Salute Your Shorts: Arnaud Descplechin's L'Aimée

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

There’s always been something interesting about seeing documentaries made by feature filmmakers. Whether it’s Martin Scorsese’s odd view of who embodies the spirit of the times in "American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince" or Spike Lee’s moving chronicle When the Levees Broke, there’s something to these movies beyond simply their topics. They help us to interpret the director’s features and also emphasize what they see as truly important outside the world of their own stories. Aside from this, feature directors often feel less compunction doing new things with the form, feeling no need to stick with a particular limiting style when, as they’ve seen, making movies can offer so many possibilities. Even disasters, like Werner Herzog’s pathologically fictional “documentary” Little Dieter Needs to Fly, end up revealing in their own strange ways.

Arnaud Desplechin has only directed one documentary in his nearly 20-year career, but it in some ways had a profound effect upon his career in leading him to A Christmas Tale, the movie that really brought him acclaim in the states despite the artistic successes of his movies like My Sex Life … or How I Got into an Argument and Kings and Queen. Much of his time after the release of Kings and Queen was spent embroiled in a lawsuit with his ex-girlfriend, but he was inspired back to filming when he heard that his father was selling his family’s house in Roubaix (Northern France). Initially recorded for posterity, the project morphed into the nearly feature-length documentary, L’aimée. At 70 minutes long, it’s lengthier than most films covered in this column, but by Desplechin’s standards it’s still pretty much a short film. In any case, it’s the key extra to the new release of A Christmas Tale on DVD, and with good reason.

In many ways, L’aimée is just one of Desplechin’s home movies. It’s not made for audiences outside of his family, so names and relationships have to be figured out slowly as the Descplechin family already knows the names and circumstances being referred to. But what separates it from what your dad has in his garage is where he takes things. Largely through a couple interviews with his father, Desplechin weaves a story of various men, a strange and lonely childhood, endless doubling and a strange sense that had he felt like it, Desplechin could’ve easily turned this story into a feature in itself. It’s a ghost story haunted by the specter of a family’s past that exists only in the uncertainty of half-remembered stories.

Another helpful aspect is that Desplechin brought along Caroline Champetier, one of the greatest cinematographers in France, to shoot things in 35mm and then later cut together elements that tie in with his father’s story, thematically, if rarely literally. 

It’s no surprise that L’aimee is stylistically daring. Desplechin has long acknowledged his debt to the French New Wave and his respect for the many techniques that it brought with it. More than that, that spirit of daring resides behind the film, always keeping things slightly off kilter so that the audience can’t tune out what’s happening. It’s a documentary that’s largely shot like a feature, with extremely careful compositions and no particular attempt at masking its constructed nature. In short, Desplechin isn’t afraid to use a tripod, which even today is refreshing in documentary cinema.

While I admire L’aimee on its own from a certain detached sense formally, the film is ultimately a build-up for A Christmas Tale, whether Desplechin saw it that way or, more likely, not. It adds depth to the feature by giving the themes, already well-developed, a personal sense and a connection. Desplechin’s grab bag use of techniques has always been to break down communicative barriers, and viewing L’aimee in the context of A Christmas Tale adds another layer. Familial strife is largely out of the picture, as Desplechin and his family seem to have quite a warm relationship, but the parts of humanity he probes at are first given screen time here.

Central to A Christmas Tale is the issue of how the past, known or not, is inescapable in the present. A Christmas Tale's fractured family is a result of ignoring issues for as long as possible, letting them exist in the past and then continuing onwards. L’aimee dips into this with the issues of Desplechin’s father’s parentage. Where did he really come from? Was his mother a nurse? Was she friends with the people who raised him? Is it important? The answer to this last question is undoubtedly "yes," that the ghosts of the past shouldn’t just be left behind in an old house, that they deserve consideration and thought.

The most interesting part of the documentary was in fact left unexplained until A Christmas Tale premiered a year later. A key aspect of the film is Desplechin’s nephews, who at their young age run around the documentary, playing and taking pictures of the past which are then shown on camera. It’s a moving facet of the film, but seems like an element of cinematic excess. It fits together with A Christmas Tale, though, and its message of the cycle of the family and renewal through generations. Desplechin’s nephews aren’t forgetting the past, of course, they’re taking photos of this, but while they acknowledge what came before them, they offer the chance of a better future. Desplechin is, at his heart, an optimist, and the contemporary generation’s fun is contrasted against the poverty and death of his grandfather and great-grandfather.

There’s more to the film than that, and more links between the two, from the emphasis on photography and writing to the emphasis on illness and how it morphs family relationships. But the two works, and their complex interaction, are deep enough that I’d prefer to simply allow anyone interested to investigate these themselves. Desplechin has been called a novelistic filmmaker, and L’aimee helps illustrate that it’s not just due to the length and plotting of his works, but also their density. Even if it ends up feeling incomplete, a vignette that does more to help a greater work than something of its own, it’s still valuable. Watching it is enough to change the experience of viewing A Christmas Story and leads me to hope Desplechin will return to documentaries again some day, whether it’s to assist his fictional filmmaking or not.