Barbara (Mathieu Amalric, 2017) (Patreon)

There are many international films that are so specific to their national culture and mythology that they simply don't circulate very much beyond their borders, even failing to reach those viewers predisposed to seek out and appreciate foreign cinema. Usually these non-starters are comedies, reliant as they so often are on micro-distinctions of class and ethnicity that are mostly lost on non-locals. Consider France's multi-billion-dollar Taxi franchise, which has made exactly zero inroads on these shores. And then consider the dead-on-arrival remake starring Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah.

Mathieu Amalric's Barbara falls into an altogether different category, given that it profiles a French national icon whose fame and artistic significance actually spread quite far across Europe -- through German, in particular -- but never made any significant impact in the U.S. It's not just that Barbara's songs were written and sung in French. She was a leading exponent of a poetic singer-songwriter post-cabaret tradition that was uniquely French, exemplified by the great Jacques Brel. The closest the English-speaking world ever really came to this type of performer was Leonard Cohen, although Scott Walker had a middle period that came close (during which, notably, he performed English adaptations of numerous Brel songs).

Barbara, the grande dame of this 1960s movement, certainly inspired a number of Anglophone acolytes, including Regina Spektor, Tori Amos, and perhaps most notably Amanda Palmer. But none of them captures Barbara's combination of raw emotional drama, political fervor, and near-Gainsbourgian sexual energy. A Jew who narrowly survived the death camps, Barbara always draped herself in black, singing songs of love and loss as if her very life depended on it.

What makes Mathieu Amalric's biopic of Barbara so special is that he seems to understand that he is dealing with a figure who cannot be summed up using conventional means. She was larger than life, and at the same time deeply fragile, a private person who fought her personal demons through her art. And so rather than simply depicting "the life of Barbara," Amalric creates a slippery, complex metanarrative. He plays a director who is making a biopic about Barbara. But he plays the director as an unstable, somewhat damaged individual, someone whose life was personally touched by having met Barbara as a young boy. As Barbara, the real Amalric film, goes on, the character of the director (named Yves Zand) gradually loses all perspective, inserting himself into shots of fans, his own reality bleeding into his picture.

Similarly, "Barbara" is played in the film-within-a-film by an actress named Brigitte, who is played by Jeanne Balibar. To say that Balibar delivers the performance of a lifetime is the kind of hyperbole that makes the critical reader's synapses slam shut, but hear me out. Balibar, one of the great French actresses of her time, has always tended toward more intellectual roles than many of her peers -- working with Renais and Rivette, in particular, opting for a cool detachment that suits her analytical style. Here, she not only embodies the vocal mannerisms and gestures of Barbara -- Balibar is, after all, an accomplished vocalist, as seen in her documentary with Pedro Costa, Ne change rien -- but is able to pivot out of that performance immediately, from a "performed" vulnerability, back into "Brigitte's" haughty star behavior, and then eventually into "Brigitte" letting her own vulnerability show through. 

That's to say, Balibar marks clear differences between the two characters, even as she begins a process of smearing and colliding them into indiscernability. And this is part of what makes Barbara so consistently mesmerizing -- at least until its conclusions, when these provocative questions are somewhat suspended. Amalric and Balibar never let us find our footing, keeping us uncertain as to whether we are actually watching a Barbara biopic, a documentary about the making of a Barbara biopic that's framed as a fiction, or a fictional construction around an actual Barbara biopic.

And it must be acknowledged. All of this emotional slippage cannot be separated from the very real layer that is the relationship between Amalric and Balibar. These two former spouses are triangulating their interactions through absolute professionalism. And yet, there is something in the way Yves / Amalric looks at Barbara / Brigitte / Balibar that speaks of deep sorrow and loss. It is as though he is seeing someone from long ago, someone who touched him deeply, but who now can barely recognize him.