MICHEL GONDRY FILMED WITH HIS AUNT SUZETTE GONDRY IN THE THORN IN THE HEART

Such a happy, such a sad, story

Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep) represents a French filmmaker famous enough Stateside for any new titles to seem release-worthy. But this memoir of Gondry's aged aunt, rich in detail yet lacking in depth, remains too slight an effort to have much of a future. It has however been picked up by the young indie distributor Oscilloscope, who released the Danish noir comedy Terribly Happy.

Suzette Gondry taught in a series of elementary schools in the Cévennes region of France from 1952 to 1986. The film begins with a film of a family dinner in which Suzette vigorously and with great pleasure tells a tale of Homeric food consumption with her late husband years ago. It's an image of vigor in age, family unity, and joie-de-vivre. Thereafter the director follows the lively old lady around to a dizzying series of towns where she taught. Each one is led into with focus on a place-sign set in a model train setup that turns out later to be a long-time preoccupation of Suzette's odd son Jean-Ives. He is an aging gay man, never happy, psychologically maimed in unexplained ways, who lives with his mother and is the person Suzette says was always "the thorn in my heart" ("l'épine dans mon cœur").

The film alternates between pictures of a still-vibrant woman loved and admired by former students, praised by her own aged mother (herself highly articulate, perhaps also a schoolteacher?), creative and endlessly energetic in teaching at her succession of schools, including a group of Algerian Arab students in the Sixties -- and the muted tale of mother, father, and son. Jean-Yves is present on screen, but sometimes unresponsive to questions, saying he "can't remember" when queried. He was taught by his mother for many years, which he did not like, and worked for his father in his lumbering and sawmill business, which he also did not like.

Questions remain unanswered. Why did Suzette teach at so many different schools? Did she commute to them or was she moving about? Where was her husband when she was on these assignments? A year in New York after her retirement is shown in the many home movies, with kids she oversaw then. Why was she there? Whose kids are these? Working with Michel on his films in recent years is mentioned, but without explanation of what she did. Her relationship with her husband, Jean-Yves' father, despite the latter's appearance in a series of stills and brief clips, is not much explained. Was Suzette a workaholic who escaped from family woes into her many classrooms? or did Michel simply fail to develop the family side in depth, despite touching on moot questions of the son and a daughter (the latter never spotlighted), except for a story about not telling them for days after their father died? There is also nothing about Michel Gondry's own mother and her relationship with Suzette.

There's a self-conscious effort to show the workings of the project by occasionally shooting the camera or sound man as Suzette revisits school sites, and an interesting sequence where family members, including Suzette and Jean-Yves, watch rushes of the documentary and comment. But apart from the model train links between passages there is nothing of the wildly inventive and playful aspect of Michel Gondry's cinematic style.

The result is a fascinating but also frustrating study. SCREENDAILY provides a bit more detail about the contents of this film in their review.

Debuted at Cannes, The Thorn in the Heart/L'épine dans le cœur will open in theaters in France in April 2010. Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, March 2020..

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.