How to make an art film

Look at me is a psychological drama of the sort the French do well. The making of, on the same DVD, shows the extraordinary trouble taken to shoot it. The script is good and so is the acting; and it is, as it is always with Agnes Jaoui, beautifully filmed.

It has started in her mind, I suspect, as a movie about Amor, a kind of lamento della ninfa, the middle part of Non havea Febo ancora from Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals. The aria is incredibly beautiful; but how to do justice to it in a film? A short video of it – MTV style – would have been too short: the aria is so much greater than the 5 minutes it last; one wants to say more about it; or at least talk about it longer, even if he has not much to say. A full length documentary about the painstaking, endless practice necessary to learn to perform it, on the other hand, would have been too dull for most viewers – interesting only to us, hopeless fans of classical voice. But a film in which a psychological drama plays out while the heroine practices for the aria’s performance – and performs it – now, that does the trick.

In the course of the film, Agnes, who always acts in her own films, sings snippets of it; she has a beautiful, strong, well-trained voice. Was she once a professional singer? In the scene, she and the heroine (who isn’t dubbed but sings the part as well as acts it, in a very good voice which is yet believably amateur) walk about a church, taking turns belting out snippets of the aria. They are trying out the acoustics, supposedly; but no one really does that this late in the game – the concert is to be later that day. What they are really doing is just belting and hearing themselves; and giving us the opportunity to hear how well it sounds. It does.

I suspect the whole point of the movie is that one scene; its central point, anyway.

Herein lies an art lesson: the best films (books, dramas, paintings) about some things are the ones that aren’t really about them, but, as it were, next to them, alongside them. The ones which mention it at most in passing. Which approach it, if they do at all, tangentially. Whose connection with the subject matter is unobvious, hidden.

In this case the connection is hidden: both the lamento and the film are about unrequited love. The story of the film – the tragedy of a daughter unloved by her father – grows out of its true subject, the aria, like a flower out of its invisible seed, buried underground.