Sarah Forestier and friends in The Names of Love.
* * * (out of five stars) The Names of Love. Written by Michel Leclerc & Baya Kasmi. Directed by Michel Leclerc. Available on Netflix.
Here’s a hypothetical exercise for you: take a jar, and for every political argument you have in your life from birth to college graduation—every dorm room bull-session and internet flame-war and debate over the Thanksgiving dinner table—drop a penny in. Then, for every political discussion you have after, for the rest of your life, in which you actually convince your opponent to agree with you, take a penny out of the jar. If you do this faithfully, what will you have on your deathbed?
A jar full of pennies, of course.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that in politics there is no reason, only temperament. The old metaphor of citizens as shoppers in a “marketplace of ideas”, rationally weighing the relative merit of the wares, is as dead as William F. Buckley. This is especially true in the age of the internet, when it more convenient than ever for folks to cherry-pick statistics, anecdotes, and other bits of informational detritus that confirm what they already believe. Instead of being objective shoppers in a marketplace, most people are ideological nest-builders, constructing the political roosts they prefer, and then hunkering down in them.
In Michel Leclerc’s The Names of Love, pretty anarchist Baya (Sara Forestier) has found a way to up-end the nests of fascists, technocrats, and other right-wingers: she seduces them. (“There’s a point right as they climax that they’re susceptible to persuasion,” she explains.) Leclerc’s comedy was a hit in France last year, and won Forestier a Cesar for Best Actress. It also happens to be amusing in translation, in a breezy, insouciant, French-comedy sort of way—as long as you don’t think too much about the tragedy at the root of its premise, the demise of actual political reason.
Alas, we never see Baya put her techniques of persuasion into effect here, for The Names of Love (actual title, Le nom des gens, is better translated as “the names of peoples”) is less about the psychology of politics than about the politics of ethnicity. Baya, as the child of a love-match between an Algerian immigrant (Zinedine Soualem) and a French hippie-chick (Carole Franck), is deeply allergic to the images and expectations that come with being a Muslim female in France. Arthur (Jacques Gamblin), the older man who finally inspires her to end her career as a political missionary, is a Jew whose mother (Michele Moretti) concealed her religion during the German occupation. Where Baya openly flouts her Muslim heritage—not just eschewing a headscarf but absently going out in public stark naked—Arthur hides his under a façade of anodyne Frenchness (his full name, Arthur Martin, is a corporate brand name in France).
The lively script by Leclerc and Baya Kasimi plays out the paradoxical truths of race and identity in these times, where they count for less institutionally than they ever have, yet in other, less formal ways they matter more than ever. The labels are deceptive, of course, but as precious to Baya as to the “fascists” she converts—as when, for instance, she learns that her college scholarship was not sponsored by a proper Socialist but by a conservative she detests. Instead of making her reexamine her politics, the news makes her weep with horror.
Your particular enjoyment of this movie will depend on your taste for piquant comedies of ideas. That, and your reaction to Forestier, who plays Baya as the kind of mercurial child-woman who buys live crabs at a market just to set them free at the beach. Whether her utter lack of self-consciousness will seem refreshing to you—or just deeply manipulative—is, like your politics, probably a matter of temperament.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
No comments:
Post a Comment