The housemaids of JLG
2009; Wiley; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-8705.2009.01877.x
ISSN1467-8705
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
ResumoIn 1995, Éditions du Seuil published the second edition of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes and Gaumont released JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre. The last decade of the twentieth century thus saw some demand for and distribution of the attempt to ‘know thyself’ on the part of two figures, Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard, who had done so much to question the very possibility of a distinct, discernible, authorial self, and particularly one capable of reliable self-reflection. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes does not negate ‘The Death of the Author’. JLG/JLG does not reverse the critique of auteur theory. But a dialectical turn, an expression of mimetic desire surfaces in these late, self-referential works of both thinkers. In Camera Lucida, published the year of his death, Barthes almost rebukes Godard for severing the image from the question of its justness: ‘Not a just image, just an image, says Godard, but I wanted a just image.’1 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 70. Godard, however, also wants a just image: ‘The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be drawn from a comparison, but from drawing together two realities, more or less distant. The more the ties between the two realities are distant and just, the stronger the image will be.’ The mutual concern that an image does justice to some thing presupposes a capacity to refer. Yet both thinkers produced a significant body of work around the premise that the modes of signification that constitute and permeate images, linguistic and photographic, are, far from reliably referential, essentially unstable and often ideologically suspect. The tension between the hope for a just image and the denial of a logic of identity emerges in the negative irony of Barthes's autobiography-to-be-read-as-a-novel and Godard's self-portrait. One site of such irony is the figure of the housemaid, who appears, not by accident, in both texts. She is a counterpoint to the male artist and thinker. To his masculine and bourgeois privilege she opposes her feminine and working-class exclusion; to his intellectual and artistic labour she opposes her physical labour; to his social and cultural visibility she opposes her invisibility. Her appearance, when juxtaposed with that of Barthes or Godard, might suggest to some a feminist critique of ‘the death of the author’– that just as marginalised subjects gain a more powerful voice, authorial agency is discredited; it certainly raises questions concerning the role of the artist. Both Barthes and Godard, at key instants, underscore her presence. Her images are the focus of this essay. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes begins with photographs, which the author describes as a reward to himself for finishing his book. He claims he selects and arranges them after the writing, but in the published volume they appear first. Appearing first, they have greater weight than the photographs of more conventional biographies and autobiographies, which commonly appear between segments of text, in relation to which they are only secondary. Barthes places forty-five photographs in the book, including a photograph of his mother, which appears before the title page, and one of himself with students of a seminar, which appears toward the end and is the only photograph to appear between pages of the text proper. (I am counting photographs of documents, but not reproductions of drawings, doodles and other graphic designs.) Of these forty-five, the eighth shows in the foreground an old woman, seated, holding a striped cat. (She looks like an older version of Barthes's grandmother, identified by a caption only three photographs later.) In the background, a housemaid stands in an open doorway, looking upon the scene of the making of the photograph. She is not the photographer's intended object, but she is caught within the frame. In turn, she catches Barthes's eye. He adds a caption: ‘Me fascine, au fond, la bonne.’2 2 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 15. (The housemaid, in the depths, fascinates me.) Rendering himself a direct object of the housemaid's fascination, Barthes completes a series of reversals where he and the housemaid initiate a looking only to find themselves captured by a gaze. Barthes's fascination with the housemaid realises the paradox that the peripheral can powerfully draw attention away from the centre. The maid stands in the background on the far right of the frame, where she appears roughly one-third the size of the central figure. What is most visible about her is the white apron – the uniform that identifies her. We can also see an unidentifiable spot of white at her feet. Only very slightly illuminated are her shin, something near her collar, her left cheekbone, and her forehead. In the dark shadow of the doorway, her features are indiscernible. The fascination she holds for Barthes, the caption suggests, is intricately tied to her partial visibility ‘au fond’. This phrase ‘au fond’ can also be found on the facing page under a photograph with a similar structure: central figure in the foreground, dark recess in the background. Young Roland Barthes (in shorts), stands on a garden path that leads into a thicket of trees behind him. The caption says, ‘Le grand jardin formait un territoire assez étranger. On aurait dit qu'il servait principalement à enterrer les portées excédentaires de petits chats. Au fond, une allée plus sombre et deux boules creuses de buis: quelques épisodes de sexualité enfantine y eurent lieu.’ (The large garden formed a territory quite foreign. One might say that it served principally to bury the surplus litters of kittens. In the depths, a darker path and two hollow balls of boxwood: some episodes of childhood sexuality took place here.) Just as the dark recesses of the facing photographs echo one another, their captions also suggest resonances. The kittens buried in the dark garden behind Barthes, for instance, oppose the foregrounded cat held by the grandmother in the facing photo. Barthes's arrangement of his photographs and captions is as important as their content. With the exception of the photograph, also in Camera Lucida, of his long legs dangling as his mother holds him in her arms, the first set of old photographs are all scenes of his childhood home, the city of Bayonne. The photograph of him on the garden path and the one of his grandmother, the cat, and the housemaid are the first, after the cityscapes, to foreground people. They precede the photographs, more conventional in biography and autobiography, of grandparents, an aunt, an unknown father, and they suggest something as foundational as ancestry. Their position on facing pages is significant: the episodes of childhood sexuality ‘au fond’ are paired with the housemaid ‘au fond’. Together they suggest classic unconscious forces: infantile sexuality and economic structure (one person has a maid and another person is one). Barthes writes of the introductory photographs: ‘On ne trouvera donc ici, mêlées au roman familial, que les figurations d'une préhistoire du corps – de ce corps qui s'achemine vers le travail, la jouissance d'écriture.’3 3 Ibid., 8. (One will find here, mixed with the family romance, just the figurations of the prehistory of the body – of this body that makes its way toward the work, the pleasure of writing.) The housemaid, for Barthes, is a figuration of the prehistory of the body that writes. In turn, the trace of her body on an old photograph enthralls the writing subject. JLG's housemaid (Brigitte Bastien) first appears aurally. (I will refer to the character Godard plays as JLG and to the historical filmmaker as Godard.) On-screen we see a lined notebook page on which is written ‘Nivôse’. The page turns and we read ‘Pluviôse’. On the soundtrack we hear, ‘Au revoir, Monsieur Jean! Je changerais les fleurs demain’ (Goodbye, Monsieur Jean! I'll change the flowers tomorrow), and JLG responds, ‘Au revoir, Madame Brigitte.’ The film cuts to a shot of JLG in bed at night, enshadowed. The maid's voice comes as a surprise. For seventeen minutes and thirty-seven seconds (over a quarter) of this roughly hour-long film, we have seen and heard him alone in his apartment talking on the phone, writing, thinking out loud, with no other presence suggested except for the voices of children outside. Has the maid been present all this time, invisible and silent while JLG's voice has reflected on a photograph of himself as child, the process of self-portraiture, death and mourning? Where was she during his phone conversation, his reflections on art versus culture, and on the ‘law of stereo’ (discussed below)? Do JLG's foregrounded reflections, which relegated her to off-screen space and silence, tell us something about her? Does she tell us something about his meditations? As Brigitte prepares to depart, she says, ‘Allez Clémence!’ Clémence never appears on screen, but possibly whispers once on the soundtrack to ask for a story. It is bedtime, so it seems plausible that she is a child, the maid's child, asking for a bedtime story before she and her mother depart. We hear the maid say, ‘Elle veut encore une histoire’ (She wants another story), suggesting the regularity of the request. Upon JLG's query –‘Which story?’– the maid chides, ‘Stop asking for any old thing’, asserting critical discernment and desire in an attempt to shape the story her employer will tell. JLG perversely takes ‘any old thing’ to be the answer to his question. Wilfully, even rudely misunderstanding, he tells a crude anecdote of a father shark who instructs his baby sharks, upon witnessing a shipwreck, to eat ‘women and children first’. Woman and child, housemaid and daughter, leave as he goes to bed. After they leave, he continues to read in bed and reflects on the way identifications obscure complexities. These reflections bear on the next sequence to feature Brigitte, which is marked by blatant misidentifications. Brigitte reappears, not just aurally, but visually, after an intervening sequence where JLG walks on the shore of Lake Geneva and in its waters, reflecting on filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Boris Kaufman, and Nicholas Ray. His solitary, ambulatory reveries by Lake Geneva recall another Swiss thinker (and author of a canonical modern autobiography), Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The final words of JLG –‘Un homme, rien qu'un homme, et qui n'en vaut aucun, mais qu'aucun ne valent’ (A man, nothing but a man, no better than any other, but no other better than he) – contain echoes of the beginning of Roussseau's Confessions: ‘Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre’ (If I am not better, at least I am different); and ‘Que chacun d'eux découvre à son tour son Coeur aux pieds de ton trône avec la même sincérité; et puis qu'un seul te dise, s'il l'ose: Je fus meilleur que cet homme-là’4 4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, book 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), 43. (Let each of them disclose in his turn his heart at the feet of your throne with the same sincerity; and then let a single one say to you, if he dare: I was better than that man there.) JLG makes a gesture of following the model of the Confessions, suggesting that his self-portrait is also a self-trial. Speaking of the photograph of himself as child, an image with which the film commences, he states, ‘Les embûches sont venues, c'est-à-dire la vie … d'où sans doute, l'air un peu catastrophé que j'ai sur la petite photo, et qui ne venait pas simplement … d'une entorse, ou alors entorse au règlement au jugement dernier imaginé, et ça ne devrait être que l'objet de ce film de le déterminer.’ (The obstacles came themselves: that is, life. Which may explain my slightly distressed look in the picture, not because I was bent out of shape, but because I had bent the rules at some imagined last judgement, and that should be the object of this film to determine.) But JLG's ‘bending of the rules’ (unlike Rousseau's) acquires positive meaning: ‘Il y a la culture, qui est de la règle … il y a l'exception, qui est de l'art.’ (Culture is the rule; art is the exception.) In addition to the setting of Lake Geneva and JLG's echoing of Rousseau's words, both texts have in common the centrality of a maid. Book 2 of the Confessions famously closes with an episode where Rousseau, while working as a servant, accuses a young kitchen maid, Marion, of a theft that he committed. Caught in possession of a stolen ribbon and publicly confronted, Rousseau, rather than admit to taking the ribbon, chooses to allow Marion (as well as himself) to lose her position. In his autobiography, he speculates that Marion, her reputation as reliable kitchen maid ruined, probably had to prostitute herself; and he claims that his conscience has troubled him ever since. He points to this guilt as a crucial motivation for writing the Confessions. Rousseau's blaming of the maid for his theft motivates two different confessions: first, he tells the reader what happened; then he reveals how he felt about what happened. With this revelation of interiority, Rousseau moves from the recounting of events to a self-defensive explanation of them. He claims that he stole the ribbon out of friendship for Marion – he wanted to give it to her. When caught and publicly questioned, he projected his desire onto her: ‘Je l'accusai d'avoir fait ce que je voulais faire, et de m'avoir donné le ruban, parce que mon intention était de le lui donner.’5 5 Ibid., 122. (I accused her of having done that which I wanted to do and of having given me the ribbon, because my intention was to give it to her.) Like Rousseau, JLG projects onto Brigitte. With this projection, we might say that in the second ‘housemaid episode’, JLG acts out the ‘law of stereo’, the explication of which immediately precedes our first introduction to Brigitte, when she is departing, with Clémence, for the night. Drawing two triangles that intersect one another to form a star, JLG explains: ‘Mais puisqu'on projette comme ça, et que moi qui écoute et regarde suis là, que je suis en face, que je reçois cette projection, que je la réfléchis, je suis dans la situation que décrit cette figure, voilà la figure de la stéréo.’ (But since one projects like this, and if I, who listen and regard, am there, if I am facing, if I receive this projection, if I reflect it, I am in the situation that this figure depicts, that is the figure of stereo.) He proceeds to locate this figure in history: Germany projected Israel; Israel reflected this projection. Israel projects the Palestinian people who in turn ‘carry their cross’. In the episode that begins with Brigitte vacuuming, we see the projections of patriarchal culture onto women along with JLG's projection onto Brigitte. But we also see JLG's projection reflect back on him, pointing up his misrecognition. From the shore of Lake Geneva, as if cued by the words, ‘Oh beloved land, where are you?’ the film cuts to books on shelves, lit by a red-shaded lamp. This is the setting where Brigitte works. She appears backlit, in silhouette, vacuuming the carpet after a shot of a notebook page on which is written ‘Les signes parmi nous’ (the title of part 4B of Histoire(s) du cinéma). In themselves, the words suggest a dialectic foundational to twentieth-century film, between the thesis that, as Roman Jakobson puts it, ‘film operates with things’ and the thesis that it operates ‘with signs’. Citing Augustine, Jakobson concludes that things ‘may be used in the function of signs’ and that, ‘It is precisely things (visual and auditory), transformed into signs, that are the specific material of cinematic art.’6 6 Roman Jakobson, ‘Is the Cinema in Decline?’, in Russian Formalist Film Theory, ed. Herbert Eagle, trans. Elena Sokol (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1981), 161–2. Appearing just before a shot of Brigitte, the phrase ‘the signs among us’ distinguishes ‘us’ from signs. But Brigitte, as an on-screen person, is a sign – as is JLG. JLG emphasises her status as signifier by associating her with other things that are signs such as paintings of women and literary characters. To whom, then, does ‘us’ refer? Should not the title be ‘The signs among signs’? The answer lies in JLG's mistakes, which point up a crucial difference between Brigitte and the signs around her. Behind Brigitte, on an easel, rests a print of Peter Paul Rubens's Portrait of Susanne Fourment (c.1625), partially covered by a smaller print of Rembrandt van Rijn's Hendrickje Bathing in a River (1654). On the soundtrack multiple voices occasionally speak over one another, an aural realisation of ‘the signs among us’. The sound of the vacuum cleaner displaces the voices on the soundtrack and the film cuts to a notebook page that says, ‘Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part.’ (Roads that lead nowhere.) These words begin this sequence with Brigitte and conclude the following sequence with the other ‘housemaid’, Cassandra (Nathalie Aguillar). We will revisit them in light of what occurs between their repetition since they serve as a clue to the complex of JLG's projections. The sound of the vacuum continues, accompanied now by music, and the film returns to a slow pan of the bookshelves. In the next shot, Brigitte remains off-screen, the low roar of the vacuum fades, leaving only the sound of the music and the shelves of books. This pan begins at a spot illuminated by one lamp, passes through books in shadow, and ends at a space illuminated by another lamp. The film then cuts back to Brigitte, kneeling, still in silhouette, unfolding a carpet she had moved in order to vacuum. As cinematic signs, the enshadowed books and the enshadowed housemaid metaphorically inform one another. Brigitte is like an unread book; an unread book is like an unknown person. As she works, Brigitte calls JLG's name (‘Monsieur Jean’) three times. By the second repetition of his name, the film cuts to a high angle shot of a table with a vase of flowers – perhaps the very ones she had promised to change in her previous, audio-only scene. Beneath their leaves, we see a print of Edouard Manet's Nana (1877). Brigitte announces that she's leaving and the camera begins to track along the length of the table top, on which are spread out reproductions of paintings and drawings that feature women. Brigitte's declaration of her departure thus coincides with the replacement of her screen image by a series of prints of canonical artworks. Next to Nana we see: Rubens's Young Woman Looking Down (Study for the Head of Saint Apollonia) (1628), Gustave Courbet's Woman with White Stockings (1861), Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Women Bathing (c.1765–72), Egon Schiele's Wally in a Red Blouse with Raised Knees (1913), Rubens and Helene Fourment in the Garden (1631), Fragonard's Bolt (1777), Diego Velázquez's The Toilet of Venus (1647–51), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Female Nude with Hat (1911), Nicolas de Staël's Portrait of Anne (1953).7 7 I am grateful to Marsha Meskimmon for helping me to identify the Rubens and the Kirchner. (Among these there are also four reproductions that I could not identify: a drawing of a reclining female nude, a painting of a boating scene, a painting of a nude, which looks like a fragment of a larger work, and a painting of a woman kneeling in a red satin skirt, which also looks like part of a larger scene.) A courtesan, a saint, nudes, lovers, woman (Anne)-as-abstraction – these pictures invite, even illustrate, the classic feminist critique of the gaze. Combined with JLG's inattention to the living and present Brigitte (he seems to see her through the veil of previously created images, visual and, as we shall see, literary), the scene, on one level, is a re-performance of the fraught feminist (self-) critique that Laura Mulvey describes: ‘Godard's cinema knows its own entrapment, and … it is still probing, struggling to give sounds and images to mythologies that haunt our culture although no longer able to challenge them.’8 8 Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 94. But the scene does challenge the foundation of cultural mythologies by probing perception itself and the capacity for recognition. Many of these prints prove difficult to place because of the way the processes of reproduction through which they have passed change them, and because in several cases we see only fragments of larger works. They are not only abstracted in their potentially feminist juxtaposition with Brigitte; they are made strange. We may immediately recognise one, feel as though we have somewhere seen another, remain clueless as to the identity of a third, or experience a shock when we suddenly recognise an image that at first seemed obscure. This shock of recognition can make us aware of all that is lost as JLG's camera reproduces a reproduction: we at once sense the image's meaning within the film and its independent being and history. A similar duality attaches to the actors in the film who play ‘themselves’– not only JLG, but Brigitte Bastien, André S. Labarthe, Louis Seguin, Bernard Eisenschitz. Their performances echo the thematics of the self-portrait, creating a provocative misalignment between the historical person and the screened one. JLG's eyeglasses rest on the last two prints and to the right of them, his hands turn the page of a book. He takes Egon Schiele's Self-Portrait (1910) and places it over the last print. Ignoring Brigitte, he begins a sentence, ‘La tragique dans les rapports sexuels …’ (The tragic in sexual relations …) and places Schiele's Female Nude (1910) (with its seemingly blood-spattered breasts) over the image of Schiele. We thus have a mise-en-abîme: Schiele's self-portrait within JLG's self-portrait gives way to Schiele's Female Nude just as JLG's image alternates with Brigitte's. The female model displaces the male artist; the female object hides the male subject. The remaining interactions between JLG and Brigitte suggest that this shuffling of prints may also be a figure for the incomplete merging of subject and object. Brigitte repeats ‘Monsieur Jean’. The film cuts back to her, still in silhouette, kneeling on the floor, as she says more insistently, ‘Monsieur Jean!’ But Godard continues his thought about sexual relations: ‘… c'est la virginité des âmes’ (… is the virginity of souls). Brigitte says, as if in response to his ignoring her, ‘Je m'en vais.’ (I'm leaving.) Only now does JLG take note – but he misnames her: ‘Qu'est-ce qu'il y a, Adrienne?’ (What is it, Adrienne?) A punctuating chord strikes and the film cuts to Rubens's Portrait of Susanne Fourment, which takes up the entire screen. On the soundtrack, JLG begins another sentence in a strained voice: ‘Le départ …’ (The departure …) and the film cuts to a shot of Brigitte holding the top of a framed print from behind. The bottom rests in JLG's lap and the print faces him. Brigitte leans over the top of the print so as to see, from upside down, the print that her employer is looking at. Her position, relative to the print and JLG, dramatises the privileging of the male gaze. Godard lights the print, the edge of her profile and her breasts – she's dressed in a red halter with a white collar. The rest of the image is mostly in shadow, or indistinct. JLG continues his sentence, ‘de la nourrice’ (of the wet nurse). He ruminates on the print as if Brigitte were not there, and yet his ruminations seem to take her in, confusing her with the wet nurse, since both are ‘departing’. But she drops her end of the picture, wishes Monsieur Jean good luck, and leaves the frame. JLG is left to grab the drawing, or etching, before it falls from his lap. The chord strikes again and the film cuts to Rubens's Susanne Fourment, now seen on its easel, unobscured by the other print, and next to a window. The piano chord sounds again and the film cuts back to JLG, seated next to the book shelves, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight, the left and right sides of the frame mostly in shadow. He says, ‘Au revoir, Adrienne’, and she corrects him: ‘Brigitte, Monsieur Jean, Brigitte.’ He pulls a book from the shelf and opens it, saying, as if in response to Brigitte's correction of her name, ‘Je ne suis pas sûr.’ (I am not sure.) Then he begins reading: ‘Dans l'extrême confusion oùétaient, pour cette femme, toutes les choses de la terre, à peine le son des paroles humaines parvenait-il à elle, mais elle n'en comprenait plus le sens. Déjà ses yeux se fixaient sur la vision que les morts contemplent à jamais.’ (In the extreme confusion in which all the things of the earth were for this woman, the sound of human voices hardly reached her, but she no longer comprehended the sense. Already her eyes were fixed on the vision that the dead contemplate for ever.) He announces that he's reading the end of Adrienne Mesurat. This announcement explains why JLG keeps calling Brigitte ‘Adrienne’. But he's not only confusing his housekeeper with Julien Green's unfortunate protagonist, he's confusing one Green novel, Adrienne Mesurat, with another, Leviathan, for the passage he reads is not the ending of the former, but of the latter. The confusion, however, helps to create the answering reflection (following ‘the law of stereo’) to JLG's projection. If any character experiences ‘extreme confusion’, it would appear to be JLG, who confuses one book with another, and a ‘real’ person, Brigitte, with a literary character. It is ‘the sound of’ her ‘human utterances’ (‘Monsieur Jean’) that scarcely reaches him. And it is arguably his prematurely elegiac exercise in self-portraiture that has his eyes fixing on ‘the vision that the dead contemplate for ever’. In other words, JLG could well see himself – not Brigitte – reflected in the tragic confusion that ultimately afflicts both Green heroines: Leviathan's Angèle, forced into prostitution by the woman who owns the restaurant where she stays; and Adrienne Mesurat, a spirited provincial girl with a pathologically overprotective father. The photographic trace of Brigitte's body, which functions as a sign, resists being replaced by other signs. It is, at once, a sign and its own ‘thing’. Similarly, the end of Leviathan resists identification with the end of Adrienne Mesurat. It is through JLG's mistakes that Godard, like Rousseau, renders interiority visible: outward things prove incommensurate with the way JLG inwardly sees them – and with the names he gives to them. But who catches these mistakes? It is far easier to miss them. Even the viewer who has read Leviathan and Adrienne Mesurat might miss the error since Adrienne and Angèle suffer similar fates. JLG's lines are an invitation to misremember. They are also a challenge to read more closely. The film transforms people and artworks into signs, but it also asks us to recognise their autonomous, extra-filmic existence prior to this transformation. The incommensurability between a powerful inner life and a contrary outer world is the subject of Adrienne Mesurat. Eighteen-year-old Adrienne develops a forceful, but extremely circumscribed interiority because she has little interaction with anyone except her oblivious father and sickly and embittered older sister Germaine. One day, picking wildflowers near a national road, she meets the eyes of a neighbour, Dr Maurecourt, who is passing in his carriage. He tips his hat and she immediately imagines herself in love. Starving for affection and life beyond the joyless confines of her home, she begins going out in the evening just to hear the sound of his footsteps as he approaches his door, and regularly sneaks into Germaine's bedroom, which has a better view of his house. But Germaine, who has had her own unhappy love story and is resentful of Adrienne's youth and health, keeps a suspicious eye on her sister, guesses that she's in love with Maurecourt and tells their father, who abuses Adrienne and locks her inside the house and garden except for their shared afternoon strolls. Adrienne, increasingly desperate, tries to hurt herself in order to get the doctor's attention. Trapped and tormented by her selfish parent, she is finally seized by a fit of desperate rage when he threatens to humiliate her before Maurecourt, and she shoves him down the stairs to his death. Alone (Germaine earlier fled to a convent where she wouldn't have to endure her father's abuse) and friendless in a town where gossips accuse her of murder and sexual impropriety, Adrienne, like Angèle in Leviathan, goes mad. Like Green's novel, JLG/JLG has two dominant spaces, the dwelling occupied by the main character and ‘les chemins qui ne mènent nulle part’. The dominant interior of the dwelling emphasises the interiority of the character. Both Adrienne and JLG often seem unaware of the tension between their inner worlds and the world outside. When not trapped in her house, Adrienne wanders roads that for her ‘lead nowhere’ partly because she cannot escape the prison of her own perspective. On one road, she comes to imagine herself in love. On another, she wanders, friendless, met coldly by innkeepers and propositioned by a worker who leaves her at first frightened, then desirous. On yet another, she descends into madness. Several shots of empty roads leading ‘nowhere’ also punctuate JLG's self-portrait. And as he wanders a road at the film's end, he, too, seems a bit mad, approaching a Latin-speaking woman (Elisabeth Kaza) and asserting that the coat beside her belongs to him. He takes it and continues down the road, disappearing into the snowy woods. The roads lead nowhere in Adrienne Mes
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