Melissa Anderson
For the man from nowhere, leaving is best: a young Parisian sojourns to Tunisia, where he was born, and finds few answers in Guy Gilles’s beguiling 1970 film.
Patrick Jouané as Pierre in Earthlight. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
Earthlight, written and directed by Guy Gilles, Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York City, March 6, 2025
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A filmmaker completely new to me, Guy Gilles, who died in 1996, has had no shortage of posthumous sobriquets bestowed upon him, from “the secret child of the New Wave” to “the Proust of the New Wave.” The author of In Search of Lost Time was a lodestar for Gilles, most obviously in his Proust, l’art et la douleur (Proust, Art and Pain), a docufiction that aired on French television in 1971. But more subtly, the towering writer’s influence on the director is evidenced by Gilles’s keen interest in memory: its hazards, it pleasures, its lability. These themes animate Earthlight (La claire de terre), Gilles’s lush, wistful third feature from 1970, which tracks the wanderings of Pierre (Patrick Jouané), a listless twenty-one-year-old Parisian who returns to Tunis, where he was born. (The special one-night-only screening at Anthology next Thursday is cohosted by the Paris film collective La Clef Revival.)
Patrick Jouané as Pierre in Earthlight. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
The past is evoked in nearly every scene, quite unmistakably in the opening, as a birdlike tour guide (Élina Labourdette) leads a group of sightseers through the Marais, one of the few districts in Paris to have escaped Haussmannization in the nineteenth century. Reflecting on the neighborhood’s iterations, the docent, in her lofty, singsong speech, proclaims, “Laughing, crying—time goes by anyway.” The expedition concludes at the Place des Vosges, where three fashionable youths—Pierre and his pals Michel (Jacques Zanetti) and Jeanne (Carole Lange)—sit on a park bench, amused by the cicerone’s rhetorical flourishes. As they discuss Pierre’s imminent departure, the segment unfolds as a fragmented, disjointed montage. One moment, for example, the camera alights on a little boy sitting near the trio; next, we see a close-up of his ear, followed by another tight shot of the red and blue stripes of his shirt. This editing motif repeats throughout Earthlight, highlighting isolated shards of time that, in their own unpredictable way, cohere into a prismatic whole.
Patrick Jouané as Pierre and Annie Girardot as Maria in Earthlight. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
Matching the elliptical style of the filmmaking is the cryptic nature of Earthlight’s protagonist. Details and backstory about Pierre emerge slowly and often indirectly. Only deep into the film do we learn that Pierre left Tunisia—where his musician parents were born, raised, and married—at age six, shortly after his mother’s death; he and his father, still in mourning for his wife, have lived in a gloomy flat in the Marais ever since. As for what the young man hopes to find in his birthplace, he doesn’t specify, simply declaring, “Leaving is best for me.” On his last day in the French capital, he stops by the respective workplaces of two middle-agers: a woman antiques dealer, a man in publishing. Each gives him a wad of banknotes and a sensual caress. Is Pierre a sex worker? Whether or not they’re his clients is never answered, yet Pierre appears to be a regular at the strange hustler bar in Pigalle where he and Michel have drinks later that night. Like much about Pierre, his sexuality seems unclassifiable, though the young man leans toward gerontophilia: on a detour to the provinces to visit the fortyish Maria (Annie Girardot), a family friend, Pierre is moved to passionately kiss the recent widow. (Grieving spouses, suffering from too many memories, abound in Earthlight.)
Edwige Feuillère as Mme Larivière and Patrick Jouané as Pierre in Earthlight. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
While who or what Pierre desires remains unclear, who desires him—or, more specifically, the performer playing him—is never in doubt. Gilles met Jouané in 1963 during the making of the director’s first feature, L’amour à la mer (Love at Sea), in which the actor has a bit part as a sailor. The two were lovers and collaborators for many years; their working relationship ended with Nuit docile (1987), which also marked Jouané’s final onscreen performance. (The actor, who died in 1999, appears as a talking head in a documentary tribute to Gilles from that same year directed by the filmmaker’s brother, Luc Bernard.) The camera—Gilles also served as Earthlight’s director of photography—delectates in every physical aspect of Jouané, who bears an uncanny resemblance to River Phoenix. Even a tendril of the jeune homme’s umber bob is filmed with utmost ravishment.
Edwige Feuillère as Mme Larivière and Patrick Jouané as Pierre in Earthlight. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
Gilles, like Earthlight’s central character, was a white Frenchman originally from the Maghreb: he was born into a Jewish family in Algiers in 1938 and arrived in Paris in 1960, two years before Algeria won its independence from the metropole. During Pierre’s sojourn in Tunisia, which broke free of French rule in 1956, he recalls very little from his childhood there. But he seeks out someone who seems to remember everything: Mme Larivière (Gallic icon Edwige Feuillère), a neighbor from the Tunis days, who arrived from Limoges in 1936 and has stayed put in the North African country. The brutal legacy of colonization is gingerly broached: Mme Larivière, a retired schoolteacher, makes halting reference to “hard times” following ’58, the year after Tunisia declared itself a republic. “My head’s full of memories; that’s why I never get bored,” she gleefully boasts to Pierre. The question lingers as to how many of those rosy recollections are the result of strenuously forgetting more baleful realities.
Patrick Jouané as Pierre in Earthlight. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
Pierre declares himself “the man from nowhere,” at home neither in France nor Tunisia, most at ease when he knows he’s leaving one location for another. While his lack of attachment to place may leave him perpetually adrift, it also affords him a kind of freedom, untethered from sentimentality. He will never be doomed to fetishize the past, unlike his father, unlike Mme Larivière, unlike a bearded habitué of that seedy Pigalle boîte who utters, “The district’s changing, it’s not like before. What fun we had.” While not beholden to memory, Pierre knows he’s not impervious to time. He hears clocks chiming everywhere, and, while crossing a bridge over the Seine, is moved to tears when he listens to a woman singing about all the quotidian actions that make up a day. This doleful yet beguiling film ends with a title card that reads simply “To be continued,” perhaps the most optimistic way of saying “Laughing, crying—time goes by anyway.”
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published this year by Film Desk Books.