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Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1962)

The films of Jacques Rozier, who died last year at the age of 96, understand the pleasures of impulsive behavior—that awfully nice buzz of winging it. Born in Paris in 1926, the French director was a somewhat peripheral figure in the Nouvelle Vague, though his debut feature Adieu Philippine (1962) was, per François Truffaut, “the clearest success of the new cinema where spontaneity is all the more powerful when it is the result of long and careful work.”

A production still from Adieu Philippine even graces the cover of a special 1962 issue of Cahiers du cinéma dedicated to the New Wave. The film’s teenage heroines, Liliane (Yveline Céry) and Juliette (Stefania Sabatini), are standing on a sailboat in bathing suits, grinning, their arms stretched jubilantly skyward. As the image suggests, Adieu Philippine is a quintessential summer movie. And like all of Rozier’s films, it’s a roving, improv-heavy hangout sesh anchored by a neorealist sensibility. It’s also deceptively frothy, as hiding beneath its vibrant holiday vibe, complemented by flamenco guitar and the frisky rapport of its central love triangle, are undercurrents of profound anxiety.

The coy relationship drama, carried out by naturalistic performances, recalls the romantic intrigues of Éric Rohmer or Jean Eustache, while the film’s loose-limbed structure and jazzy flow are redolent of Jacques Rivette. Yet key to Rozier’s project are his nomadic impulse and his disinterest in Paris, the city that ensorceled his contemporaries. Underneath his comic impulses are serious existential inquiries into questions of freedom: what does wasting time teach us about ourselves? Is there any real escape from the strictures of bourgeois modernity?

Adieu Philippine revolves around Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini), a television cameraman, and his two girlfriends, Liliane and Juliette, whom he woos with the promise of access to the world of showbiz. (Rozier himself began his career in television, and directed several small-screen pilots and documentaries throughout the ’60s and ’70s.) The first half of the film takes place in Paris, where we’re flung into the contained chaos of several urban interiors: a television production set full of windowless rooms, Michel’s cramped family home, and nightclubs with low ceilings.

In the second half, Michel absconds to Corsica, where he’s joined by the girls, the three of them finally untethered from the social and economic realities that dictate their lives in the city—their work schedules; their conservative parents. In contrast to their typically regimented days, their time on the island is blissfully lawless, its vast stretches of unfenced land encouraging a freedom of movement. The friends embark on a road trip to track down a man who owes Michel money, traversing coastlines and mountains, and occasionally plopping down in random patches of grass to have a picnic or set up their tents.

At the same time, the specter of the ongoing Algerian War hangs over the film, as Michel is waiting to be drafted by the French Army. This grim shadow creates a curious tension: the trio’s romping feels like a rejection of authority, yet the unstructured splendor of the island’s wilderness offers no concrete means of escape. On the contrary, the open range and aimless wandering produces a state of limbo that calls attention to Michel’s deferral of the inevitable.

Near Orouët (1971), which depicts a trio of young women vacationing in coastal France, likewise both celebrates and ironizes the escapist urge. The film begins in Paris, where Joëlle (Danièle Croisy), an office worker, types away in a small room filled with secretaries. When their supervisor, Gilbert (Bernard Ménez), isn’t around, the women discuss their much-awaited, late-summer holiday plans. Come September, Joëlle settles into a pastel-colored beach house with her bestie Kareen (Françoise Guégan) and Kareen’s cousin Caroline (Caroline Cartier). This windy, isolated location—which the women have accessed by rowboat, followed by an arduous trek over sand dunes—unleashes their inner children.

The freewheeling antics of Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) come to mind, though Rozier’s take on feminine play is comparably grounded, the women’s fun and games unbeholden to the cosmic conspiracies that motivate Rivette’s heroines. The women fritter their time away, and when Gilbert (who is hopelessly in love with Joëlle) just “happens” to appear in the village, desperate to secure a place in their house, they allow him to crash there at the price of becoming the group dunce, an object of mockery who absorbs the girls’ cruelties. This business makes up a lot of the film’s delightful silliness. Against a gray coastal backdrop, accented by extra-long shots of races across the sand and bird’s-eye views capturing the girls’ mindless lazing, the characters seem to fall under a dissociative spell.

When asked in an interview which screen hero most appealed to him, Rozier responded with Zorro, the masked vigilante of pulp-serial and silent-cinema fame. In his pop-cultural affinities, Rozier was not alone. An entire postwar generation of Frenchmen were raised with the adventure tales of H.G. Wells and Daniel Dafoe. These fantastic narratives, in which exploration was conducted for its own sake and travels were savored for their encounters with the unknown, also reflected the imperialist projects of nations like France, as in Jules Vernes’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in 80 Days. 

The Castaways of Turtle Island (1976) renders absurd these colonial dreams in the context of the modern tourism industry. A straightforward satire, the film is Rozier’s most blatantly commercial endeavor—its leading man, Pierre Richard, a kind of French response to Gene Wilder, was then at the height of his popularity—though it failed to break the financial losing streak initiated by Adieu Philippine. In fact, the movie tanked at the box office in spite of its popular trappings, which in part explains Rozier’s meager output afterward. (Maine-Océan Express arrived a decade later, and his last-completed film, the backstage farce Fifi Martingale, was released in 2001.)

In The Castaways, Jean-Arthur Bonaventure (Richard) and his buddy Joël (Maurice Risch) are travel agents who’ve devised a new tourism package meant to appeal to Westerners who want to take exotic journeys. Their “Robinson Crusoe” tour promises an off-the-grid vacation on a desert island—though, unsurprisingly, Bonaventure and Joël are out of their depth. The trip ends up ironically echoing the disastrous expedition of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), with Bonaventure and Joël’s brother Bernard (Jacques Villeret) leading a crew of hapless tourists through jungles and across waterways. The duo justifies each obstacle as a perk of this supposedly authentic experience, though their difficulties are mostly self-induced: they’re not true outdoorsmen, but just adult men with grand delusions.

In a running theme, Bonaventure fetishizes women of color—a giant poster of a Black pinup girl hangs in his bedroom, and at the start of the film, he goes on a date with a Black woman with a thing for “white guys with blue eyes.” There’s an obvious parallel between the excitement he feels on this rendezvous and the high he’s chasing on Turtle Island. He is dragged to a Parisian samba club by his gregarious new lover, and for a moment, we hear her speak with her fellow immigrant friends about the challenges of their life in France. Nowhere else in the film is Bonaventure so deeply out of his element. Moments like these seem much richer and more meaningfully transformative than the quests abroad that these characters stake their hopes on; there are other worlds all around them.

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and historian who contributes regularly to The New York Times, The Criterion Collection, The Nation, 4Columns, and other publications.