For decades the greatest film by French writer-director Philippe Garrel has been one of the hardest to see. Garrel completed L’Enfant Secret in 1979 but didn’t exhibit it until 1982, because, according to legend, he couldn’t afford to pay the lab that had processed the film. Despite winning France’s prestigious Prix Jean Vigo (an annual award for movies exhibiting an original vision), the film has seldom been screened and was released on DVD only in Japan (even there it’s been out of print for a while). The rareness of L’Enfant Secret has heightened its reputation as a precious object, a movie so intimate that watching it makes you feel as though you’ve been let in on something private. Nakedly autobiographical, the film plays like a confession; moreover, Garrel elicits such sensitive performances from his actors that they too seem to be baring their souls.
Though much of L’Enfant Secret is shrouded in mystery, it was the most lucid film the director had yet made. Garrel directed it after a decade of making experimental features (The Virgin’s Bed, The Inner Scar) that abound with cryptic allusions and symbolic imagery. These films can be ravishingly beautiful and maddeningly opaque, sometimes simultaneously, suggesting a personal aesthetic that isn’t meant to be fully understood. By tying this style to memories of his on-again-off-again relationship with the pop singer Nico (who appeared in some of his 70s films), Garrel grounded his images in direct and relatable experiences. By the time he made L’Enfant Secret, Garrel had also become a master of photographing faces; like his great experimental feature Les Hautes Solitudes (1974), much of the movie transpires in close-up, and Garrel inspires a Warholian fascination with his subjects as they exhibit various emotions and subtly change their expressions. The film’s details may be obscure, but the materiality of the images is palpable and the emotional content unmistakable.
Directed by Philippe Garrel. 94 min.
