Cures for Midlife Trauma: Post-coïtum animal triste and Vénus beauté (institut)

Abstract

Cures for Midlife Trauma: Post-coïtum animal triste and Vénus beauté (institut) Joan M. West CINEMA, BY ITS VISUAL NATURE, represents a powerful medium of influencing cultural perceptions. It has also traditionally been notoriously ageist. As the baby-boomer generation continues to move up the demographic ladder, more and more of its female cinema-goers have begun to note the truth of Jean Kozlowski's witty assessment that "Movies tend to give us only an abrupt shove from cute ingenue to weird old crone."1 The message from this highly insinuative medium is that women are either (preferably) beautiful, willowy, sexy, desirable and desiring, that is, young; or appallingly, uselessly old. The healthy, vibrant, productive forty- and fifty-something women who manifestly surround us in real life become almost totally invisible on the screen. As the presence of female directors in the French filmmaking industry has increased throughout the 1990s, the representation of women has taken some fresh directions worthy of note. A brief look at some recent aging studies will inform the discussion of films that follows. In the popular cultural imagination of many Western societies, turning forty often represents a female rite of passage. Women who are "no-longeryoung " and who have completed their stint of childbearing and motherhood are expected to "act their age." They must gracefully, quietly, without protest enter a stage of life perceived as the onset of physical degeneration and the end of sexuality—the "beginning of the end." While one cannot deny that biological factors play a role in these perceptions, it seems equally true that the process of aging is, to a very large extent, socially and culturally constructed, and that our current construct focuses on matters of physical and mental decline. This emphasis has caused us to develop a distaste for aging that leads many to experience midlife as a kind of trauma or even to deny it entirely.2 The field of age studies has dubbed the phenomenon "middle-ageism" (or just "ageism"), an ideology of the life-course representing midlife aging as primarily a matter of decline, characterized by a fear of being not-young.3 This ideology with such a disparaging view of the process of aging is extremely insidious and taints most aspects of our lives. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, among her many studies, has examined the role that novels in particular have played in resisting it. The strength of the influence such stories wield lies in Vol. XLII, No. 3 17 L'Esprit Créateur the fact that fiction is so often read as a true portrayal of real-life experiences, and thus as offering a worthy model for evaluating our own. Whereas many novels feature a "decline narrative," Gullette distinguishes a positive vision of midlife women in what she designates as a new genre—the midlife progress novel.4 The heroine of these works, in contrast to the one in the decline narrative , is characterized in terms of life energy rather than loss of beauty. She is capable of surviving as well as of rescuing herself from her dilemma. This fictional heroine can make love as well as participate in mutual love (activities often reserved for youth). These women "do not always get everything they want. . . nor do they always keep what they obtain. But however close the genre edges toward decline, it shies away from the fictional punishments that feel like comeuppance" (Gullette 83). These midlife progress novels, therefore, provide distinctive portraits of women who have become empowered to utilize their middle years for growth. They stand as a forceful rebuttal to the mainstream culture's narratives of decline. Two French films in the 1990s by female directors offer noteworthy similarities to the kind of midlife progress stories that Gullette has remarked in the American novel. While younger figures—adolescents and young women in their twenties and thirties—have certainly not disappeared from the screen, remarkable creations of women past their fortieth year but very demonstrably not yet "weird old crones" have appeared. This essay, then, proposes a closer examination of these portraits: Brigitte Roüan's Post-coïtum animal triste (1997, English title: After Sex) and Tonie Marshall's Vénus...