La rosiere de Pessac 79 (Jean Eustache, 1979)

 

Jean Eustache’s 1968 La rosiere de Pessac chronicled the annual selection and celebration of a “nubile” and virtuous young woman intended to embody the town’s better nature and aspirations; it coincided that year with France’s chronic social upheaval, against which Eustache’s film stood in an intriguing, resonant tension. Returning to the same subject matter eleven years later, Eustache moves from black and white to colour, a choice which underlines how the annual event is gradually becoming less embedded in tradition and community, and more of a ceremonial abstraction serving as a basis for commerce and a generalized good time. The second film allows a fuller sense of Pessac, of the contrast between the “old town” in which the activities are concentrated and the apartment blocks and impersonal streets which presumably constitute the bulk of its growth; the film ends on an event not seen in the 1968 version, an open-air celebration which seems to become increasingly drunken and rowdy, the chosen rosiere (a highly reticent woman whom I don’t think is ever heard uttering a complete sentence) being pulled unenthusiastically from one table to the next, kissing a grueling volume of cheeks. There’s an undercurrent of desperation to the festivities though, linked to the film’s frequent evocation of economic hard times: the rosiere herself has to live elsewhere during the week for the sake of finding work, returning to Pessac only at weekends. On a more basic level, it’s intriguing to note how a selection process which was efficient and collegial in 1968 has become more halting and messy (the voting procedure has changed for unspecified reasons, with some uncertainty over how it now works, and there’s much more talk of neighbourhood associations and accompanying petty bureaucracy). And whereas in the original it seemed at least plausible that the process might yield an actual and not merely symbolic virgin, the update is laced with gossip about the secret pregnancies of former rosieres. Oh well, nothing stays the same…