samwm’s review published on Letterboxd:
For someone who is often accused (by morons) of being ‘too French’, Garrel is very Germanic in his sensibility. Not just Murnau (though him too). In the work of this period he isn’t too evasive or ‘artistic’ for narrative, but too blunt, too ‘crude’. He is challenging because of how directly he addresses you. His portraiture comes from an unbounded regard for what always exists already in the surface of the human creature, the idea that every effect of narrative is already contained there — the same discovery that was made by the Flemish artists of the Northern Renaissance (over the 70s, Garrel repeats in miniature the secularisation that they effected). Other filmmakers pretend they think this, very few others have followed through on it, and none have to the same extent.
The parenthetical phrase from Daney that Filipe mentions — ‘it is taken for granted that the viewer has also suffered’ — is the key. But it’s too easy not to really think about what it means. To have one’s suffering taken for granted is to be liberated from the requirement to articulate it. It’s to be admitted into a community of equals without condition. In film, that camaraderie comes from faith in surfaces: pain is opaque, but opacity is recordable and transmissible; more than that, it’s honoured in recording and transmission. So Garrel, who could not stop making films about the same lost loves, is the least self-indulgent filmmaker. Watching L’Enfant secret is like finding yourself at the bottom of a pit, and there’s someone else there, and he’s offering you a cigarette.
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