Sound And Vision: Jacques Audiard
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: several music videos by Jacques Audiard.
Jacques Audiard's newest film, Emilia Pérez will be released this week in cinemas and soon on Netflix. A darling at the Cannes Film Festival, and a probable oscar-contender, the film might seem like an odd fit for Audiard, since it's a full blown musical. But while Audiard is mostly known for his gritty humanist dramas, like Dheepan, Un Prophéte (A Prophet), De Rouille et d'Os (Rust and Bone) and De Battre Mon Coeur s'Est Arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), there has been a droll sense of humor to his films before (The Sisters Brothers), some magical realist touches (especially in A Prophet) and a focus on music (The Beat That My Heart Skipped). And yes, early on Audiard has directed a few music videos.
Before he launched his current sense of style with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Audiard was quite well known in his native country of France as a screenwriter. He made two movies in the mid-nineties that are all but forgotten. After those two early outings he made three music videos that in their own way all show promise of things to come. The first of those, Noir Désir's Comme El Vient (below), shows Audiard's visions of life through and through. As a filmmaker he is interested in what divides and connects us, making films about very specific subcultures (like prison life in A Prophet) and cultures (Sri Lankan immigrants in France in Dheepan). He finds universality in those specific stories. In Rust and Bone he lets two very different people, a street boxer and an orca trainer fall for each other. Audiard's work, in other words, is deeply humanist, trying to find the connections between people even if there are barriers. In the music video for Comme El Vient, he had two barriers set up for me personally, making a music video entirely in sign language, interpreting the lyrics to a French-language song. I don't speak sign language, nor am I fluent in French. But the powerful imagery and the emotion comes across nonetheless. I connected to it.
The music video for Alain Bashung's La Nuit Je Mens (also below) shows of Audiard's gritty realistic side, setting a video inside a bathroom, and showing both the performer and several women through a static viewpoint outside of the room. The women, in various states of undress, are not glossed-up, nor seem aware of the camera. There is a low-key beauty to the unpolished look of the video. But it can also be viewed as creepily voyeuristic, an accusation Audiard has had directed against him before, especially with the polyamory pic Les Olympiades.
The last video shows off some of Audiards absurdist humor and magical-realist imagery. Louise Attaque's Ton Invitation (finally below) starts out as a slightly comical fight between a man and a woman, which turns realistically and uncomfortably violent very quickly afterwards. But then the fantasy takes over, and the lovers' quarrel turns into a Luchadore-fight. Before we know it we are literally in the ring, the living room being replaced by ropes and a canvas, including a referee. It's the kind of dryly witty exaggeration that Audiard would only return to in a few moments in his career (especially in the ghost-scenes in A Prophet and some of the more deconstructionist tendencies in The Sisters Brothers). But his new film Emilia Peréz, which at the time of writing I haven't seen yet, is supposed to be quite wild for Audiard's standards. We might think we know Audiard, but he keeps moving in interesting and surprising directions, while also having established a very clear tone of voice and style all his own. That is rare and should be cherished.
