#cybele ou les dimanches de ville d'avray

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Cybèle ou les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray

dir. Serge Bourguignon

1962

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Nicole Courcel, Patricia Gozzi and Hardy Krüger on the set of Sundays and Cybèle (1962, dir. Serge Bourguignon).

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Cybele ou Les Dimanches de ville d'Avray  (Serge Bourguignon, 1962)

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Sundays and Cybele by Serge Bourguignon. 1962

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"Cybele ou les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray" (1962)

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CYBELE OU LES DIMANCHES DE VILLE D'AVRAY  シベールの日曜日

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While 'pedophilia' is never explicitly referred to in Sundays and Cybèle, to the spectator of today, it is a constant subtext, present throughout the film in a manner that is both pervasive and oblique. Part of this ambiguity comes from our different awareness of the issue today, and part from the process of adaptation. Bourguignon removed the novel's explicit references to pedophilia in Pierre's murky past; he also deleted the criminal environment surrounding Pierre. What he retained quite faithfully, on the other hand, was the central relationship between Pierre and Cybèle. This is portrayed, as it is in the novel, as innocent and natural, a perspective critics at the time endorsed nearly unanimously, writing of the 'pure' love of the protagonists. (In fact, that term was bandied about so often that it begins to sound like denial.) Sundays and Cybèle is keen to emphasize the notion of a harmless and guilt-free bond between the two characters. First, Pierre and Cybèle are presented as children; Bourguignon, indeed, called his film 'the story of childhood recovered and childhood preserved.' Pierre, despite being an adult, is depicted as a benign, dreamy, and innocent figure—another significant difference from the book, in which he is capable of brutal violence. Second, Pierre and Cybèle's encounters take place mainly around the beautiful woods of Ville-d'Avray and its string of lakes, and much is made of the links between Cybèle and nature, starting with her name, which designates an 'earth mother' goddess from antiquity, as well as the couple's pronounced love of trees and water, repeatedly underlined by both dialogue and cinematography. Third, the film explains Pierre's actions in a way that diminishes his responsibility. The opening of the film, composed of documentary footage of warfare in Asia, shows his trauma to be war-induced, rather than the result of the criminal violence of the novel; a shot of a young Asian girl's terrorized face suggests that he is about to kill her, and thus casts the relationship with Cybèle as expiation for his war crime. Finally, the construction of point of view contributes to making the bond between Pierre and Cybèle acceptable. While the spectator witnesses the platonic nature of their relationship, and the saintly Madeleine and the artistic Carlos are consistently supportive, disapproval comes from highly unsympathetic outsiders who mock or taunt Pierre. As a result, even when he briefly turns violent at one point, we sympathize with him as a victim of persecution. The film convincingly absolves Pierre because he is, deep down, a 'child.' More difficult to accept is the way that it makes Cybèle a mini-adult. Patricia Gozzi was twelve years old when she made the film, and physically looks her age. Yet her strangely sophisticated talk transforms her into a child-woman. In addition to her repeated 'I love yous' and stated wish to marry Pierre when she is eighteen, the film skews the register of her dialogue away from a child's language, with such literary phrases as 'Au fond tu es un enfant perdu' (Deep down, you are a lost child) or the coquettish tone of such sentences as 'Pierre, est-ce que tu serais jaloux?' (Pierre, would you by any chance be jealous?), which it is hard to imagine coming from a twelve-year-old. In this respect, critic Françoise Giroud may have had a point when she wondered whether the necessary concision of the English subtitles had indirectly helped the film's wider reception in the U.S. The film, in any case, subtly projects on Cybèle a disturbing view of adult womanhood. At one point, Pierre is told that Cybèle is ill, and he finds her in the orphanage infirmary. There, she sulks and then vents her anger at having seen him with Madeleine, the dialogue of a jealous woman in a child's mouth creating a jarring effect. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the only critic of 1962 to pick up on this view of femininity was Giroud, one of the few women to write about the film. As she noted in L'express, 'The slightest word pronounced by the little girl betrays a possessive, castrating will—visible even more clearly in the mistress.' Pierre thus is not just the prisoner of his own post-traumatic mental state (poetically evoked when we see him in one of Carlos's beautiful cages) but also of controlling women; against this background, his recourse to phallic symbols makes more sense (stealing a dagger and then the cockerel-shaped weather vane from the church's spire). Sundays and Cybèle is testimony to the historical determinants of film reception. Where most people at the time saw a struggle between the innocent world of childhood and cynical, sordid 'society,' today we may be more inclined to see an adult abusing his power to seduce a child bereft of fatherly love, however innocent his intentions. Yet Sundays and Cybèle is also aesthetically rewarding and emotionally affecting. We do believe in the innocence of Pierre's intentions toward Cybèle; we are moved by the girl's vulnerability as her father abandons her; we feel compassion for Madeleine as she spies on Pierre and Cybèle walking through the woods hand in hand. One reason for the emotional power of the film is undoubtedly Hardy Krüger's performance. Against the odds, his naturalistic acting style and youthful good looks render him an attractive character, while his slight German accent elegantly emphasizes his 'otherness.' Another reason is the way Bourguignon embeds the encounters between Pierre and Cybèle in a poetic evocation of the natural environment of Ville-d'Avray, splendidly served by Henri Decaë's cinematography. Similar to his beautiful wintry landscapes in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le silence de la mer (1949), the film that made both director and cinematographer famous, Decaë's elegiac views of the lakes and woods of Ville-d'Avray in Sundays and Cybèle justify the implicit comparison with Corot's paintings of the same area (which one character mentions).

Excerpts from Ginette Vincendeau‘s essay “Sundays and Cybèle: Innocent Love?” for the Criterion Collection (2014)

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365 Day Movie Challenge (2017) - #300: Sundays and Cybèle (1962) - dir. Serge Bourguignon

Many viewers have probably forgotten or perhaps never heard of the 1963 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, but Sundays and Cybèle is a haunting, lyrically crafted gem, released at the same time that New Wave pioneers like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Louis Malle and Claude Chabrol were counted among the dominant young artistic voices in French cinema. Serge Bourguignon was one of their contemporaries, but he never quite fit into the group, possibly because of Sundays and Cybèle’s critical/financial success overseas.

The story is simple: Pierre (Hardy Krüger), a pilot who has suffered from amnesia ever since a traumatic event from the French-Indonesian War in which his plane crashed and he killed a little girl, finds a new reason for happiness when he befriends Cybèle (enormously talented child actor Patricia Gozzi), who has been abandoned by her father at a convent. Pierre knows her only by the name given to her by the nuns, “Françoise,” but even so they unite over the shared burden of loneliness, quickly becoming dependent on each other for the kinds of comfort and conversation that that are not understood by the world of cynical adults. Of course, heads begin to turn in the small town of Ville-d’Avray; many locals are convinced that the bond between the emotionally damaged veteran and his young friend is not innocent or pure. Pierre’s girlfriend, Madeleine (Nicole Courcel), is also suspicious of the pair’s friendship, but even though in time she sees otherwise, she cannot avert the tragedy that strikes in the film’s final scenes.

Many of the images in Sundays and Cybèle float across the screen as though we are watching a dream. This is thanks to the evocative black-and-white cinematography by Henri Decaë (the masterful DP who shot Elevator to the Gallows, The 400 Blows and Léon Morin, Priest) and the lovely music by Maurice Jarre (the same year that he composed the score for Lawrence of Arabia). The ending is a tad rushed and some of the scenes showing tense interactions between Hardy Krüger and Nicole Courcel could have been shortened, but overall Sundays and Cybèle is a moving experience brimming with the bittersweet poetry of the human condition.

P.S. If you watch the film on the restored Criterion Collection DVD, do watch the interviews with Serge Bourguignon, Hardy Krüger and Patricia Gozzi. Bourguignon is a particularly fascinating figure since his directorial career was so brief; I don’t know why so many of his proposed projects fell through back in the day, but in the 2014 clip he appears to be quite charming.