Lonely Cities, Lonely People: The Cinema of Yannick Bellon (part 1 of two)
Bellon was a talented woman filmmaker whose work needs to be discovered by American cinephiles.
We now live in a world where binging media has become a preoccupation. But it’s one thing to watch a season of a scripted show on a platform, and quite another when (the old-school mode of binging) you go to the same theater several weeks in a row to catch every film made by a particular filmmaker. Thus, of all the films I saw in 2025, I was most pleasantly surprised by a festival of the work of the little-known-in-the-U.S. director-scripter Yannick Bellon (1924-2019).
Up until 2024 I was only aware of Bellon through the documentary she made with the great Chris Marker about her mother, the photographer Denise Bellon, called Remembrance of Things to Come (2001). That film is quite good, but it only vaguely conveys what Bellon’s own filmmaking is like, through its emphasis on memory and the difficult situations in which Denise Bellon shot her most memorable photographs.
In May 2024 I attended a screening of Bellon’s Jamais plus toujours at MoMA; the film was being shown in tribute to its star, Bulle Ogier. I was completely drawn into the film’s exploration of, among other things, memory and what happens to our possessions after we die. It was such an important discovery for me that I was delighted when L’Alliance (formerly the Alliance Francaise) announced in spring 2025 a two-part, months-long festival containing all of Bellon’s fiction features.
In the process of attending all the screenings in the series, I got a much fuller portrait of Bellon as an artist. This also helped me connect her less-heralded work with of the “Left Bank New Wave” (of which Marker was a member) and reminded me of the answer to the question that confronts American cinephiles who love Barbara Loden’s Wanda — namely, were there no other women filmmakers making independent, highly personal films during the “maverick era”?
The answer, of course, is yes; they just weren’t Americans. Although Agnes Varda is still the best-known French woman filmmaker of the Sixties and Seventies, there were other European women who made deeply personal fiction films that still resound decades later. Bellon is one of these, and it’s important to point out that her time making features lasted for two decades, until the early Nineties. (She had earlier made many short films and documentaries for French TV.)
Looking over the themes of Bellon’s films, one might wrongly think that she made the kinds of sentimental films that were produced for American TV from the Seventies through the Nineties and were summed up as “problem dramas” (or, more specifically, “disease of the week”). Instead, her films are well-scripted and exceptionally well-directed character studies of women in transition.
There is also a sense that her films dwell in the “cinema of loneliness” that marks some of the finest character studies of the past sixty years. Her characters are often alone in a crowd; her films often provide prolonged glimpses of the faces of characters who are not having their stories told. In this regard Bellon is like Godard in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, letting us know that we could be seeing this other person’s story, that passersby are just as worthy of contemplation as the heroine we are watching at the moment.
One of the important things to know about Bellon’s career as a maker of fiction features is that by the time she directed Somewhere, Someone she had been making short films and documentaries for over twenty years. This experience informed the look of the fiction features and the realism of her scripting.
The recent retrospective at L’Alliance of Bellon’s films was the first such retro to take place in America. Her films have rarely been programmed by rep houses over here and, despite there being two different box sets of her work in France, not a single one of her fiction films is available on disc on these shores; Remembrance is the only documentary she made that is available here.
The two-part nature of the Bellon retro meant that her films weren’t shown in chronological order but I will review them here in that fashion, in order to make this a more coherent discussion of how her style and themes grew over the years.
*****
Bellon’s first fiction feature, Somewhere, Someone (Quelque part quelqu’un, 1972), has a wonderfully evocative opening, which establishes the city of Paris as a character in the film. Here Bellon definitely crafts a tale of a lonely world in which people can connect but will also continue to live a solitary life, even if they have a partner.
This theme is declared outright with the film’s opening sequence, in which we hear whispers under the credits and the camera moves through different apartments quickly, and we see the lives of the apartment dwellers one after another. At first loud, suspenseful music is played; this gives way to a choral theme that “enshrines” the loneliness of the characters.
The film focuses around three couples. The one that gets the least screen time (but relates most deeply to the “city of loneliness” theme) is an old married couple who are being kicked out of the apartment they’ve lived in for decades. A second couple is a young scientist and his girlfriend, who embody the “beginning of things.”
The third couple, on whom most of the focus is placed, are a woman, Raphaële (Loleh Bellon, Yannick’s sister), who works assessing people’s living spaces to see if their rent should be increased or decreased, and a reporter, Vincent (Roland Dubillard), who is an expert on financial trades and is a blackout drunk. Raphaële is getting restless about Vincent’s alcoholism to the extent that she starts dating another man, but she soon is back with him and he is once again passing out.
Throughout, Bellon includes street life sequences that not only add to the portrait of the city as home for the lonely, they also serve to foreshadow things that will occur later in the film—as when Raphaële sees a man laying unconscious on the street, with a crowd gathering around him. These moving moments definitely have the feel of a documentary— that is because Bellon made documentaries for two decades before Somewhere.
The film includes moments where the dialogue is so palpably emotional that the lines remain with the viewer. One of those occurs when Vincent rebels against Raphaële’s caring for him and asks her point blank, “What gives you so much faith in me?”
An even more haunting moment occurs when a supporting character in the film, an unemployed woman who is first seen asking Vincent for directions to get to a certain location in Paris, is seen at the job she ends up getting, as an orderly in a hospital.
One of the patients she tends to is seen talking to himself, saying, “You know how it will end… we’re in this room…. We pass like ghosts… I’m scared.”
The film’s final image also has a haunting quality: After the plot has reached its conclusion, we see a very large audience in a stadium. This is a jarring moment, as the film is most definitely a study of solitude. As the camera pans back from the large crowd we hear their cheering voices filtered down… to the whispers that we heard in the beginning of the film.
As I researched this film, I found that Bellon based the two lead characters on herself and her husband, the poet, journalist, and newspaper columnist Henry Magnan, who was an alcoholic and committed suicide in July of 1965. This explains why the relationship between the two is so clearly defined and why Raphaële’s reactions to Vincent’s drinking are both fatalistic and hopeful that he might actually quit.
The films after this one end on a more “up” note, which tallied with the name of the festival at L’Alliance, “Yannick Bellon, the Happy Pessimist,” taken from a quote from Bellon where she admitted she was a pessimist but was a rather happy one.
*****
Bellon continued to craft fascinating character studies in her next few features. Jean’s Wife (La femme de Jean, 1974) is like Somewhere in that it is an accumulation of scenes, with us seeing the lead in the present tense and then flashing back to her memories.
Also, as in Somewhere, the spaces around the characters are as important as the characters themselves. The lead character here, Nadine (France Lambiotte), a newly divorced woman, is seen wandering around Paris and, while the focus is on her, the film seems to chronicle again a lonely life in a big city. The film’s action spans a year, so we see the city throughout the four seasons, as our heroine (as the saying used to run) “gets her act together” and is able to solidify her own identity outside of marriage.
The film opens with Nadine in the midst of a crying jag so intense that her old neighbor comes to her apartment to comfort her. (She is then seen on the Metro crying as well, helped out by an anonymous woman.) She works (again!) as a surveyor of apartments, evaluating the tenants’ rent; she has a teenage son with whom she close, but she can’t equal her ex-husband in the presents given to the boy. (We see his dad gifting him with a new motorcycle.)
In one wonderful scene we see her on the streets of Paris, walking through an upbeat New Years celebration. We also see her memories, which occur to her at random moments. She eventually meets a man in a museum whom she starts dating regularly. He’s honest and quiet and very loving; he’s also, sadly, the only drab individual in a film that is otherwise filled with realistically drawn characters.
It becomes clear that the boyfriend character is there as a romantic partner but also as a sounding board for Nadine’s ideas about her future. She notes at first that it is “too late” to go back to the career in astrophysics she set aside years ago; in a rare bit of “too good to be true” plotting for Bellon, she soon gets a career in that field.
Nadine gets helpful advice from her son, who urges her to stop dressing demurely (“like a grandmother”), and from his girlfriend, who tells her that when a man leaves her it’s “pas de drame.” The son also informs his father that his mother is “better off” without their marriage.
She resists the lure of her boyfriend and then, out of the blue, her husband asks to meet her. They go to see a movie (about which they subsequently disagree) and he says he’d like to get back together. Nadine, having grown since their split, tells him honestly, “It’s over. I’m someone else.” We presume she will continue with Mr. Quiet Boyfriend, but if she doesn’t, that wouldn’t be a problem as well. She is done being defined by her relationships. (This is celebrated visually at the end by a long tracking shot.)
Jean’s Wife further cemented Bellon’s visual style, with a documentary look in the scenes shot around Paris and a Cassavetes-like reality to the two-character scenes shot indoors. (This connection is cemented by the fact that we see Nadine coming out of a screening of Minnie and Moskowitz.) The visuals are augmented by a beautiful score by Georges Delerue.
Bellon wrote the film with assistance from Remi Waterhouse. Here we don’t follow multiple characters as in Somewhere, but we do get a side-plot that is brief but wonderful: The older neighbor who comforts Nadine at the beginning is seen trying a computer dating service. She keeps on meeting farmers (which is fine with her; she wants to leave the city) and eventually finds a man to marry and live with, somewhere in the country. She and Nadine have both “grown” in the course of the film.
*****
As I noted above, my interest in Bellon’s work started with the documentary she made with Marker and the fact that one of her films starred the great Bulle Ogier. That film is Nevermore Forever (Jamais plus toujours, translated literally as “Never again always” making it quite close to the slightly more poetic Kate Bush album title “Never Forever”; 1976). It was the first solo feature by Bellon that I saw and I was bowled over by it; although I enjoyed all but one of the films in the L’Alliance retrospective, Jamais remains my favorite because I find the view of memory and relationships contained in it to be deeply moving.
Memory is indeed the theme of the film, and this links Bellon to the “Left Bank New Wave” (Marker, Resnais, Varda), all of whom made profound features about memory. The opening draws one into the plot beautifully by immediately conjuring memory: Claire is seen moving through a room filled with objects that are from various estates, all going up for auction. As she sifts through the items (many of which we see again later in the film), she centers in on a photo album, in which she sees pictures of... herself.
We soon learn that the objects being auctioned were owned by her friend Agathe (Loleh Bellon); the two women may or may not have been lovers (signals in that direction are sent), but they were most certainly best friends. Claire encounters Mathieu (Jean-Marc Bory) in the auction house, and the two reminisce about Agathe, who was a friend of his as well. We learn that the two met before and that Mathieu was quite smitten with Claire.
Bellon moved back to the structure of Somewhere here by having Claire and Mathieu as the main focus, but we also follow the lives of a young couple (Marianne Epin and future star Bernard Giraudeau) and a group of teenage boys who are cinephiles addicted to classic cinema, most prominently American comedians (Keaton, Fields) and stars of the ’30s-’50s. These plots can be seen as dispensable, but they relate to the burgeoning Claire-Mathieu love story because all the characters are drawn to physical objects that are related to the past, theirs or other peoples’. Suffice it to say that I have much affection for the young cinephile scenes, as I was a teen like that, immersed in the past while enjoying the present.
Claire resists the growing connection to Mathieu, because she doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life. (“I barely know myself,” she tells him at one point.) It’s also because she is still dealing with the death of Agathe, who was found dead in her apartment. We see the two friends in flashbacks rehearsing a play Agathe is acting in; we also see how Claire felt about “losing” Claire when she was traveling with productions.
Mathieu, played with much restraint by Bory, continues his pitch to Claire, telling her “Now is the right moment for us to meet,” as he was was too shy and too geekish when they first met. The joy in these characters’ scenes is derived from this being a pretty reasonable and realistic middle-aged romance (or effort toward a romance.) Thus, a goodbye scene the two have at an airport is played with no trace of soppy sentimentality—it is genuinely touching. (Claire tells Mathieu of her uncertainty about life in general, saying she has the “impression of landing somewhere,” as she is about to board her plane.)
The masterstroke here, which adds to the film’s rewatchability (I’ve seen it three times so far), is that Bellon counterpoints all the action with shots of the various places that our possessions go when they die. Auction houses and antique stores for the more valuable things; blankets on the street for things with some small cash value; and garbage trucks for the biggest items (furniture) and those that have no cash value.
The looseness of the dramatic structure of Jamais allows Bellon to include several moments of the above, plus one scene that is simply sublime: Mathieu, who teaches history, shows Claire his collection of early 20th-century postcards. The cards have images of French communities and the important events they underwent (making them seem like news reports of the period, as Claire points out). As Mathieu and Claire study the faces of the people, Bellon goes “into” the cards themselves and eliminates the couple from the soundtrack. One can’t help but assume that this scene was an acknowledgment of Denise Bellon and her photography (which was sometimes about the “news of the day,” but always had a sense of the period and country it was shot in, regardless of the context).
For those of us who avoid Spielbergian sentiment like the plague, the finale of Jamais is subtle and truly moving. We see a woman we haven’t seen before, in what looks to be a near-future period, entering a modernist antique store. She looks at various items, but she settles on a photo album, the very same photo album that the film began with… but this time, there are additional photos, of Claire and Mathieu as a couple growing old together happily. (The final image is of the woman in the antique store becoming a frozen image herself, resembling an old painting.)
The universality of Bellon’s take on memory — the fact that our stuff will outlast us and will be disseminated one way or another; and that couples who made different impressions on each other at different times might eventually find happiness together — is what makes the film so special. Also, the fact that the characters never overtly cry (and seem too confused to cry). They’re still carefully moving their way through life, figuring it out as they go.
I see that at least one other person was as moved as I was by Jamais, as it has been posted on YouTube with English subtitles. (You click the Closed Caption button.) Watch it here.
****
The next film in Bellon’s filmography, Rape of Love (L’amour violé, 1978) presents another, more traumatic slice of life, taking place in Grenoble this time. Along with the later Naked Love, this film shows how Bellon was able to deal with deadly serious subjects by making us privy to the thoughts and emotions of the lead character, and eventually reaching a hopeful note (ever the “happy pessimist”!).
Nicole (Nathalie Nell) is a nurse who is engaged to be married. She and her fiancé socialize with another couple who are their best friends. (The male in this couple is played by Pierre Arditi, who had some great roles in the later films of Alain Resnais.) A light prelude to the real action shows the two couples socializing and discussing their lives; Nathalie’s friend gave up science to live out in the country with her husband (echoes of Jean’s Wife).
Late one afternoon Nicole is harassed at a bar in a village near where she lives. As she leaves the bar, a quartet of men (one of whom is played by later star Daniel Auteuil) decide to stalk her, driving their truck behind her bicycle. As the evening comes on, they bump her bike and she is suddenly surrounded by them. We see them humiliate her, insulting her and forcing her to strip. Two of the men rape her while the other two hold her down; they repeatedly smack her throughout the rape. (Most of the action is off-frame, but it’s still a stark, disturbing scene.)
She is then seen visiting a male doctor friend, who tells her she needs to be hospitalized. She tells her seamstress mother and her friends that she fell off her bike (as she has sustained visible bruises), telling the truth only to her best friend.
Bellon inserts an interesting scene in this part of the film: The fiancé is doing his military service and sits around with his fellow soldiers making dirty jokes while listening to an audio tape made covertly of a couple having sex. (The fiancé seems not as into it as his fellows, but he doesn’t ask them to shut it off.) She ends up telling her fiancé about the rape and he takes it personally, saying it will disrupt their relationship. (“And me?” he asks her.)
Haunted by the event, she thinks a truck following her as she bicycles to her friends’ house contains the rapists; it turns out complete strangers who mean no harm are in the cabin. This gripping, sad sequence is counterpointed by an odd moment where the two couples discuss different kinds of rape, including “metaphysical rape.” (It’s not depicted as such, but it seems like a particularly cruel topic of discussion, given what Nicole has gone through.)
She finally tells her seamstress mother, who says, “It’s best not to talk about it.” Her best friend, on the other hand, witnesses her breaking down (saying, “I can’t stand myself”) and demands that she go to the police and report the rape. Her fiancé is bothered that she can’t make love with him but tells her not to go to the cops, saying, “I don’t want to look like a fool.” His friend Arditi tells him that, despite the fact that “you’re the one who’s been raped” (!), the fiancé must show more compassion for Nicole.
Nicole then sees one of the rapists when she back in their area. We watch as each one of the “suspected” quartet are arrested. Nicole is asked by the police if they are the men in question. (Her response: “How could I forget?”) Her lawyer stands firmly behind her, urging her to “break the silence,” but also warns her the ensuing legal processes are going to be very upsetting.
We see how the lives of the rapists change as the trial is about to begin. One of them is told off by his parents; they go to Nicole, asking her to drop the charges and offering money if she does so. The wife of another of the quartet does the same thing.
Given the tediousness of most trial scenes in most movies, the legal processes here seem pretty grueling, as the trial takes place in the judge’s office. The judge is a woman, but she comes down hard on Nicole. Eventually one of the quartet gives up the other three and admits Nicole is telling the truth. Oddly, though (perhaps this happened in French trials in the Seventies?), the judge reconvenes the trial in the farm area where the rape took place.
Nicole’s fiancé, who has been distancing himself from the whole thing and has been furious with Nicole for coming out publicly and accusing the four men, then shows up at the legal proceeding and hugs Nicole, signaling that he has been wrong and that he truly loves her. It’s a somewhat convenient conclusion (as is the process by which Nicole sees one of the rapists again and by which they are caught by the law).
The film rises above these bits of contrivance, since it has several very effectively dramatic (and one very disturbing) sequences. (The film was the only one to receive applause from the viewing audience at L’Alliance.) The performances, as always with Bellon’s best films, are spot-on, and her sense of reflecting the character’s feeling and thoughts and mapping them onto the location she inhabits is particularly strong here, in spite of the fact that this story partially takes place in a town with beautiful countryside and is not a “city of lonely people” tale.
The contrivances in Bellon’s script are also forgivable because Rape of Love gets far more inside its lead character than American theatrical films about the topic — think Lipstick and The Accused — ever did. (In the U.S., this topic was presented with greater intensity and plot logic on television.) Nell also deserves high marks for taking on such a difficult role and making Nicole seem very real, especially when depicting her traumatic reaction to what has happened to her.
To be continued...