‘Neige’ Review: Juliet Berto and Jean-Henri Roger’s Moving Vision of Social Solidarity

The recent retrospective of Juliet Berto’s acting work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents an artist who occupied the forefront of both formal and ideological reimaginings of the medium during her lifetime. An icon of the French New Wave for her roles in landmark films by Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard, she also regularly lent her presence to works of radical leftist filmmaking from directors such as Robert Kramer and Marin Karmitz. Neige, Berto’s 1981 directorial debut made in collaboration with her partner Jean-Henri Roger, bears the influence of these artists and synthesizes them into something entirely its own, a playful and unpretentious work that nonetheless retains a fierce political anger.

The title of the film—which translates to Snow in English—refers to heroin, the drug around which much of the plot revolves. Berto stars as Anita, a bartender in Paris’s racy Pigalle district whose committed to protecting Bobby (Ras Paul Nephtali), a young Black drug dealer (and addict) whom she’s essentially raised since childhood, from the predation of police narcs.

The film quickly accumulates a cast of eccentric characters around Anita, including the gentle street preacher Jocko (Robert Liensol), her Hungarian karate-enthusiast boyfriend Willy (Jean-François Stévenin), and taxi driver turned informant Bruno (Paul Le Person). Neige’s ensemble cast, vivid location shooting, and improvisatory style point to Rivette’s influence, but the forces that the characters find themselves up against aren’t the shadowy, nameless conspiracies that so often hang just beyond the edges of that auteur’s frames. They’re simply the realities of marginalized people living in a racist police state, and the filmmakers track the clash of personal emotions and social prejudices with a keenly perceptive, empathetic eye.

The Pigalle of Neige is largely one of queer people, sex workers, immigrants, and drug addicts, a community that the filmmakers are more than happy to hang around as the machinations of the plot slowly unfold. One might accuse Berto and Roger’s gaze of being touristic, but the lived-in textures of the film’s world and the inner lives provided to its characters speaks to an investment that never stoops to easy martyrdom. Berto’s character moves through Neige as if carrying the entire weight of its struggles on her shoulder—not as a victim but as someone who constantly feels the need to use her relative good standing and privilege to protect those around her. Even as the film’s bold colors and relaxed camerawork capture a vibrant community, the sense of fear and uncertainty inherent to life on the edges of society is impossible to escape.

Those fears are manifested in the two bumbling, malicious narcotics detectives who gain information from Bruno with the promise of paroling his wife, who’s in prison for murdering the dealer who supplied their son with the drugs he overdosed on. Neige looks with clear-eyed horror at the moments when the ambient social violence that hangs over the proceedings becomes brutally immediate. The film’s back half, which mostly follows the characters’ attempts to procure a fix for Betty (Nini Crépon), a transgender woman going through life-threatening withdrawals, offers its own model for resistance through the bonds of friendship.

This idea represents Berto and Roger’s main achievement in Neige: the reorienting of the Hawksian cinematic ideal—a group of peers banding together in the face of oblivion—to a deeply moving vision of solidarity. Rivette similarly bent the Hawksian ensemble to his own ends, but those ends were largely mysterious, creating layer upon meta-cinematic layer by calling attention to the theatrical nature of the ensemble itself. Berto’s vision is much angrier and more direct, but in retaining Hawks and Rivette’s casual hangout atmosphere, it more honestly casts the courage of its characters as an everyday necessity rather than an invented idea of heroism.

At times, Neige may even be too casual. It never quite achieves the dramatic precision of, say, Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings and Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, and its images are never as charged as, say, Pierre Clementi’s In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal, another 1981 film from an actor-director about French heroin subculture beset by police violence. But in moments like the heartbreaking scene between Betty and Anita, where Betty describes her first heroin high as “the impression we had lived only for that moment” before referring to herself as a “synthetic thing,” the film’s hard-won humanism belongs only to itself.