Nowadays,French female directors make more and more their presence felt on the scene .Yannick Bellon was their pioneer in the seventies,just as Jacqueline Audry and Agnès Varda were in the fifties and the sixties .
"Quelque Part Quelqu'Un " is her first full-length film ,and,let's put the record straight,her least accessible work. Yannick Bellon,who was the first in France to tackle the burning subject of rape ("L'Amour Violé") ,would come back to a much more conventional ,palatable, form ;she would also begin to champion any good cause coming :breast cancer (L'Amour Nu"), homosexuality ("La Triche" ) ,ecology ("L'Affût"),drug addiction and delinquency ("Les Enfants Du Desordre"),you name it...
"Quelque Part Quelqu'Un " takes place in a urban landscape, made of steel and glass ,where the weak (and even the strong) find it hard to survive .Maybe the key to the movie is the ethnology lecture on native tribes and their dualism.Paris is changing at such a speed that the city leaves many a man in the cold.Old buildings near decay are destroyed,replaced by modern ones ,which are not more hospitable for all that (see the scene where the architects meet ).
In this flood of people, we follow some characters who sometimes meet (the architect and the old lady ;the same and the woman from the provinces) but do not communicate .All these human beings' are holding conversations which always remain incomplete .Even the educated persons cannot avoid isolation and despair: the architect urges her lover,a journalist and a doomed writer,to give up drinking but he does not feel like living anymore because "my work is absurd". And those who enjoy a simple happiness (the dinner scene may be the only one,in a 100 minute movie ,where some sunshine breaks through)like the old couple -the marvelous Helene Dieudonné- , see their life destroyed :they have to leave their old flat and to settle down in the suburbs because the old lady could not live in those high buildings ;they lose all their friends but as the old lady sadly says :"that's the way it goes" .
Bellon ,half way through her movie, leaves the concrete inhuman world she depicts for the Paris of yore ,pans across the town ,her look stopping at Montmartre,Notre Dame and the mythic canal saint- Martin.Georges Delerue's score ,which was unusually spooky,oppressive and distressing ,becomes tuneful and sweet ,as Musette accordion is heard,and comforts the viewer for a short while.
Her movie is not wholly convincing though;it sometimes looks like a jumble ,with clichés: the demonstrations, a post May 1968 commonplace ,with "revolutionnaries " bawling "L'Internationale", the young man who refuses the establishment and the nine-to-five routine ,but nevertheless took advantage of that society for he was able to study... ethnology.
Julien Duvivier's 1952 movie transferred to the realities of the seventies just before the crisis which would shake the world shortly after.A time capsule,maybe too pessimistic for its own good.As a first movie, it's an interesting effort.
