Les Hautes Solitudes (1974) Directed by Phillippe Garrel
7D
Les Hautes Solitudes takes a very different approach to movie making, The 80 minute movie is completely silent (a very astute decision, actually) and focuses primarily on Jean Seberg's beautiful face (two other "actors" are involved, an equally beautiful but very different dark-haired young woman and, on rarer occasions, a young man). But the emphasis is definitely on Seberg. Seberg who died five years after the making of this film, likely by suicide, was famous for one iconic role, that of the short-haired hawker of
The New York Herald Tribune and unlikely
femme fatale in Jean Luc Godard's monumental New Wave film,
Breathless. Because of some tragic events in Seberg's own life, a miscarriage, for one, her mental state deteriorated over the years. In
Les Hautes Solitudes we see a woman barely able to control her emotions which pass over her face with the frequency of passing clouds in a stormy sky. In fact, she is far more expressive in this film than in any of the other films in which I have seen her act. So what are 80 silent minutes of one distraught woman's changing face like to sit through? It became way more interesting than I would have guessed, actually, but not for reasons that I could have predicted. For one, I felt like I was a different kind of viewer, The movie made me aware of how much I contribute to the meaning of the images that I see when I watch a movie. In a way, I had to re-negotiate my relationship to the work I was watching. Was Seberg acting? Was this more like documentary footage? Why does she look so little like the Seberg I remember from her early years? She looks more like Catherine Deneuve's older sister. Who is the dark haired girl and what is their relationship to the guy who is in a few important "scenes"? There is simply no information in the movie to give me answers to these questions. I realized I was making up answers on my own--none of my assumptions and guesses necessarily convincing to anybody but me. There is a reason why most lawyers say that eyewitness accounts are seldom accurate representations of what exactly happened. I was making sense of a film in a way that was totally my own, and I realized I almost certainly do this all the time. I, as spectator, had to become a central "creator" in the construction of "meaning" in
Les Hautes Solitudes. In the actual moment, this realization didn't seem theoretical or academic at all.....to sometimes disconcerting effect. I found I was smiling back at Seberg as she smiled at me.
MUBI
. It's melodramatic and anticlimatic and predictable but I love it.
