Self-Identity - #1 Don't Look Back

Review of a French Movie focused on Self-identity

A Review of Director and Author Marina de Van’s Movie:

“Don’t Look Back”

 

 

Reviewed by Dan McDonald

There are movies that the thinking Christian finds deeply satisfying from a philosophical perspective which he cannot readily recommend to others.  This is because some of the best movies to drive us to thinking about modern issues of life have often stretched the limits of what one might want to watch.  The French made film, “Don’t Look Back” is a film that makes one think, but is also one that pushes the limits of what many Christians will being willing to watch.  “Don’t Look Back” is not a family-friendly film.  That said, I have never known a movie to so powerfully deal with the very modern issue of self-identity.  This movie brought home to me in a powerful way just how important of a modern issue self-identity is.  I was sort of the conservative guy, who felt all this psycho-babble about self-identity and self-image was pretty much modern man’s way of feeling sorry for himself and making up issues with which to find an excuse for not doing what one knows he ought to do.  But as I watched this movie, a whole new perspective regarding how modern men and women view themselves and their place within humanity took shape.  I have become aware that much of what ails men and women in modern Western civilization is that we find ourselves as modern men and women to lack a sense of sureness regarding both who we are, and what role we are intended to fulfill.  Perhaps the line which captures the spirit of this movie is when the main character, questioning her own understanding of her life story, tells her mother that she has to go back to a time she cannot recall because, “There are holes in the stories you have told me of my life.”  That is as profound as any movie can ever get.  The movie focuses on a character whose life story is dependent upon the stories others told her of her life, because something happened around the time she was eight years old that caused her to have almost no memories of anything in her life before she was eight years old.  I fully suspect that Marina de Van, the director and screen writer, understood that she was using the character presented in this movie, to pose the question to modern civilization if perhaps there wasn’t something missing in the stories told to each of us about our lives.  For the Christian dealing with life in our modern setting this is perhaps one of the most profound questions we must ask about life in our culture.  Is there a hole in the story we are being told about our lives?  If we believe there is a hole in the story of life as it is being described to modern men and women, then we can begin to address this problem of modernity in which men and women can find little assurance either of who we are or how we fit into modern life and culture.  So I am torn on one hand to acknowledge that this is a definite “R” movie with adult themes and settings, although as we can say “there is no actual full frontal nudity.”  So from that perspective one may wish to avoid the movie.  On the other hand, philosophically speaking I found this to be one of the most important movies I have ever viewed.  Do you ever get the feeling that living in our modern world is complicated?

Marina de Van, is a name that I suspect is not known to most of my American readers.  She is French.  Any movie she has made is French, and if they have an American audience it is because someone either knew French or didn’t mind watching a movie where they understood the dialogue by reading the subtitles beneath the movie.  Marina de Van, may well become one of the better known names of twenty-first century film-making.  Her work has captured the attention especially of European film critics.  She has been compared to Alfred Hitchcock, as a film-maker capable of presenting the human psychological condition, with a tendency to be more extreme than Hitchcock.  “Don’t Look Back” was her second work as a director and screen-writer.  It is a mild work in comparison with her first movie offering entitled “In my Skin.”  In de Van’s first work she portrayed a character descending into madness who became a cutter, that is one who compulsively cuts on themselves.  There is clearly a continuation of a theme between her first and second offering.  I have never seen her first film, but it is clear that she seems to believe that it is important to make movies about people who feel estranged from their own bodies, persons, and life histories.

While de Van’s acting history was primarily as an actress in horror movies, I have no doubt that what she is doing is not just an extension of her history in the horror movie genre.  There is more to de Van than her formerly being an actress in horror movies.  Before attending one of the leading film schools in France, Marina de Van graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in philosophy.  It was after completing her studies in philosophy that she attended film-making school and then worked as an actress with one of France’s leading makers of horror movies.  One suspects that she had a long-term vision for getting to the place where she could make movies about philosophical issues she felt needed to be discussed in modern life.  That is what I found so powerful about “Don’t Look Back.”  As one whose college minor was philosophy, I can almost picture Marina de Van presenting a scenario to a college philosophy class prior to having a class discussion about self-identity.  She would be the sort of instructor who wanted a lively discussion and therefore wasn’t willing to show her hand on what she thought.  Instead she would set forth a scenario that would lead to a lively dialogue between varied men and women with varied perspectives.  That is what she does so wonderfully in the making of  “Don’t Look Back.”  She has done her work of setting up the class discussion and now she leans back and let's the class explode with their varied responses to the scenario she has set up.

“Don’t Look Back” is extremely well set-up.  It is a wonderfully executed movie with extremely creative photography that makes you feel like you are seeing the movie’s main character seeing herself in the mirror through the prism of a degenerating understanding of who she actually is.  This is a movie where the character and the two actresses playing the role of the single character of Jeanne are turned inside out.  We think of actresses playing roles and presenting a character in movies.  But in “Don’t Look Back” actresses Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci are presented in different contexts as Jeanne.  There is a sense in which you understand the Marceau and Bellucci are not the character Jeanne.  The character Jeanne is a mysterious and hidden person, fighting to understand who she is, and Bellucci and Marceau are merely the projected images of a hidden Jeanne trying to somehow discover a way to come out of the shadows.

It is a testimony to de Van’s directing skill, as well as the abilities of actresses Bellucci and Marceau that when you watch the two actresses portraying Jeanne you understand that this is not some cheesy double personality flick, but a single human being with a conflicted understanding of who she is.  The character presented by Marceau is picked up and continued and developed by Bellucci in a way that at first you begin to think she looks different, and then you realize that indeed this is a different actress but the same character, not with a new mind but an evolving or devolving mind whichever it may be.  The result is that you are brought to feel the character's frightening sense that she is losing her grip on reality and that time is beginning to work against her as she fights for her sanity and well being.  She feels she must find answers for her fragile life and she also understands that her search for answers might possibly be a headlong rush into madness.  It is a frightening portrayal of the loss of one's own assurance of self-identity.  It is at once a psychological thriller that can be viewed as a horror film, but to describe it as a horror film would be to characterize it as something abnormal, whereas this movie is simply the portrayal of something all too normal wrought graphically in perhaps a somewhat extreme portrayal.  It is something of the reality of modern life caught in the horror of modern life where one feels that they are living a life comparable to a fish out of water.

The set-up scene that leads to the unraveling of Jeanne’s self-identity is a wonderful set up for the rest of the movie.  Marceau is presenting the person of Jeanne in the scene.  Jeanne is a biographer, a successful biographer who is respected for her ability to bring the subjects of her biography to life.  She has decided to write an autobiography.  Her publisher has finished reading the manuscript and is telling her his thoughts.  He is not kind.  He wonders how it is that someone who has written such wonderful biographies and made the subjects of her biographies come to life could then tell her own story with neither passion nor life.  He finds it unexplainable how she tells the story of other lives so wonderfully and her own story without feeling or life whatever.  Jeanne, in the person of Marceau, tells how she knows so much of her life only from the stories others have told her, because something happened when she was eight years old and since that time she has had no memories of anything that happened to her before she was eight years old.  From that point on Jeanne’s self-identity begins rapidly to unravel.

De Van presents a secondary modern woman’s issue in this film without dwelling on it.  Marceau’s presentation of Jeanne is especially set forth in the context of Jeanne’s career as a writer.  Bellucci’s presentation of Jeanne is generally set forth in the context of Jeanne’s family life.  It is interesting how de Van sets this forth almost secondarily, but the feeling of a divide between family and career has been for many women something they have felt as an identity issue.  As an aside in this regard, I think that perhaps it is unfortunate that the divide between career and family is often dealt with as pretty much wholly a woman’s issue.  It is an issue, that is a human issue, as old as the Industrial Revolution.  Before the Industrial Revolution most men and women both lived and worked in and around their family and homes.  But with the coming of the Industrial Revolution men began to “go to work.”  The dividing of life into home settings with family and work settings away from the family emerged as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.  At the time of the Industrial Revolution it was mostly only men who "went to work" to provide for the family and then came home with a shortened day to give to family as husband and father.  Women, for several decades, continued to remain at home where they were nurturers of the family, and sometimes laborers within the home setting.  The struggle for women to have distinct home and career lives has been a later deveolpment, for better or worse.  But perhaps we should realize that this dilemma of divided family and career lives is in reality a human problem affecting both genders.  In de Van’s film, the men associated with the story are not very helpful as Jeanne tries to sort out her unraveling self-identity.  Perhaps it is time for this to be seen as a human issue which needs addressed first as a human issue, that has individual or gender specific applications.  Perhaps such a consideration would do much to aid the common cause of the genders rather than to divide the genders into their seemingly permanently divided modern perspective.  That however is simply an aside to the movie’s message.

The movie was shown at the Cannes Film Festival as a candidate for best movie of the year.  It did not win, but in my humble opinion as one who is not really a movie critic it surely deserved to be considered for a best motion picture of some year.  Actresses Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci brought to life the character of Jeanne and in the course of their film duly highlighted the modern dilemma of struggling to understand one’s own self-identity and purpose in life.  Americans may recognize Marceau as the beautiful Princess Isabella in the movie “Braveheart” or as Bond’s rival and femme fatale in “The world is not enough.”  Bellucci might be recognized as having a recurring role in the “Matrix” series of films or as Mary Magdalene in Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”  But in this movie, both of these actresses can be seen as serious actresses who deserve respect for their ability to present an emotionally challenged and complex character to life on the screen.  Both of these women show us how acting is a true work and labor of talent and skill forged to present the human condition on film.

I will never again think glibly of the question in modern life of self-identity.  Before I viewed “Don’t Look Back” I thought that such an issue as “self-identity” was simply psycho-babble.  Having watched “Don’t Look Back” I am beginning to suspect that many a modern man or woman is going through life feeling that something is missing in the story of their lives which they have been told.

De Van’s treatment of the issue of self-identity, which has been so ably presented by the cast and film crew, has wonderfully highlighted an important modern issue for which men and women are hungry for satisfying answers.  When we see countless television shows and discussions of self-image, self-esteem, and self-identity our conclusion should not be that all this discussion is because we have been misled by psycho-babble, but rather we should conclude that beneath all these questions is a problem deeply ingrained in the modern perception of life.  That is something that “Don’t Look Back” brought home to me very forcefully.  I am grateful for that lesson.  De Van presents these questions, I suspect to raise our awareness and to encourage discussion of a deeply modern issue.  I cannot overemphasize my debt to her for that contribution to my life and my understanding of life especially in the modern context.

De Van’s movie perhaps gives us mostly modern and not Christian insights regarding the issue.  These modern answers should not be ignored or belittled, but from a Christian perspective we should have perspectives that relate the issues to a solidly Christian perspective.  Psychologists and many moderns will find a large percentage of these problems dealt with inwardly in one’s life history, in their childhood, and in their individual discovery of an authentic life emerging from knowing one’s self wholly from within one's own individuality.  But the Christian likely will find a need to explore more than these ordinary human scenarios for a Christian perception of this issue.  I cannot help but think of an ancient man who, like Jeanne, felt like he had a hole in the story of his life.  He felt the hole in his life was answered only in his learning to put on Christ.  St. Augustine therefore later wrote in his confessions, “We are restless until we find our rest in Thee.”  The reality, I fear is that for the most part, modern Christianity has done little to help modern humankind find the connection between faith and human issues of self-identity.  What St. Augustine discovered about self-identity has not been sufficiently understood by our modern contemporary Christianity and as a result a world seeking understanding is largely left trying to find answers within their own experiences apart from the riches of a Christian tradition.  Our rich Christian tradition and heritage has the wealth of Biblically informed human history with which to relevantly aid modern humanity's search for human self-identity in relationship to God’s work of creation and our call to redemption in Christ Jesus and re-integration into the whole of creation and humankind.  The world, in which we live, deserves the best answers that our Christian community can give.