Michelin Tendre: Les Amants

In Les Amants director Louis Malle obtains the collaboration of Louise de Vilmorin to redraw the narrative of a short tale that Vivant Denon wrote in the pre-Revolutionary years under the title Point de lendemain (roughly translated as “No Tomorrow on the Horizon”).¹ It, too, deals with vanishing points in its representation of triangulated love and female subjectivity in postwar France. In Malle’s adaptation Jeanne (Jeanne Moreau), the somewhat cloistered wife of Henri (Alain Cuny), a well-to-do publisher in Dijon, the owner of a château and a surrounding estate, finds solace in trips she takes to Paris to spend weekends with her friend Maggie (Judith Magre). She is seduced by the elegant world of polo, where she meets the elegant and sportive Raoul (J. L. de Villalonga), the man who, as the husband quickly discerns, becomes her lover. The husband casts his wife in the webbing of a scheme that will catch them unaware. He arranges a fishing party to which Maggie and Raoul are invited. They speed from Paris to Burgundy in a Jaguar while Jeanne, dissimulating her designs, drives alone from Paris to the château in her Peugeot 203. The vehicle breaks down along a road that runs along a canal. She flags a man driving a modest vehicle, a “people’s” car— a Citroën 2CV or “Deux chevaux”—driven by a young man, Bernard (Jean-Marc Bory), who happens to be a student of philosophy driving to Burgundy to leave some books with his mentor. Bernard picks up Jeanne, who is impatient and fidgety, no doubt about being unable to play out a scheme that would allow her to spend time with Raoul under her husband’s nose. Jeanne is literally beside herself when he takes a detour to his mentor’s home in a small town in the Yonne or Auxerrois. Bernard finally delivers Jeanne to the château where the husband, bearing the manners of the country gentleman that he is, invites the stranger to have dinner and spend the night with them. Bernard occupies a solitary room. Jeanne refuses to see Raoul. She gathers herself by going downstairs to get water. She passes by Bernard’s room where he has been listening to a recording of Brahms. She goes out into the moonlight, back inside again, where she meets Bernard once again. They spend the wee hours of the morning in ecstasy. In the moonlight Bernard opens the fish cages by a dam at one end of the pond where a morning of fishing was scheduled to take place.

Having decided to leave with Bernard for good, Jeanne returns to the château to get a few belongings. She first encounters Maggie inside the château, and then her husband just on the outside, before she takes off with Bernard. They putter off in the 2CV (the slow whir of its transmission having affective charge in the memory of drivers having driven the popular vehicle) as Jeanne’s voice speaks in the past tense, off, of the doubts and fears precipitated by the decision she has taken. Just before the end they stop to have a cup of coffee inside a roadside café where, unfolding what appears to be a Michelin roadmap, they plot their future itinerary. The couple returns to the car that the camera records slowly moving forward on a country road and away from the environs of the lives they had been living. The music of Brahms that had inaugurated the film in the sequence of credits, heard at capital points throughout the narrative, now turns the conclusion toward a new and uncertain future.

Maps enter the film at three distinct junctures. First and most famously, the title and credits, in white characters, dissolve into one another over an image of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Carte du pays de Tendre; the celebrated allegorical map had accompanied Clélie, the ample novel of her signature that had been a bible for the Précieux in the early and middle years of the seventeenth century.² It had been conceivably drawn in opposition to the military cartography, inaugurated by neo-Cartesian engineers under kings from Henry IV up to Louis XIV. Named ingénieurs du roi, these cartographers, as we noted in chapter 2, set about redrawing the defensive lines of the nation and the design of fortresses in a period when new modes of artillery were changing the ways of waging war (Buisseret 1964). Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Carte du pays de Tendre of 1654 brings the viewer back to the world of the salon and a space that women had crafted for themselves, quite possibly in opposition to the masculine world of the engineer and soldier.³ For viewers nourished on French literature the very map, reminiscent of Molière’s groundbreaking one-act satire, Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) in which men play a trick on two women who mime the language of sentiment, becomes something other than that for which it stood.⁴ In Les Amants the Carte du Tendre is anything but a comical object. With an uncanny affective valence the map melds into the music of Brahms (Opus 18, String Sextet 1 in B-flat Major) and comes forward to pervade the visual field in much of the film.

The presence of the map of the Pays du Tendre in the film stands in strong contrast to two other principal cartographic moments. One takes place when Jeanne, confused and in turmoil, descends in the middle of the night to drink some water. Hearing Brahms being played on the turntable—the same that accompanied the image of the map in the credits—in the room where Bernard is reading, she leaves her bedroom. As if both seduced and bothered by what she hears, Jeanne crosses the space of a room crammed with objects—a sort of Wunderkammer—in which a folio atlas is opened. She moves by, closing it, as if signaling that the duplication of one spatial depiction of a small scale within the closed confines of the room and the château might be too much to bear: better, it is implied, that the monumental projects of classical France, such as Guillaume Blaeu’s Grand Atlas (1647), a hefty tome of the kind that seems to be what she closes, be forgotten.

The other sequence is of two parts. In a first section Bernard and Jeanne are in the 2CV en route to the château. The couple needs to consult a map in order to find their way to Dijon and Henri’s regal residence. The map is unfolded but not really heeded or studied in the heat of the moment. At the end of the film the couple pours over the same roadmap that they unfold on the table of a café where they stop to get their bearings after having taken leave of the château.

Because of its association with the music of Brahms the “Carte du Tendre” seems omnipresent. It provides multiple views of the roads that will be taken, and it also infuses the uncommon spatial texture of the film in general. More radically, the music brings a cartographic presence to the way the camera records the landscape. One moment, early in the film, is crucial. Jeanne has just returned to the château from one of her first trips to Paris. She enters the vestibule of the château (much as had Christine in walking on a floor paved with black-and-white tiles in La Règle du jeu [Curchod 1998, 106–15]), where she meets the maid who brings forward Jeanne’s young daughter. The mother salutes her daughter and their keeper before entering into a living room where Henri is seated, pensive, looking at a fire that crackles in the fireplace. Happy to see her, but reserved and somewhat suspicious, he follows her movements in the way that the camera pans from left to right (and she enters) and then right to left (as she moves toward the fireplace behind the sofa where he husband is seated. The camera takes note of a fairly diminutive landscape painting in which a road cuts over a field to the right and by a wooded space to the left. The painting becomes visible as the camera holds on the couple in a plan-séquence in which Henri inspects his wife with his eyes, remarking by way of what might be a crocodile’s compliment, “Tu deviens tendre” (the English subtitle reads, “You’re affectionate,” but Henri’s words are slurred enough to confuse “tu deviens tendre” [you are becoming affectionate] with “tu viens tendre” [you come or arrive with an affectionate or tender air]). Jeanne makes no definitive answer, ostensibly ruminating on what he might mean or on the rhetoric of a ruse that would be one step ahead of one of her own.

All of a sudden “Tendre,” the word that the map had called to every viewer’s mind in the credits, is folded both into the narrative and the field of the image. In Henri’s voice it is a tender trap. Jeanne is discovering tenderness in a new and amorous longing for a man whose identity Henri will seek to discern, but the adverb resounding in the inner ear of the protagonist turns into the very landscape of the painting that hangs on the wall. The landscape becomes a variant of the précieux map that in itself had been a landscape, an estate map, or a map destined to foster commerce and trade in the tradition of Georg Braun and Franz Hogenburg.⁵ The painting that we are almost unconsciously asked to associate with the map becomes a point of attraction and of vanishment in the shot itself. The camera keeps the picture in view long enough for the wandering eye to associate the “Inclination fleuve” that cuts a deep furrow through the center of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s map to the road on the landscape. Viewers familiar with the details of the credits usually note that the itinerary of the map tends to go from a town, “Tendre sur In[clination],” whose buildings erected on both sides of the river are connected by an arched bridge, to another, at the bottom, slightly larger but of similar aspect, called “Nouvelle Amitié” (New friendship). They might be tempted to see in the landscape the road replacing the river that leads from one agglomeration to another.

If not, at least the connection is obvious enough to blur the line of divide between the credits and the field of the image. The picture is placed in the frame in order to spot a vanishing space that refuses to vanish. Point de lendemain, point de fuite: the picture is placed at the center of the shot much as “Tendre sur Inclination” is placed at a point where sightlines converge on Scudéry’s creation.⁶ Yet the picture cues an optical itinerary by which spectators can see themselves wandering about the shot itself, moving left and right with Jeanne Moreau, and into and through the words as they are spoken and heard both tenderly and strategically. The camera seems to be refashioning Renoir’s tendency to shoot partial views of greater wholes that cannot be discerned. The depth of field that had been Renoir’s signature is also Malle’s, but now the picture-as-map, seen in the broad horizon of cinemascope, flattens the image and requires the eye to “unfold” its constituent surfaces as it might a roadmap that is being opened and extended in full view.

The film is composed of closed spaces whose implicit totalities are defined by allusion to those in Renoir and other classical films. The episodes of the narrative are determined by spatial closures out of which the protagonist and the film itself seek an exit. How to find a way out of Renoir’s world is an issue doubled by that of the protagonist in the repeated instances where she would like to “drive” (but not “crash”) out of a tender prison. Jeanne spends an evening in Paris with Raoul. They consume the first hours amusing themselves in an amusement park. Raoul takes her to the shooting gallery where she hits the bull’s eye after the paramour had shown her how to aim and fire. Allusion to the hunting sequence of La Règle du jeu is clear, but less obvious is the way the sequence dissolves into the couple’s entry into the flying car of a newly fashioned merry-go-round. The device is a wheel whose spokes carry miniature cars that levitate and descend up and down as the mechanism turns counter-clockwise. In a medium shot Raoul gallantly places Jeanne in one of the two seats of the miniature vehicle before he climbs in and sits next to her. She adjusts a veil over her head while Raoul, sporting his bow-tie and tuxedo as the voice-off, heard from a megaphone, intones, “Attention au départ.” The departure and takeoff are effortless. The six ensuing shots crosscut three medium close-ups of the couple in the driver’s seat, looking about the flicker of moving lights and gently clasping and fondling each other, with long shots of the mechanical motion of merry-go-round from the “takeoff” to the “landing.” At one point the camera, set on Raoul and Jeanne, drops slightly to show the headlights of the car, implying that they are in a toy-version of the vehicle that will later be cause for everyone’s change in fortune. As the sequence unfolds, the characters are not seen descending or exiting but, in the smooth transitions of the editing, they dissolve into the following sequence in a dance hall where they bob up and down to the rhythm of a mechanical mambo.

The sequence moves too quickly to allude to the claustrophobic ending of Julien Duvivier’s Panique (1946), in which two ill-fated and evil lovers seek exit from the crimes by taking refuge on a merry-go-round. No indication of is made of an exit from the machine. But in the midst of the music lingers the voice-off, “Attention au depart.” A call is made on the part of the film to the spectator and the characters to take heed or be careful in watching the film from the beginning. Malle elides the caution with the words Raoul whispers into Jeanne’s eyes in the sequence that follows. “Je voudrais tellement te rendre heureuse [I so much want to make you happy]” barely drifts over the music while Jeanne, voice-in but also ostensibly off, says calmly that she is happy, to which Raoul responds with an unconscious explanation of the spatial and temporal construction of the film. “Notre vie n’est faite que de moments . . . c’est toute une vie avec toi que je voudrais [Our life is made only of moments ... I want a whole life with you].” If Raoul’s words have any weight in the midst of the levitation, he wants their lives to conform to the definition of an image or of an event in the manner that André Bazin had defined them: an epiphany, a momentary but totalizing grasp of one’s space and place in the world in which the relation of the individual to a broader geography is felt in the duration of an instant.

Attention au départ: After Henri imposes the plan in which he will bring the suspected players of the tryst to his domain for a weekend of fishing, an establishing shot (that immediately recalls the first shot of the film) puts Raoul on his dark horse in the middle ground. He rides in a circle before Jeanne arrives in a white car, deep in the background. The camera cuts to Jeanne stopping her car, opening the door, exiting, coming forward to meet Raoul on horseback, and announcing, “Je pars ... je m’en vais [I’m leaving, I’m off].” A remarkable dissolve ends the sequence when Jeanne, her head posed against Raoul’s thigh, his right hand holding the end of the polo club and two reins drawn behind her, looks off and away (in exactly the way that Geneviève de Marrast had done in La Règle du jeu [Curchod 1998, 161]). She contemplates love with Raoul as a perilous venture at the very instant her face blends into a roadscape: doubled for a flash in the same shot, she is in the foreground, in close-up, but also in the distance, speeding toward the camera as it recedes along the way. The two straps of Raoul’s club seem to be white lines painted on the edge of the road that runs parallel, we discover as it unwinds, to a canal.

The “departure” leads, of course, to the breakdown that becomes a new point of departure. The car rolls into what seems to be a map-like picture of the bend of the road and the canal whose sides are decorated with pylons of trees, bar-like shapes reflected in the calm water to lend a loosely gridded aspect to the frame and bring forward memories of similar shapes in the first shot, but also another film shot along inner waterways, in the closed spaces of Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934). The shot becomes a tableau-sequence when it laterally reframes itself, moving left to display the road and hillside behind Jeanne’s face, which registers disbelief when a jalopy (filled with locals of a lower class) goes by, waving but not stopping to help her. Car and Carte du Tendre begin to mesh in the long take that follows, in which Jeanne fidgets and tosses a cigarette in the water (as had Henri at the end of Renoir’s Une partie de campagne, 1936) before another jalopy—a 2CV, a deux chevaux—comes into frame from an area behind the bend in the road and canal, thus beginning a new departure.

After the student has driven Jeanne to a local garage Jeanne enters into the strange space of a garage, the fiefdom of a mechanic and his grease monkey. A man repairing a bicycle wheel (from an angle that is identical to the gigantic water wheel by which the lovers will walk later in the night) is deaf to her entreaties while the boss, speaking in a thick Burgundian accent, tells her that her words cannot be heard. He asks her what kind of car she has, and she responds that her Peugeot 203 “is not for him.” As he informs her that his is a “Renault” garage, the student enters the frame with a map in his hands, asking her if she doesn’t need his assistance any more (the deaf mechanic tells her where she can find a telephone). In the background he stares down at the guidebook. He opens it and lets his hand point both at the page and, in the greater space of the shot, at Jeanne’s body, in the foreground, which his index finger almost caresses. The camera pans right to follow Jeanne en route to the telephone on the wall. The young man’s voice utters (as Jeanne approaches the phone, occluding him and thus, in the unconscious register of the film, uttering in her thoughts what he says, now off, to the Burgundian repairman who is occupied with repairing the tow truck): “Quelle est la meilleure route pour aller à Montbard d’ici? [What is the best way to get to Montbard from here?]” As she dials and asks for “Dijon 413” the Burgundian is in the background, his rotund back facing the viewer while muttering some directions, arched over a grille, he plumbs the depths of the motor of a Renault.

The camera reframes the space of the garage in the plan-séquence. Jeanne’s rescuer remains in the background before he takes leave, kindly thanking the boss for the directions, while Jeanne awaits word from the receiver that she holds in her left hand. She annuls the call, hangs up, and runs to catch the young man who has just entered a sunlit area where his car is parked. In the next shot (taken from an angle perpendicular to the view of the inside of the garage), Jeanne trots toward the Citroën, seen from the back, on whose corrugated bonnet the young man consults his map and his guide. As they depart he announces that he must stop in Montbard to deliver books to a former professor. The shot, taken from the back of the car (the camera no doubt mounted on a tripod in the open trunk), registers the forward movement before it dissolves to a classic take of the couple looking forward from behind the windshield as the space in the background now slowly recedes. When Jeanne examines herself with a pocket mirror, it is clear that a play of reflections underscores the ambiguity of a movement backward countered by a movement forward in the physical and affective space. A first sign of a real departure is given when the sign of the place-name of the village (seen on the right) recedes while the car advances. The couple seems to be moving into a new world underlined by the memory of the map seen in the credits, especially insofar, in view of Jeanne’s self-involved presence, as the young man’s defensively ironic demeanor seems to be anything but tender.

They drive into the countryside. The road they take surely reproduces the central conduit of the Carte du Tendre, except now the car is seen moving on a landscape that is indeed a map whose elements of force and doubt are shown in the slight reversal or shifts in itinerary. In these takes the memory of the map in the countryside turns what would be nothing more than the shot of a car-driving-down-a-country-road into a far more complex relation of sensibility and perception of a path or itinerary.⁷

Spaces open and close much in the way that the roads move back and ahead. They are illuminated and darkened, walked and driven through, and sometimes discovered as terrae incognitae. The interlude with Bernard that brings Jeanne out of the château and into the night seems to be an entry into a painting of Magritte or Delvaux. As Jeanne and Bernard cross fields and hedgerows bathed in moonlight (or day-for-night) and disappear into wooded lairs, they retrace the paths taken by starstruck lovers not only in Denon’s pre-Revolutionary fiction but also along the shores of the Lignon in Honoré de D’Urfé’s L’Astrée and in the thick foliage of the paintings of Poussin.⁸ “Est-ce un pays que vous avez inventé [Is it a country that you’ve invented],” Jeanne asks while swaying in her lover’s arms, before she asserts, “pour que je m’y perde [so that I’ll get lost in it].” The landscape in which she loses her bearings needs to be situated. She does not wish to go off the map but to find new and other places within the territories it represents.⁹

They soon climb into a skiff that embraces their enlaced bodies and drift downstream to the outstretched trunk of a weeping willow where they moor the craft before descending to the terra firma. The exit from the boat is enveloped in the memory of the final sequences of Une partie de campagne, in which Henri and Henriette first descended from a skiff moored by a willow tree in broad daylight to find the imaginary “home” in the woods in which they furtively lost themselves in love—before, on a second trip to the same spot, the forlorn lover opened a melancholic wound in revisiting the place to which Henriette had just repaired with her hapless husband in order to dream of her discovery of love with Henri. The pathos of Renoir’s film comes forward as if to mark the delicate urgency of the instant and to describe a space of another film in which the lovers have become unmoored. The fragility of the idyll is enhanced by the allusion to Renoir’s short feature; yet, at the same time, Jeanne and her paramour put their feet on the ground and move forward. They steer their way through the memory of Renoir’s rewriting of Guy de Maupassant’s tale. When the lovers return to the land, they regress to reminiscence of the château de Solognes in La Règle du jeu from whose interior, in Renoir, any egress (except for that of the director in the role of Octave) was shown to be impossible (Curchod 1998, 266–67). By the walls of the edifice, adjacent to the mottled bark of the flaky trunk of a plane tree and the black spots on the hide of a white Dalmatian that guards the periphery— the patches of wood and the dog resembling islands and hills of a topographic map—Bernard utters, as if he were remembering the stakes of Renoir’s closed spaces, “Je ne veux pas monter dans le château. Allons-nous en [I don’t want to go back into the castle. Let’s get out of here].”

How to find a way out of an overly plotted territory of film, love, and idyll becomes the stake of the final sequences. A map helps the lovers in their quest to find new and other spaces, but only after a tender geography of love intervenes. Brahms accompanies the couple in their act of love. The bars of music continue to cue memory-images of the Carte du Tendre as the camera contrasts Jeanne supine, her bare flesh and head in profile against a background of crumpled sheets. The camera tilts down along her arm and stops to display her open hand against a line of dots sewn into the bedspread. A broken line of imaginary places on the bed leads to the lifeline in the palm of her hand, the wrinkles suddenly melding with those of the sheet on which it is posed. Soon she rolls over and with an index finger writes a text or the lines of an itinerary on the back of her lover. They clothe themselves in bathrobes and put towels over their faces in order both to refer to Magritte’s paintings of lovers “wrapped” in cloth and, it seems, to distinguish between faces and folds of fabric that would be molded to the hills and valleys of their faces.

Their play with towels and diaphanous scarves is capped at the point where the departure is suddenly realized. In profile, in a medium close-up Jeanne adjusts a veil about her head as the camera holds on a fan framed on the wall behind and between the couple who stare at each other. She has just walked by a bed whose elevated stead is decorated with diapered folds of fabric erected from a false baldachin. Its bends contrast the pleats of the fan, flattened to emphasize a painted floral pattern that in turn draws attention to the bends and twists of the scarf she plies about her neck. Its paisley pattern rhymes, as it were, with the floral design of the wallpaper in the room she has just exited (and to which she will soon return). The husband enters from the right, mocks Jeanne in repeating her own words in a whisper, “dépêche-toi [hurry up],” as the camera follows her exit into the next room where Bernard arranges himself in front of a mirror. She arrives and looks into it: the mirror image shows Jeanne’s face in its beauty, while the backside is an amorphous mass of folded fabric. In the allegory of the film it would be said that one side is the uncertain “map” produced from the contact of the fabric on the contour of the heroine’s head and the other the face and gaze that look anxiously both backward and ahead.

The fan—an éventail, the word accreted in the image for French viewers—and its flattened folds announce an “event” of the departure, the virtual unfolding of the space of the film from an allusion to Mallarmé’s poetry of folds that constitute vital and fugacious events.¹⁰ The sequence, punctuated by the words, “il faut partir [we’ve got to go],” “sortons d’ici [let’s get out of here],” “partons [let’s leave],” is now and again shot in a mirror, in total reflection that draws attention not only to infinite specularity—to something totally imaginary—but also to the possibility of real spaces out of frame.¹¹ The latter are reflected on the front of the windshield of the 2CV as it leaves the château in view of the four characters— Maggie, Raoul, Coudray (Modot), and the husband—who, all immobile, watch it drive away. A long take (no doubt a matte shot) in medium close-up of the couple, in profile, looking right, at the windshield and what lies beyond, but also at the right side of the frame, registers the fear, doubt, and pleasure the lovers evince at a moment resembling any of many scenes of departure—Rinaldo and Armida of Ariosto’s Orlando furiosio among others—in elegiac literature. Jeanne’s headdress wafts in the air in a way that makes the wind and breeze an element of the event of departure and commencement. “Où allons-nous? [Where are we going?],” utters Bernard who looks ahead and quickly turns his head toward and away from Jeanne, who responds, “Allons n’importe où ... j’irai partout avec toi [Let’s go anywhere, I’ll go everywhere with you].”

A contrary movement on the image track no sooner counters her words and the drift of her voice affirming that they go forward. After she speaks, the direction of their movement reverses. She raises her right hand to look in the mirror in such a way that it is impossible to know whether she looks at herself (as she would have in the early stages of the film, at the moment of her defensively narcissistic plenitude in respect to her husband and their insufferable marriage) or at the landscape that would be receding in the distance (so that doubts and second thoughts about the departure would come forward while the landscape disappears). In all events the raised hand is sign of a continuity that links this shot to what follows: the shot turns on its axis by 180 degrees by displaying the couple in profile from the window of the door on the driver’s side. Her left hand is now poised on the opposite side of the frame and such that the cut is shown to be at once visible and seamless.¹²

They now look from right to left, apparently toward a future that had just been “past” on the left side of the frame. Jeanne puts her hand to her mouth as if to silence the words just uttered or to turn the film into an emblem or a “mute speaker” in which what is seen “speaks” as much as what is heard.¹³ Bernard raises his hand to embrace hers (her wedding ring shines) that holds the mirror, and he pulls it to his cheek to affirm his affection while she closes her eyelids and covers her left eye with her hand in a hieroglyphic gesture that signifies the grief of inward vision, which Bernard underlines when he states that he would like to see her (while he must keep his eyes glued to the road ahead). The visual dialectic holds until the car (and the lateral movement of the landscape that passes from left to right) goes by the countryside while a rooster crows three times (the biblical innuendo clearly marked in the insistent resonance of the cockle-doodle-doo) before the vehicle comes to a halt in front of what seems to be a blank space or a wall. Three signs (one a restaurateur’s license and the other a panel of a telephone booth) indicate they have arrived at a roadside café. Jeanne, still coiffed in her silken scarf, responds to Bernard’s words, “J’ai faim. On s’arrête? [I’m hungry. Shall we stop?].” She looks left and right, her nose almost caressing a small poster in the background, beyond the frame of the window of the car door, placed on a windowpane, that advertises “Gitane” [Gypsy] cigarettes. In a small blue rectangle the silhouette of a gyrating woman in a still image serves as a legend to the shot and its implicit narration. Has Jeanne become a gypsy after leaving her husband and their daughter? Is she now a rootless nomad or any of the few figures from the third world glimpsed now and again in the film? Or does the emblem merely tie a text or a title and an image to the silent narration of the shot, thus conferring upon it a tension of image and language that may not have been so visible up to now? If the answer to the question is affirmative, the cartographic impulse of the camera is clear.

In a barely noticeable but uncharacteristic gesture Bernard exits from her side of the car, no doubt in order not to bump into the camera that peers through the window on his side and to keep the image of the dancing gypsy between them as they exit and enter the café. A dissolve brings the couple to a table. In the overlapping of the two shots the side window of the car draws a frame around the pair seated at a table, a cup of coffee before them, and what is surely, because of its oblong format, a regional Michelin map (perhaps of northwestern Burgundy) extended over its surface as if it were a tablecloth. They look down while, in the space of the dissolve, the three signs are retinally suspended in the image: the “cabine téléphonique” is set over a barkeep in the background, the restaurateur’s license over Jeanne’s face, and the Gitanes poster to her left. It melds into a mirror that reflects the horizontal line of the zinc surface of the bar and the backside of her head as she smiles, seated next to Bernard who gazes down at the map. A local character wearing a beret passes in front of them from right to left. The camera dollies forward into medium close-up to register Jeanne’s doubt and lingering perplexity— as well as her own beauty—as she looks at herself in the mirror before looking back at the map, and at Bernard, before he notices the presence of sunshine. The light prompts another departure now begun after the couple has studied the map.

The last sequence of the film is bound to the image of the Carte du Tendre. When the couple is again seated in the car and looks ahead through the windshield (seen from a three-quarter angle) the music of Brahms returns. Jeanne’s voice-off throws the time of the episode into limbo: “Ils partaient pour un long voyage dont ils connaissaient les incertitudes [They were leaving on a long journey of whose uncertainties they were well aware].” The voice-off continues as the car rolls. “Déja à l’heure dangereuse du petit matin, Jeanne avait douté d’elle. Elle avait peur, mais elle ne regrettait rien [Already, at the dangerous hour of dawn Jeanne had doubts about herself. She was afraid but held no regrets].” The camera pulls away from the car as she reconstructs in the third person the ambivalence and doubt of that moment in her life. Emerging into view is a landscape under a partly cloudy sky that is marked by a sign on the roadside (to the right) indicating “Vandenesse,” the little burg where they had stopped to sip a cup of coffee and get their bearings. It is the first of several signs that pass by. After it recedes, the car passes a stout white horse, a farm animal that would draw a plow, inattentive to the passing vehicle, which calmly grazes by the roadside. It disappears and to the left emerges the tower of a church piercing the broad expanse of the sky. The camera slowly pulls farther away and directly in front of the moving car. The long take of the shot recovers a landscape divided by the road but now marked by a visual trajectory that moves from the converging lines of the road to the church and upwards along those of its spire. Where the eyes of the personages look forward and are doubled by the headlights the viewer is tempted look into the landscape that recalls the bird’s-eye view of the map.

The ambivalence of the moment is conveyed in a spatial dynamic by which the pull to go forward wins over the view that would be led into the picturesque background. Yet the lingering figures of the road sign, horse, and church cannot fail to bring forward another relation, no less dynamic, through allusion to the end of Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (1950), a film literally framed by two road signs. It begins with a tracking shot from a vehicle that enters a country town called “Ambricourt” (in the Boulonnais) and ends, after the excruciatingly painful death of the young priest (who succumbs to stomach cancer) with a shot that passes by the road sign indicating that the traveler is exiting the town. On the sign is printed “Ambricourt,” but now, in the longstanding tradition of semaphores on French roads and highways, the toponym indicates that the traveler is leaving the place whose name is struck through by a red diagonal line. Ambricourt is put “sous rature” or under erasure. In Bresson’s adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s novel, what would have been a priest’s written representation of the life and times of the inhabitants of the little village as he encountered and gave himself—thus bringing salvation—to them is called in question. The project for a representation both of the contents of the novel and the film as unmediated or virginal image is subverted.

At the conclusion of Malle’s film it is clear that we are both in and outside of a religious curfew or pallor cast over the narrative and geographic space of Denon’s tale. The church in the background, its presence announced by the three crows of the rooster less than a minute before, recedes even though it is part of a configuration of vanishing points that persist in the image and in the story (aptly titled Point de lendemain). The church seems present to underscore the dangers of the itinerary made on the map. A transgression is made and is not made. Jeanne cuts through the barriers of an unwanted situation, but she is also simply on the road that leads ahead. The couple drives on a secular path of the kind, as any good edition of the Michelin vert would indicate, engineers in pre-Revolutionary France had built throughout the French provinces.¹⁴

The dialogue with Bresson leads further because in Les Amants the road sign marked “Vandenesse” is not barred by a line indicating exit, termination, or departure. The town disappears, but it is not stricken from the map of the movie. The name is left open and seems to dissolve into the landscape and clouds above. André Bazin astutely observed that in Bresson’s version of the Journal, textual matter, such as a geographic marker, is seen not in order to lend credibility to the film, but to call it in question.

The most moving moments of the film are rightly those in which the text is supposed to say exactly the same thing as the image, but because it says so in a different way. In fact the sound is never present to complete the event seen: it reinforces it and multiplies it as does a violin’s resonating box the vibrations of its cords. And even this metaphor is wanting in dialectics because it is less a resonance than the mind perceiving a gap like that of a color which is not superimposed on a drawing. And in this fringe the event liberates its meaning. It is because the film is entirely built over this relation that the image, especially toward the end, reaches such a degree of emotional power. (1999, 123)

In the final sequence of Les Amants “Vandenesse” disappears into the past but does not become oblivion. An ambiguous marker, like the figure of the gypsy on the Gitanes poster or the itinerary to and from “Tendre” and “Nouvelle Amitié” on the Carte du Tendre, the toponym signals movement that can be taken in various directions. In its name the viewer is tempted to hear Brahms’s violins by way of the metaphor Bazin coins to describe the end of Journal d’un curé de campagne. Malle literalizes the critic’s metaphor through the music accompanying the tracking shot of the car as it drives forward along the Burgundian road. The emotive power of Malle’s film is heard in the resonant notes of the violin, to be sure, but also in the automotive whir, a sort of white noise, of the little engine that powers Bernard’s “deux chevaux.” The car containing the two lovers literally doubles or passes the single horse grazing by the shoulder of the road.

The film becomes what in the introduction was called a cartographic “diagram” because it does not lead to a terminus or sum up a state of things past. Malle chooses not to let the end-credit, “Fin,” emerge from the landscape in a dissolve. The word that would be a vanishing point is not in the field of the image for the reason perhaps that it would otherwise not have allowed the road sign, the horse, or the church to bear the allusive meanings that they might seem to have. Against a black background, the white letters of the last word of the film occlude any converging lines of perspective. The ending reverses, too, the excruciating effects of closure that Bresson brought to the Journal. Bresson’s film terminates with the image of an indeterminate black cross on a white field. It becomes Bazin’s clearest manifestation of the reality of pure cinema: “Just as Mallarmé’s white page or Rimbaud’s silence is a supreme state of language, the screen void of images and rendered to literature here marks the triumph of cinematic realism. On the white cloth of the screen the black cross, maladroit as that of a death-notice, the only visible trace left by the Assumption of the image, attests to what its reality merely stood for” (1999, 124).¹⁵ Malle puts his word in white in smaller uppercase letters upon a black background that refuses to release any sign of development or closure. It is as matte and opaque as the map of the front-credits and of an enigma that a return to the Carte du Tendre would have severely obviated.

The viewer of Scudéry’s map in both Clélie and Les Amants is led to wonder how it figures in the dialectic of city and country or Paris and province. Paris does not figure anywhere on the Carte du Tendre, nor are any of its memorable places ever seen in Malle’s feature. Yet both the map and the film would have been most intensely seen and read in the capital. Would the effect have been one that displaces the country into the city? Would the sensuous landscapes and tracking shots along the roads of inner France, “la France profonde,” have the impact of a new discovery or an unforeseen rural encounter? If we displace the ambiance of the pre-Revolutionary era as it is felt in Denon’s tale into the landscape of Les Amants a new cartography comes into view. During much of the Enlightenment new roads were built to radiate, like spokes of a wheel, from the hub of Paris. A colonial mission was felt to inhere in roadbuilding, but at the same time there developed an “erotics of space,” the discovery, rapt, and rape of what was taken to be a landscape of pleasure, novelty, and also of fear, that in order to be controlled was quickly taken to personify the feminine character of the nation (Certeau, Julia, and Revel 1975, 158).

Malle’s camera rehearses the dialectic in plotting unforeseen itineraries through a countryside bristling with life. Accompanying the hum of Bernard’s 2CV are warbling birds and a distant buzz of cicadas. Living and palpitating, the landscape is discovered in all of its tender vitality as the personages make their way through it. And so does the camera when it takes to the road and discovers what topographers and writers had found when they ventured, like new lovers, at once within and out of the confines of their cities and châteaus. If the nation is mapped as might the geography of the comely body of “France” the viewer wonders if indeed the navel would be Paris and the torso and appendages the provinces. In order to test the validity of such an unlikely allegory and prosopopoeia we can return to Truffaut, the director whose early cinema willfully confused its origins with the capital city, mother, and nation.