Pascal, Christine 1953-1996

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Pascal, Christine 1953-1996

PERSONAL:

Born November 29, 1953, in Lyons, Rhône, France; committed suicide, August 30, 1996, near Paris, France; married Robert Boner (a producer and author), 1982.

CAREER:

Film director, actress, and author. Actress in such films as L'Horloger de Saint-Paul, 1974, Les Guichets du Louvre, 1974, Que la fête commence …, 1975, La Meilleure façon de marcher, 1976, Des enfants gâtés, 1977, Chaussette surprise, 1978, Félicité, 1979, Le Chemin perdu, 1980, Bonbons en gros, 1982, Subterfuge, 1983, Hell Train, 1984, Elsa, Elsa, 1985, La Travestie, 1988, Rien que des mensonges, 1991, Les Patriotes, 1994, and Regarde les hommes tomber, 1994; also appeared in episodes of television series and in television movies. Director of films, including Félicité, 1979, La Garce, 1984, Zanzibar, 1989, Le Petit prince a dit, 1992, and Adultère, mode d'emploi, 1995.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Best script award (with Robert Boner), Montréal Film Festival, and Louis Delluc Prize for Directing, both 1992, both for Le Petit prince a dit.

WRITINGS:

SCREENPLAYS; AND DIRECTOR

(With Bertrand Tavernier and Charlotte Dubreuil) Des enfants gâtés (title means "Spoiled Children"), Corinth, 1977.

(Coauthor) Félicité, 1979.

La Garce (title means "The Bitch"), 1984.

Zanzibar, 1989.

Le Petit prince a dit (title means "The Little Prince Said"), 1992.

Adultère, mode d'emploi (title means "Adultery: A User's Manual"), 1995.

Also author of additional materials for film Aquí, el que no corre … vuela, 1992.

SIDELIGHTS:

From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, Christine Pascal had starring or supporting roles as girlfriends and mothers, students and schoolteachers in more than two dozen European-made features. Never blossoming into a major international star, she went on to direct and write a number of well-received films. The feature movies Pascal directed (all of which she either scripted or co-scripted) are heavily autobiographical. Collectively, they are disturbing, revealing, achingly personal psychological portraits. In them, Pascal elicits a fascination with male and female sexuality and the jumble of feelings people experience over sexual issues. The films are punctuated by raw emotion, and jarring sequences illustrating erotic sexual encounters with strangers. All of her characters—and especially her psychologically unhinged heroines—experience deep emotional turmoil, attempt to exorcise childhood demons, are haunted by death, act out sexually, or become consumed by sexual fantasies.

After a collaborative effort in writing Des enfants gâtés ("Spoiled Children"), Pascal directed and cowrote Félicité, when she was just twenty-five years old. It is her lone directorial effort in which she stars, and she casts herself in the title role: a young woman who is spending an evening with her lover, who meets a female friend whom he invites to join them. Félicité then is overcome by jealousy. She returns home by herself, at which point she begins drinking nonstop. Via hallucinations, she recalls her childhood and her domineering mother, and she plays out sexual fantasies, including some anonymous copulation and a striptease in a cheap club.

In La Garce ("The Bitch"), Pascal's heroine is a young woman who jumps between her gangster boyfriend and a policeman. In Zanzibar, she is a drug-addicted actress. Set in the frenzied world of independent filmmaking that Pascal knew all too well, Zanzibar focuses on three characters: a producer who is attempting to secure financing for a project even though there is no script; the actress; and a tyrannical director. In Le Petit prince a dit ("The Little Prince Said"), she is an emotionally unstrung actress, and in Adultère, mode d'emploi ("Adultery: A User's Manual"), she is a married, career-driven architect who plays extramarital sexual games with a friend.

Le Petit prince a dit is a drama about a ten-year-old girl who is diagnosed with a lethal brain tumor. While the child can accept her impending demise, the same cannot be said for her divorced parents: an actress and a doctor who is used to being in command of his life. Adultère, mode d'emploi is an exploration of the professional aspirations and personal/sexual/romantic needs of contemporary men and women. It is the story of married architects who work as a team and are awaiting word if they have won a major competition. As they do so, both characters act out their trepidation via sexual promiscuity.

Tragically, Pascal was unable to exorcise her demons artistically or otherwise, and Adultère, mode d'emploi was to be her final film. A year after its release, she committed suicide, at age forty-two, as reported in Variety, by "throwing herself out the window of a clinic on the outskirts of Paris where she had apparently been battling depression."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, December 23, 1974, "Black Thursday a Moving Film about Jews of Paris"; June 29, 1976, Vincent Canby, review of The Clockmaker; January 17, 1978, Vincent Canby, "Film: Director Makes Debut in Best Way"; October 11, 1979, Vincent Canby, "Screen: The Young Girls of Wilko, from Poland: A Dark Comedy"; April 22, 1981, Janet Maslin, "Spoiled Children, about a French Director"; July 18, 1986, Caryn James, "Film: Isabelle Huppert in Sincerely Charlotte."