Au pan coupé (1967) User Reviews

My first Mubi viewing: Jeanne & Jean.

[DoorsofDylan · 8/10 · 20 February 2023]

Originally planning to treat myself on my birthday on February 9th by signing up to it, an advert on YouTube was too tempting, and led to me signing up to Mubi.

Arriving home after a bit of a rubbish day,I decided to cheer myself up, by watching something on Mubi for the first time (I had signed up a week ago.) Knowing nothing about this title, I got ready to meet the couple.

View on the film:

Flickering back and fourth between the middle and the aftermath of the relationship, the screenplay by writer/directing auteur Guy Gilles (who tragically died from AIDS at just 57 years old) pans along the couple with a magnetic stream of consciousness via Jeanne layering her memories of the romance one on top of the other like photographs, which Gilles pairs up with the melancholic mutterings from Jean, who looks across in the aftermath, as the relationship fades into the distance.

Dovetailing the stages of Jean and Jeanne's romance, director Gilles & The Creatures (1966-also reviewed) cinematographer Willy Kurant skillfully weave between grainy black and white with shimmering bursts of colour,as French New Wave (FNW) jump-cuts and superimposition dissolve to a pensive atmosphere of Jeanne (played with an exquisite passion by Macha Meril) exploring shattered segments of her romance with Jean, (played with a great wear and tear weight by Patrick Jouane) which Gilles brings into focus with FNW ruby reds and dashing pinks darting across the screen, skillfully emphasizing in flashbacks the colour Jeanne now feels she had in life,during her romance with Jean.

The mysteries of intimacy

[oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx · 10/10 · 31 May 2021]

"Au pan coupé" is the name of a café where the two lovers Jean and Jeanne meet. It has also been suggested by an English-language subtitler of this movie that the phrase "pan coupé" refers to the cutaway surface which replaces the angle where two sections of wall meet. What could we place at this location, maybe a shrine, or a fountain, perhaps a tomb? What exists at the place where the life of young lovers intersects?

With the throaty notes of some clarinetting, the movie commences. Sensitive and plaintive sounds which set the tone for what is to come. Delicate scenes of romance are shown in a present tense, and also in remniscence as Jeanne attempts to come to terms with the aftermath. The main tension is that Jean, whilst full of life, is also uprooted and dissatisfied with society. He has been unguided and is dizzy. The world, it appears, does not want all its inhabitants. At the border between adolescence and adulthood, he chooses to live outside of society rather than join the bottom of a hierarchy. Jeanne provides her milk of human kindness, but it proves an insufficient antivenom.

The images often approach that realm of the sublime, where beauty is beyond the capture of words: Jeanne's hieratic sketch of Jean and his psychosocial malformation; a stlil life of dainty lover's crockery; wrought-iron tendrils in a suicide's garden, questioning the sky; cupolas of an unlit chandelier in a dark room. Images of Jean and Jeanne are used to suggest that we are the creatures of nurture: Jeanne's father looks like an older Jean, but is his opposite in personality and grounding, whilst Jeanne's picture is on the wall of the café as an entirely different character (the absent daughter of an eccentric lady). My highly subjective/speculative interpretation, yet of information that demands an interpretation!

I finished feeling a gratitude for being invited to these intimacies, and a reverence for the idea of Jean's to bring the colours of Provence to Paris, and to ourselves. Underneath the pavement, the beach, as they used to say in 1968.