Simone Barbès or Virtue (Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980)

The wonderful thing about cinema, or any artform really, is its utter infinitude. For all the moaning about the death of cinema (and cinema, it seems, has been dying since at least 1908), there is such a vast array of underlit corners and historical alleyways ripe for discovery. The more I learn about film, the most overwhelmed I am by how much I do not know. Until the recent restoration and re-release of Simone Barbès, I had never heard of critic-turned-auteur Marie-Claude Treilhou, and had only vaguely heard of the boutique film outfit, Diagonale, that produced it. Diagonale is the domain of Paul Vecchiali, one of the least assimilated figures of the French cinema. Sometimes it seems that his work is but a rumor, something daring cineastes plan to delve into but seldom actually do. (The relative inaccessibility of Vecchiali's films doesn't help matters.)

Taken on its own, Simone Barbès is a highly unique piece of cinema, one that continually strikes notes of lush decadence on the cheap. To watch Treilhou's film is to immediately slot it into your mind palace, and film history more generally, as a fait accompli, a connective node to dozens of other, better known but still marginal cinematic enterprises. The fact that Simone Barbès came out the same year as Fassbinder's Querelle makes total sense. Both light upon the so-called cinéma du look of the 1980s (early Besson, Beineix, De Palma, Mann) but play it like Jack Smith would: foregrounding the low-rent atmosphere to exploit the fabulousness of pure conviction, of belief.

The film begins in the lobby of a seedy Parisian porno theater. Simone (Ingrid Bourgoin) is the manager, and she works alongside the flighty, lovelorn Martine (Martine Simonet). They bond over the ridiculousness of their situation, the endless parade of losers who they must usher to their seats. As one would expect, one or two guys, regulars mostly, are polite and affable. But it's mostly a panoply of male fragility, embedded in the nuts and bolts of workplace comedy. (Simone Barbès finds its mirror image in Bette Gordon's Variety, three years later, in which both director and protagonist take the male gaze very seriously.) 

At midnight, Simone is off work and heads down to a gleefully louche lesbian bar to have a drink and meet up with her terminally distracted lover. In fact, Simone becomes our entree into this funky demimonde, with its punk-ragtime house band, glowering regulars holding court at private tables, and a sardonic bartender whose jaded worldview doesn't preclude a belief in the magick arts. No one dominates in this sequence, not even Simone, whose spot at the end of the bar speaks to a studied detachment. She is the quintessential French existentialist heroine, hardened by experience but longing for connection.

Tired of the bar and walking home, Simone accepts a ride from an older man, referred to in the cast list as the dragueur délicat, or fragile flirt (Michel Delahaye). It is clear early on that Simone has no sexual interest in him, and Treilhou seems to suggest that he may be as unattracted to women as Simone is to men. This extended two-shot, with Simone driving his car around Montparnasse in the wee hours, allows the characters to gently spar with one another, suggesting and rebuffing, having minor arguments, in the course of recognizing their shared loneliness. The film ends as dawn, Simone now back home.

Simone Barbès was the first feature shot by the late Jean-Yves Escoffier, best known for his work with Leos Carax. His treatment of urban light is immediately recognizable, and Treilhou permits him to shoot the squalid environments with no attempt to disguise their chintz. Treilhou was a contemporary of Akerman, Ottinger, and Jarman, and Simone Barbès suggests that she may be their equal. In its style and playfulness, Simone Barbès is a touchstone for a particular strain of cinema: Jacques Nolot, Yann Gonzalez, João Pedro Rodrigues, Bertrand Mandico, and even early Todd Haynes. Like all of them, Treilhou embodies a queer cinema of poverty, one that reflects gay and lesbian culture's long tradition of making a virtue of necessity.

Right now, you can watch Simone Barbès or Virtue on Another Screen.