UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE

Jean-Luc Godard was passionate about UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE; he praised it as a synthesis of Robert Bresson’s ascetic technique and Italian neorealism’s social content. He said, "UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE comes across as a document, as a clinical statement on reality. And I insist on the word "clinical". Marcel Hanoun presents a film where the suspense does not come from the social aspect of the heroine's misadventures, but rather from their pathological aspect. Marcel Hanoun's originality is to have been able to not only describe a dramatic situation, but also to elaborate a woman's character. That's why I like this film."

Marcel Hanoun’s first feature film, UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE, was shot in 16mm on a low budget. The film begins with the end of the story: a woman is taken in by a benevolent elderly woman; she’s embarrassed and considers leaving, but instead travels back within her memories of the preceding days; in flash-back we see what has happened to her since her arrival in Paris with her small daughter. The film ends before her reverie is complete, and the spectator is left with the open-ended question of what will happen when she emerges from her memory.

Throughout the film, in first-person voiceover, the mother narrates her experiences seeking accommodations, looking for work, and feeding her daughter. As she recounts her experiences in the past tense, in temporal terms this contradicts the present-tense dialogue interaction with her various interlocutors that she meets throughout Paris. Similarly, her voiceover describing the events corresponds in elliptical fashion to the imagery of her wandering the Parisian streets with her daughter. In Hanoun’s hands, this deceptively simple drama becomes a cubist portrait of a woman’s daily struggle to avoid poverty and maintain her dignity in the Paris of the 1950’s – the film shuttling between past, present, and an unknown future; between documentary-like images of Paris and a fictional construct; and between reality and memory. According to film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in 1970 upon the film’s belated showing at the New York Film Festival, “UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE creates a new kind of filmic reality, a fugue-like narrative form which infuses a simple story with unnatural beauty and power. There is little chance of a masterpiece like UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE receiving the kind of attention it deserves.”