Passion (1982 film)

The Night Watch is intercut with views of Isabelle working in the factory. There is discussion over what story the painting is telling, or whether it has no story at all, over its intricate construction, and over the source and intensity of its lighting. These three themes echo throughout Passion, which has continuing arguments over the significance of plot, the relationships between characters, and the inadequacies of artificial light (symbolising the artificiality of cinema itself).

• 
  The Parasol
• 
  The Third of May 1808
• 
  La Maja Desnuda
• 
  The Family of Charles IV

Accompanied by the Introitus of Mozart's Requiem, elements of four Goya paintings are shown. At first only the woman from the apparently innocent pastoral scene of The Parasol can be seen, who then walks towards the firing squad in Third of May 1808 and is enmeshed in the horrors of war. In the background can be glimpsed La Maja Desnuda, exuding sexual allure, while actors are getting ready for Charles IV of Spain and His Family. Inserted are shots of Isabelle asleep in her apartment.

• 
  The Valpinçon Bather
• 
  The Turkish Bath

Paintings of nude women in Turkish baths, such as The Valpinçon Bather and The Turkish Bath, are only recreated in fragments, interrupted by episodes in the motel and in the factory. The naked actresses in the studio continue the theme of desire, typified by the Naked Maja, while the outside scenes reprise the world of work.[1] When Jerzy is not content with the lighting, as usual, the producer asks him what is «the right light». He responds by plunging the studio into darkness, to show that it is a place where lighting can never match reality, and draws a comparison between Hanna, a woman open to the light, and Isabelle who is opaque. However, Jerzy does persuade Isabelle to be one of the naked models.

• 
  The Entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople
• 
  Jacob wrestling with the Angel

In these tableaux, which recreate the Entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople and Jacob wrestling with the Angel, there is a high degree of movement. Knights on horseback circle restlessly around the set of the Greek city, while Jerzy himself becomes part of the scene when he begins a wrestling match with the actor playing the Angel.

The Assumption of the Virgin

Set to Fauré’s Requiem, the tableau of the Assumption of the Virgin has parallel scenes in the motel involving Jerzy and Isabelle, who admits she is still a virgin.[2]

The Embarkation for Cythera

The Embarkation for Cythera is only shown in disjointed fragments, after it becomes evident that the film is never going to be completed, and the camera stays far away, giving a dispassionate documentary air to the empty ship and isolated couples. Significantly, it is the only tableau in the open air exploiting natural light.

In several ways, the film looks back to Godard's 1963 film Contempt, about the tensions among a multinational team on location making a film that will never be completed. That film also had Michel Piccoli as one of the male leads and was shot by Raoul Coutard. It too oscillated between the demands of art, in that case a debased commercial version of an immortal work, and of life.

In Passion, the contrast between the two is clear. The world of the tableaux vivants is that of high art, of rich colours and forms embodied in costumes and props of beauty and accompanied by a soundtrack of masterpieces. That of people outside, both those making the film and those at the motel and the factory, is one where, though they may have ideals, they cannot escape everyday issues of survival, particularly sex and money. It is a world that is grey, wintry and often dull.

The artistic interludes in the film have no dialogue, just as the paintings they represent speak silently to viewers by means of form and colour. But the life of the film makers and townspeople suffers from lack of communication, with often incoherent conversations that are sometimes in different unsubtitled languages. One character has a stutter, another a hacking cough, one is mute, and the producer tries to talk to the director through a closed window.

Links are made between the world of imagination that is being created in the studio and the quotidian world of the characters. The characters playing the producer and the backer keep complaining that there is no plot. To which the director Jerzy replies that life does not have coherent plots, that things just happen, but it is art that can escape this grim cycle and is necessary for that reason.

Specific links between art and reality are seen at moments: the armed crusaders entering Constantinople are parallelled by the police suppressing the factory strike; the ship due to sail for Cythera is paired with a jet trail in the sky; the close-ups of Hanna in the motel are matched by zooms on to faces by Goya. Though life can be drab, full of tensions and misunderstandings, art can soar above it because it can convey pure emotion.[3] As Godard said in 1982: «Sometimes one has to film emotion, to fill the screen with pure emotion. Only painting and music can achieve that.»[4]

The opposition of light and dark first appears in the Night Watch, the first of the tableaux vivants, in the context of how light is distributed in the painting. Later on, during the Ingres episode, the two women Isabelle and Hanna are described by Jerzy as the opposition of night and day. According to him, Hanna is like the day, as she is opened towards everything, while Isabelle is like the night because she is difficult to reach.

The studio is the place governed by man-made light, whereas the places outside the studio are often shot in inadequate natural light. Yet the lighting of the tableaux vivants in the studio can never reach the qualities of pure natural light outside, and therefore remains artificial.

The life of the characters is bound by the needs of love and of work, and the ways in which the two get mixed. Jerzy starts an affair with Hanna, owner of the motel where he is staying, and after a screen test wants her to be in his film as well. The industrial nature of the film studio is contrasted with the factory owned by Hanna's husband, at which Isabelle works. Isabelle even suggests that the repetitive movements of manufacturing mirror those of lovemaking.