Original subtitles

Aragon.

I'm filled with the deafening silence of loving

The deafening silence of loving

I'm filled with the deafening silence of loving

The deafening silence...

of loving

- Do you know Elsa? - I don't believe so.

I keep thinking I know her well,

but Elsa keeps changing the way I think about her,

so I'm always thinking I can't quite pin her down.

Yet I've been thinking that

for the past 37 or 38 years.

It's strange you should think that.

I remember Elsa's hat and fur coat

the day I met her.

But the rest can't be pinned down.

Well, I have quite precise memories.

Louis looked like a dance-hall dancer.

His hair was incredibly dark,

which no one can believe now, with his blue eyes.

And his hair has gone white, so people think he was blond.

But he was ever so dark.

He was very thin and very handsome —

a bit too handsome.

It made him look like those young men...

one would meet in dance halls.

The first time I saw Louis from behind,

he was dressed in black,

and his suit was all shiny.

Like a piano.

I was sitting on this stool. A friend said to me...

"You should meet that woman."

I was playing dice by myself.

I turned and saw the corner table, where the day before...

November 4, 1928...

there'd been lots of people, and one had said...

"The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky asks you to join him at his table."

A Mayakovsky like this.

And quite independently,

the next day, November 5,

you walked into the café through that little swinging door.

And from that day on, we've never been apart.

What would I be without you?

You who took the first step

What would I be without you but a heart turned to stone?

Or time fixed forever on this watch face?

What would I be without you but this stammering and stuttering?

From you I learned everything about human affairs

Now I see the world your way

From you I learned

How to drink from fountains

How to read the distant stars in the sky

How to take up a passerby's song

I learned everything from you

The true meaning of a thrill

In Le grand jamais you write...

"In life you never know what people think. You only imagine it."

I try to imagine your life...

and imagine you.

All I can do is imagine you.

A little girl...

In Russia there was once a little girl

called Zemlianichka,

or "wild strawberry."

It was the era of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov,

and at school, for a staging of a Chekhov story,

Wild Strawberry had been given an important role.

A little girl wakes up pointing at the floor and screaming...

"Oy proosak!"

Meaning "Oh, a cockroach!" That was all.

The little girl grew up.

She's 16.

She has Elsa's eyes.

Elsa's Eyes

Your eyes are so deep that as I bend to drink

I saw every sun reflected in them

And desperate souls plunging in to die

Your eyes are so deep I lose all memory there

Shadows of birds, a murky ocean Then the sun and your eyes change

Summer carves the clouds into angels The sky's never bluer above the grain

Enchanted by beauty, the child's eyes widen

When you open yours, they're like wildflowers laid open by the rain

Is lightning hidden in the lavender?

I'm caught in a net of shooting stars like a sailor dead at sea in August

O Paradise, a hundred times lost and found

Your eyes are my Peru, my Golconde, my Indies

One fine night the universe ran aground

On the reefs the wreckers had set ablaze

But I saw shining above the sea

Elsa's eyes, Elsa's eyes, Elsa's eyes

That's when you introduced that strange fellow to your parents,

a fellow no one had yet noticed,

who decked himself out in a yellow coat —

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky.

Not the one in that picture.

A young man resembling Belmondo...

a six-foot-four Belmondo.

What are you thinking?

One never knows what you're thinking.

How can one even try to trace your semblance in words?

You who are so different, so fleeting

Always changing and transformed

Whom nothing could fix in my eyes

Neither passion nor the years

Always new and surprising

Love, love

You whose portrait evades the stroke of pen and brush

Like the indefinable form of laughter, as indefinable as a sob

Memory without recollection

And wound without dagger

Imagine you...

All I can do is imagine you.

One day you went off to join that Frenchman

you'd met back then.

There were Frenchmen then in Russia.

He's the one who gave you your pen name.

With that Frenchman you went to Tahiti.

And to evoke distant Tahiti,

you later chose to use a painting of it

in our strange Oeuvres Romanesques Croisées

which began coming out last year.

This painting by Rousseau,

who had never traveled to tropical countries.

By 1923 you had left your Frenchman.

You were in Berlin, among all kinds of people.

And as I walked into this café on the Kurfürstendamm,

you were walking out through the same door.

We didn't meet.

There were Russians in Berlin, all kinds.

Writers like Gorki, Remizov,

and Chklovski, who was in love with you.

He showed his book to Maxim Gorki,

and as there were six of your letters in the book,

Gorki wanted to meet you and persuade you to write.

In Russian, of course.

This is the Elsa who, in Moscow in 1925,

published In Tahiti.

You wrote a second book, Wild Strawberry,

the story of that little girl.

But you'd already returned to France,

intending to stay just a short while,

when, in this empty bar...

Caressed by kisses, the years race into the void

Avoid, avoid, avoid shattered memories

The sun is the same to the pale pianist

Who sang a few words, always the same

Darling, do you remember those carefree days

When we lived together in Montparnasse?

Life slipped by without our noticing it

Evenings are already turning cold

The heart runs late

Caressed by kisses, the years race into the void

Avoid, avoid, avoid shattered memories

We lived here in Montparnasse.

We didn't have a penny. How would we manage?

Elsa thought of making necklaces.

She told the story in her last book in Russian...

and as I did later in Le Cantique à Elsa.

You made jewelry for daytime or evening wear

Everything became a necklace in your lyrical hands

Pieces of rags, pieces of mirrors

Necklaces as fine as glory, unbelievably fine

Elsa waltzes and keeps on waltzing

Early in the morning...

I'd set out with a suitcase filled with your necklaces.

I sold to merchants

From New York and Berlin, Rio, Milan, Ankara

The jewels your gold-washer's hands created

These rocks like flowers bearing your colors

Elsa waltzes and keeps on waltzing

We lived like that for two or three years.

We felt rich, until one day you'd had enough.

So I became a journalist for 1,300 francs a month.

That was in '33 or '34.

Berlin, the Reichstag fire.

Paris, February 6, 1934.

And then we lived here, in the heart of Paris.

It was the time of the Spanish Civil War.

"Writing a life story means going beyond this life, beyond history."

We went to Madrid in a truck,

bearing gifts for the Republic's writers.

"Just as a train speeds through the landscape

with its stops, switches, signals, bridges, tunnels, catastrophes."

Munich.

Prague.

And around this time, though you kept it from me,

you wrote in French.

A miracle! In French.

But who was Thérèse?

A name heard on the radio in a quiet voice

that wasn't destined for us.

Thérèse?

Here's how Max Ernst saw her

for our Oeuvres Croisées.

But who were you talking about?

For me, Thérèse is who you were then.

Your soft hand on your cheek.

"Good evening, Thérèse."

Am I interrupting?

Not at all. Come sit down.

In fact, you can give me a hand.

I've got myself all tangled up

in these proofs.

Of course, if I'd asked you, "Am I interrupting?"

you'd have said, "Yes, I'm writing a poem about Elsa."

I enter this country she opens up to me

Where everything throbs with her presence

Her hand opens the shutter overlooking the garden

Where one hears the sound of invisible things

I'll invent for you, my rose, as many roses

As there are diamonds in the sea

As many roses as there are centuries in stardust

As there are dreams in a child's head

As there is light in a sob

I will invent for you the rose.

I will invent for you the rose

You looked at me with your eyes of pure oblivion

You looked at me over memory, over wandering choruses

Over faded roses

Over thwarted joys, over abolished days

You looked at me with your eyes of blue oblivion

All the roses I sing of All the roses I choose

All the roses I invent I vaunt in vain with my voice

Before the rose I see before me

Readers of these poems expect me

to be 20 years old forever.

And since I can't satisfy...

that need for beauty and youth that readers have,

I feel guilty, and it makes me unhappy.

That's what's terrible. They're not just for me.

That's why I speak...

of other poems, other texts.

At least I know what they're about,

and all that remains a secret to others.

Maybe I'm not very good at sharing.

Aragon always says he's a shadow at your feet.

He's wrong.

He's doing me wrong.

He's always belittling himself compared to me.

It annoys people...

and they're right.

For thirty years I have been this shadow at your feet

For thirty years my thought has been the shadow of your thought

"You think all this is an allegory. You don't hear me..."

I know I've done a lot for Aragon,

because we were made for one another.

I've greatly influenced his writing.

He's very grateful to me, I think.

Because in the end, it went the way he wanted it to go.

There was a time

when he was really struggling to find himself.

He'd completely lost his way as a writer.

And having me at his side —

and I say this without false modesty —

probably made him feel like his path was mapped out.

He's always thanking me for that.

He never stops thanking me.

What a miracle to be together

The light on your cheek, the wind playing around you

When I see you, I still tremble

Like a young man resembling me trembled on his first date

Blame me if I cannot cope

Can one adjust to flames? They've killed before

The soul's eyes gouged, adjusting to dark clouds

For the first time your mouth, your voice

From wing to mountaintop, the tree trembles

It's always the first time when your dress touches me

Take this heavy fruit Discard the rotten half

Bite into the sweet half, thirty lost years

Sink your teeth in I give my life to you

My life truly began the day I met you

Your arms barred the path of my insanity

Showed me a land where bounty is sown

In the confusion you cooled my fevers

And I ignited like gin at Christmas

I was born from your lip

My life begins with you

All these poems are for you.

Do they make you feel loved?

No, they aren't what makes me feel loved.

Not the poetry.

It's the rest. Life.

"Writing a life story, with its stops, switches,

signals, bridges, tunnels, catastrophes..."

Here only this world ends, and this film.

Here we are separated,

but here begins Elsa's second life,

in which she is Elsa Triolet,

the Elsa Triolet of today, author of some 17 books.

No longer only the woman I imagine,

but the woman who imagines,

who has given life to dreams

and characters I have lived among for a quarter century,

watching them be born, I myself being one of them.

A long story that I'll tell you some other time.

For now, be content with this fairytale with its pat ending.

They married and lived happily together...

as in every fairy tale.

When I learned in your arms that I was a human being

When I stopped pretending and became myself at your touch

Take these books from my soul Open them everywhere

Tear them apart to better understand their perfume and secret

Brutally rip open the pages Crumple and tear them

You'll retain but one thing A single murmur, a single chorus

A long, babbling thank-you This happiness like a meadow

Child-god, my idolatry The endless Ave of the litanies

My blossoming, my growing beauty My reason, my folly

My month of May, my melody My paradise, my blazing fire

My universe, Elsa, my life

My universe, Elsa, my life.