What could be more eloquent than the fate of a bunch of middle-aged friends to analyze the changes of an era and tell their progressive disenchantment? By making these three films, the American filmmakers Lawrence Kasdan, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet have in any case brilliantly seized on the subject.
“Friends First”, by Lawrence Kasdan (1983)
They lost sight of each other. The fault of love, family, profession. To life, in short. And then this unexpected but predictable call that they dreaded without wanting to admit to themselves. One of them killed himself. Suddenly. Brutally. Without a word and without a farewell … This is the starting point of the Friends first, by Lawrence Kasdan (1983), republished by BQHL Éditions. French title almost joyful thanks to Georges Brassens, but which, in the original version, is much more serious: The Big Chill (Le Grand Frisson).
This is what the friends of the deceased feel, the time of a weekend that they decide to spend together. No vitriolic settling of scores on the part of the scenario writer – as will conceive it, years later, a Thomas Vintenberg in Firm. But a series of short scenes, like flashes. Often caustic on those who have become caricatures (the star of a successful TV series). But moving on the left-behind (the guy who came back helpless from Vietnam). The most interesting remains, however, the dead girl’s very young girlfriend, whom the others regard with heartbroken condescension. With her incongruous reactions, it is she who is right, she who is about to live her life in the face of those who fear they have already lost it …
A little funny anecdote: the dead man, whose body we see at the very beginning, during a surprising scene, is played by a (future) star, Kevin Costner. He was involved in many flashbacks, all deleted during the editing. To be forgiven, Lawrence Kasdan offered the actor, two years later, the main role of his western Silverado…
“Georgia”, d’Arthur Penn (1981)
We were and we stayed with the bourgeois in Friends first. The heroes of Georgia (1981) are the sons of workers (like Steve Tesich, the screenwriter). But Arthur Penn’s words are similar to those of Lawrence Kasdan: to describe, over a decade, the evolution of America in the 1960s. Because he comes from a nation deprived of liberty, Yugoslavia, the hero is persists in seeing in his adopted country a Promised Land. And the filmmaker’s talent consists in making the slow disillusionment of his three young people, constantly generous and warm, in love with a pretty eccentric who will marry one, have a child in the second and go, ultimately, to live with the third, that she will never stop loving …
The whole film – a jewel that has not aged a bit – is exhilarating. If this is not the brutal episode, admirably staged, where a businessman, odious and incestuous, massacres his daughter during the reception which follows the marriage of the latter … With humor, Arthur Penn entrusts the role of bastard to James Leo Herlihy, figure of the counter-culture, friend of Tennessee Williams, activist against the Vietnam war and author of the novel Macadam Cowboy, adapted for the cinema by John Schlesinger in 1969. It is impressive there.
“The Group”, by Sidney Lumet (1966)
The cruelest of the three is Sidney Lumet in The group (1966). The action takes place in the early 1930s, as America rebounded from the long crisis that followed the Great Depression. Among the enthusiasts who believe in a better future, eight women – all young, graduates and ambitious – will come up against obstacles stubbornly imagined by the novelist Mary McCarthy (big publishing success in the early 1960s) and that Sidney Lumet will align with a sort of quiet desperation. Thus the provincial (Joan Hackett, formidable), humiliated by a dandy writer, she ends up alcoholic with a man older than her. The feminist Democrat (Elizabeth Hartman) finds herself enslaved by a stubborn and Republican husband, in the name of her motherhood. And the seemingly obsessed (Joanna Pettet) misses being locked up in the mad by her husband – another draw!
One could dread a backward-looking and outdated film. But his words could in many ways adapt to the current challenges. Like Lawrence Kasdan in Friends first and Arthur Penn in Georgia, Lumet, in fact, observes the progressive disenchantment – inevitable? – of each generation faced with the vagaries of life. The time it takes for a utopia to be born, to expand, to die out. And to reappear, even more beautiful, always more desirable.
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