Midway through Simple Passion (2020) the protagonist, Hélène, played with studied poise by Laetitia Dosch, announces to her lover, “I have a lot of respect for sluts.” The line is delivered in English, rather than French, and arrives following a tense exchange after sex, in which Sergei objects to the pencil skirt and garter stockings she’s just put on to go out. Telling her she looks indecent and that men will “stare at her ass”, he orders her to take them off. She refuses, and a brisk physical scuffle ensues: Hélène pushes Sergei and he restrains her hands above her head. When she voices the line in question, the pair have reconciled, and Hélène’s head is nestled in Sergei’s shoulders. Her back is turned towards the camera; her delivery is both erotic and defiant, but her exact expression can’t be read.
With notes of enigma and ambivalence, French-Lebanese director Danielle Arbid’s adaptation of the Annie Ernaux novella of the same name continues mapping this brief love affair between Hélène, a writer in her forties, and Sergei (Sergei Polunin), a younger Russian diplomat who is married to someone else. The argument does not appear in Ernaux’s original text, and is one of several differences between the film and the novella (for another, the film is set in present-day France, as opposed to the early nineties). The scripting of the “sluts” line signals a departure from Ernaux’s more measured, less sensational account, the objective of which is to forensically describe a short period in the narrator’s life, during which, in her words, “I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come round to my place.”¹ The unapologetic passivity of this admission is retained in Arbid’s version, and though it might be unpalatable for a feminist audience more concerned with women’s liberation than waiting around for men, it raises questions as to just how simple the film’s vision of desire will be. Voiced by Hélène at the open of the film in a direct-to-camera reminiscence resembling a screen test (we later find out that this shot is extracted from a later scene in which she visits a doctor) the testimony does, however, underscore the searing self-awareness that characterises Ernaux’s original protagonist. It also anticipates the shape of the film, which loosely follows Dosch’s character, a literature professor who suspends the habitual procedures and conventions of her comfortably intellectual life in the Parisian suburbs after meeting Sergei at a friend’s place and initiating an intense erotic relationship which fizzles after a few months. The feature shuttles between sex scenes and Hélène filling her hours in the ‘dead time’ between rendezvous, though it is not overly concerned with plot in a linear sense. Instead, with welcome anti-lyricism and empirical precision, Simple Passion’s preoccupation is to expose a brief interval of sexual pleasure and, in these memoir-bloated times in which people are keen to equate ‘sharing’ with deep intimacy, to show as opposed to tell.
The narrowness of Simple Passion’s focus is both its greatest strength and most obvious weakness. In French, the title plays off sly associations with the past historic tense, used for distantly remote events that have long been concluded, though the after-effects of the affair are not so neat. In Ernaux’s original text – a bold, early example of autofiction, though the author might prefer the term “impersonal autobiography” or, more technically, “auto-socio-biography” – persistent metatextual insertions, in which the author ruminates over how to best “write the passion” into existence, and therefore relive it via literature, save us from confinement to the limitations of the romantic plot.² Yet, apart from Dosch’s hypnotic opening monologue in which, making use of some of Ernaux’s more reflexive meditations, Hélène reports that everything she did independent of the love affair during those months – teaching, seeing friends, going to the cinema – seemed “disconnected from reality”, Arbid’s version otherwise strips the story of Ernaux’s supporting architecture. The result is a less introspective account, though one which has to work doubly hard to flesh out both Hélène’s character and the chemistry of the central dynamic, whose desired intoxicating ‘simplicity’ doesn’t always ignite.
Indeed, in a film which brokers ‘passion’ in its title, viewers might expect the love scenes to be especially full-blooded and pyrotechnic. Arbid reportedly studied Patrice Chéreau’s Intimité (2001) and the tender photography of Nan Goldin for Simple Passion’s prolific bedroom tableaux. Filmed by Pascale Granel at a careful distance against sparsely rendered backdrops, these register the blunt rawness of obsession rather than the carnal joys of sex. Though Hélène clearly enjoys the theatrics that preface her encounters with Sergei – shopping for clothes, lingerie, and make-up, rediscovering her body in smouldering performances of anticipation – the act itself often falls a little flat. At times the banality of the encounters – lots of silk robes and sex against walls – made me doubt what exactly has compelled Hélène to suspend the richness of her life to ‘lose herself’ in an affair with a taciturn, tattooed type who seems more like a Pinterest board of Slavic clichés than an actual love interest. “Fucking with you is so good,” he gurns at one point, after downing a shot of whisky, with the effect less erotic than slapstick.
In Ernaux’s novella, the attraction to cliché itself – and how inhabiting a certain crudeness might allow for freedom from the stifling conventions of the bourgeoisie – freights the affair. In the novella, Hélène is endeared by her lover’s lurid displays of nineties consumer culture; similarly, in the film she tells a girlfriend that she doesn’t mind Sergei’s love of massive cars, Putin and Hollywood. In the source text, Ernaux tells us how this flagrant consumerism teleports her back to her adolescence in provincial Normandy, to the records and dresses she craved before learning to adopt the more refined markers of taste and class demanded by the literary elite.³ For her protagonist, assuming clichés like pop songs and horoscopes is therefore one way of resisting the more ‘discreet’ consumptions of the middle classes,⁴ of turning her back on the excruciatingly self-conscious class performances famously analysed by one of Ernaux’s mentors – the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu – around the time of her writing.⁵ It also refuses the lyrical outpourings of the écriture feminine (feminine writing) practiced by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, among others, which Ernaux has denounced elsewhere as an “excretable” expression and a sexist concept. (“There is no such thing as masculine writing.”)⁶ The book relates, and thus makes visible – in unadorned, nonjudgmental and indeed straightforward prose – the sometimes humiliating, sometimes thrilling and often mundane events of women’s lives, resisting the obligation, carried forward by nineties feminist theory, for everything ‘personal’ to be politicised.
Given the indelible watershed instated by #MeToo and the subsequent #balancetonporc and #MeTooInceste movements, it feels brave of Arbid to translate Simple Passion into the present day. Yet, other than a few smartphones and transient mentions of ‘apps’, the world of the film feels pointedly abstracted and atemporal, confined mainly to Hélène’s apartment where the meetings with Sergei take place. More anachronistic is the treatment of Hélène’s status as a mother, which Arbid leans on heavily to demonstrate the stakes of her ‘uncharacteristic’ abandonment to the affair. Scenes of Hélène languishing in bed, after the relationship has broken down, chastised by her ex-husband as unable to “even prepare food” for her son, convey something of the unvarnished textures of romantic disillusionment but seem stuck in the rote, outdated binary equation of “good sex = bad mother”. (Ernaux’s text, in contrast, makes only passing reference to the narrator’s maternity.) In another scene, teased at the start of the film, Hélène begs a doctor for a sick note to excuse her from teaching her classes. A prescription for sleeping pills is framed sympathetically but risks equating the disorienting aftereffects of “passion” with pathology and psychoanalysing Hélène’s fascination with Sergei as a ‘hysterical’ symptom of deeper malaise.
Simple Passion’s noble project is to portray the vulnerability and beauty of physical desire embarked upon by two consenting adults. But, in 2021, it is difficult to venture ‘passion’ between men and women as ever being a ‘simple’ equation, in the sense of being unencumbered by political realities. Perhaps this challenge is what makes the film feel caught between the book’s original nineties context and the present day’s hyper-mediated and contentious landscape, which refracts the original, ‘straightforward’ sexual affair between Ernaux and her lover through more complex lenses of illusion, fantasy, and power. Early on in the film, as she walks through the streets of Paris with a friend, Hélène recalls a scene from her childhood in small-town France, in which her aunt was publicly shamed for having an extramarital relationship. “I wonder in the end if people blamed her for being unfaithful,” she says, “or for making love instead of cleaning her windows.” The observation distils the uneasy tension between carnal appetites and social appearances that appears in both the book and the film. Before it took on connotations of promiscuousness, the original sense of the word ‘slut’ designated a slovenly woman, a woman who did not keep her domestic space spotless.⁷ In tidying up the messes of sexual obsession just a bit too hygienically, through its additions of a medical and diagnostic framework, Arbid’s adaptation of Simple Passion teeters close to wanting to endorse false narratives of healing and recuperation, however. Though the ending of the film, in which Hélène drives Sergei back to his hotel in Paris, leaves the question of whether the couple will see each other again somewhat unresolved, Simple Passion ultimately cleans its windows a shade too much, as opposed to letting sexuality’s murkier and more uncertain aspects productively obscure our view.
[1] Annie Ernaux, trans. Tanya Leslie, Simple passion (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), p.12. [2] See Annie Ernaux, Les Années (Paris: Folio, 2008, p.229) and Journal du dehors (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). In a book of interviews with Michelle Porte (Le Vrai Lieu, Gallimard, 2014) she reports, ‘I’ve always resisted the categorisation of my writing as “autofiction”: because that term suggests a folding-in on the self, something closed off to the world’ (p.108, my translation). Her desire to perform an emptied and depersonalised forensics of the self via writing has led critics to appoint her work an exercise in ‘autoethnography,’ (see particularly Odile Mécheneau Whittaker, Autoethnographie: l’écriture du corps chez Annie Ernaux, Austin University of Texas at Austin Press, 1996]). [3] Annie Ernaux, trans. Tanya Leslie, Simple passion (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), p.23 [4] p.20. [5] See Annie Ernaux, ‘La Distinction: œuvre totale et révolutionnaire’, in Pierre Bourdieu: l’insoumission au héritage, ed. by Édouard Louis (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2016), pp. 27–53 [6] See Annie Ernaux, ‘Entretien avec Raphaëlle Rérolle,’ in: Écrire, écrire, pourquoi ? Annie Ernaux: Entretien avec Raphaëlle Rérolle [online]. Paris: Éditions de la Bibliothèque publique d’information, 2011 , p.3-16. [7] See Melissa Febos, ‘The Mirror Test,’ in The Paris Review, Issue 235, Winter 2020
