La permission
Melvin Van Peebles (1967)
La permission was one of several novels Melvin Van Peebles wrote in French during his years in France (the 1960s, more or less). His screen adaptation of La permission appeared the same year the novel was published. In plot terms, the film is exactly what its title says. Stylistically, it’s more complicated.
Turner (Harry Baird) is a Black soldier in the US Army, stationed in France. Summoned to the office of Captain Lutz (Harold Brav), he’s informed that he’s getting a promotion and a three-day pass for the weekend ahead. Turner had hoped for the extra stripe; the pass is an unexpected bonus. He spends the weekend in Paris, where he meets and falls in love with Miriam Duval (Nicole Berger), a white girl who works in a shop and suffers from poor health. They spend two nights together in a hotel and take a day trip to a beach in Normandy, where three of Turner’s white colleagues from the army base also turn up. When Turner returns to the base early on Monday morning, Lutz strips him of his promotion and confines him to barracks – for what the senior officer terms a betrayal of trust. Turner’s punishment ends when a Black female gospel choir, on a European tour, calls in at the base and Lutz wants someone to show them round. Turner eagerly takes advantage of his restored freedom to run to a phone box and call Nicole. A male voice on the other end of the line tells him Nicole isn’t there and that she’s sick. The film ends where and how it began, with a freeze frame of Corporal Turner on his dormitory bed.
The BFI handout introduced the screening as ‘part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour’ and comprised a New Yorker piece from June 2020 by Richard Brody, whose view that this is ‘among the great American films of the sixties’ was also quoted in this month’s BFI programme brochure. I know Brody’s writing well enough not to take such a judgment too seriously but I was keen to watch The Story of a Three-Day Pass, of which I’d never heard, and I’m glad to have seen it. I don’t really get it, though. Made in black and white, the picture is evidently influenced by the visual techniques of the French New Wave (freeze frames aren’t the only means used to interrupt the narrative, often to disorienting effect). Richard Brody is a connoisseur of Godard, Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, which may partly explain his enthusiasm for Van Peebles’ movie, as well as his confidence in reading it. Here’s an example of the latter. Describing the fantasy sequences which occur as Turner and Miriam prepare to sleep together for the first time, Brody writes:
‘Turner’s [fantasy] is of himself as a velvet-cloaked and lace-bedecked aristocrat, sipping wine by the fire and approaching his lady fair on her canopied bed; whereas Miriam’s fantasy is of being captured in the wild by grass-skirted, spear-bearing, pelt-wearing black men and rescued by a similarly garbed and styled Turner.’
I don’t see how Brody knows to whom these fantasies belong (assuming, though this too seems arguable, they belong to any individual character and aren’t, rather, ironic conceits on Van Peebles’ part). Couldn’t Turner’s fantasy just as likely be Miriam’s and vice versa, especially given the attitudes they both express in a relatively realistic episode in the film? The lovers go to a club where the performers are Spanish. The emcee, noticing the couple, refers to them humorously as ‘Señorita Big Eyes and Señor Blackie’. Turner is infuriated, a fight breaks out in the club and he’s thrown out. Trying to calm him, Miriam tells the still angry Turner the emcee didn’t intend a racist slur. She goes on to say something along the lines that people are just people and racial difference doesn’t matter. Why, then, would she fantasise about being at the mercy of African tribesmen? There’s nothing else in the story to suggest that white girl speaks with forked tongue. Mightn’t it be Turner, sensitive to whites seeing Black men as ‘savages’, who imagines himself exceptional?
Miriam’s remarks outside the club anticipate her wishful thinking later in the film. As soon as his fellow soldiers see her with him on the beach, Turner fears the worst. Miriam assures him the other men won’t tell tales at the base; later, she says that, even if they do, she’s sure Captain Lutz won’t reprimand Turner. Miriam’s whiteness consistently blinds her to the racial implications of which Turner, for all that he’s mostly genial, is all too well aware. That awareness is regularly expressed by his looking in the mirror where his reflection talks back to him. At the start, as he excitedly prepares for his interview with Lutz, this alter ego tells Turner that, if he is to be promoted, it’s because ‘You are the captain’s new good colored boy, you are the captain’s Uncle Tom, baby!’ After Miriam has sought to allay his concerns about Lutz’s reaction to what he’s told by the other soldiers, the mirror image smiles, ‘I’m not so sure’.
The exchanges between Turner and his reflection are Van Peebles’ strongest device (and Harry Baird does his best acting in them). With the help of the cinematographer Michel Kelber, Van Peebles also offers a distinctive picture of Paris, thanks to the mostly unlovely people and places Turner encounters before Miriam – a suspicious bookseller, a sparse strip-show audience, a deserted, windswept park, and so on. There are memorable moments. In a club, Turner gazes at a white woman (not Miriam) before imagining himself moving in slow motion towards her: the white clientele on the dance floor parts, Red Sea-like, on either side of him. But I couldn’t make sense of why, on arrival in Paris, he changes out of his military uniform into trenchcoat and fedora, and wears shades – the get-up doesn’t appear to correspond to either his self-image or his idea of how others see him. Turner’s perceptions and experience of racism gradually eclipse the ingenious style(s) of The Story of a Three-Day Pass, reducing its technical highlights to just that. Although this film doesn’t look like a conventional inter-racial drama of the time, it increasingly feels like one.
The piece is emphatically unrealistic, though – not only visually but also in the plotting and the supporting performances. The three white soldiers happen to make their way to a beach that’s totally deserted except for Turner and Miriam; the gospel choir chooses a US army base as a port of call. The overplaying of Harold Brav as Lutz and Tria French’s Mrs Abernathy, the first lady of the gospel choir, is intensified by Van Peebles shooting them in tight close-up. (Lutz, when he’s talking to Turner, speaks to camera.) In the lead roles, imposingly handsome Harry Baird and fragile, unassuming Nicole Berger are complementary and charming presences, evem though they’re required to indulge in an awful lot of unnatural laughter. Still, the love scenes between Turner and Miriam are beguilingly shot and carry a real erotic charge. Their unhappily short-lived romance is given extra meaning, sad to say, by the real-life fates of the actors. Nicole Berger was killed in a car crash even before the film was released. Harry Baird, after losing his sight, retired from acting in the mid-1970s.
Richard Brody rightly notes that ‘Reality overtook the movie’ in other ways, too. When it premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival in October 1967, there were no longer any US troops stationed in France – the result of Charles de Gaulle’s edict of March 1966. By the time the film opened in American cinemas in mid-June 1968, de Gaulle was still in the Élysée Palace only by the skin of his teeth. In light of May 68 and the protests still taking place the following month, the surprisingly empty streets of Paris in The Story of a Three-Day Pass must have looked very strange to audiences coming to the cinema straight from watching television news.
10 August 2021
