Intertexts

I. Gentille and Medicine: Psychopathology and Therapy in Question

An attractive woman in her late thirties strides briskly along a Paris sidewalk. Suddenly, she looks around and lunges across the street to accost a man walking a few paces behind her on the opposite side. He has, the woman accuses, been following her since they got off the metro, but he may as well give it up: she has no interest in joining him for a coffee, today or any other day. Nonplussed, the man insists that he was not following her and indeed had not even noticed her, but apologizes to the increasingly flustered woman for inadvertently causing any concern, either by following or by not following her. She proposes that they sit down for the coffee that she so categorically ruled out a moment before, but the man has an appointment; they agree to rendezvous the following afternoon.

So begins Sophie Fillières's drolly disorienting romantic seriocomedy Gentille (2005), a film about uncertainty and doubt that constantly leaves both characters and viewers revising their initial assumptions about the identities of people and the meanings and governing logic of events, only to second-guess their own reassessments in light of the surprising truths that misrecognition and misinterpretation often turn out to tell. Like the writer-director's earlier Grande Petite (Big Little Girl, 1994) and more recent Un chat un chat (A Cat, a Cat, released in English as Pardon My French, 2009) [End Page 82] and La Belle et la Belle (Beauty and the Beauty, released in English as When Margaux Meets Margaux, 2018), Gentille, whose title translates to the English "Good Girl" or "Nice Girl" (or woman), profiles an endearingly off-kilter female protagonist wrestling with the conundrums of her own desires, social image, and sense of self. Fontaine Leglou (Emmanuelle Devos) has a respectable career as an anesthesiologist at a private psychiatric hospital and an apparently stable, fulfilling relationship with Michel Strogoff (Bruno Todeschini), a paleoclimatologist who shares her apartment and her offbeat sense of humor. But nothing in Fontaine's life is comfortably self-evident, least of all to her. As her response to "(not) being followed" suggests, she wants to feel desirable to other men and to explore the possibility of other erotic connections. This interrogation of her love life is connected to an anxious curiosity, which animates the film as a whole, about the way she is perceived by others more generally and about what it means to be oneself. In the park, Fontaine is spontaneously moved—"it came over me like the need to pee," she laughs—to sit for a street caricaturist; while posing, she is hailed by what seems to be a passing acquaintance, but the ensuing conversation reveals that neither she nor he is the person "recognized" by the other (the man is not really Fontaine's bank adviser, Mr. Loniewski, but rather one Dr. Gudarzi, a physician; Fontaine is not really his former patient, Ophélie Legouénédal), although the details of Fontaine's life parallel those of her alter ego (she has reconsidered a plan to move to Bordeaux, not to Toulouse, and is still with a boyfriend named Michel, not Bernard). At the public swimming pool, Fontaine, having lost her bathing suit, must borrow one from the reception and squeeze, disgusted, into someone else's second skin.

Arriving home, she impersonates the cleaning lady as a joke and then worries that Michel has been fooled. Fontaine's questioning of identity penetrates into the heart of the erotic couple, which is always riven by the essential unknowability of the other: why is there a little girl in the apartment with Michel, and why is each of them wearing one glove? In bed, when Michel coyly asks if Fontaine knows what he is thinking about and she replies that she does, are the two of them really referring to and, more importantly, desiring the same thing? When, at the end of this inauspicious episode, Michel asks Fontaine to marry him, she is therefore [End Page 83] unable to agree, even though she is (almost) sure...