Punishment or the Bad Liaisons

Punishment (or the Bad Liaisons) is an hour-long film contained within the group of 8 movies by the famous ethnographer Jean Rouch, all ostensibly pictures about African (or Africans) and recently issued by Icarus on DVD.  Punishment doesn't have much to do with Africa but it's a little lapidary gem, an account of a curious experiment performed in the laboratory of Parisian streets and gardens.  A pretty 17-year old girl (she sometimes says she is 18 or, even, 19) gets kicked out of her High School philosophy class.  We see her hurrying across the Seine to the Left Bank entering the school and, then, when the teacher asks her a question (it has something to do with self-awareness and morality), the girl admits that she hasn't be listening and can't answer.  The teacher expels her from school for the day and warns that if she behaves similarly in the future, she'll be thrown out of the lyceum for good.  At loose ends, the girl wanders around Paris, looking for an "adventure".  She encounters three men:  a handsome and engaging student who tries to seduce her, a homesick African who may be gay, and an older man who says that he is a research scientist in physics and who ultimately entices her to his apartment.  The student and the scientist are well-mannered, polite, and articulate, but it's obvious that they are interested in talking her into a sexual encounter.  The young African is friendly but not otherwise aggressive.  In each case, the girl says that she is looking for an adventure and that she wants these men to abandon everything to flee Paris with her.  This demand discomfits all three men and they retreat from her in confused dismay.  The movie documents the events of the day using a handheld camera that tracks the characters as if, indeed, they were protagonists in an ethnographic film.  Paris as revealed in this film is the Paris of Jacques Rivette -- that is, the enchanted city.  The Luxembourg gardens are ghostly with statues and big basins full of water and weird swimming creatures; with the African, the couple stroll through a natural history museum with hundreds of stuffed animals haphazardly assembled in the middle of a structure that looks like a train station.  In one sequence, we see a large black seal laboriously pull itself out of the water.  At night, mannequins in store windows beckon mysteriously.  The girl has made an assignation with the student -- he is to meet her the next evening at a certain place.  Although the ending is hard to interpret, I believe the last few minutes, shot at night-time, represent the next evening -- the events of the preceding day are crudely recapitulated:  men approach her and try to make small talk but their intentions are clear and she rudely orders them away.  We see her walk into the darkness where twenty feet from the camera she is suddenly illumined, rim-lit as a lonely wanderer in the darkness, and, then, a final shot seems to show the student at the place where she told him to meet, his profile illumined only the flare of his cigarette -- none of this is clear, however, and the ending is subject to debate.

The girl's demand on the men is eerily similar to Jesus' dictate to the rich young ruler (see Mark 10 for instance, although the story is also told in Luke and Matthew).  If you want to follow me, Jesus demands, you must sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor and, then, you may come with me.  The rich young ruler, like the three men in the movie, goes away from the encounter disheartened:  he is not willing to make the leap of faith that Christ demands.  Rouch's film has a fairy tale texture -- there are three encounters with three different men but they all seem to end in the same way.  No one is willing to take the radical measures that the girl demands.  It is unclear whether her demand is meant seriously, or is merely a way to keep the wolves at bay.  But the men in the film are dismayed by what she requests and, at least, the shy and friendly African (she knows him from earlier) and the scientist libertine seem to take her demand as real and retreat from her.  The libertine in particular is an interesting figure -- he is much older than the girl, meets her at the book-stalls along the Seine where she is searching for a volume of Chateaubriand. and actually gets her to his apartment where a print of one of Piranesi prisons or Carcieri decorates the wall of the room.  We hear citations from the Marquis de Sade's Justine during this part of the film, highlighting the danger in which the girl has put herself.  Although the man seems dangerous, he is discomfited by her radical request and, apparently, lets her go unscathed. 

Rouch's little movie is cool, distanced, and mysterious.  Some writers suggest that the movie was critically reviled.  If so, the film should be re-evaluated.