I was interested in seeing Poison Friends for two reasons: (1) it’s directed by Emmanuel Bourdieu, frequent collaborator of Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life…, Esther Kahn, A Christmas Tale), one of my favorite filmmakers; and (2) it’s directed by Emmanuel Bourdieu, son of the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one of my intellectual heroes. Bourdieu pére’s work — I’m thinking especially of Distinction, his mammoth contribution to the sociology of art — deals with the elaborate strategies undertaken by social agents — i.e., everyone ever — to fight for the legitimation of their “cultural capital” in a panoply of highly differentiated and competitive social fields.
Appropriately, then, his son’s second feature is the story of one such strategist, an unscrupulous graduate student named André Morney who terrorizes his friends with the certainty of his literary taste and his keen sense of the high cultural game. Morney is a radical aesthete who insists, with Karl Kraus, that writing must be “necessary,” scorns all would-be literary authors — i.e. everyone in the movie — for their “pathetic literary pretensions,” claims “I never joke about literature” one moment and “Trust me, shallow modernism is in” the next. From an American perspective, part of the fascination of Poison Friends is its depiction of a parallel social universe, one where aspiring writers compete with the intensity of the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross (and where James Ellroy is considered a great American novelist). To truly understand what literary accomplishment means to these French adolescents, we’d probably have to transpose the story into the film or music industries, where the cultural stakes are higher; the world of Poison Friends is a lot closer to Altman’s The Player than it is to mild evocations of the US literary life like Wonder Boys or Finding Forrester.
As a filmmaker, Bourdieu fils is not entirely assured: his dialogue wavers between Rohmerish subtlety and Fassbinderian bite, and the dreaminess of his mobile camera doesn’t entirely suit the sharp edges of the script. But he shows plenty of promise, not least in exhibiting the same sense of humanity and pathos carefully concealed in the apparently ultra-cynical work of his father. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I guess. I’ll be interested to see where it rolls from here.
by Evan Kindley | Source: Strand DVD
23 Nov 2008 5:55 PM | Submit Comment
