Persecution

My first film during Easter Sunday is Persecution by Patrice Chereau. In a way, this is a typical French film, told in images and terse dialogue.

 

As the film opens, we see a young beggar, probably a drug addict, moving through a busy Paris Metro train asking for a Euro. He was not getting a good response and finally took it out on a feeble looking fat lady who was looking at her. He stared back and slapped her. She was close to tears but did not dare to fight back, not even to scream or to break out in fury to curse the beggar. She was seen by another young man sitting nearby. He immediately got off at the next station where she got off and hounded her why she allowed herself to be insulted and beaten without fighting back. But the lady just would not be bothered to answer him. He wanted to take her to a cafe to sort out the matter but she said she was in a hurry and quickly ran out from an exit. The young man felt very annoyed.

 

Next we see him in an apartment, putting in some electric cable. Some one came to see him. It was a friend, Alex, an accountant who admired his courage. He brought some food and drink for him and wanted to talk to him. He appeared very pissed off that he followed him to his work place. But he allowed him to stay and talk and ate with him. But he warned him he was not to do that again. Then we were shown that another man was interested in him. This time it was a former fellow worker who was in love with him! He stalked him, entered his house through the window and left him a note saying that he is in the bedroom. Before he returned home, the stranger had completed the decoration of a part of his partly decorated house. He went into the bedroom and found a naked man on his bed. He grabbed him, and beat him up but the man would not fight back. He chucked him out. On the other hand, when he called his girl friend of three years, she was always making excuses that she was too busy to see him whenever she returned to Paris or that she was too tired. Finally, she agreed to see him in his favourite pub. But when she was  there, he allowed her to be talked to by his "brother", Thomas, a black man who tried to chat her up. It was obvious that something was wrong with their relationship.

 

The problem appears to be that he was too intense. He believes in whatever it is that he is doing and thinks that one should always act on what one truly believes in. His world is a black and white world. There are certain things you must do and certain things which you must never do or allow other people to do to you. His girl friend Sonia is a seminar organizer who has got an MA and had to travel all the time to all parts of France and Europe and America but he was just an independent house decorator who subcontract work and sometimes work alone and sometimes with other workers. When he felt that she was avoiding him one time she came to Paris, he just dropped in into her apartment unannounced, rather like the stalker who stalked him. She was not very happy that he did that but they made love. She said that he might see something he didn't want to see. She was always calm, cool, rational and level headed. But he wanted to be with her all the time and whenever he got a free moment, he would always call her by telephone. Even listening to her on the phone was better than not seeing her there and then. Later, when he could not stand this type of uneasy relationship any longer, he wanted to confront his girl friend. Sonia said she found the relationship suited her very well. She wanted to have the best of both worlds: to have a lover but to maintain her independence. But he said she should not just expect him to wait on her all the time and nearly broke up with her. She on the other hand said she found the existing relationship was fine for her and that she was happy that it should continue excatly that way. He disagreed. He said that if one really loved the other, one should think about the other all the time and should spend time together as much time as possible. Sonia however said that it was  quite sufficient for her just to have the idea that she is wanted by someone who genuinely loved her but that it was not necessary for both of them to be together all the time because when two lovers are actually together, often there might be quarrels and things might not work out all the time and she did not want that to happen. So a relationship in which one is both present and absent is best. Sonia knew that how he felt. To please him, she bought him a brand new motor car so that he needed not take the metro or relied upon his friends like Alex to pick him up and drop him down in his work. Alex had been married but found that nothing worked and was always depressed and thought himself a complete failure. Alex once told Daniel that merely talking to Daniel already gave him hope and would lift him out of his depression. Anyway, she took him to a garage to look at it. He liked it. He took the car but left in anger when she did not agree that they should move in permanently. 

 

Whenever Sonia was on a trip, she appeared to genuinely enjoy talking to Daniel. It made her feel safe and wanted. When she appeared reluctant to see Daniel, Daniel asked her if there was some one else. She told him frankly that her company accountant wanted to go after her. They would go out together but in a group and she did not allow it to develop further. Perhaps she wants love but only at a safe distance and only true intimacy from time to time. She may want physical intimacy but lives in fear of true no-holds barred emotional relationship.

 

As the film developed, the stranger wanted to move in with him and climbed into his ground floor flat again. So he closed the windows whenever he went to work. But one day, he found that the guy was sitting on a bench in the courtyard to wait for his return. Upon seeing his persistence, he took pity of him and told him that was the limit. He would not beat him up if he found him to be wating for him. He however would not allow him to move in with him because he did not like homosexuals. But he permitted him to work with him. When his male admirer got into his house. He was touched by his sincerity and commitment. He told him a secret which he had previously told no one: his childhood and why he visited a home for the aged as a volunteer. When Sonia learned about this, she dropped into his house without notice. This was something she had never done before in the entire three year that she was his steady girl friend. It appears that she was now jealous that someone would love him so much that he would run the risk of being beaten up by him and still persisted in going after him. She told him she tried to wipe that man off her mind but could not. In the end, she allowed her emotions to get the better of her reason.!

 

Is the director trying to tell us that all real love involves commitment and that the inevitable pain and suffering of being so close to another yet not being with that other is part and parcel of being genuinely in love?  Is the director trying to suggest that people who are truly committed will thereby exert a kind of irresistible charisma by virtue of their intensity and that it is precisely this excessiveness which draws others like to him like a magnet,  even against the other's  better judgement? Is love and passion always incomptaible with rational calculations and restraint?  Is the hero a persecutor? Is he being "persecuted" by his male admirer? Is he not at the same time "attracted" a little by such devotion? Is Daniel himself not  in his own way "persecuting" Sonia by always trying to exact a level of commitment from her which she was not yet ready to give ? Do people get a kind of perverse satisfaction by being "persecuted" by someone one loves because being persecuted and badly treated by the object of one's true love might still be better than being completely ignored? Is the fact that one is somehow still "connected" to the object of one's love, albeit that it is a painful form of "persecution" , is nonetheless better than having no connection at all?  Is he trying to suggest that a love which is too comfortable may be lacking in one something? Is he suggesting that insecurity and jealousy may be an essential element of all true love?