Aidez-Moi!

By R.C.

BEAU-PERE

Directed and Written by Bertrand Blier

(Scene 1: We hear cascades of lounge music as the scene fades in on Remy Bachellier [Patrick Dewaere]seated at the piano. The Paris nightclub is deserted, and Remy, 29, looks desolate too. He has the face of a sensitive troglodyte--jaundiced skin stretched like parchment over his skull--and it becomes creased with resignation as he speaks.)

Remy: Bon soir, mesdames et m 'sieurs. Forgive a nightclub pianist for speaking up like this. But I have a problem. I lived with a woman, a photographer's model, for eight years. One day, after an argument, helas she died in a car accident, and I was left with her 14-year-old daughter Marion, who had lived with us all along. I thought it best to send her off to her father. How was I to know that this little girl's absence would haunt me so? In her eyes--and perhaps in mine--she's no longer little. And now she tells me she wants me to be her first lover. What can I do? Marion has youth, loveliness, gravity, and a huge crush on me. I have only my poor scruples. And look, I'm no hero. Comprenez? I wish I did. (Piano music crescendoes violently. Scene fades out.)

(Scene 2: Marion [Ariel Besse]sits up in bed, the silhouette of her long limbs and thin body impressing the sheets. Straight black hair frames a face as yet unformed by character; big dark eyes; a mask of solemnity. In a few years she mil go to the Sorbonne, study phenomenology, debate Marxism over cafe filtre. Now, poised to make the jump from child to woman, she speaks.)

Marion: Beau-pere, you know, means stepfather and handsome father. That's my Remy. He's really juvenile to resist me. Here I am, a 14-year-old in perfect working order, all systems go. But for no reason he's afraid to sleep with a little girl in his arms. So first I'll explain the logic of the situation: that it has to happen some time, so why not with him? And if that fails, I have a sure-fire solution: as we part at a train station, I will give him a soulful kiss and an enigmatic smile, and the train will pull away, and the poor dear will be mine. (She smiles enigmatically as the scene fades out.)

(Scene 3: Remy stirs from the bed he shares with Charlotte [Nathalie Baye], a gentle pianist in her 30s. He looks contentedly at her sleeping form.)

Remy:Life is funny, n 'est-cepas? What happened to me was ordinary enough--man gets girl, man loses self to girl, man meets this woman--and yet Bertrand Blier decided to make a movie about it. He is fascinated with the feral precocity of French children--you remember Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, his black comedy about a boy prodigy and an interested older woman. I have to admit, Blier told my story with sympathy and humor and a nice ironic detachment that kept the whole affair from seeming too sordid. Was I a monster? Was little Marion? I leave that for you to judge, as Blier does in his film. But I must stop now. I don't want my talking to wake Charlotte, or the little girl in the next room. Charlotte's six-year-old daughter. Lovely child. Big dark eyes. And a--Comment dion?-- mask of solemnity. (He turns out the bedroom light.)

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