“None of my films are realistic, and certainly not naturalistic, including Sound and Fury, even though it touched on a certain social reality. They all contain a shadow zone,” claimed Jean-Claude Brisseau during one of his press tours. It was an accurate self-assessment that nevertheless does not quite do justice to the experience of watching a filmmaker whose tonal shifts are unnerving for being so unemphatic, and whose plausibly ordinary characters are suddenly buffeted by the sex and violence of cinema at its most fantastical. Brisseau loved the films of Luis Buñuel, and the commitment to tackling social ills while being allured by surrealism and the dark beauty of the fantasies it could offer puts Sound and Fury in the spirit of titles such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Viridiana, and, most particularly, Los Olvidados and its wolf pack of poor and desperate children. The youth gangs in both Los Olvidados and Sound and Fury might be victims of an uncaring world, but neither filmmaker is particularly inclined to spare them for their own cruelties in keeping it perpetuated, and the oneiric irrationality is meant to match the spirit of how they proceed with life.
Sound and Fury is the story of a 13-year old named Bruno, a Parisian slum resident who has recently moved to live with his mother in a concrete block of a high-rise apartments after his grandmother’s passing. (The aspect ratio emphasizes its fundamental squareness.) Brisseau’s first scene has Bruno address his pet bird Superman, who is transfigured via an edit from a small brown canary to a majestically peevish-looking hawk. Bruno’s arrival at the apartment introduces us to his new neighbor Jean-Roger and his father Marcel, with fellow pre-teen Jean-Roger lighting doormats on fire, and his father subsequently assaulting both his son and the neighbor who caught him. Bruno’s mother, meanwhile, greets him over the phone and leaves him alone in his new room to fantasize about a woman, and the earlier transgressions of continuity and arson start to look practically timid when we see the clearly underaged Vincent Gasperitsch fondling her naked body, a sudden cut to a hawk’s claws scratching his face, and then a quick cut back into the reality of his first day at a new school.
Brisseau, a teacher in his own right, may be more sympathetic to the animal-loving and clearly good-hearted Bruno, but he’s nevertheless just as seduced by Jean-Roger and the adults’ casually cruel behavior, and knows they keep things lively if nothing else. His interest in the wild emotional fluctuations that cinema can provide is best exemplified by a sequence that shifts from Bruno and Jean-Roger spying on a naked prostitute, to her meeting a male client, to the client getting jumped and brutally beaten by a gang, to the prostitute and the female leader of the gang tenderly kissing as we hear the man’s offscreen screams, followed by a jump cut into an entirely different scene. Another example comes from Bruno Cremer, giving maybe his greatest performance as Marcel, casually introducing himself to his son’s new friend by firing off a shotgun in the amateur shooting gallery he’s transfigured his apartment into — the wall inevitably breaking down and a furious neighbor peeking his head through the hole would not be far off from something out of Jacques Tati, were it not for the Native American-themed targets he was aiming at.
It perhaps goes without saying that since this is a movie about troubled youths, the boys become terrors in school, with attempts to send a caseworker — after Jean-Roger instigates a classroom fight — resulting in more gun-related threats from Marcel. We get the classic case of a sympathetic teacher who takes a legitimate interest in Bruno and his love of birds (she’s curiously unnamed and played by Fabienne Babe), but Brisseau knows from experience that this isn’t Ken Loach’s Kes and the canary will never really become a hawk. She’s a moral compass and a sort of mother figure, but that is not a pathway out, and Bruno’s fondness for her quickly becomes troubling. A spying Jean-Roger inevitably jumps on the opportunity to sew further discord when Bruno allows himself a moment of expressing his inner turmoil.
Discussing the recurring theme of voyeurism in Brisseau films inevitably bleeds into something with a real-world ugliness. Brisseau’s reputation has remained in a tricky position for many years, with much of his later career demonstrating a struggle to find funding and filming movies in his own apartment as a result. His arrival occurred during a transitional period, when the French New Wave’s style was starting to break apart: a new generation was making their own mark in the world of cinema. Éric Rohmer supported Brisseau from early on, and they shared a similar love for using conversation as characterization, along with both working as teachers and repeatedly utilizing the actress María Luisa García. (She plays the woman of Bruno’s isolation fantasies here.) The best-known filmmakers that emerged around the same time as Brisseau included fellow post-Rohmer emotional extremists Jean Eustache and Maurice Pialat, who shared Brisseau’s interest in the darker sexual politics that were beginning to become a point of interest in cinema. Brisseau’s tonal swerves into fantasy, however, made him more of a forerunner to the bloody transgressions of the subsequent New French Extremity movement — around the time that Sound and Fury was released, Catherine Breillat was emerging in her own right. Virtually all of the above filmmakers also possessed Rohmer’s reactionary streak and rendered it more explicitly part of their work, with Brisseau’s being particularly rooted in Catholicism: Bruno wears a cross necklace and his solitary home life has the ascetic qualities of Robert Bresson films.
Further complicating Brisseau’s reputation, possibly forever, are his sexual harassment allegations from circa 2005, where he was accused of forcing actresses to masturbate during auditions while he watched and masturbated in his own right. He pled guilty and then made a film about the experience in 2006, with its own little Buñuel homage in the title: The Exterminating Angels. (Sound and Fury’s own title was reportedly inspired by Shakespeare rather than Faulkner.) The thorniness of his relationship with women is best exemplified in Sound and Fury by Jean-Roger deciding he wants his brother’s girlfriend and receiving a horrifying form of assistance from the matriarchal gang he’d previously ogled with Bruno. When he died in 2019, he was left out of the In Memoriam section of the César awards, with only García protesting on his behalf. She gets to provide the final moment of grace in Sound and Fury, functioning as a sort of sexualized version of the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio as she gives poor Bruno a way out. Even that moment of perverted redemption is what finally slams the door shut on Jean-Roger’s antics, leading to a final letter to the teacher that he’d tortured so often that finally finds him reckoning with the ruin considerable he left behind, with all the limited capacities for such things that pre-adolescents are capable of. (It’s reminiscent of various Bresson endings, particularly his three 1950s titles and their focus on imprisonment.) And so, it seems there’s a little of Brisseau in all the characters of Sound and Fury: by the end, the lonely and sensitive boy is gone forever, the troubled provocateur has found himself alone and reckoning with his past sins, and the teacher can only look out the window of her classroom — there’s nothing to dream about anymore.
