Reflective Breath __UN SECOND SOUFFLE

Careful, don't get winded.


Notices to watch the breath and check the pulse were commonly heard on the aerobics tapes of the 1970s + 80s.  "Don't forget to breathe!" "Are you above your target heart rate? If so: SLOW DOWN. If not, let's work HARDER!"
 In writer-director Gerard Blain's elegiac UN SECOND SOUFFLE (1978), the breath and wind is slowed and riffed on.  A momentary pause opens wide onto a scene of emotional stillness; no matter if the subject is mid-run, mid-record spinning or mid-drawing room.
The portrait of divorcee Francois' (Robert Stack) wealthy, worldly late in life bachelorhood is sober and stately.  Like a regal animal, near extinction, he is chronicled National Geographic style in the frame as he accomplishes his forest jogs.
A second wind is also a return to breath; an end to the inhalation of inner stasis.  Blain lays out a story of pluralism.  This film is not a chronicle of "one" second wind, but a series of inner reflections and distanced resignations. These inward movements are interspersed with suddenly expelled emotion. Distended sequences of exercise build a wave like crescendo of the regret that only comes with age.  The zen-like runs are countered with scenes of frenetic interaction.  When he is portrayed engaging with others it is always competitive (side by side or front to back in the frame) or flung into an overly filled mise en scene, confused in its decor and emotions.
Francois is emotionally and physically distanced from his family in early scenes, and he lives in a post - marriage, post - family constructed haven.  His emotions guarded; his looks toward familiars feature scant suspicion and a weighty regret.  His gazes at his competitors in dating (all vastly younger and virile), track a haughty disdain.  His eyes never quite hunger, yet he persists in competitive pursuits and tracksuits.

queuing his song to queue emotional deep connections 

savoring his "favorite movement" which promotes in him, literal stasis; total reflection

Shots of Stack's protag are dominated by the room in which he lives; be it the room of his conspicuously mod bachelor den or the unmarked trees of the woods.   Other times his camera moves in close to Stack's expressively resigned eyes; imagining, feeling, what we are not quite sure.  

His character competes in a progressively accelerating dating game with a young man he matter of factly learns (in the most sober post or pre coital interview) is sleeping with his much younger live in girlfriend.  The young man is at least 20 years junior, rides a motorcycle, and is regaled in bright primary colors. All of these attributes (including the bike, leading to minor injury, another sequence pregnant with the viewer's worst imagined futures) are co-opted by Stack's sullen man. He is virile, he is competitive, and he now bikes in the city streets and works out in the public sphere of the pre-fab  gym, as contrapuntal as can be to the shades of green in the natural world of his earlier runs.
In one shot, the two men playing this game (though maybe only the elder knowingly) encounter each other in the gym shower; Stack literally peaking in at the competition's natural goods.
The second wind is, at times, the viewer waiting to exhale.  Holding one's breath in a pregnant wait for an emotional release; scenes are directed surrounded by a heaviness that is  insinuated yet denied.
Then there are the moments, often brief, when the pain or the reality of a dynamic is expressed most directly, even with humor such as in this scene, or sans humor early on when Francois bursts out to his daughter that she must have an abortion.  Here the second wind is the culmination of introverted breath; shooting out with surprise, brevity, and honesty.

Emotion is very simple.  Very true.

Back to the gym.. Some 14 years earlier the fear of sexual desire and virility of men was drawn in primary saturated hues of the material world, in Alfred Hitchcock's MARNIE(1964).  A screaming recall of that yellow purse is repeated in a shot (against white synthetically colored /tiled gym + shower walls) in UN SECOND SOUFFLE as an orange Adidas bag calls out a similar signification.  The denatured orange in the anesthesia of the constructed gym is stifling and alarming.

MARNIE and her Yellow Purse

Every moment we die a little more.  One's second wind is never promised; a sentiment that is the singular recurring musical and visual thread of Blain's picture. Each run is heavy with the viewers' imagination; pregnant with collapse. Gerard Blain's films stand as a recognition; a nod to this sober, unwavering fact.
As in the very title of one of his last films,  AINSI SOIT-IL (2000)
 "SO BE IT."

"Time is not on your side, on your side, on your side."