Et crac…! 1969. France. Written and directed by Jean Douchet. In French; English subtitles. 15 min.
Claude Chabrol, playing the cuckolded husband, is oblivious to his fed-up wife Bulle Ogier and her lover François Mooro-Giafferi in this farcical menage à trois by Cahiers du cinéma critic and New Wave champion Jean Douchet, made in the same year as Chabrol’s own La femme infidele.
Paulina s’en va (Paulina Is Leaving). 1969. France. Written and directed by André Téchiné. With Bulle Ogier, Michèle Moretti, Yves Beneyton. 35mm courtesy Dovidis and the Cinémathèque française. In French; English subtitles. 90 min.
A second-generation film critic for Cahiers du cinéma, André Téchiné assisted on Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour fou and Marc’O’s Les idoles before casting two of the actresses in those films, Bulle Ogier and Michèle Moretti, opposite Francois Truffaut favorite Marie-France Pisier in his largely forgotten feature debut Pauline s’en va. The film has its roots in avant-garde theater, with allusions to Jean Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, and Samuel Beckett. Thrust into a world of madness and violence (or is it gaslighting?), Ogier is shuttled from a psychiatric institution to a brothel, while her brothers become resistance fighters in some enigmatic version of France.