Sundays and Cybele

Serge Bourguignon's Sundays and Cybele is a simple, exquisite film about the loneliness of three people. Acted with nearly miraculous honesty, it sustains a fragile mood between tentative happiness and softest tragedy without a single misstep.

At first the story seems to be about Pierre (Hardy Kruger), a shell-shocked World War II flyer who has been supported and nursed back to a precarious stability by Madeleine (Nicole Couriel). She becomes his mistress and, though he remains sullen and distant in his illness, loves him with a half-maternal fierceness. Madeleine struggles towards his rehabilitation so that they may marry and "lead a moral life together." But Pierre secretly befriends Cybele, a twelve-year-old girl who has been abandoned by her parents to a local convent. Pretending to be her father, Pierre takes her out to the woods each Sunday, and the pair embark on a beautiful (but perhaps dangerous) fantasy romance.

Bourguignon uses his camera to show us the scene in the hazy distortions of Pierre's vision. We experience his vertigo at a rippling pond, the too-high trees, the electric cars careening in an amusement park. Finally, we appreciate the imbalance of his mental state, but have lost the ability or desire to empathize with him. In a quiet, attractive, inexplicable sense he is crazy, sometimes inscrutably moody or violent; we cannot understand him. Yet he is all the world to both Madeleine and Cybele, and so the film is about them; their profound love for Pierre, and the strange competition between them.

Soon Pierre and Cybele have abandoned themselves to their blissful if obfuscating frolic. Each feeds on the other's need to love. Cybele is an immensely feminine, bright, enchanting little girl (Patricia Gozzi plays her with astonishing insight, with the seeming understanding of a mature woman--she is the best child actress I have ever seen). Pierre grows into a father who will one day be a husband. When Madeleine discovers the relationship she becomes frightened and mystified. She spies on them.

Is Pierre, as her closest friend suggests, innocently playing at a marvelous, infantile game? Or is he a passionate psychotic, as a psychiatrist implies, intent upon working through his wartime guilt (in the opening flash we see Pierre kill a girl when his plane goes out of control) by destroying Cybele? One is stupidly tempted to debate this question in evaluating the film's tragic conclusion.

Actually, the question is irrelevant in responding to the ending. There is no black and white, no moral message involved; even mental disturbance seems impenetrable. Simply, complications lead with a terrifying inevitability to heartbreak and death. We long to blame someone, but because we do not comprehend Pierre's psychology there can be no blame. The power of the film lies in what happens, on a purely emotional level, to the two women who love him.

Bourguignon has frustrated our predisposition to a goodies against baddies orientation because, through interdependent use of sound, photography, and skillful editing, he offers a perpetual shifting of perspective. Not only at the end should we suspend any predilection toward valuative judgement. Throughout the film we must experience the world in terms other than our own. In one scene (when we follow Pierre's desperate race to the convent) it bounces madly by us in the rear-view mirror of a truck. In a restaurant party, a babbling couple are grotesquely distorted through the stem of Pierre's champagne glass.

Pierre and Cybele stand, hand in hand, by the lake. The camera moves backward and we see their reflections in the water. They move away, yet their backs come towards us. The camera inverts, the lake becomes the land. But to dissect the scene in this manner as we watch is to shatter the stuble imagery that Bourguignon invokes. If instead, we suspend our critical faculties--sit back and let ourselves be fooled again and again--we may enter into manifold perceptions of the world.

For Sundays and Cybele dramatically juxtaposes at least five opposing states of consciousness: the adult, the insane, the child-like, the conventional, and the occult.

Pierre participates tentatively in all of these states. As he is not fully adult, the mature self-sacrificing love that Madeleine offers becomes repulsive to him. Yet the twilight world of Cybele's precocity--a world filled with latent sexuality, but where no real consummation is ever possible--draws him irresistably. (In Greeks mythology, love of the goddess Cybele demanded the same transmutation of erotic drives. Her male devotees emasculated themselves to achieve estatic unity with her.)

Pierre finds in Cybele a shaman and guru, and obediently follows her in a ritual play-therapy. Through her he will be freed from his amnesia and vertigo--"You will be my healer," he pleads early in their friendship. And, indeed, the dizziness disappears when at last he climbs a steeple to steal the weather-cock she has so long cherished.

Is Cybele a true or artificial muse? Has she really led him out of the neurosis that held him prisoner? Or is he using her psychotically, in a way she could never understand, to seek punishment for his traumatic "war-crime" and relieve his guilt? If we decide positively on either side we pervert the tragedy by transforming it into a social "message." Bourguignon deepens the impact of his conclusion by this ambiguity. Our response never admits rights or wrongs. We have perceived the nature of Pierre's love through too many eyes.