The Plough: a downbeat meditation on art and love

• Reviewed from the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival

Philippe Garrel breaks his decade-long streak of black-and-white relationship dramas with The Plough, a family portrait with clear autobiographical overtones. While amorous entanglements of a very French kind – mercurial, adulterous – do feature, as they must in a Garrel film, they’re relegated to the background. A subdued romanticism permeates The Plough, which explains the uncharacteristic switch to colour, with veteran DoP Renato Berta’s elegant and understated cinematography luxuriating in autumnal hues.

The title refers to the name of a troupe of puppeteers made up of siblings Louis, Martha and Léna (played by Garrel’s children Louis, Esther and Léna, respectively), their father (Aurélien Recoing), and Pieter (Damien Mongin), a struggling painter who was rescued from vagrancy by the troupe and became an honorary member of the family. Their love for each other and passion for their craft is beautifully demonstrated in a series of shows. Mostly filmed from behind the stage and scored to a soundtrack of children’s laughter, these early scenes take great pleasure in revealing the invisible and intricate performances involved in bringing the puppets to life.

Puppetry would seem like a tailor-made metaphor for the manipulation inherent in a film director’s practice, all the more pointed when the actors are his own children. But the inspiration also comes from life events, as Garrel’s own father, Maurice, was a puppeteer before becoming an actor – a trajectory mirrored by Louis in the film. Rather than engaging in autocritique, Garrel wishes to celebrate the genuinely independent making of art as a noble pursuit threatened by the changing times. After the father dies during one of their shows, the others are left rudderless. The ensuing mental decline and death of their grandmother (Francine Bergé) cuts their last ties to the past, motivating Louis and Pieter to pursue their respective dreams of acting and painting. Although the sisters do their best to keep going by themselves, the troupe is effectively doomed.

This succession of events is charted with a matter-of-factness bordering on fatalism. It could be that the death in 2021 of scriptwriting giant Jean-Claude Carrière, Garrel’s frequent collaborator and his co-writer on The Plough (alongside Arlette Langmann and Caroline Deruas Peano), influenced the film’s mood, rendering it a depressive reflection on one’s mortality and legacy (Garrel himself is 74 years old). All three siblings eventually find happiness in work and love, whereas Pieter, embodying the Garrelian archetype of the selfish and self-destructive artist, suffers a mental breakdown after destroying his relationship. Their contrasting fates are supposed to read as an affirmation of the ascendancy of love, but it’s a message that seems at odds with the film’s prevailing mood of resignation.