For never shall a child of vice love a virgin creature. There are very few real marginals in big art: all the somewhat shocking content is now, as during it, left to the majors. Therefore, the depiction of abominations in literature and cinema is rarely complete without shocking or moralizing. The inevitable distance of enormous size between the author and the dinghy, the object of his attention, the distance aesthetic, ethical and etiquette – cannot but reduce the degree of artistic persuasiveness of the final product. "I like to watch children die," from the tender, filled with absolutely - if in fact - bourgeois virtues purified by Mayakovsky, passes through the register of yellow slaps and slaps to public taste, and not photos from Auschwitz. Not least because inhumans, for the sake of real, not red words, who love to watch the death of children, are mutilated, as a rule, not only morally, but also mentally (thought is simple, but much less trivial than it may seem at first glance - Bernhard Schlink, a writer, otherwise mediocre and very much, made his name on it). Inhumans almost never have the intellectual resources necessary to create a full-fledged artistic statement. Jean-Genet is the only exception to this rule. A scumbag in both senses of the word, two-thirds of his life spent in prisons and there lowered, and lowered voluntarily, drooping and braving, not possessing the rudiments of any, even a hard-core conscience, with equal ease (and pleasure, reaching, according to his own words, to orgasm) betrayed both fraternists and thieves, his comrades, cooperating with the police, the gendarmerie, as well as the most diverse ultras in their mutual devouration, Jeune possessed a unique gift of vocabulary art from the art center. Images that struck the reading public not so much the novelty of completely frostbitten obscenity, as absolute authenticity: where others had only tasting evil as a spicy seasoning, the Wife had a spoon in evil, and not in the order of personal choice (" In the defilement it is sweeter!), but simply because he knew nothing else in life and did not want to know - evil he was flesh of the flesh.
The relatively quiet fame of Zhenet in our days is explained, of course, by the fact that the cream from his first literary experiments was removed by the Parisian intellectuals of the seventies. The youthful novel of Jeunet with the eloquent name “The Miracle of the Rose”, irrepressible with its ejaculation, such an energy of baseness and dirt, pretty fueled the sluggish flame of the talents of Sartre and Gide, who had signed up by that time. The former criminal, who soared thanks to the masters to the heights of literary fashion, was dragged around the salons like a jester, like a circus freak, like a room crocodile, and, dragging, cutting, combing, in many ways exhausted his talent. Having filled his hand in skill and mastered professional techniques, Zhene lost the immediacy of meanness, and with it most of his victorious power - author and human. In addition, extremely frivolous about his own writing heritage, he did not care at all about how he was disposed of by plagiarists or co-authors - directors, playwrights, directors. As a result, the lion’s share of his film adaptations does not bear almost any imprint of his own worldview: in “Kerel” Genet-Fassbinder sticks out from everywhere, of course, not Jeune, but Fassbinder, many times everyone – from Cocteau to Viktyuk – used and remade “Maids” and completely lost any script roots. The only picture truly scorched by the hot and stinking breath of the Thief and Martyr, paradoxically remained “Mademoiselle” by Tony Richardson.
Actually, there is no paradox here. Richardson also had his own unique (in the spirit of time and taste especially) gift. He was able to read the source and transfer to the screen the author’s perception, minimally refracted by his own consciousness. This is too, alas, too late, Nabokov noted, entrusting him with his last lifetime film adaptation. Richardson was a brilliant - sensitive, obedient, professional - accompanist with the screenwriter. And therefore he managed to bring to the viewer the fire of Zhenya blazing, and not extinguished, not smoldering barely live coals under the raw compost of the director's senate. Moreover, Richardson put the entire film crew at the service of the screenwriter, not excluding two well-known obstinates - Jeanne Moreau (by that time already the palm bearers of Cannes and his wife) and the cameraman David Watkin, making them diligently imitate the modeling of roles and the pictorial manner of Buñuel's "Maid's Diary", so that in comparison with all sides the skill and richness of the many times strongest literary basis played out. The result, it seems, shook him: it is known that Richardson watched his entire film only once, immediately after editing, after which he had a nervous breakdown; it is also known that he – completely irrational, given the objective quality of the footage – stubbornly refused to put his creation for the competition of any cinematic awards, as if wishing him to be forgotten.
Indeed, "Mademoiselle" is able to shake the most sophisticated of modern connoisseurs - despite the fact that the film is not a single truly shocking scene. This is a kind of condensed von Trier with extreme economy of expressive means, without Trier’s unbridled entertainment, the “overcoat” of a kind, from which (and where else?) the Trier rebellion against the world order grew. Only in Trier evil is usually subjected to artificial distillation. In "Mademoiselle" it is extremely convincing, reliable, ordinary. Not covered, not mourned, not avenged.
The seemingly unmotivated actions of the heroine are subject to the sacred author’s arbitrariness: after all, Mademoiselle is an obvious author’s alter ego. Mademoiselle prison buddies called in his youth Jeune - there was something in him all his depravity uplifted, a kind of stinking aristocracy in the style of "from scum - princes." It is no coincidence that there is so little female in the character of Jeanne Moreau - at the extreme, by all means aggravated femininity of her external appearance; it is no coincidence that the key elements of this appearance are also surprisingly slender legs in stockings and invariably elegant shoes, painted lips, cleaned hands - all the attributes of young pederasts. In general, the symbolism of the film is scanty, banal, transparent, but surprisingly effective (because the ambivalence of the symbol does not enrich, but it can kill): a snake as an initiation into the mysteries of carnal sin, a bird egg deliberately crushed before a deadly betrayal, a calf poking into the swollen udder of a poisoned cow, the bare knees of an orphaned boy, the sweaty, muscular torso of a local womanizer and a bal... Life is unkempt, dense, animal-smelling, fertilizing, tender, soft, unsophisticated, defenseless before vice, and evil, excluded from this life by its very sophistication, but thirsting for a thirst for diabolical, insatiable, indomitable, and in the impossibility of such communion defiling the altar. How's Blake? And suddenly the serpent spewed out the poison on wine and bread, and I returned to the barn as a pig, and I lay down among the pigs. Having regurgitated with such poison, Jeunet died in a dirty Arab dens - categorically refusing a posthumous place in the Pantheon, bequeathing himself to be buried in an unknown Algerian cemetery next to his last lover. Did you understand anything in your hour of death? Or did you always understand?