Some Notes on Bewitchment By Richard Armstrong Richard Armstrong is an Associate Tutor affiliated to the British Film Institute. His book, Billy Wilder, American Film Realist, appeared from McFarland in 2000. He is currently writing Understanding Realism for the Bfi's Understanding the Moving Image series and Chocolate Biscuits and Italian Neo-Realism, a blend of reception aesthetics and personal memoir. He is a regular contributor to the websites Audience, Bright Lights Film Journal, Senses of Cinema and Talking Pictures, and contributes book reviews to the Times Higher Educational Supplement.

I first saw Cactus (Paul Cox, 1986) in February 1989 on BBC2 and was smitten by its spirituality, its account of the exotic, its European arthouse style. Elatedly laying eyes on the video in 1992, I have seen Cactus maybe fifteen times since. The film has had a cherished place in my memories since that night in 1989. I have looked forward to the opportunity to write a sustained piece on Cactus for years. Seeing and thinking about it and what others have had to say about it over the last week, Cactus has come to seem vacuous, derivative and self-indulgent.

The film is set in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne and tells the story of a young Frenchwoman, Colo, in exile from a difficult marriage and going blind as the result of a car accident. Cactus charts her attempt to come to new terms with herself in a new relationship with Robert (Robert Menzies), a man blind from birth. Cox's Lonely Hearts (1981), Man of Flowers (1983) and My First Wife (1984) gave notice of a feeling for outsiders combined with a quirky sense of humour, Cactus is suffused with light. Attempting to delineate Colo's pain and isolation through her diminishing encounters with the world, DP Yuri Sokol's camera finds her always already enveloped by her environment, a sub-tropical Eden peopled by kindly eccentrics. Making the most of leading lady Isabelle Huppert's diminutive porcelain features, ethereal mien and French accent, Cactus is a tantalizing blend of the vernacular and the metaphysical.

But I've grown tired of an amorphous obscurantism that is more and more difficult to write about. What was this preoccupation with Colo's getting back in touch with her environment but an arty excuse to celebrate Isabelle Huppert, snagged from the international stage for a domestic production. Arguably, Cactus tells us more about the brute mechanics of raising production capital than it does about how real individuals relate to their environment. In the film, Huppert relates to her environment through Missoni Country Casuals, of course, a franchise with funding consequences for Cox. A philosophy degree taught me to be sceptical about metaphysics, which is why I now find Cactus hollow. Critics have drawn attention over and over again to the amusing birthday party at Martha's, the Cacti and Succulent Society meeting. But I can no longer reconcile paying lip service to leftovers from an Ealing comedy with a convincing discussion of Cox's feel for metaphysics. Concision with the Other doesn't sit well alongside camel impressions! What I felt like now was a dynamic vital portrait of Australian life. Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton, 1999) and The Negotiator (F. Gary Gray, 1998) came and went on TV that week and I found myself preferring these, for all their faults, to this, once one of my favourite films. As I watched, growing bored, I began to wonder about those other people glimpsed as Huppert trundles around Melbourne looking lost and lovely as she must. What of their lives? At one point, the "moody bugger" Robert is seen in long shot as a pedestrian tries to assist him. He rudely rebuffs her. The woman (Dawn Klingberg) stands there… clearly stunned. Now it seems quite a shocking moment. All the time I bought into the romantic conceit, I bought the idea that Robert is sociopathic because he is seeking a higher place. A cliché that we like to entertain about the blind which helps to construct them as 'different', but also somehow 'understandable.' But as I watched Menzies' performance, Robert became difficult to get close to. A cactus, indeed. And are we really to buy the idea that a young, educated woman with a sharp mind and a passionate nature is going to want to settle down in a retirement community in the Dandenongs? Wasn't Cactus a canny attempt to keep a visually interesting Australian cinema, an Australian art cinema, in front of the international gaze? (I like the metaphor "A new kind of 'hello.'"). And a male gaze, at that! After all, aren't those flashbacks of hers really trailers for L'Image d'Isabelle? As The Player (Robert Altman, 1992) shows, in the movies History is movie history.

In Madame Bovary (Claude Chabrol, 1991), Huppert plays the ill-fated Emma as some lost saint drifting amongst the prosaic detail of an inconsequential Normandy village. In his Filmnews review of September 1986 , Adrian Martin wondered if Cox's delineation of a 'world' over several films isn't a withdrawal from the world itself. At stake in Chabrol's film is the woman's ability to survive the limitations and injunctions of a real sociopolitical status quo. This is something that tests us all. It brings tension and tragedy into our lives. But, as Martin argues, in Cactus the real doesn't exist in the sense that it does for an audience mired in the real world: contingent, problematic, painful, political. Indeed, the film's project of putting Colo back into concision with the world through touch wouldn't seem so redundant if I didn't now think the film so hermetic. Notice those moments as Cox strives to be metaphorical and 'European', such as when a babbling sylvan brook gives way to Colo weeping. Cactus is an artefact that mobilizes recollections of Isabelle Huppert's oeuvre and deploys them with care in Paul Cox's sacred space. In 1993 I noted that the flashbacks to the accident find Colo's subjectivity rendered on the surface of the film like glass. (Another way of saying this is a star vehicle.) With references to realism's arch-advocate Andre Bazin's God-given space, I gave in to Cox's joyous tribute to the Australian spring and its role in a bigger plan. I even invoked the Rousseaux, Henri and Jean-Jacques, to describe Cox's exotica and a woman's place in it, according to 'natural justice.' (Now that seems like the grossest kind of misogyny).

Huppert became identified in European and American arthouse circles from the late-1970s as a sensitive purveyor of passionate vulnerable women who succumb to society or themselves. In The Lacemaker (Claude Goretta, 1977), she portrays a young hairdresser who falls in love with an educated young man who leaves her because of her limited education and personality. Violette Noziere (Claude Chabrol, 1978) detailed the history of an actual petit-bourgeois Parisienne who in the 1930s poisoned her parents. Coup de foudre (At First Sight, Diane Kurys, 1983) followed a successful bourgeoise in wartime Lyon into a loving friendship with another woman. Chris Peacock in Time Out compared Coup de foudre with the 'women's pictures' of Dorothy Arzner, a film "showing - without resorting to melodrama - the desire and heartbreak of everyday life." In the same magazine, Tom Milne described Violette as "a patient and saintly Grizelda." Before fame, Huppert's performance as Beatrice in The Lacemaker was less accessible to conventional definition. Quiet, passive and radiant, there was something ineffable about that shot of her - sunken eyes, slight smile - with which the film leaves us. 'Ineffable' was just what Cox wanted, suiting the je ne sais quoi that he wanted to recreate outside Melbourne. In a recent article for the French magazine Trafic, Adrian Martin briefly discusses Australian perceptions of the French and things French. Whilst "very French" is "frivolous, cultured, sensual, theatrical", the French are seen, at least in populist representations, as "hyper-intellectual, over-cultivated, arrogant, incomprehensible."

An icon of the French art cinema, Huppert's name had gone before her. Witness the number of non-French directors - Cimino, Cox, Hansen, Hartley - who have drawn upon the cultivated, 'spiritual' French model and her associations. Cast here as victimized, vulnerable, Huppert lets the little girl show. The film's preoccupations with touch and the star come together when Colo in disbelief and helplessness reaches for her injured eye, pawing at her lovely skin in anticipation of audience empathy and longing. The woman-as-girl gets plenty of exposure in French cinema. If Huppert's Jeanne in Chabrol's La Ceremonie in 1995 brought a punkish pixie quality to the little girl, the makeover responded to the turn the French fillette had taken - Nikita, Amelie - in the 1990s. "I'm altogether too ethereal", 'Isabelle' says in Amateur (Hal Hartley, 1994). Cactus takes copious opportunities to admire Huppert as she applies make-up, promenades, smiles, looks sad, flits nude in and out of shadow. The way the other actors fawn over her now grates on me. When Colo and Bea sit in a beautiful two-shot together, Colo remembering pristine walks in the Black Forest, Maughan looks away like the other thespians do during a stage soliloquy. The 'Colo Song' is painful. "You really are a beautiful young woman", Martha (Sheila Florance) tells Colo. "She's French, you know", intones husband George (Peter Aanensen), and you can almost hear the cultural frisson. Recalling the way in which classical Hollywood films seemed to 'stop' before the spectacle of the leading lady, scenes like this make you realize what you were dragged in out of the rain to see. Cactus is awash with camera mobility, but what do we see? We see Colo. We see what Colo sees. As a role, Colo is hardly stretching for anyone. I know women who could play to a T a beautiful shock victim, and play her with a French accent. What in 1989 had been the noble sufferings of a fragmented soul, has become a watchable repertoire of simpering and pouting. What a fool I was. Not for falling for Huppert - I did that in 1978 - but for being taken in by the studied panoply of pans and tracks with which Cox and Sokol ensnared me in the inner life of an angel. For that frisson as I am deluged in an audiovisual cacophony of avant-garde discord and grungy Super 8. For the reaching, halting, exploring between two lovers. For that whipbird intermittently insisting that an indigenous art cinema modelled after Paris is possible out here. But worst of all; for not realizing that Stella Dallas, Penny Serenade, Dark Victory, Now, Voyager, Terms of Endearment, Muriel's Wedding, The Last Days of Chex Nous, The Sheltering Sky, Boys on the Side, Career Girls, The Piano and Thelma and Louise didn't have more soul and wit, conviction and accuracy than this nonsense. What is very French about Cactus is the way in which it showcases a French corporate/aesthetic strategy to sell French womanhood as infantilised. I was one of that "rapt and appreciative audience" which would flock to Cactus in droves, taken in by that perception of France which seems to grip English-language communities worldwide, and which French films and the state machinery behind them assiduously cultivates. But Cactus also had the attributes to appeal to a cinephile. It had the air of the unusual delicacy happened upon amidst the anonymity of just another weekday evening. It was what some film writers like to call a 'gem'. Appealing to the arthouse constituency and the excitable lone connoisseur, the film lends itself to passionate and sectarian advocacy in the age of the multiplex. If multiplex fare celebrates narrative, art cinema has traditionally celebrated imagery. Cactus exemplifies the degree to which these preoccupations have converged in the arthouse miniplex since the heyday of high art cinema. Cactus is no less a celebration of the star as Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) or any other multiplex vehicle were. Where it and so much other arthouse fare fails is in playing so assiduously to the institution and failing to reconcile words and images as really good films do.

My experience of Cactus poignantly exemplifies the role reception plays in our perception of particular films. Plushed to the scuppers with Yemeni ground coffee on a wet and rainy evening, and mesmerized by Huppert and Australian exotica, I fell for this truffle. When I saw it, I was eighteen months away from eye surgery myself. Clearly the theme of eye surgery had something to do with the way I interacted with the film. It augmented Huppert's image with personal experience in the same way as women in wartime cinemas interacted with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford over the issue of enforced austerity and loneliness. How ironic that Cox bonded with Huppert largely over the film-industrial issue of putting an Australian art cinema before an international audience. Seen in this light, the film's excessive emphasis upon imagery, particularly of Huppert, actually undermines the director's noises of solidarity towards the visually challenged community, as well as his project of reinstalling touch as an overlooked mode of communication.

My perception of Cactus has been overwhelmingly historical, however ahistorical and apolitical the film. I connected with a star, and appropriated her for my own historical ends, much like a more desperate, bolder fan might have abducted Huppert herself. Indeed, the film's obscurantist rhetoric about concision with a blessed environment increasingly comes over like a metaphor for obsessive spectatorship. Since the 1980s, reception studies of this or that film or star showed us something of the way spectators interact with films. But there is much work to be done at this grassroots level. There needs to be much more autobiography in film writing, with all its inspiration and disappointment, tension and tragedy. Because when I used to go on to friends about Cactus, I was really going on about myself. Last week my eyes were opened.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002