MORRIS DICKSTEIN
109
Pialat,whose work was first shown in 1968, builds
Le
Carr~1
around his
own young son, Antoine, and his alter ego, the ubiquitous Gerard
Depardieu. The boy shamelessly mugs for the camera, stealing every scene
from the hapless adults around him, while his father, played by Depardieu,
behaves just as willfully towards his estranged wife, his ex-wife, and his
current mistress, always turning up at odd times, playing up to his boy as
the only real anchor in his life. Eventually, it becomes hard to tell whether
this is a movie
about
self-indulgence or simply the director's self-indulgent
home movie.
Where
Le
CarpI
seems half unscripted,Jacques Audiard's
A Self-Made
Hero
is all too neatly dramatic, like the "quality" films that preceded the
New Wave. Based on a novel about the French Resistance, it features
Mathieu Kassovitz (here last year as director of the repellent slum drama,
La
Hairle)
as a shy, Zelig- like character who rises precipitously at the end
of the war by sheer mimicry, faking Resistance activities he never even
saw. His heroic past is too easily accepted by everyone from his gullible
landlord and the resisters themselves to members of the postwar govern–
ment. The "self-made hero" is believed because people
want
to believe
him. His resourceful role-playing is a cynical metaphor for how most peo–
ple actually get on in society. But the movie also takes a troubling
revisionist view of the Resistance itself. Once exaggerated into myth, it
can now be debunked as as kind of daydream if not an outright fabrica–
tion.
If
the movie shows there
were
real resisters, though not many, it also
implies that the Resistance was something of a collective fantasy.
A
Self–
Made Hero
is a smooth, pleasant, polished piece of storytelling, but like
Agnieska Holland's
Europa, Europa
- in which a young Jew survives by
impersonating a Nazi - it never really confronts the more disturbing
implications of its hero's play-acting.
An even greater disappointment, though clearly popular with the
audience, was Deepa Mehta's
Fire,
which projects a feminist fable about
the horrors of patriarchy onto a New Delhi setting. It revolves around two
sisters-in-law who are neglected by their husbands, one because all his pas–
sion is expended on his Chinese mistress, the other because
his
only
passion is for his Hindu swami. The first swinish male, who keeps up a
brisk trade in porno videos, is barely interested in consummating his mar–
riage of convenience; the second is trying to tame his flesh and has not
slept with his wife for thirteen years. Predictably, the two women not only
form an alliance but begin an affair and run off with each other, passing
through fire, like the legendary heroine Si ta,
to
find the love and respect
no chauvinist male would give them. Directed by an Indian woman who
lives in Canada, the film, complete with a visit to the Taj Mahal and a
slimy, masturbating servant, turns India into local color, picturesque but
