PATRICE CHÉREAU. A FILMMAKER OF FLESH AND BLOOD
Distance is, as in boxing, one of the essential factors in the cinema by Patrice Chéreau (Lézigné, France, 1944). His films, like the pugilistic activity, make its characters undergo intense physical experiences of raw carnality, in which the bodies enjoy and suffer and the skins ooze passion as much as pain. Dedicated since the beginning of his career to the theater, which he considers his “mother tongue”, he has said, however, that he makes films to get closer to the bodies and to find a physical density that theater cannot offer.
His staging of Phaedra (Racine), Hamlet (Shakespeare), The Dispute (Marivaux), Peer Gynt (Ibsen) or Rêve d’automne (Jon Fosse) have exalted him as one of the most important contemporary stage directors in Europe and he is largely responsible for having made known to the public the work of Bernard-Marie Koltès while he served as artistic director of the Théâtre des Amandiers of Nanterre (suburbs of Paris).
Without ever abandoning his theatrical roots, soon he was tempted by the passionate dramaturgy of the opera, and despite his limited experience in these matters, agreed to stage Richard Wagner’s tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen) at the Bayreuth Festival of 1976 to mark the centenary of its premiere. Ingmar Bergman, Peter Brook and Peter Stein had previously rejected the request and although the version of Chéreau, put together in just three months under the musical direction of Pierre Boulez, then roused steely reviews, it has become a landmark of modern opera performance. The French director moved the action to the time of the industrial revolution (the context in which the work was created), perhaps returning to Bernard Shaw’s ideas about the connections between the gold of the Rhine and the curse of capitalism. However, his work is particularly distinguished by the interpretative intensity he demanded from the singers and its unusual erotic aspect, two features that have branded his subsequent cinematic style. Forced as the audience to observe the evolution of his actors from the stalls, Chéreau decided to take the camera to dramatically reduce the theatrical distance: “the language of theater is more abstract, the language of cinema brings me closer to reality.”
The movie camera in his hands is absolutely organic and moves without reserve or hindrances around the bodies of characters whose relationships always develop in the proximity of the short distances. Flesh was already present in the title of his first film, Flesh of the Orchid (La Chair de l’orchidée, 1974), based on the novel by James Hadley Chase, but it is palpable with particular liveliness in his four most personal works: The Wounded Man (L’Homme blessé, 1983), Queen Margot (La Reine Margot, 1994), Intimacy (2001) and His Brother (Son frère, 2003), in which the director also appears as a screenwriter, a facet which he exclusively reserves for his cinematographic activity.
These films range from the sensual and often violent physicality of the body and the intimacy of the human spirit, a dialectic that is at the core of his cinema. The Wounded Man proposes a stark portrait of a stormy and unhealthy homosexual passion that arises in a sordid and marginal environment. A bleak picture of the desperate physical need between two human beings finds its heterosexual counterpart almost twenty years later in Intimacy, loosely based on the novel by Hanif Kureishi. Through their ocasional sexual encounters two strangers establish a desperate emotional bond that disintegrates when he begins to be interested in her unsatisfactory personal circumstances. The carnal enjoyment is thus associated with an insurmountable spiritual loneliness, and Intimacy becomes an inverted reflection of the shocking drama presented by His Brother, where the appalling degradation of a terminally ill body yet fosters the affective rediscovery between two previously estranged brothers.
Queen Margot finally gives literal testimony of that what is staged by Chéreau is the body, soaked in sweat and blood, and destroyed by pleasures and pains that flow from the interior drives of the human being. This spectacular and colorful historical fresco with undeniable Wagnerian taste, represents the massacre of the Huguenots on Saint Bartholomew, but is perhaps the final image of Margot, statically contemplating the decapitated body of her lover in an empty room, which expresses with most pictorial beauty that the physical pain always gets intimate in Chéreau’s cinema.
Several Molière Awards and accolades at the festivals of Cannes and Berlin, attest to the remarkable results with which Patrice Chéreau has combined his work as director of theater, opera and film, as well as ocasional actor, writer or producer, His multifaceted and versatile artistic trajectory therefore points him out as the legitimate and worthy representative of the contemporary ideal of the Renaissance Man.
Nekane E. Zubiaur
Research Fellow (UPV/EHU)
