FEVER, the film, or FRANCE’S COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS
For the first evening of the season, on Tuesday 5th of September 2015, the Société des Gens de Lettres, (SDGL) in partnership with Strutt films, held at its seat, the Hôtel de Massa in Paris, the preview of FEVER. The film, an adaptation of Leslie Kaplan’s eponymous novel, is the first full length feature film of the Franco-British photographer Raphaël Neal http://www.raphaelneal.com. It was realized in participation with the actors and technicians, with an original music by the French singer and composer Camille. It has received several awards and been shown worldwide. Leslie Kaplan, Alice Zeniter (co-scripwriter) and Raphaël Neal attended the preview. FEVER will be on Parisian screens from the 7th of octobre, Rive gauche at the MK2 Hautefeuille, in the presence of the director and the film team, at the Lucernaire (from October 15th), Rive droite at the Luminor. FEVER is also on Facebook : www.facebook.com/fever.lefilm
The film’s subject matter is gratuitous murder, and the madness brought about by this trangression. Two teenagers in Paris, at the beginning of the 21st century, Pierre and Damien, think out their own theory of blind chance, thus escaping from any sense of guilt and responsibility. In the span of a few months, they plan and execute what appears to be the perfect murder. This minor news item attracts little public attention, and is quickly dismissed as an unresolved crime. Yet this woman’s demise, chosen so they think by chance, after a while alters their consciousness. A psychological mutation takes place, bringing to the fore the two teenagers’ deep inconscious motivations. With a shock Damien’s hears his grandfather, a former civil servant under the Vichy regime, voicing his own arguments : To be a crime there must be a personal reason, a motive, a personal mobile. But if one obeys orders…As for Pierre, he becomes painfully aware of his Jewish grandmother’s deportation at Auschwitz through his study of the Second World War and the Papon and Eichmann trials. He sinks in aimless philosophical ramblings, suffering from insomnia and soon from hallucinations. During the philosophy class he bursts out in tears, ready to blurt out the truth ; he had told Damien : We won’t say anything, but perhaps it will kill us… Damien stops him, and the philosophy professor, the beautiful Madame Martin, unaware of their distress, advises him to take some magnesium to ward off the stress of the forthcoming baccalauréat exam !
This intrusion of the irrational in the humdrum of everyday life creates a tension between the protagonists and the world around them. Zoé, unwitting witness of the crime, stands for normality, but is she so normal ? Her obsession with the two boys she had seen leaving the building is shown in a disturbing manner : Damien confronts her in the backstore of the Monoprix supermarket in Montparnasse. He grabs and tightens her scarf around her neck, saying : Is that what you want ? The ambiguous relationship between victim and murderer is introduced. What is the real and hidden motivation behind the two boys’ choice of their victim, glimpsed from the café’s window as she passes by ? How did they get to this point after hearing quotes from Nietzsche in the philosophy class : Human speech is a beautiful insanity. It enables man to dance on and above all things, and from Freud. Leslie Kaplan writes : According to him not to believe in chance happening was to hold a religious, superstitious view of life, to assume an ultimate universal order. Suddenly Damien said : « I want to go further, not only do I believe in the working of blind chance, but I want to control it ». The hidden play of dark and irrational forces at work in human destiny is described against some somptuous views of Paris, bringing to the fore the Montparnasse district through the eye of the phtotographer and his love of the city.
The secondary theme is cleverly woven in the main topic : it describes the two teenagers’s relationship with the feminine principle. Their victim is a woman, women crowd their life and control it. We see their philosophy professor provocatively dressed in a tight low-cut dress more suitable for a coktail party than the classroom. Then there are their mothers : Damien’s pretty, too pretty, superdicial and frivolous, addicted to shopping, and Pierre’s own enbittered and bad-tempered. Their female schoolmates are no bettter, Damien tells them : But you are wearing those minute shorts, you do like to be stared at ! The two boys feel exposed and powerless confronted with the provocative and domineering feminine principle all powerful in post-modern feminist society ; only Pierre’s grandmother is able to show him love and affection. It is a very Freudian view of society.In killing this unknown woman they effectively kill the mother archetype, but in so doing, instead of sublimating mentally and emotionally this ritual murder, they become mad. Convinced that they are acting out their own freedom of choice, asserting their own original individuality, they are in fact aligning themselves with some dark hidden forces they ignore at their own detriment : the collective memory of their national identity.
Unfortunately Freudian thought reigns supreme in France since Lacan. But God is by essence infinite, and universal order has been scientifically proven. The egocentric weakness of the warped materialist Freudian theory is obvious. Just the opposite for Jung, who in a Western humanist tradition places man at the centre of the universe, but within a cosmology. Human beings are all connected to each other and to the universe by an invisble web, the past is projected into the future in the present moment, forming a single whole. In committing this trangression the two boys have denied their own humanity, hence their madness. But also in acting out their own fantasy through pride and ignorance, they have unwittingly entered a fateful realm. They have become a link in a past chain of horrors. bearers and instruments of base instinctive urges, which must be acknowledged and exorcised so that the vital forces of reason and creativity can be released and renew mankind’s destiny.
The shadow of the Vichy government sits dark and heavy on French society, still locked in the code of silence over this taboo. The film shows President François Mitterrand speaking out the famous words in a TV interview in 1993 : France will not apologize for the Vichy government, it would be encouraging hatred. The blatant perversity in the terms used is shocking : to make amends for an ancient wrong and to apologize, is to encourage hatred ! Two years later, a more enligntened president, Jacques Chirac, ackowledged France’s responsibility in the Shoah, on July 16th 1995, in his now famous and historic speech at the Vélodrome d'Hiver. While mayor of Paris, he had conceived the project in 1986 for converting the hôtel de Saint-Aignan in the Marais district in a museum dedicated to the Jewish culture, the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, whici he opened as president in 1998. Under his second presidency in 2002, the 76 000 Jewish victims déported from France in the Nazis’ plan of the FinalSolution, aided and abetted by the Vichy government, were inscribed on the Wall of Names in the Shoah Memorial. Unfortunately this worthy desire for atonement and national exorcism, essential to raise and cleeanse the national psyche, has not been emulated by his successor Nicolas Sarkozy. This petty-minded histrionic president cared little about the general good of the country, and he betrayed the humanist ideals and desire for redemption of his predecessor and own party. He shamelessly manipulated the old French demons for his onw personal profit, cheapening Résistance heroes, such as Guy Môquet, in using them as personal propaganda tools. He played on ambiguous national feelings of ancestral hatred and the sense of guilt, whipping up racial hatred in inflammatory speeches, as in Grenoble in July 2010, directed against the Gypsies (Roms). This decline in generosity of spirit, in humanism, in tolerance, carries on under the presidency of François Hollande, despite his opening of the Shoah Memorial at Drancy on the 21st of September 2012. Whether they be Jews, Roms, or Arabs, they are stigmatized as not one of us, and marked as different. This in spite of the secularism (laïcité) so often invoked in the name of reason, which sadly amounts to little more than to the eradication of all transcendendal values and of the sense of sacredness, including the respect due to women, bearers of life. Speaking of their victim and to seek a justication, Pierre says to Damien : She was a whore Damien replies : They are all whores. Is there another country in the world, where since the 18th century the female vagina has become an insult, the c… ? It is used as a noun, a verb and an adjective, and women themselves use it now in their desire for feminine emancipation, not thinking that they are lowering and degrading themselves doing so. In the name of progress France has turned away and shunned the traditional values and virtues essential to a healthy balanced society. Seemingly rudderless French society is rapidly sinking in a decadent and destructive materialism. These TV children, as Sarkozy calls himself, sprung from the anti-establishment movements of May 1968, are still under the influence of their pernicious perverse slogans, such as : It is forbidden to forbid. They do not have the vision, the altruism and the moral stature to exorcise the old demons of France’s collective memory, and change the course of its national history. All is equal, and all is lowered to the lowest common denominator in the manipulation of the medias for economic and political ends to cater for the pettiest, lowest, instant desires of the masses obssessed with consumerism. How distressing to hear students demonstrating against Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s proposal of a new employment contract en 2006, under the presidency of Jacques Chirac. They were shouting : We want to consume, in answer to a fairer employment project.
Beyond established religious creeds and dogmas, spirituality and philosophy in their transcendental power and humanists values, unite men in mutual respect and acceptance of their difftences. But what happens when in the name of secularism spirituality is derided as angelism and superstition, when blasphemy becomes a Republican virtue, when philosophy, the thought process leading to knowledge, thus to the art of living in harmony with oneself and with the others, churns over false and empty formulas ? Insany beckons, even if France, so proud of its Cartesian reasoning, still claims to be after Ancient Greece the philosophers’s home country. But Consumo ergo sum has replaced Cogito ergo sum,
This state of doldrums does not only date from the Second World War, and does not only concern xenophobia and racism. It goes back to the very foundation of the Republic, to the French Revolution and the Terror. Man’s lowest and vilest instincts were unleashed beyond all reasonable justification. Collective hysteria expressed in constant blood baths whipped up a frenzy of unleashed cruelty and bestiality justified and praised in the name of principles inscribed on the front of the Republican Pantheon : Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. This paradox is at the very root of the French Republic. The country has never exorcised this heavy shadow and the stain on its national honour. It has never come to terms with this bloody past, as the historian Jean des Cars remarked on the set of the Franco-German TV ARTE program 28 Minutes, the 8th of septembre 2015, during the coverage of the Queen’s long reign celebrations in England. He added that Russia had exorciseed the demons of its own Terror and Revolution when President Yeltsin asked for forgiveness for the Tsar’s and his family’s murders in a ceremony held for the burial of their remains in 1998. In France, said des Cars, We have not settle this trauma and laid down the ghost, so it still goes on. The country lives on ignoring its past, refusing to confront its collective and social consequences, preferring to dwell in a crepuscular penumbra made of half-baked arguments and excuses, false statements, hypocritical lies, intellectual dishonesty and censorship. As a result critical analysis is blinded and weakened, the intellectual process sinks into sophism.Creativity of thought and action is lowered in this sickness of the soul and the spirit, a perversity and perversion which endure since the 19th century. The Marquis de Sade, recently acclaimed as a philosopher of the Enlightenmant, is the most representative of this particular syndrom. He wrote in Juliette : This is what murder amounts to : the redistribution of some disorganized matter, some changes in combinations, some broken molecules beeing sent back in nature’s crucible, which will release them in few days under another form in the earth ; what wrong with all that ? It is hard to understand that France, the self-appointed country of Human rights, can raise this perverse insanity to the heights of philosophy !
This intellectual and spiritusl heritage brought the two unwitting boys of FEVER to commit this insane act. The obssessively syncopated jazz-inspired rythm of Camille’s music and Peggy Lee’s song Fever, punctuate the feverish beat rising in their veins, until when overcoming them and blinding them, it leads them in due course to madness. Once can just regret that this madness made explicit in Leslie Kaplan’s book remains implicit in the film. The end does not put enough emphasis on its haunting presence in everyday life’s events, influencing them irrevocably ; one just sees the two boys exchanging a look of complicity in the Baccalauréat exams room. The film, as the book, must be recommended and praised for having the courage to confront the question of evil in a contemporary society dedicated to the frivolity, superficiality and insignificance of entertainment. Above all it has the audacity to stand up to the heavy past which suffocates and paralyzes the French national psyche
MONIQUE RICCARDI-CUBITT
Paris, 4th October 2015