Maine Ocean (Jacques Rozier, 1986)

Jacques Rozier’s Maine Ocean often has a rowdy, expansive feel to it, with outsized characterizations and confrontations (in this sense it’s far removed from his earlier Du cote d’Orouet) – the narrative expands from an initial fracas on a train between two women (one of them an errant Brazilian samba dancer) and the fare inspectors, moving on from some of the characters but later returning to them: it feels like the movie wants to scoop up everyone it touches and to forge an all-accommodating unity. This leads to its joyous peak on the island of Yeu, off the Vendee coast, where the characters eventually dissolve their differences and devote themselves to music making and performance, a creative process we observe evolving note by note. The movie then flirts for a while with a bizarre resulting notion, that one of the fare inspectors might be discovered by an American promoter as the “next Chevalier,” before swerving dramatically and leaving him abandoned by all the others, devoting its last twenty minutes or so simply to charting his journey back to the mainland, involving several changes of boats and much agonizing about the low tide: the stuffy imposer of rules and order finds himself stripped of almost all context, literally and figuratively searching for a way back to the shore. By then we may almost have forgotten an odd digression earlier on, where the other woman, a lawyer, chooses to defend a client by launching into a disquisition on different modes of language and their social baggage, which links to how Rozier initially emphasizes the theme of miscommunication – in the end, the fragmentation reasserts itself in a different, elemental form. The film’s shifting modes of transport – from land to air to sea – reflect its remarkable, wildly unpredictable encompassing of everything from communal goofiness to last-man-in-the-world-tinged solitude.