My Favorite Season was the second film discussed in the 2021–22 Siblings on Film series led by Mary Brady and Diane Borden. I've participated in these discussions for six years.—E. E.
“The woman that every man desires and every woman wants to be”—Antoine discussing Émilie in Ma saison préférée
In post-war French cinema, who more aptly suits this characterization than Catherine Deneuve in André Téchiné's 1993 film My Favorite Season? In all of her later films, this French actress registers for viewers both as the characters she plays and herself—where “herself” refers both to audiences’ experience of her history on screen and to her extra-cinematic identity.
A droll instance of this duality is in a dialogue from the 2004 Arnaud Desplechin film Kings and Queen, where Deneuve plays Madame Vasset, a psychiatrist, in conversation with a patient, Ismaël, at the termination of his treatment:
Ismaël: Do you know that
that you're very beautiful?
Mme Vasset: Yes, some people
have told me that.
One imagines the generally reserved Deneuve, in character as a therapist holding the frame, yet thinking, along with the audience, Quel espèce d'imbécile!
A more recent example of Deneuvian self-referentiality is in Hirokazu Koreeda's 2019 film The Truth, where she plays an aging actress, imperviously sheathed in artistic self-absorption. In a poignant moment near the end of the film, in recognition of an emergent peer, she gifts a younger actress an Yves St. Laurent dress that she, Deneuve, the actor, might well have worn in another movie or in her parallel career as a model.
All this is by way of introducing Deneuve as Émilie in the 1993 film My Favorite Season, the second of her seven films with André Téchiné, and the second Deneuve movie, following A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2014), included in our ongoing film and psychoanalysis series. This year's topic, siblings, recalls the performing range Deneuve displays in two of her best-known early films, Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967). In the former she plays a psychotic sister; in the latter, a musical, she sings and dances with her real-life older sister, Françoise Dorleac, a near double, who in the same year the film was made was killed in an automobile accident.
The tribute to Deneuve's allure quoted above—“the woman that every man desires and every woman wants to be”—is delivered in My Favorite Season by her brother, Antoine, played by Daniel Auteuil. The film portrays a highly conflictual relationship between siblings estranged as adults, he an unmarried surgeon in Toulouse, she a lawyer married to Bruno, played by Jean-Pierre Bouvier, also a lawyer, a decent but unimaginative husband. In contrast to this stolid suburban marriage, sibling bonds wrought in childhood and adolescence are evoked as the reverie of a summer idyll in a green southern France world of forests and rivers—a world revisited in numerous Téchiné films such as Wild Reeds , another we viewed in the Brady-Borden series focusing on adolescence. In My Favorite Season, as elsewhere, the director rejuvenates the trope of time as a river, poignantly and sensuously capturing the flourishing of love, shadowy eddies of feeling, and the inevitability of loss.
A key sequence in My Favorite Season, capturing the spell and intensity of adolescent erotics, qualifies the reverie. Antoine and Émilie are drinking at a riverside café, somewhere near the city of Toulouse, the city where, later in the film, Antoine and Émilie for a short time share an apartment with a balcony overlooking the Garonne River. Émilie has disclosed to Antoine that she recently separated from her husband. Unable to contain his excitement, Antoine goes off to the restaurant bathroom, his recurrent neurotic response to surges of anxiety. In his absence, Émilie turns to look at the river where she sees young people frolicking and swimming. Antoine returns to discover that Émilie has fainted. We can infer a sudden return of the repressed and that the combination of emotion and drink have been overwhelming. Following Thomas Ogden's 2017 paper “Dreaming the Analytic Session,” we might speculate that Émilie's swoon is paradoxically an awakening from a partially dreamed dream—in effect, a life event unrealized, hearkening to an experience, an emergent memory, too saturated with desire to sustain. When Émilie turns to look at the river, the subjective camera assumes her
point of view; then it becomes detached, objective. We never actually see Émilie faint—reflecting that experientially, the initiation of a swoon may be unknown to the person who suffers it.
In connection with the ongoing series of films, I also link Deneuve's fainting to her role in A Christmas Tale. At the beginning of that film in which she plays the dying mother of adult children—two of whom, a brother and sister, are profoundly estranged—she blacks out, the first symptom of a fatal disease. In My Favorite Season, Émilie and Antoine's mother, Berthe, played by Marthe Villalonga, has prodromal fainting spells that initially reunite the brother and sister in trying to care for her. In addition, My Favorite Season begins with a related visual pun. From inside the farmhouse where she raised her children, we see Berthe, in preparation for departing her home to stay with Émilie, closing the shutters from outside, literally blacking out the screen.
In My Favorite Season, as elsewhere, the director rejuvenates the trope of time as a river, poignantly and sensuously capturing the flourishing of love, shadowy eddies of feeling, and the inevitability of loss.
In counterpoint to the idealized but melancholic brother-sister relationship—haunted by both the incest taboo and sibling rivalry, that is, the evident preference of their mother for Antoine over Émilie—is the teasing, sexually-charged, on-again, off-again relationship between Lucien (Anthony Prada), Émilie's adopted son, and Rhadija (Carmen Chaplin). Rhadija is a Moroccan girl who works in the parents' law firm and is almost part of the family. Lucien insists that he loves Rhadija (aka “Radish”) and, as evidence, attests that he gets a hard-on every time he sees her.
The triangular mother-daughter-son relationship in My Favorite Season challenges the major premise of Siblings, Juliet Mitchell's 2003 book that we are reading in this year's Brady-Borden series. Mitchell argues that what she calls horizontal sibling relationships may be as develop-mentally consequential as vertical, that is, parent-child ones; more specifically, sibling relationships need not be viewed only in the context of vertical ones. As an illustration of the mother's continuing influence, however, consider the lengthy sequence in which Antoine and Émilie are driving Berthe from the farmhouse to a nursing home. Their route takes them through the countryside of their childhood. On the way, they stop at a river where Antoine strips naked and insists on swimming, which he'd been forbidden to do in childhood. Sister and mother watch in a kind of amused wonder. Later in the drive, Émilie asks her mother if she'd like to listen to music. Berthe brusquely comments that earlier they would all have been singing. Antoine and Émilie then begin to sing a nonsense jingle from their childhood drives while Berthe listens contentedly in the back (no longer in the driver's seat). We see the car in long shot with the song voice over as if the trio were sheltered in an idyllic dream. We can see that the siblings are still very much in the shadow of their mother/parental relationship—a point at least in tension with Mitchell's hypothesis.
The concluding sequence of the film shows the complexity of the horizontal versus the vertical relationship. The funeral after Berthe's death from a cerebral hemorrhage temporarily reunites a family divided by a marriage undone. For the most part, Bruno, daughter Anne (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve's real-life daughter), Lucien, and Rhadija stand off by themselves while the mother's presence, for a time, seems to linger over the brother and sister. Later, as a diversion, each of the participants is invited to speak of their favorite season. In a tête-à-tête with Antoine that can bring tears even after multiple viewings, Émilie, seemingly freed from her discontent by the mother's death, offers, in the guise of an ode to summer, an unfettered declaration of love that is surely one of the most affecting in all of cinema.
Eric Essman, M.A., is co-chair of the Visiting Scholar Committee of PINC. He is a Community Member of SFCP and has contributed numerous book and film reviews to fort da, the journal of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.