The Son of Gascogne
With Gregoire Colin, Dinara Droukarova, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Laszlo Szabo, Pascal Bonitzer, Otar Iosseliani, Alexandra Stewart, and Jean-Claude Brialy.
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In the question-and-answer session after the screening, I discovered that Pascal Aubier had directed only one other feature between Valparaiso Valparaiso and Le fils de Gascogne–Le chant du depart in 1975–but had meanwhile made 38 short films for French television. Even more striking to me was the profound continuity I felt between the two features I’d seen. The new film had as much heart and lyricism as its predecessor and also involved an elaborate hoax, one that testified no less eloquently to some cherished nostalgic fantasies of its own period.
Three months later, The Son of Gascogne premiered in France on TV during the Cannes festival. It’s hard to say whether this made it more marginal than Valparaiso Valparaiso or less: even though The Son of Gascogne was probably seen by many more people, it had no critical profile. Aubier’s film did get selected by the New York film festival, however, thanks in part to my enthusiasm for it as a selection committee member; during Aubier’s visit to New York for the showing, he landed a teaching job at New York University and has been based in this country ever since.
The film offers a highly personal take on the myth of the New Wave: the two glimpses we have of “Gascogne,” in photographs from the 60s, are of Aubier himself. In one, he’s standing alongside Stewart, Iosseliani, Meril, and Karina in Moscow; in another, he’s leading a street demonstration in May 1968. In fact, Aubier published a full-length book a couple of years ago, Les memoires de Gascogne–a personal scrapbook of photographs and documents combined with an extended dialogue between Aubier and Eisenschitz detailing the complex interface between this movie and Aubier’s various activities in film and politics over three decades.
