anatomy,” as for Cayatte love is a stiff cadaver and marriage over before it even begins.
Perhaps it’s because these two films are about the most elemental of all irreconcilable differences—those between man and woman—that the depictions of Jean-Marc and Francoise register as archetypal. To Jean-Marc, who fashions himself as a long-suffering, self-sacrificing reformer of delinquents, Francoise is a materialistic gold digger and a drunken social climber who is lavishly promiscuous, careless about her intellectual progression, and indifferent to the suffering of the poor. Francoise, who is all Audrey Hepburn-esque coltish bewilderment, sees herself as the eternal victim of violence, be it police, sexual, or conjugal; she would have us believe that the freedom she so ardently desired meant nothing in the face of love and that Jean-Marc is a complacent coward who is lacking in ambition, a violently jealous ex-Casanova, and so pathetic that she is compelled to pull the strings in ensuring he can progress in life, abasing herself so he can feel that he is what she decidedly knows he is not: a man.
The cleaving of one into two, both the couple and the film itself, most emphatically asserts the notion of the unbridgeable gap between people and the perceived hopelessness of understanding one another. Cayatte could not, it seems, have conceived over the project otherwise, as by its very constitution it reinforces gaps and distance. Classically, a couple collides and comes apart within the confines of a single film, a totalizing enclosure that ensures some unity, some dialogue, and some common ground. With Jean-Luc and Francoise, two distinct worlds are supposedly created, but both are solipsistic, as for Cayattte neither lives nor narratives can ever be fully reconciled.
Anatomy of a Marriage screens this evening, October 15, and on October 16 and 17, at L’Alliance New York as part of the series “Version Restaurée / Restored Version.”
