Film - Existentialist angst? Nobody can outgloom the French
The first time I saw Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (aka Whatever), a French film marketing officer tried to persuade me that it wasn't worth seeing. "He's such a horrible man," she said, and visibly shuddered. I asked her who she meant. Was it the director Philippe Harel, who also plays the lead role, or the character himself (referred to in the voice-over as "Our Hero")? Or did she mean Michel Houellebecq, the author of the novel on which the film is based, and whom Harel is manifestly impersonating - greasy, combed-over hair, gingerly held cigarette and all? She shrugged, as if to say that they were all pretty much of a muchness. Indeed, in Harel's film, they effectively are - at least, in the sense that Harel's, Houellebecq's and Our Hero's personae unsettlingly blur together in the story of a man with a world-class identity crisis.
Houellebecq, who collaborated with Harel on the screenplay, is a cult figure in France, especially among younger readers. Thanks, in particular, to his bestselling second novel, Les Particules Elementaires (published in Britain as Atomised), he has been variously applauded as the legitimate heir to Albert Camus and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and attacked as a misanthropic, right-wing nihilist. Oddly, Harel's film was not commercially successful in France, possibly because it was so faithful to the book that it offered fans too few surprises. In fact, Harel offers his own twists and, if anything, his version (despite an ambiguous happy ending) offers a darker, more sour vision than the book.
Houellebecq's overwhelming preoccupation is with the drabness and futility of modern life: yes, only in France could such a writer top the bestseller lists. Our Hero is a middle-aged, middle-management man in a computer firm, who spends much of his time addressing shiny, bureaucratic seminars. He abhors his job, but has nothing else in his life - weekends are spent sitting dolefully in his kitchen. The first of many cracks in his life's grey surface appears when he forgets where he has parked his car, and never bothers to look for it.
Our Hero is not merely bored, but affects to have a complex philosophical take on the universe ("a furtive gathering of elementary particles, a fleeting shape on the way to chaos"). He is even bored and nauseated by sex - and, in Houellebecq's universe, sex is indeed boring and nauseating. The very first scene - which gives a taste of the Mike Leigh-ish cruelty of the film's social comedy, and of Houellebecq's sour misogyny - takes place at a dull office party where a woman gets halfway through a derisory striptease, then throws in the towel.
The first part of the film provides a flat, matter-of-fact delineation of Our Hero's doleful grind, with commentary both from his own snooty, weary voice-over, and from an omniscient narrator who suggests that Our Hero, negative though he is, doesn't know the half of it. The film evokes a world suggestive of Reginald Perrin as rewritten by Guy Debord, the situationist prophet of social malaise. The script is spot-on about the humourlessness of French corporate culture, and is steeped in its soul-destroying, quasi-scientific jargon ("the vendor-client matrix"). But Our Hero's analysis of this world is just as inflated, self-parodically pompous in its would-be sociological rigour - the film's title refers to Our Hero's analysis of modern sexuality in Marxist, market forces terms.
In the second half of the film, Our Hero sets off on a seminar tour with his colleague Raphael Tisserand (Jose Garcia), an indefatigably dapper smiler, whose eagerness to have a "sympa" time hides his sexual despair. Harel and Garcia make a fabulously cringe-making double act, an Abbott and Costello of the soul's dark night. Harel is weary, shabby, anoraked, resembling a scruffy cousin of Charles Aznavour; Garcia is punctiliously shiny, fussy, always up for more disappointment. The social comedy becomes uncomfortably cruel whenever the two men set foot in a disco, but this is only the prelude to Our Hero's macabre manipulation of his colleague, which is where the story topples into forbiddingly black nihilism.
What the film has to say about the contemporary urban condition may seem banal and one-dimensional, like the extended whinge of an over-articulate, embittered adolescent. Indeed, it is essentially this public persona that has made Houellebecq a household name in France - a sort of middle-aged, wearily whining Jeannot Rotten who has mellowed into complacent adulthood. But Houellebecq's world-view is carried across in his books with absolute conviction, and the blackness is all the more serious for being passed off as comic fatigue and dandyishness. Harel's dry, cool, neutral wit and Gilles Henry's studiedly sleek photography serve Houellebecq well; and, even in French cinema's currently crowded market of films about existential gloom (Seul Contre Tous, L'Ennui and so on), this modest adaptation stands out with appropriately charmless conviction. Unlikely though it may seem, Harel makes Houellebecq's cartoon hell a compelling place to visit.
Extension du domaine de la lutte (Whatever) is showing at the Renoir, London WC1. Michel Houellebecq's novel Whatever is published by Serpent's Tail (£8.99)
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