Henri Bergson believed that the phenomenon called humour arises when the material world falls short of our spiritual aspirations. Had he lived long enough to savour Chantal Akerman’s work, he could have found proof for his thesis. Not only was Akerman a gifted metteuse en scene of Chaplinesque slapstick, but how she depicted romantic love was also a source of uncontrollable chuckling, thanks to this gap between wishful dreaming and all-too-human reality.
Take I’m Hungry, I’m Cold, a short vignette from the omnibus film Paris vu par ... 20 ans après. Two almost-mature gal pals (Maria “Who’s Zed?” De Medeiros and Pascale Salkin) flee Brussels, where they are suffocating, toward Paris, city of light and love. In the dead of night, they arrive, ready for adventure! Though they have to sleep in first, that goes without saying. After applying a line of eye pencil in the hope to appear older, the next day takes them to a bar-tabac, where the Parisian reality turns out to be full of the film’s titular hardships.
In the lilting staccato that will characterise much of Akerman’s work in the years to come, they order coffee, bread, and cigarettes only to realise that all is “not like back home.” The tic-tac-toeing between the two friends is endearing because they are debating life wisdom entirely à l’improviste, but no less adamant. They are trying out life, rather than actually understanding it. When, after buying a second sandwich, their money runs out, they come to realise that this is precisely when life actually begins—an existence that soon enough seems primarily made up of cold and hunger.
The solution that presents itself is likely the funniest scene in this endearing gem, as the friends decide to busk to gather some money. After finding a succession of restaurants unsuitable and thus passing them by, they open their throats in one establishment for a rather tone-deaf “lalala”. Their plan works: they are invited to share the table of two older men. One of them even offers the ladies a place to sleep. At night, when one of the girls leaves the bed to once again satisfy her hunger, the other invites their host under the sheets so that she can rid herself of her virginity in mere seconds. “Comme ça, c'est fait.”
The shot in which one girlfriend devours her just-fried eggs while the soundtrack emphasises what’s happening in the bed in the other room introduces a more melancholy undertone. Akerman’s work sweats unmistakable queerness from every pellicule pore, and one of the recurring stylistic figures is the pair of girlfriends, one harbouring more than purely platonic feelings for the other. Our adventurous buddies thus follow in the footsteps of the young women in the unfinished The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman (1971) and also foreshadow the girlfriends Pascale (again portrayed by Pascale Salkin) and Mado (French chanteuse Lio) in Golden Eighties (1986) to receive their most moving portrait in Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels (1994). I’m Hungry, I’m Cold is pretty much a prologue to the latter, or more poetically put, a test flight.
In the space that opens between the two friends at the end of their adventure, the desire of one for the other will blossom. For now, they walk out of this film together, facing an undecided future. But the time for trial and error might be over. The kisses they exchanged, under the guise of portraying each other’s defaulted boyfriends, may soon take on new meaning as the capstone of that period when cold and hunger still seemed something romantic.
But these are problems for later. Right now, life has yet to begin.
