Disgust. A conversation about the character Anaïs in Anaïs in Love, French 2021 film directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

― Anais Nin

Disgust. A conversation about the character  Anaïs in  Anaïs in Love, French 2021 film directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet.

Why talk about disgust? Conflicting meanings and reasons why disgust is powerful and socially bonding and considered moral whereas I have reframed it, from embodied feelings to consider it as a feeling that is unethical.

Disgust means to me someone who has behaved in a way that disgusts me. They have done something that denies conversation as well as defies my own questioning regarding their self-entitlement to behave in a certain way in a social setting. Their defiance doesn’t present me with creative energy nor an opening to question my own bias nor subjectivity. The behaviour is a barrier and invalidates future acts that might change society or provide happiness and relief from the ordinary. This “barrier” feeling, meaning no potential, depth nor possibility for transformation (either the act the person has done nor my thinking to attempt to reframe) is like stopping a stream needing constant motion to cleanse, renew and explore. Invalidation is one concept I have considered to discuss the inner feelings of disgust.

The barrier is a blocking, a wall that behaviour “behaves” (I think I’m trying to reach the moment of feeling like stating a world that worlds, or a lack that lacks) to control me and my own needs.  And the behaviour invalidates my safety and expectations in a community. Some people simply live in a way that’s disgusting and their treatment of others (their well being, need for safety, enjoyment, and social cohesion or intelligence with empathy or awareness of alterity and diverse interests).

Disgust isn’t moral for me it’s ethical and for me it pushes me and my inner being. Disgust, feeling that disgust is another psychosocial attempt to control. I feel controlled by the barriers that feeling arouses. It’s an attachment that’s perverse or against my own nature. This is unethical for me.

Disgust becomes a feeling of oppression and the oppressiveness of the other that determines me and wishes only to subjugate, control and dominate. Their perspective is the only one. The wish to dement; or to repeat their behaviour to produce and reproduce their social, what disgusts me, as the only access to the social. The oppressive feelings is that unethical, felt disgust. It’s not moral, for me, because I have repositioned myself through questioning as the one the disgusting or act of behaving in a certain way can’t stand and determines to overpower and defy their own discomfort and feelings (immaturity, for example as well alienation and isolation from their group) to cast aside any connection to rule or control.

One film that reveals an example of this (I have experienced this in  many situations) is 2021 French film Anaïs in Love directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet. I couldn’t stand the immaturity of the young main character Anaïs. Her selfish, self-centred pursuit of whatever she wanted and with disregard to others’ feelings was, I assume, a perspective of French freedom and sexual liberation. I usually attempt to consider other perspectives offered to me through film narratives, and almost accepted her older female (played by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) lovers’ approach that she needed to express herself. Her allure was her energy and free nature. But when Anaïs didn’t get her own way I didn’t find this freedom. I simply thought her immaturity was disgusting and unethical. She was selfish. The film, like the title explored female sexual expression and attraction. I did consider the erotic stories of the author with the same name  Anaïs Nin and this quote from her writing: 

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings”.

 My feeling of disgust revealed more about my own sense of identity and love as well as my values: that  Anaïs in the film didn’t know how to replenish, she simply took. Her character, I felt, lacked social development and love that would end up alone simply because sexual attraction would wither with her need to feel free without connections. A strange feeling. The questions that might be better explored through French philosophy about freedom and whether Sartre’s often quoted assertion “Man is condemned to be free” might suggest that Anaïs’ freedom for me was a condemnation that was unethical or disgusting because it was individual and selfish because of her lack of acceptance. Her need to impress herself and feel wanted oppressed others’ needs.

For me, the character drained the sources of others’ generosity or sexual attraction to her and love never really matured nor developed as a way to understand and connect with people. Disgust, beyond abject physical repulsion or rejection, becomes part of the discussion about maturity and community not simply a power of horror oppressing diversity or differences that is generally accepted as a moral attitude towards control and social meanings of disgust.

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Mimicry and imitation: Paris etc 2017 (French language tv series).

Mimicry and imitation: Paris etc 2017 (French language tv series).

Why do women imitate other women? 

The young woman from Alsace, her flatmates’ “favourite fascist!” travelled to Paris to learn to cook (or become a chef?) in a busy Parisian kitchen. She arrived with long blonde bland hair, engaged, young and a National Party supporter because her family believed “migrants are taking all the jobs from French nationals”. Her flatmates questioned this because they asked, What does it mean to be French in the 21st Century? Allison, neither a Parisian nor a German from Alsace (something the region is known for is it’s location as well as cultural differences) was altered: after her first sexual encounter and then moving on to a young female chef she changed and looked more like the other female chef: short, edgy haircut, eye brow piercing, tattoo fresh on her neck with black liquid eyeliner her “look” from the innocent, countryside transformed by Parisian life and social interactions. Her ideals remained the same. She couldn’t accept the body of the other woman and she couldn’t communicate this justly: she felt repulsed because “she didn’t know how to express herself with the woman”. The other woman, hurt and emotionally distressed, responded with depth to the still seemingly naive “fascist” Where was her emotional connection to herself and to others?

Imitation comes from many sources: sexual attraction constructed through cinema, social media, and magazines as well as the home and other social institutions (education, religion, etc). How was she to unlearn her socialisation process and reframe her future and her needs as a young person? 

Paris, after their own terrorism attack is discovering the “etc” throughout this film and through diverse perspectives – age, relationships, gender, professions, etc. Who does this young woman imitate to discover Paris? Not a local and not quite foreign in the capital she explores as a tourist with an extended stay. What is Paris to us, the outsider? Are they used to the camera gazing at them, longing for the stereotype romance and the black and white photograph by Robert Doisneau The kiss by the Hotel De ville that sealed it from the outsider’s perspective: the romance. The lifestyle. The language. The philosopher and the revolutions (with refusal and the underground). Imitation and why we do it intrigues many psychologists and their research. Mimicry, simply put, works like a social glue and indicates a person wants to be as admired as the one they imitate. It also promotes social bonding and cohesion. Allison changed her look to belong and to explore within a social group. The critics suggest it’s because some people have no personality nor identity of their own and lack the confidence to create their own identity within a social group. 

What is Allison? And the people who visit Paris? What are they seeking? My approach to this is to question and not accept a fixed response; with flexibility I explore other films/books with  similar outcomes reported like, the ordinary women who followed Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (loose memoir) approach to letting go, eating a culture and finding love somewhere other than America. More exotic? More likely a holiday romance? Or spontaneous and accidental finding of one’s self, a travel writer, someplace else. Neither local nor superficial tourist, What is found and What is lost?

Single White Female syndrome, named after the American film, labelled the disorder that imitates beyond normal limits or spectrum: the aggressive, murderous approach to mimicry and imitation of a “look” and identity to experience life beyond the person’s ordinary – past issues – and present problems. Imitation, in this instance is obsession and the compulsion to do harm reveals the dark side of envy and extreme jealousy. French films often (at least the thinking ones) offer the spectator ways to experience sexual jealousy beyond murderous intentions. They know it happens and, for some writers, the educational aspect of conversation and acceptance becomes the philosophy and the attraction to the French culture in films. Paris, etc revealed complications and relationships that weren’t perfect.

The red balloon that the artist made brought my thinking back into film theory’s history: the 1956 French film by Albert Lamorisse, The Red Balloon. A child’s need for hope as well as innocence through the eyes of the child. The artist created a much larger red balloon and we see, driving through the streets of Paris the excited eyes of the onlookers – like tourists visiting – all had an innocent and hopeful look on their faces: joy and simple fun finding this red balloon travelling through Paris to the artist’s destination. The hope for the young girl from Alsace? That her innocent approach to finding work was questioned: that her political ideals fit for Weimar Germany and the entrance into the world arena of Nazism because so many suffered poverty,  unemployment and starvation after WWI and weren’t without social credibility because all nationals believe they deserve protection and financial security as well as question: is violence or neglect of who we are as people a problem that institutionalised poverty and the acceptance of unemployment as simply racially motivated? Like the Stolen Generation in Australia, many have suffered the politics within the foundations that construct the institutions and the mimicry and imitation that socially bonds people to a group and group acceptance. The young male band, the flat mates with their beautiful French song singing the spelling of Amour L’amour en toutes lettres by Les Nouveaux Garçons (Unfortunately the O and the Story of O once they sung this and the translation appeared, I thought of Pauline Réage‘s novel, 1954 The Story of O, and the disturbing elements of SadoMasochism unwanted in my image of amour or love. The less than innocent Alsace moment becoming sordid and questioned simply because of translation and my educational past I brought to viewing to frame this scene) brought a balance to the imitation and mimicry: they experienced their political life as well as their music as local, a group as well as a moment or experience that we can’t get access to: theirs. 

We all need to have self-expression and a group – psychologists and sociologists argue. And we all need to feel our story validated. Imitation does annoy some people and occasionally is flattery. It’s the way we explore expressing this annoyance and acceptance that makes the difference to deepening social connections. For me, the references within my writing that have appeared again from discussing this film are from remembering Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Tati (especially the Kleptomaniac in the department store) just as much as I would have liked to have discovered more of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s influence in contemporary French cinema. This series didn’t appeal to me immediately and of course, I remained to uncover the questions as well as suggestions that the French cinema often offers to the spectator. Of course, complicating the story is the Tahitian man who states quite clearly “I hate Paris”. He is Tahitian and French speaking and prefers Tahiti. He doesn’t see the romance nor desire to be the tourist. He has contempt – not like Godard – and reveals another lover, a way to love that doesn’t fit Paris.

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Mrs. Lowry and Son, 2019, director Adrian Noble.

Mrs Lowry and Son, 2019, director Adrian Noble.

I knew nothing about L.S Lowry prior to watching this film. I still don’t claim to be an expert, like some I watched with. They knew all – from the film and other articles – they made their claim. This knowledge was theirs: they knew. I sat silently listening to them. I was silenced by the film, not by their knowledge. I felt strange. L.S. Lowry was painted in a light that was grey and sensitive. His mother, insensitive to his existence, abused and neglected him. He remained loyal, looking after her – is this care? I wandered off from the chatter, and thought about care. What if I was bedridden, who would take care of me and how would it be done? The cruelty that was and became the life L.S Lowry on film was difficult. Feminist theory has argued that women need re-education and care to change and develop away from the financial dependence that patriarchy had imposed. Some feminists suggest that men need the education and the impossibility, like Shirley Valentine suggests, marriage is “like peace in the Middle East: There is no solution”. The mother-son relation was seen, through my eyes, a pleasure for the mother to feel touched when her hair was brushed and flattered into a childish stupor when a neighbour paid her attention. This girlish performance of admiration and adoration was short lived.

Mrs Lowry complained of her middle class upbringing and the shame of living “working class” (and on borrowed, creditors money for these complaints!) She belittled and demoralised her deceased husband and son. She ranted that she never wanted a son or child. SHe abused him for his need to paint what he saw: factories, stooped workers dressed in grey and their stories. She abused him for this obscenity to her sensibility: sailing boats, once admired by the neighbour, became the focal point. Dirty factories and ugly portraits were as shameful as his poor position in the workforce. Mrs Lowry didn’t – in the film – connect with her son and his diversity: art was not a hobby. Art was who he was and how he experienced his world. His mother wanted him to see a doctor for this appeal and self-expression. I didn’t claim to know like those around me “knew”. I felt the director and writer offered me a path to feel empathy for an artist and their struggles within their family and with society. For this knowledge, the gift of connecting with someone, was important. I couldn’t know L.S. Lowry or claim this. I did feel angry that someone was treated this way because of wealth and class. I did connect with his feelings of invalidation: the cruel anxiety that the mother threw away from herself at him through harsh, critical words to set herself in a place above him and of authority was something I have researched in education, the arts, and through psychology research.

Mrs Lowry reminded me of a lecture about generalised anxiety: how this impacts on the way people believe they are being viewed by others and their reality. Often distorted, generalised anxiety locks people up – metaphorically – in their homes and away from gatherings because of anxiety. They don’t enjoy public speaking and they find relief through avoidance. Mrs Lowry locked her son up in her own class anxiety. Instead of going outside and simply enjoying a day – beyond class distinctions there’s always the sunshine or feeling of rain or interacting with a milkman or butcher. Mrs Lowry chose to demoralise all of these. What did she fear the most? Looking like a poorer woman or not having the civil awareness to interact with people as humans? I saw her as a cruel, fear filled woman ageing in her bed and delighting only in the touch of her son. Her loneliness was cruel. Her class upbringing made her this cold, and lonely. 

Posthumously, L.S Lowry was offered a Knighthood and he turned it down. Unlike most who enjoy the fame and spotlight, the film offered us some insight: his mother was no longer living so he didn’t need to accept the gesture. He painted what he saw: the outside world is what I have briefly noticed in his artwork. Factories, red doors and stooped people dressed in blacks and greys. Head down, walking, moving, not leisurely resting. Leisure time was not present in his paintings. Or was the walk something more for this class of workers? Did some, like him, have another life we can’t know beyond the soot, the debt and their stoop?

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

The gift of imperfection: laughter. A short discussion.

Thunderstorms and heavy rain have dampened the once traditional Australian Christmas: off to the beach for a picnic or in the backyard for a BBQ. Humour has always been a part of my own family’s tradition and choosing films to watch – like the ritual and the feeling of Christmas has arrived – like A Christmas Story (1983) and the Australian film Crackers (1998) are one tradition with the inclusion of more darker stories like the Finnish film Rare Exports (2010) I enjoy: accepting imperfection and laughing instead of crying over warped stars on top of hacked trees with bickering relatives and distant intimacy. 

A BBQ with a flamed dog, a Chinese spontaneous Christmas dinner because the dogs ate the turkey or simply the horror entrance of evil Santa cracks the seriousness of the day. A Christmas Story with a narrator, a BB Gun and children delighted my mother just as much as all hands helping delighted her for an easy Christmas day. She laughed and watching and participating in my own mother’s laughter was a gift and supported accepting imperfections, distance and tough times whether with her or throughout life. Ralphie was the story that became a part of ours. Their let downs and disappointments as well as problem-solving techniques revealed the fissures, cracks and need to accept diversity and imperfection in our lives. I have looked on at those who are determined with perfect images for Christmas with a chuckle: what if their star went up in flames, How would they cope?

A dysfunctional Australian family produced some thoughts and memories of BBQ’s, one lane travel behind caravans slow and wide, as well as the occasional infidelity that destroys others’ perfect stories about visiting family and keeping up appearances. The working class humour is enjoyable and distant from the reality that agitates and anxiously denies – a few stories of seriousness when getting it wrong leading to almost murderous endings because humiliation is often the downside of working class consciousness in other settings. 

Laughter is grounding and satisfying. I haven’t needed excess wealth for that. I have had a floor where a dance teacher once reminded her class “The floor is your friend!” And that thought, her laughter, finds me grounded in my own imperfection and cracking laugh. The earth and gravity is your friend, your centre and centre-point for feeling and joining with the music. It has a history beyond humanity and holds the keys to sustainability and relationships – if we open ourselves to this friendship. 

I have lived through fires, floods and water restrictions and the people around me have retained a sense of community and humour within their own circles and lives. The floor forthat dancer was the earth mother, was her connection to spirituality, future, present and past. The floor gave her strength no matter what age and was to remind women (no men present at the time) that they weren’t ballet dancers ethereal in flight, and that didn’t matter. They were requested to feel and to feel grounded and loved by themselves and the earth. Like laughter and experiencing that in the family home, dance grounds and accepting mortality. 

Connecting is, like the title Crackers suggests, a pulling the Christmas cracker together as well as a little mad or “crackers”. The madman or the mad in these films hold a lantern, or light, to shine into our lives to remind us to live and feel alive accepting imperfection, feeling the ground and gravity’s pull.  

© Cate Andrews, 2023.

There is a voice crying in the wilderness…

A discussion of Zingarina’s dance from the film Transylvania (2006) (6 different languages spoken in the film) directed by Tony Gatlif with reference to Hélène Cixous & Catherine Clément’s (1986) writings The Newly Born Woman and abreaction.

“There is a voice crying in the wilderness … the voice of a body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? It is, they say, the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage” – Sarah M. Gilbert (1986).

There is a scene in the film Transylvania that offers us a glimpse into a woman’s dance, Zingarina, that seems to combine a knowledge of Greek dancing (plate smashing) and Flamenco wrist rolls. Some research suggests that ancient Greeks smashed plates in an act to achieve kefi (good spirits and joy) as well as warding off evil spirits and to bring good luck in celebrations (such as weddings). A symbol of new beginnings and for the western viewer a release from female duties (the washing up). The sensuousness of Raqs Shaki, or the connection to Arab influences and imagined, is also present. Zingarina dances fear and desire, passion, remembrance and a body that transcends time and transgresses rational meanings. No good fortune comes from this dance. The plates smashed belong to the dark continent of intense sadness and the active engagement – that is foreign to us – of the body-in-action living through grief.

She is dancing her rejection, her alcohol releasing her hysteria and what looks to be an attempt to release herself from her repressive culture. Catherine Clément wrote a tale about a Tarantella, a story of women dancing in “a ferocious festival of metamorphosis… with a tragic happiness.. an interlude of orgasmic freedom” (Gilbert, 1986, pxi). Outside of the law, the familial structure and society, Zingarina’s dance becomes her shriek – not from her mouth, but from her desire to release her body from her sexual desire that has been refused and rejected by her unborn baby’s father. Gilbert (1986) writes, “The hysteric, who lives her body in the past, who transforms it into a theater for forgotten scenes, bears witness to a lost childhood that survives in suffering” (1986, pxii).

For Freud and Breuer, “at the center of this theater of catharsis” is abreaction. Clément and Cixous’ writings suggest that a silenced woman, her repression and suffering, participates in dance to take an interlude and express wild. abandon and orgasmic freedom in style of an exorcism. Abreaction “Emotional discharge through which the subject liberates himself from the affect connected to the memory of a traumatic event, thus permitting it to not become or remain pathogenic” (1986, 15-16). Zingarina’s act brings out the trauma of her loss and through her dance this appears and does not achieve resolution or catharsis. Her living and daily acts need to provide this in her final achievement of ridding the past that possesses her: the birth of her child at the end of the film. This is the cathartic moment: we might imagine the hysterics body bathed in light as catharsis and woman reborn from dancing, shrieking and through milk and blood.

Zingarina’s pain and suffering appears flamenco-like in structure. Her arms raise and she rolls her wrists. She turns on her body and looks no-one in the eyes. Her drunkenness possesses her. Her body is foreign to us: the depth of pain seems “hysterically possessed by a nameless Master” and there is no spoken language to soothe her or to spoken by her to relieve her pain (Gilbert, 1986, xii). Her dance is one of painful loss. And it reveals her childhood that survives in suffering; following other scenes of imagined meeting between herself and her past lover and the intensity we witness: she, like a very young child who brings toys to their mouth to explore their world, taste it and own it, longs to taste, hold and touch – engulf – her lover. The dancer’s body is “located in the past” and cannot at that point in time move forward, or step out of into the present beyond the emotional pull to the past. The discharage of emotions necessary for abreaction, or liberation, is still caught in life and lived passion.

The flamenco-like approach to movement sets up a sequence that reveals the archaic or primordial shaman or witch approach to the spectacle of magic and illness. The dance is a métissage, a mix and fusion of cultural influences that brings us to acknowledge Zingarina’s authentic or genuine felt experience that fuses her awareness of her body with the music to give to us her dance of pain, passion and longing to forget or release (from her dreamlike state and childlike desire to return through imagination to her past). It’s a dance that questions the western viewer’s sensibility and knowledge of dance and styles; it transgresses our ordinariness (the western viewer) to seek gratification in the music and the moment. And is also a scene filled with pathos – pity and sadness – as well as a maternal desire to give empathy, love and warmth to the outcast and destitute isolation and loneliness intensely felt through Zingarina’s dancing body.

Zingarina unzips her top to reveal her belly; her seduction is of no-one, an imagined body exists within the music. Her seduction is mythical and hysterical, it is memory and it is frightening. The strangeness or foreignness to us, the viewer, is her hysteria that has through struggle, revealed itself through her grabbing of plates and releasing her emotions at each smashing or dropping of the plates. Her past is desiring to leave her body, through the plates and release to the floor. The interlude that is the dance gives her this moment, a symbolic moment that – from the following scenes – fails. Zingarina needs time and this dance is a point of departure as well as arrival. She is, throughout the movie, often in a trance-like state that her unhappiness and torment possess as well as dispossess her from feeling in the present.
The rebellious body, the excess and the antiestablishment attitude is an adult with alcohol, a desire beyond her own culture that desires the music and touch of her lovers culture, as well as the fear that she crossed the boundaries from sanity or rational understanding into the irrational grip of out-of-control memories in emotion. This pull in the dance is also the release from her hands of the plates as well as the loss of rational awareness and inhibitions to move with the music, rhythms and voice of the singer in a small, enclosed space. A club? An underground cafe/nightclub? The place is unknown and time is not conscious. The dance appears to have transcended time and it is only until Zingarina leaves with her traveling compainion Marie that we are brought back into any awareness of time: it is night.

This language of the body reveals something akin to what Clément and Cixous describe as a cry-language; her libido is cosmic and isolated and her attempts to make a history with her past lover come only into being as pain and passion oppressed. The mythical being that dances before us, as spectacle has exposed the invisible and revealed the child struggling out of fantasy or child-like myth. This dance presents unrealisable and unrecognisable desire; it is fictitious (metissage, or fusion) and imagined as well as archaic and belongs to a time beyond my own, Clément and Cixous write “Madmen embody the impossible configurations of a return to childhood. Shamans claim to have made fictitious voyages, transitions between here and the beyond” (1986, p7). Zingarina is not speaking the language of flamenco as we know it she is speaking the tongues of may oppressed and rejected people; the many tongues of Roma people dispersed through exclusion and myth, Imaginary and their Reality (abject poverty and loss, lack of political representation and recognition that love would affirm). This dance forms part of Zingarina’s journey to move from childhood and hysteria – or the holding onto a past that can’t be touched – to motherhood and acceptance of her body, her life with her child in a land that is strange and familiar to her: Romania.

Cixous, Hélène & Clément, Catherine. (1986). The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Introduction by Sandra Gilbert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gatlif, Tony (director). (2006). Transylvania. Film.

©Cate Andrews, 2021.