La Tortue sur le dos (1978)
Directed by Luc Béraud

Film Review

Being first and foremost a writer, Luc Béraud presumably had first-hand experience of that bane of a scribe's existence, the unmitigated horror that is the writer's block.  Odd that he should choose this as the subject for his first film as a director, a meandering but amiable comedy-drama which adopts as its title the apt metaphor of a 'tortoise on its back'.  Béraud shared the screenwriting credit with Claude Miller, with whom he had already collaborated on Miller's own debut feature La Meilleure Façon de marcher (1975).  Béraud would lend his writing talents to several of Miller's subsequent films, including L'Effrontée (1985), as well as working with directors as diverse as Pierre Jolivet, Alain Jessua and Anne Le Ny.   Luc Béraud is best known for his second feature Plein sud (1981), featuring Patrick Dewaere and Jeanne Moreau.  After this he directed one further film for cinema, La Petite Amie (1988), before devoting the remainder of his career to French television.

In La Tortue sur le dos, auteur diva Jean-François Stévenin gives a superlative impression of a man desperately in search of inspiration for his latest book, but it is the irrepressible Bernadette Lafont who ends up stealing the film from him.  The scenes with Stévenin and Lafont are easily the funniest and most truthful the film has to offer, as convincing a portrayal of conjugal life as any to be found in the oeuvre of François Truffaut (indeed the latter's Domicile conjugal springs readily to mind).  As Stévenin contemplates the abyss and wrestles with the ultimate terror that is the blank page, Lafont waltzes around him like a tornado in human form, so it is inevitable that something has to give. It's a shame that the hyperactive, attention-seeking Lafont ends up being the casualty, as she is unceremoniously ejected from the proceedings around the film's mid-point so that we can follow Stévenin on a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland excursion into Parisian Bohemia.

From this point on, the film becomes increasingly surreal and aimless.  Amongst the odd assortment of characters encountered by the protagonist in his quest for enlightenment are a rich woman who employs him as a ghost (she supplies pencils galore but no inspiration) and a carload of artistic misfits who would (in real life) soon become one of the most successful French comedy troupes ever (l'équipe du Splendid).  Two of Truffaut's favourite performers, Jean Dasté and Véronique Silver, put in memorable cameo appearances, and Claude Miller (incidentally, Truffaut's former production manager) makes a rare appearance in front of the camera, looking like a weirdly zombified Gallic version of Woody Allen.  None of these can fill the Bernadette Lafont-shaped cavity that Béraud has dug for himself, and so the film soon loses momentum in its second half and ends up dragging itself to the finishing line with the pace and elegance of a spluttering old jalopy running on diluted carrot juice.  La Tortue sur le dos is far from being Béraud's best work but, despite its rambling, uneven narrative and relentless barrage of pregnant pauses (which are presumably intended as a wry allusion to the life-sapping moments of sheer nothingness a writer has to negotiate when practicing his métier) it is not without charm.  The film will certainly strike a chord with anyone who has ever tried to earn his crust by hacking away at the coalface of creativity with the blunted shards of a depleted imagination.  Who'd be a writer?

Film Synopsis

Despite his best efforts, Paul, a once successful writer, cannot overcome the crippling mental block that is preventing him from writing his next book.  His wife Camille does her best to reassure him but soon Paul's anxieties begin to put their relationship under a severe strain.  In a moment of crisis, Paul walks out of the family home and launches himself into a new mode of living, away from his creature comforts and middleclass certainties.  But will this passage through Bohemia be enough to unleash Paul's creativity...?