Word: bourguignon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Serge Bourguignon's Sundays and Cybele is a simple, exquisite film about the loneliness of three people. Acted with nearly miraculous honesty, it sustains a fragile mood between tentative happiness and softest tragedy without a single misstep...
...Bourguignon uses his camera to show us the scene in the hazy distortions of Pierre's vision. We experience his vertigo at a rippling pond, the too-high trees, the electric cars careening in an amusement park. Finally, we appreciate the imbalance of his mental state, but have lost the ability or desire to empathize with him. In a quiet, attractive, inexplicable sense he is crazy, sometimes inscrutably moody or violent; we cannot understand him. Yet he is all the world to both Madeleine and Cybele, and so the film is about them; their profound love for Pierre...
...Bourguignon has frustrated our predisposition to a goodies against baddies orientation because, through interdependent use of sound, photography, and skillful editing, he offers a perpetual shifting of perspective. Not only at the end should we suspend any predilection toward valuative judgement. Throughout the film we must experience the world in terms other than our own. In one scene (when we follow Pierre's desperate race to the convent) it bounces madly by us in the rear-view mirror of a truck. In a restaurant party, a babbling couple are grotesquely distorted through the stem of Pierre's champagne glass...
...lake. The camera moves backward and we see their reflections in the water. They move away, yet their backs come towards us. The camera inverts, the lake becomes the land. But to dissect the scene in this manner as we watch is to shatter the stuble imagery that Bourguignon invokes. If instead, we suspend our critical faculties--sit back and let ourselves be fooled again and again--we may enter into manifold perceptions of the world...
...neurosis that held him prisoner? Or is he using her psychotically, in a way she could never understand, to seek punishment for his traumatic "war-crime" and relieve his guilt? If we decide positively on either side we pervert the tragedy by transforming it into a social "message." Bourguignon deepens the impact of his conclusion by this ambiguity. Our response never admits rights or wrongs. We have perceived the nature of Pierre's love through too many eyes...