Bavo Defurne (2016)
The woman introducing the Belgian film-maker Bavo Defurne at BFI praised Souvenir as a fusion of queer cinema, social realism and something else I immediately forgot. Defurne is an established name in queer cinema and Liliane, the heroine of Souvenir, once sang in the Eurovision Song Contest, which has for years now been celebrated as a camp extravaganza. It isn’t presented as such in Souvenir, though: I couldn’t see anything queer about the movie. It sure as hell isn’t social (or any other kind of) realism. Maybe Souvenir is the something else it was claimed to be in the intro but I’m doubtful. I think you just have to up the auteur when you welcome him to the stage at the London Film Festival.
Liliane works in a pâté factory. When she leaves work, she goes back to the apartment where she lives alone, and spends her evenings watching television and knocking back alcohol. Jean, a young man who comes to work temporarily at the factory, strikes up a conversation with Liliane. He says he recognises her as ‘Laura’, a young singer who once represented Belgium in Eurovision. Liliane denies it but Jean is certain: although Laura long since vanished into obscurity, Jean’s father is such a loyal fan that he still plays her records and watches her performances on VHS. Jean is an aspiring (lightweight) boxer. Once he’s got Liliane to admit to her secret past, he asks if she’ll do a special performance of her old Eurovision number at an upcoming social do at his boxing club. She says no, insisting that she’s retired completely. Then she says yes, provided there’s no publicity. She gives the performance and gets a warm reception – especially from Jean’s father. The next day, a television crew descends on the pâté factory. This causes a brief rift between Liliane and Jean but they’re soon in a relationship together. Then Jean loses a fight, decides to give up boxing, persuades Liliane to make a career comeback and becomes her manager. He’s not much better at this than he was at the boxing so Liliane renews contact with the man who was once her manager and her husband. She contests a preliminary heat to decide the Belgian entry for the next Eurovision Song Contest and wins – she’s through to the national final. She wins that as well but her drink dependency has also been making a comeback, as things between her and Jean have gone from good to bad to worse. She totters back on stage to reprise her winning song, keels over and ends up in hospital. In the final moments of Souvenir, Liliane stumbles from her bed, wires trailing, to find Jean waiting for her at the other end of a hospital corridor.
I booked for Souvenir for two reasons: first, because Liliane is played by Isabelle Huppert and I was attracted to the idea of seeing her do something lighter than usual; second, because I’m fond of Eurovision, especially the Eurovision of several decades past. As a factory hand, albeit one with a celebrity backstory, Huppert is more plausible than Catherine Deneuve was as Björk’s shop-floor pal in Dancer in the Dark. Even so, the fine-boned Liliane still seems, and to fancy herself as, a cut above the rest: on the bus ride from the factory, her co-workers chatter together while she sits alone, reading Marilyn French. In his words to the audience before the film, Bavo Defurne said Isabelle Huppert was ideal for the role because she can ‘create a layered character’. Defurne certainly needs an actress creative to this extent: he and his co-scenarists, Yves Verbraeken and Jacques Boon, haven’t written a layered character. But the longer Souvenir went on (it’s ninety minutes all told: along with an elegant opening titles sequence, brevity is its main plus point), the more I felt Huppert made matters worse. Although the story is feeble and the protagonist’s situation daft, Huppert’s ability to present the semblance of reality, regardless of the unreality of her surroundings, makes you occasionally distressed by Liliane’s unhappiness. It’s the worst of both worlds that Isabelle Huppert is less equipped to communicate the character’s appetite for, or pleasure in, singing to an audience. You can believe Huppert’s Liliane can still get into the dress she wore for Eurovision. At the boxing club event, her competent but tentative voice and her hand movements, unchanged from the ones Laura did years ago, are mildly touching. Once Liliane has embarked on remaking a career, however, we’re watching a fine actress doing an impersonation of an ex-songbird that’s accomplished but impersonal.
When Jean (the eager, rather inane Kévin Azaïs) first says he knows who Liliane is, he describes her alter ego Laura as ‘like ABBA but not as successful’. Needless to say, she’s not remotely like ABBA but it turns out that Laura was runner-up the year they won. That was ‘thirty years ago’, which means Souvenir is taking place in 2004 – although to infer that may be to take the film too literally: Bavo Defurne clearly isn’t interested in precision. The real disappointment is that he’s no more attentive to larger changes in Eurovision Song Contest ethos and fashion. The two MOR numbers that Liliane sings, decades apart, belong to the same Eurovision vintage – 1960s or maybe 1970s. The vagueness of my dating reflects the fact that you can be pretty flexible with Eurovision fare, which always took longer to change than music in the real pop world. But if Liliane re-emerged as a fifty-something in the 2000s, singing the Jean-inspired ‘Joli garçon’, she’d get to represent her country in Eurovision largely through being a camp-comical anachronism. Instead, we watch her performing the song to a mysteriously middle-aged-to-elderly studio audience, who bob along to the catchy rhythm, as they might have done at a mid-twentieth-century Eurovision eliminator. Perhaps the most annoying thing about ‘Joli garçon’ is that it is catchy. The morning after seeing the film, I couldn’t get it out of my head until I discovered an ideal antidote: ‘My Lovely Horse’, from the great Father Ted episode, ‘A Song for Europe.’ The woman who introduced Souvenir at the LFF screening might well describe ‘A Song for Europe’ as a searing exposé of potential political duplicity in a specifically Eurovisionary context.
Bavo Defurne virtually ignores the very large age difference between Liliane and Jean. One of the few promising comic possibilities in the story is for Jean’s father to be jealous of his son’s having an affair with the father’s longstanding pin-up girl but nothing is made of this either: Dad laps it all up. Neither he nor his wife expresses any feelings about Jean giving up boxing. Back at the pâté factory, there’s not much more interest shown in Liliane’s renaissance as a star: you feel they’d at least resent the success of someone stuck up enough to read a posh book on the bus. In the early stages, the causes of delays to Liliane and Jean’s getting it together are weak even by romcom standards – this was the second LFF film I saw in the space of three days where the principals owned mobile phones but didn’t always know how to use them (see also La La Land). The most puzzling thing Bavo Defurne said at the start was that Souvenir was the story of ‘an optimist and a pessimist’. I’m still not sure which was which but my friends and I didn’t hang around for the post-screening Q and A to find out.
10 October 2016
