The Plough Review: A Family Affair Haunted by the Ghosts of French Cinema’s Past

Philippe Garrel’s The Plough is a minor addition to the iconic filmmaker’s oeuvre. In the end, its pleasures are closely tied to its shortcomings, as the film shows us once again that failing at monogamy in France is no tragedy deserving of a scarlet letter, but rather the inevitable consequence of trying to domesticate desire. The film doesn’t go much beyond the rehashing of that cliché, going through the motions that comprise it in a purposefully matter-of-fact way to suggest that French relationships are all a predictable, and slightly hilarious, farce. And much like the art of puppeteering that brings a family together, this propensity to take love more seriously than betrayal is transmitted from one generation to the next.

At the center of The Plough is a puppeteering troupe consisting of Louis (Louis Garrel), his sisters Martha (Esther Garrel) and Lena (Lena Garrel), their father (Aurélien Recoing), and their grandmother (Francine Bergé). Joining their ranks is Pieter (Damien Mongin), a friend of Louis’s whose true calling is painting. Peter has just had a child with Hélène (Mathilde Weil) and needs some quick cash, and after cheating on her with Laura (Asma Messaoudene), a temporary player for the troupe, he’s amicably asked to move out of his home. But, then, Louis pursues Hélène and starts a relationship with her, and when Louis reveals this to Pieter there’s no drama, just a tacit agreement that love is a moving train, and nobody owns anybody’s heart.

Garrel’s films often straddle a fine line between homage to and mimicry of French cinema’s crown jewels, mainly the work of Éric Rohmer and Jean Eustache. They suggest attempts at updating the ur-texts that comprise the fantasy of Paris as a haven for heterosexual love done right. That is, love where drama is disarmed by being interwoven into the fabric of everyday life, and where lovers seduce and are seduced through erudition and effortless cool.

Within this dynamic, which makes up the Parisian myths toward which Garrel, Rohmer, Eustache, and many others gravitate, men and women come together with passion and eventually let go of each other—though not before starting to see other people. They savor bodies without hang-ups and nonchalantly engage in existential musings. Perhaps they spend the night together, and the next day the man fetches croissants at the bakery while the woman looks beautifully disheveled, without an ounce of makeup on her face. When the bonds break, there will be some suffering but no moralistic demands, because there’s still more pleasure to be had elsewhere, in the arms of other lovers. The cycle, then, starts all over again.

Not every part of this trajectory occurs in The Plough, but they all haunt the world that Garrel concocts. Those parts worked to perfection in In the Shadow of Women, what with its carefully calibrated mix of homage and mimicry as it grappled with the truisms of love, French-style, evoking Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore along the way. In The Plough, though, Garrel tones down the pathos and exaggerates the humor, mostly through the figure of an increasingly senile grandmother and the depiction of Pieter as a pathetically self-obsessed, failed artist.

For a film that counts three of Garrel’s children as part of the main cast, it’s surprising how little emotion it all displays. Plot twists involving a succession of deaths in the family and a storm that destroys the puppetry set, ruining their business, feel flat, even implausible. But the sort of gravitas that seems necessary for the most satisfying of French clichés to amount to playful reworkings, not tired repetitions, does make a few appearances throughout The Plough.

In a brief dialogue between Martha and Lena, one proposes to add a modern flavor to their puppet theater shows, while the other believes that nothing is more modern than performing the classics. In another sequence, the grandmother is being buried and Louis uses a pocketknife to unscrew the Christian cross adorning her coffin, throwing it away in an attempt to do justice to the grandmother, who was an atheist. Here, a bewildering gesture does all the talking.

And in the most poetic moment from the film, but also its most short-lived, Garrel flirts with a dimension so nuanced and unpreoccupied with storytelling that it’s as though it were lifted from a Roy Andersson film. In what feels like a parenthetical sequence, or interlude, Pieter and Martha stage a street performance during which their puppets gaze at a storefront window. One puppet asks the other what they’re looking at. “Nothing,” says one puppet, before it asks the other puppet what it sees, to which the answer is “everything.”