Delphine Seyrig and the best year ever | Little White Lies

Women In Film

Del­phine Seyrig and the best year ever

16 Sep 2020

Words by Lillian Crawford

A woman with curly red hair wearing a red dress, posing with a man in a tuxedo in the background.
A woman with curly red hair wearing a red dress, posing with a man in a tuxedo in the background.
With India Song cur­rent­ly play­ing on MUBI, we take a look back at the actor’s superla­tive fem­i­nist tril­o­gy from 1975.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Del­phine Seyrig was born in 1932, but in 1975 she became a rep­re­sen­ta­tive for French women. Under the direc­tion of var­i­ous high-pro­file men – includ­ing the likes of Jacques Demy and Luis Buñuel – Seyrig estab­lished a star image which she brought to three films direct­ed by women: Mar­guerite Duras; Chan­tal Aker­man; and Lil­iane de Ker­madec. They trans­formed the Chanel-dressed sylph Seyrig, who made her name in Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marien­bad, into an every­woman, house­wife and mother.

These ordi­nary women took to the streets of Paris in the 1970s. Seyrig signed the Man­i­festo of the 343 pre­sent­ed by women who had ille­gal abor­tions in 1971. She formed the col­lec­tive Les Insoumus­es (Dis­obe­di­ent Mus­es) with direc­tor Car­ole Rous­sopou­los, who filmed protests with the sec­ond Sony Por­ta­pak cam­era sold in France (after Jean-Luc Godard). With Seyrig on the front line, it was vital that oth­er women iden­ti­fied her as one of them.

The image Seyrig cre­at­ed across the woman-direct­ed films she made in 1975 – India Song, Jeanne Diel­man, 23, quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles and Aloïse – forms a trip­tych. In the left pan­el, direct­ed by Duras, Seyrig plays Anne-Marie Stret­ter, the adul­ter­ous wife of the French ambas­sador in Cal­cut­ta. In the right pan­el, by de Ker­madec, Seyrig plays Aloïse Cor­baz, the real-life Swiss artist who was kept in a men­tal hos­pi­tal after becom­ing obsessed with Kaiser Wil­helm II. In between is Akerman’s mag­num opus, in which Seyrig plays Jeanne, a house­wife and sex work­er. We ini­tial­ly align with the male gaze when we see Seyrig – glam­our, wom­an­hood, artistry – but, through these films, our per­cep­tion shifts.

Unlike the nat­u­ral­ism of Jeanne Diel­man and Aloïse, India Song mythol­o­gis­es Seyrig’s char­ac­ter into an emblem­at­ic fig­ure. When Anne-Marie is faith­ful to her hus­band, she is the duti­ful wife dressed to the nines in a bur­gundy gown. But she’s devel­oped a lep­rosy of the heart” and refus­es to play the piano any­more. She fills the void with affairs, although she takes lit­tle plea­sure from them. We imag­ine Jeanne took to sex work for the same rea­son, to break up the day, but now it’s just part of the rou­tine. Why sat­is­fy men who don’t val­ue you?

Aloïse asks the same ques­tion. The artist’s paint­ings fea­ture mil­i­tary men embrac­ing women with closed eyes. They are blind to the world and dis­al­lowed the same expe­ri­ences as men. The actor Michael Lons­dale co-stars in both India Song and Aloïse, which makes them invert­ed mir­rors of each oth­er. Where in India Song Lonsdale’s Vice-Con­sul of Lahore fails to win Anne-Marie’s love, the doc­tor he plays in Aloïse ties her down. Anne-Marie has agency while Aloïse doesn’t.

A woman with curly red hair wearing a grey cardigan and floral scarf, sitting at a kitchen table, looking focused as she writes on a piece of paper.

Lonsdale’s men trap Seyrig’s women in con­fined spaces, with the embassy in India Song and the hos­pi­tal in Aloïse func­tion­ing as pris­ons. The depres­sion into which Seyrig’s char­ac­ters spi­ral reflects women’s acqui­es­cence to being held hostage – what Bet­ty Friedan in her 1963 polemic The Fem­i­nine Mys­tique called the prob­lem with no name” in the con­text of house­wifery. Just as Aloïse’s art is the work of a woman denied a voice, India Song visu­alis­es the unspeak­able sense that Anne-Marie deserves more than her hus­band gives her.

Duras does this in two ways. The sound is desyn­chro­nised, mean­ing the char­ac­ters appear mute while we hear their nar­ra­tion in voiceover. This dis­junc­tion between image and sound in India Song pre­vents us from see­ing Anne-Marie as an indi­vid­ual. Then, by fram­ing the cen­tral room of the embassy with­in a large mir­ror, char­ac­ters are vis­i­ble onscreen despite the actor being stood, unseen, behind the cam­era. The mir­ror makes Anne-Marie’s duplic­i­ty lit­er­al, crys­tallis­ing her alter­nate per­sonas as wife and adul­ter­ess into two dis­tinct images.

Then there’s the addi­tion­al image of Seyrig her­self. All three direc­tors want us to con­nect the actor to her char­ac­ters. In an inter­view about Jeanne Diel­man, Aker­man said, If I had cho­sen a non­pro­fes­sion­al actress for the role of Jeanne, she wouldn’t be more than a sin­gle woman. Because she is an actress, she rep­re­sents all oth­er women.” The ambassador’s wife is as good as the house­wife; indi­vid­u­als, but two sides of the same coin.

While work­ing on these films, Seyrig direct­ed a doc­u­men­tary about women’s act­ing expe­ri­ences called Be Pret­ty and Shut Up!. In her inter­view, Jane Fon­da reveals how male pro­duc­ers altered her appear­ance. She reflects that, I, Jane Fon­da, was here, and this image was there, and there was this alien­ation between the two.’ Seyrig said she found play­ing char­ac­ters writ­ten by women felt more real to her than pre­vi­ous roles writ­ten by men, that they were borne of unique­ly fem­i­nine empa­thy. She was clos­ing the gap between her­self and her image.

A person lying in bed, asleep, with a sleep mask covering their eyes.

By star­ring in films direct­ed by women, Seyrig hoped to bring their films into the spot­light. Jeanne Diel­man remains the most well-known. Akerman’s film is an unflinch­ing snap­shot of a woman’s life and its mind-numb­ing unpaid labour – peel­ing pota­toes, mak­ing beds, run­ning errands… Snap! Jeanne throws her­self onto a client and plunges a pair of scis­sors into his neck. Filmed through the bed­room mir­ror like Duras’s fram­ing in India Song, Aker­man gives Jeanne a dual per­son­al­i­ty that is more vio­lent than the staid house­wife we have seen hitherto.

Where did that come from? In her book The Art of Cru­el­ty, Mag­gie Nel­son crit­i­cis­es Jeanne Diel­man for this irra­tional cli­max which appears to have no basis in the char­ac­ter we’ve watched close­ly for over three hours. Look again. It’s sub­tle, sim­mer­ing, but it’s always been there. That moment is the Man­i­festo of the 343, the Wages for House­work move­ment, Andy Warhol being shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, whose SCUM Man­i­festo’ stood for Soci­ety for Cut­ting Up Men’. The visu­al pun of scis­sors aligned with the cin­e­mat­ic cut realis­es Freudi­an cas­tra­tion anx­i­ety for the male view­er. It’s Akerman’s caus­tic way of telling men the women are coming.

But it’s not the end. Jeanne sits at the din­ing table as she does every evening. There may be rup­tures, but we are bound to repeat. It’s like the haunt­ing piano theme com­posed by Car­los D’Alessio which drifts through the embassy in India Song, the same music Anne-Marie dances to with man after man, the record seem­ing­ly stuck. It’s a pes­simistic end­note, that there’s no exit, but it remains a per­ti­nent tune forty-five years lat­er. Seyrig was instru­men­tal in bring­ing it to our atten­tion, but just like Jeanne Dielman’s end­less chores, there’s still work to be done.

India Song is avail­able to view on MUBI now.

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