“The Condition” by J. Bonnell: rolling up the bourgeois house

This morning, a film coming out at the cinema: The Conditionsigned Jérôme Bonnell, and adapted from a novel by Léonor de Récondo which had a certain success ten years ago, entitled Loves. The story of a bourgeois couple in the province at the very beginning of the 20th century, surrounded by their servants, their sexuality, and the arrival of a child. It is not easy to tell such a story today, marked by at least a century of realistic and naturalist literature – 19th –, parasitized by characters and motifs which have become fictional clichés: the notable lower part of the forehead, the Emma Bovary in crisis, abused maids, and other inconsistent lovers. Jérôme Bonnell and his film do quite well, slowly but surely shifting the point of view on the characters, removing some, developing others, in a form of welcome modesty.

André, performed by Swann Arlaudis a notary. He runs a study in the bourgeois house where he lives, with his young wife Victoire and his mother Mathilde (respectively Louise Chevillotte and Emmanuelle Devos), but also two servants, one of whom is very young, Céleste, played by Galatea Bellugi. The only man in the middle of a sort of gynoecium from which no one ever really escapes, he maintains a vexed and/or violent relationship with each of his wives. He regularly abuses Céleste after dark, renewing an archaic right of sexual abuse whose brutality he does not seem to see; like a child, he chastises his mother, who has become mute following a brain accident and who seems to pass a harsh judgment on him; he harasses his wife, who conscientiously but without joy fulfills her duties as mistress of the house, and counters his signs of affection with increasing dryness. All these tensions are suddenly exacerbated when the good Céleste becomes pregnant, this pregnancy is discovered, and a dangerous pact is formed between the characters.

A story of solidarity and perhaps love between two women from different backgrounds

I told the story starting from the male character, while the novel and the film tell a female story. I chose this choice on purpose, even though the film alternately adopts that of each of these characters, in a rather suffocating closed environment, where sexual matters, at the same time as shame and violence, circulate in all directions: from the maids’ rooms upstairs to the bourgeois salons downstairs, from the intimacy behind closed doors and in white linen to society receptions. I chose the male point of view, even though the film actually tells a great story of solidarity and perhaps even love between two women from diverse backgrounds, because it is interesting – I find – that the filmmaker did not evacuate this figure of André, and did not reduce him to what he is in fact in part: an aggressor.

By developing this character, which is not obvious in a contemporary economy where justice is sometimes done expeditiously to the female characters by artificially reducing the male pole, Jérôme Bonnell does not compromise the complexity of the story, and develops a fine social and emotional mechanism, which revolves in a house, a Norman house, which resembles like two drops of water to those of Gustave Flaubert orOctave Mirbeau.

The Condition is a demonstration on the scale of the household, which balances well between the literary tradition of dominant men and lost women on the one hand, and on the other hand a new situation which often freezes the characters of historical fiction just as much, but in the other direction. As a demonstration, the film sometimes suffers from a little academicism, but it develops renewed figures as in a small chiaroscuro theater.