A Simple Story (Marcel Hanoun, 1959)

Marcel Hanoun's Une simple histoire is a film more commonly heard about in vague whispers than addressed head-on. This is because its maker, Marcel Hanoun, remained a marginal figure in the French New Wave, despite the fact that it was he -- not Resnais or Rivette, and certainly not Godard -- who was selected as the representative for the "movement" by Anthology Film Archives for its Essential Cinema canon. While this could potentially have made Hanoun a central figure in the U.S., regardless of his fortunes at home, Anthology's policy of showing films only without subtitles only insured that he would be studiously ignored by all but a few diehard cineastes. So although Hanoun, like Chris Marker and Alain Cavalier, made the "pivot to video" with gusto and remained productive until his death in 2012 at age 82, he remains one of those individuals we always mean to delve into, like Biette or Vecchiali, but seldom do.

As it happens, A Simple Story is a masterpiece, a missing link between the poetic grace of Jean Renoir and the shot-by-shot rigor of Robert Bresson, and as such, a fundamental piece of cinema history. It is also a heartbreaking tale of minor aspirations crushed, parental obligations thwarted, and the cold hard reality that filthy lucre counts for much more in our modern world than human beings and their needs. Even more than in its meticulous shot breakdown, A Simple Story's frank organization (pun intended) around the gradual depletion of its protagonist's cash reserves is a clear harbinger of Bresson's pitiless materialism.

Hanoun's film begins in medias res, as a fireman's wife (Madeleine Marion) finds two individuals sleeping in a vacant lot near her home. It's a mother (Micheline Bezançon), whose name we never learn, and her young daughter, Sylvie (Elizabeth Huart). The woman takes the pair in, gives them a bite to eat, and insists that they stay in her apartment while she and her husband go off to work, even calling midday to make sure they haven't fled out of shame. At this rare act of kindness, the mother cries, and begins to reflect on everything that has happened to her and Sylvie since coming to Paris from Lille several days ago. It is at this point that the film enters the extended flashback that it will occupy for the remainder of its running time.

Plotwise, A Simple Story is indeed slender, but its bare-bones construction allows for both an elemental emotional power and a reduced canvas for formal exactitude. (One can clearly see that the Dardennes are fans, as the influence is clear, and not merely triangulated through Bresson.) The mother is constantly trying to juggle incompatible difficulties: finding a place to stay, looking for work, and finding someone who can provide childcare for Sylvie while she looks. Her job search fruitless, she depletes her savings very quickly but Hanoun presents it in a grueling, methodical manner. The mother and the girl are shown walking down streets, entering and exiting doorways, going down into Metro stops and emerging again, sitting at cafes, and generally finding ways to occupy space, both within the city and within the frame. The sharp cutting emphasizes the fact that they cannot stay anywhere too long.

Another key feature of A Simple Story is Hanoun's treatment of dialogue. Much of the verbal work of the film is performed by a voiceover narration by Bezançon, allowing street noises and ambiance to assert themselves. However, Hanoun also permits direct dialogue, which is often a direct duplication of what we hear in the voiceover. So for instance, the mother's voiceover will state, "she asked us for the rent," and the hotel proprietess will be heard asking for the rent at the same time. This double dialogue creates a distance between ourselves and everything we are watching, never allowing us to forget that we are inside the mother's own story. This structure is in place even before the flashback begins, indicating that Hanoun is striking an odd balance between 1st and 3rd person identification, employing both direct narration and free indirect discourse.

The overall impact is not unlike the abstracted neo-classicism we see in works like Markopoulos's Twice a Man or even Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant, where the narrative hovers in a dreamlike space between realism and the gesticulation of early cinema. On the surface, it can resemble lack of affect, but this is not quite true. There is emotional response just below the surface, but it is enrobed in a sheath of automatism, as though the characters are not entirely certain they are actually experiencing what is before them. (The straightforward brattiness of Sylvie offers a good comparison for reading this behavior.) This helps us perhaps to understand better what Bresson was going for with his "models," not a lack but a different, otherworldly kind of presence, something related to the avant-garde trance film.

Regardless of the intellectual connections that A Simple Story sparks like a pulsing neuron, it is just a beautiful piece of cinema. It speaks to the hardships that women face when trying to strike out on their own, without justification or apology, when men in the city see them as easy marks or sex objects, or when children are seen as a burden or, in this case, a sign that their mother is a woman of loose morals. Everything about Hanoun's gaze amplifies its lack of judgment. Or, more precisely, it uses Bezançon's moony visage as a mirror, with which to reflect judgment on the cruel world around her.