As I sat down to write an updated introduction to my book, Ethics and Lao-Tzu, originally penned some twenty years ago, I found myself, as on that prior occasion, contemplating a recently revisited film. Once again, it is classic European cinema, albeit of a markedly different sort than the Antonioni film about which I found myself previously thinking.
A Man and a Woman: Twenty Years Later reprises, as its title suggests, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, originally released in 1966 to universal acclaim and starring French actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée. Existentially-speaking, Lelouche’s film may not be on quite the same level as Antonioni, but one watches for the inimical French elegance and flair and the riveting performances of Trintignant and his filmic lover, Aimée. A Man and a Woman remains deserving of its vaunted stature — why Lelouch went on to direct a second sequel three years before Trintignant’s recent death at 91.
Robert Abzug (a cultured friend and simpatico spirit no less than the author of Rollo May’s remarkable biography), intuiting that I, too, would be saddened by news of Trintignant’s passing, forwards a link to an article remembering Trintignant’s extraordinary career in the Forward, a progressive Jewish-American newspaper:“A giant of acting forever changed by the German occupation of his homeland.” Both Trintignant and Aimée emerged, it oughtn’t surprise us, out of venerable ethical/ethnic circumstances and stock. Trintignant’s father, a successful businessman, became involved in the French underground during World War II, eventually assisting Jews in gaining safe passage out of occupied France by way of Spain. When Trintignant’s father was imprisoned in Marseilles upon being apprehended by French collaborators, Trintignant’s mother had an affair with a Nazi soldier. After the war, she was publicly shamed. Upon his release, Trintignant’s father scolded his son for remaining silent as his mother had her hair shorn before being marched through French villages with others in a display of public humiliation. Trintignant’s sympathy with the plight of the outsider (indeed, with the complexities of character more broadly) was more than professional accoutrement. Rather, it seems to have been the stuff from which his rarified work both on film and stage evolved and was, through the course of a lifetime, meticulously crafted. Aimée adopted her own father’s Jewish faith as an adult. Lelouche himself grew up in an Algerian Jewish home. His mother, he recalls, hid him in movie theaters as a child out of view of the Gestapo.
It is Trintignant’s haunting performance in Bertolucci’s adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel, The Conformist, that keeps cycling through my mind. In the weeks following Trintignant’s death, I have revisited Bertolucci’s masterpiece for the first time in years and reread the Moravia novel as well. Both artworks remain compelling reveries on character and its all-too-human deformations and entanglements. “The first sin was joined by a second,” observes Moravia of his protagonist, Marcello, in the opening pages, “and there was no way he could undo either of them.” All future decisions and actions will be underwritten by flights from anxiety and consciousness of difference in an attempt to assume an outward mantle of conventionality. “It’s funny,” observes his blind friend, Italo, of Marcello on the threshold of marriage and a seemingly important assignment in the fascist secret police that will culminate in the assassination of a former professor; “Everyone would like to be different from the others, but you want to be the same as everyone else.” “What do you think your marriage will get you?” his friend inquires. “The impression of normalcy,” is Marcello’s succinct, ingenuous reply. Giulia, Marcello’s betrothed, appears to be a woman with no especial consciousness of difference at all —precisely what many conforming doctors and psychotherapists might order. As the Czech novelist Milan Kundera observes of an image-driven world, “many people, few gestures.”
It is my understanding that Trintignant and Aimée never were lovers despite enactments in Lelouche’s films depicting both passion and the poignant nature of loss over the course of time. It’s my understanding also that their friendship was held to be special to each of them — even if, with Taoist restraint, this was something seldom discussed publicly or, possibly, at all. I find something exquisitely moving in such a quietly resolute, heartfelt connection (both the one depicted at intervals on screen and the one that inhered in what we like to think of as “real life”) — a bond likely infused with moral and psychospiritual under- and overtones. Trintignant would go on to work with some of the great European directors of our time — François Truffaut, Costa-Gavras, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Michael Haneke among them.
Jaspers scholar Matthias Bormuth (a refugee, not unlike myself, from organized religion and, increasingly, the professional guilds) informs me from Berlin that Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt (who shared a similarly hallowed connection) would refer to such partnerships of character and thought as Geisterreich, a “sphere of minds.” There is much that the discerning world might glean from Jean-Louis Trintignant’s myriad collaborations over the course of a life uncommonly well-lived and well-played.
Ed Mendelowitz received his doctorate from the California School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley, where he worked closely with the preeminent psychologist and author, Rollo May. He is Associate Editor of The Humanistic Psychologist, serves on the board of editors for the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, and has contributed to some of the major compendiums of existential/humanistic/depth psychotherapy. His writing explores the intermingling of psychology and clinical narrative with art, literature, music, cinema, religion, and philosophy. He is the recipient of the Rollo May Award for “independent and outstanding pursuit of new frontiers in humanistic psychology.” Ed lives in Greater Los Angeles with his wife, Khanh, and daughter, Miryam, where he maintains a part-time practice in psychotherapy.