The Pregnant Virgin and the Child Whore: Female Suffering in Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge
Sardent, Creuse. A well-dressed man gets off a bus. He used to know these streets, used to know everyone around here. He’s coming back in hopes of tranquility, to heal from the tuberculosis that has affected him, but the small hometown looks much sicklier than he does. The streets are empty, the stories relayed to him are ones that happened years ago. There’s nothing new here. The only change is in the man himself. François, now a city man, no longer fits in the small world of Sardent. He has committed the worst crime of all: escaping. When he asks what happened to his old friend Serge, now a violent alcoholic, he’s asking the wrong question. In Sardent, nothing precise happens to people. Life takes ahold of them until it spits them back out.
Commonly considered the first film of the French New Wave, Le Beau Serge doesn’t exactly kick the movement off on a positive note. The title seems ironic: perhaps he used to be a handsome guy an eternity ago, but now Serge is everything but ‘beau’. If François was able to escape, Chabrol will tell us again and again how Serge’s desolate state is the result of his stay in Sardent. Another bomb gets dropped very early in the film, almost casually: Serge’s first child was stillborn and most likely suffering from Down syndrome. We are soon made to understand that all his subsequent unpleasantness is a direct consequence of this trauma. Like an involuntary guardian angel, François will spend his time in Sardent trying to save his old friend from his demons. Chabrol’s debut is a grim story of male friendship on top of a greater statement about the feelings of powerlessness that comes with living your entire life in the same small place.
Serge is not the only one who suffers from the lack of interaction with the outside world; in fact, two other characters are key to the film’s plot. One is Serge’s wife, Yvonne, currently pregnant with his second child and constantly subjected to his violence and cruel remarks. The second is Marie, Yvonne’s seventeen-year-old sister, who has the widely known reputation of sleeping with a different man every day. François will take an interest in both, for different reasons.
If the New Wave announced novelty in film conventions, some habits remain hard to break. Only a few years before has the film noir movement come to an end, with its dark alleys and its ambiguous characters. If the tone of the film itself seldom reminds the noir, Chabrol’s treatment of his female characters feels uncomofrtably familiar. Femme fatale has often been a more polite way to say whore, and it has been accepted since the Bible that being a pregnant wife doesn’t stop one from being a perfect virgin. Both François and Chabrol will see Yvonne and Marie in these terms, rarely stopping to reflect on their own flaws. Chabrol would like to make us believe that this is Serge’s world, but Serge’s world is perhaps more importantly a man’s world.
François’ sympathy for Yvonne grows as she comes closer to her due date. At first, she is pointed as the reason for Serge’s suffering. Not only did he have to marry her once she became pregnant, she couldn’t even deliver the child properly — a double sin that Serge is incapable of forgiving. Yvonne’s own feelings regarding the situation are never discussed, not even suggested. Only in her attitude towards Serge can we see resentment. For most of the runtime, Yvonne is a failure of a wife. She constantly gets cheated on, can’t get ahold of her husband during his drinking outings. Even in the last minutes of the film, when she’s delivering her baby under the snow storm, the entire town is indifferent to her struggle. She couldn’t evolve from Virgin to Mother the first time; and so in everyone’s eyes, she remains stuck in an unnamed in-between place, one that no woman is usually allowed to be in. Women in Sardent aren’t allowed to exist outside of categories. Slightly bending the norm is synonymous with completely surrendering their humanity.
Only when Yvonne screams in pain does she regain it. Only when the baby turns out to live does Serge start smiling. The film’s final shot, when the camera blurs over an hysterical, laughing, still drunk Serge, is supposed to bring hope. This is one the shortest coming of age story presented on the big screen: we’re meant to understand that finally, Serge is no longer a child. Now that Yvonne has made him a father, he can learn to grow. Nevermind that François had to dig him out of the snow, passed out due to being drunk only minutes earlier. Serge has spent the entire runtime hurting people right and left; yet he is granted redemption immediately. By comparison, Yvonne has had to go through unrecognized, lengthy suffering to be forgiven for something entirely out of her control.
And yet Yvonne remains well treated compared to her sister. Before being interested by Yvonne’s troubles, François is seduced by the young Marie. It doesn’t take long before the two start seeing each other despite the villagers’ warning against the teenager. In an episode of pillowtalk, François asks her who her first time was with. She refuses to answer, but when he asks if it was with Serge, her laughter is an answer in itself. This short episode is supposed to say a lot about Marie’s own lack of morals, since she slept with her sister’s husband visibly without any remorse on her part. Once again, the fact that Serge slept with a then-fifteen year old when he was at least ten year older is unjudged. A pattern arises: the women of the film are responsible for every action that involves them. On the other hand, for Serge, and to a certain extent François, things just happen to them. They are defenseless against the wickedness of the world, which is as much the town itself as the people — and more specifically, the women — that inhabit it.
Unfortunately, this earlier incident is far from the worse that will happen in Marie’s arc. A rumor runs through the streets of Sardent: Marie’s father, the alcoholic Glomaud, isn’t actually related to her. He meets François at the bar of his hostel, and immediately confronts him about his relationship with his daughter. After taking one of François’ silences as a confirmation that Marie indeed isn’t his daughter, he storms out. Later on, François discovers the teenager in her bed, crying. We soon learn that in a horrific turn of events, Glomaud raped her.
But this story never gets to be about Marie, and her suffering only matters for a few seconds. The crime is then about François’ short-lived anger and revenge, then about Glomaud’s nursing back to health, then finally about Serge’s own analysis of the situation. We have to hear a man we are supposed to sympathize with justify the rape of a teenager by her father. His stance is clear: since she had been having sex under his roof, it was inevitable for this to happen. Once again, the blame is entirely on Marie. And the film makes no effort to disprove it. Only the day after, Marie is back to her joyful self, perfectly playing her role of the villain by having Serge dance with her instead of his wife. What happened the day was but a fleeting moment of pain. The facility with which the film brushes incestuous rape away is disconcerting, if not deeply disturbing.
The novelty of the visual style, the jarring edits, all is made to obscur how profoundly conservative Le Beau Serge truly is. It now isn’t as well-remembered as subsequent New Wave films, but it is worth wondering if its strict virgin/whore binary has influenced the rest of the movement. At every turn, we are reminded that if François and Serge are allowed to be people and to be granted forgiveness in spite of their mistakes (from alcoholism to adultery), Yvonne and Marie are but plot points, and inconvenient ones at that. The virgin earns no more respect than the whore, for she is stuck in a role and constantly scrutinized by outside forces that make sure she fits it well. As for the whore, she is but a cautionary tale, a villain, an incarnation of evil that makes innocent men stray from their rightful path. They are a part of Sardent itself, a town that Serge constantly feels oppressed by. In 1958, individuality remains a male characteristic. Man versus nature and man versus woman become synonymous. Only one is allowed personality, only one can feel trauma. And in the end, only one can gain something from the narrative.
Le Beau Serge is not only a cautionary tale against coming back home: for women, it is a painful reminder that films that are considered important may not consider them as people at all. Rarely has the virgin/whore binary been so prevalent and the reality of female trauma so thoroughly diminished and ridiculed. The recognition of male vulnerability should be able to co-exist with female humanity. There is some comfort in the fact that such an obviously terrible treatment of rape and domestic abuse wouldn’t slide so easily nowadays. Unfortunately, in 1958, hell still is an abused woman.
