In French Serial Vernon Subutex, High Fidelity Meets Vagabond, Delivering Peak TV For The Other One Percent (EXCLUSIVE TEAR-JERKER CLIP)
What’s the story: Seeking a lifeline, a newly-homeless former record store guru goes through his address book, contacting friends with whom he was once, long ago, united by music and subculture. He embarks on an odyssey delivering poignant moments of existential heroism as well as damning looks at self-preservation, compromise, and self-betrayal. Whether, like Hornby’s character, he survives to contemplate domesticity, or, like Varda’s, he dies in a ditch, I leave for you to discover. Vernon Subutex is a compelling single-shot serial, not a schmuck-bait-riddled series, so there is no second season…this ain’t no Hot Tub Time Machine.
Simply put: For me, perhaps not since Agnes Varda’s Vagabond, (and to a degree, Mike Leigh’s Naked ) has a self-exiled individual embarked on an outsider odyssey so revelatory, illuminating the hypocrisies and self-deception within the life more ordinary — almost every vignette in Vernon Subutex is an indictment of human cowardice in the face of self-preservation, resulting in attendant self-resentment over abandoned-or-compromised-dreams and leading to subsequent acts of indifference, reflexive self-preservation — and at times, outright vindictiveness — by the titular character’s old friends, cumulatively doing profound harm to someone whose anarcho-individualistic dharma has, in a world too-far-gone, placed him at the precipice of total ruin.
In the serial-opener, Vernon (Romain Duris) emerges like Lord Roy in The Music Room, starting his typical day homebound, loungewear-clad, with coffee, ganja and a net porn wank, in his own crumbling manor, of a sort: the apartment situated over his long-shuttered record store, within the walls of which he was, half a lifetime ago, a high priest of new sounds, defender of emerging bands, a life-changing selector. And like Lord Roy, Vernon is the last of a dying breed, living through a peacefully aimless life, his fondest memories revolving around music from the time when record shops were central reference points. For extra-credit reading on same, “Notes From A Time When Everyday Was Record Store Day” is this author’s ode to a few now-gone record shops from his long-gone Manhattan.
While the surprisingly brief flashbacks to this time in Vernon’s life are intended to evoke a late ‘80s early ‘90s indie record shop in France (though, I wasn’t there, so what do I know?), posters notwithstanding, the depictions of his halcyon days play anemically, like gestures of communication (in one scene element, groan, two dudes get into a fist-fight over whether Grunge is shit) however, the mise-en-scene of the contemporary, middle-aged versions of his friends is written and created via a longer look by a sharper eye, and any lame dialogue is authentic to the lameness of the characters (a self-important crypto-currency yuppie scum manifesting the new nihilism, proclaims “God is the sum of all logarithms, and we are riding the wave”.)
And so, it is amidst this climate that Vernon’s casual absolutism is crumbling: before he can finish his coffee and enjoy a happy ending in front of his computer, city marshals arrive, giving him ten minutes to take all that he can carry, refusing with irked bewilderment his touchingly naïve offer to barter with a test-pressing of the first recording by Les Thugs as partial payment. Like Steve Martin in The Jerk, he leaves, carrying essential odds and sods.
Nonetheless, on the cusp of hobodom, Vernon discovers that with his digital music library, he can still impact others and maybe save himself, beginning at a bus stop where, after making an annoying comment about the dichotomy twixt a stranger’s organic grocer tote bag and her cigarette, then even more annoyingly bumming a cigarette, he, in what seems a cheesy self-aggrandizing stranger’s pride-saving, post-mooch contrivance, announces — like a Manson-esque bus stop leprechaun granting a wish — that he is going to repay her for the cigarette with a song, claiming he’d sized and cued her up musically.
Playing it tough-but-with-a-heart, in keeping with her Katrin Cartlidge visage, and manifesting how there are no small parts, she (Céline Carrère) agrees to listen, and within the first sung word, her initial cynicism yields to stunned, teary-eyed gratitude, and this moment (watch the series for the full scene) of human-scale magic makes for a cute short-film-within a mini-series by way of random bus stop slice o’ life, working like the movie’s PSA for itself: a microcosm of the universe of hard choices they both occupy in very different ways, made jarringly manifest as reality claims his fleeting bus stop companion, who abruptly pulls off the headphones (when the words “Leaving all your dreams” are sung) as she, to his surprise, chooses not to miss the arriving bus over completing her listen to the unfinished song. Before leaving, she gifts him her entire pack of smokes, giving him a long, piteous and grateful look, apologizing for the fact that she can’t do more for him.
And so, just as the self-displaced pre-Buddha Siddhartha can fast, wait and read, our involuntarily displaced 50-something, can do two out of three, plus, he has his infinite playlist. Borrowing computer time in the library to find old fiends via their Facebook pages, he embarks, like The Swimmer without the backyards and swimming pools, looking more like Charles Manson than Burt Lancaster, and irrepressible as Giannini in Seven Beauties, soldiering on with his weather-beaten mug, passing through various lives as a ghost of Christmases past, present and future.
As he swings from life-rope to life-rope, unsure of the catch and release points punctuating his visits as friends reach their limit of what they’re willing to share or tolerate, leaving him again to his wits, we the audience find ourselves hoping that a beneficiary he be of the familiar cosmological proposition that there exists an all-knowing entity which looks after fools and children. And though earnest, Vernon is no saint, however, he seems to be the only one trying to remedy a transgression (stealing books from a hostess-cum-lover) while paying an outsized penalty for same, despite his best efforts.
By way of burying what for some will be the lede, I’ll add that on this same day that he’s been evicted, Vernon’s received an invite to the homecoming and comeback show of an old friend and now-legendary rock star, Alex Bleach (Athaya Mokonzi), whom he was the first to support, and from whom Vernon hopes, he will be able to get some help when they reunite at his show that very evening.
While the reunion goes well and Alex pledges to help him, when Vernon awakes after their night of hard partying in Alex’s studio, he finds him dead, in front of a video camera to which he’s recorded three mini-DV tapes of a grand goodbye, which includes a major bean-spilling on a sleazy and powerful indie film producer. Thus begins the caper component to this story, replete with a scumbag private detective who calls herself La Hyène (Céline Sallette) and has to decide if what she does is really amoral; a lesbian-emergent love story; a young woman’s discovery of who her mother really was; a look at the damage that can be done via opportunism and online social engineering, and additional hard truths about contemporary life and the abandonment of principles and lifestyles espoused by our younger selves. Throughout it all, we see how, although Vernon seems to never have grown up, it is the friends from his youth whom have, in their ostensible progression into adulthood, devolved into entropy.
Will his existential heroism lead to death by a thousand cuts, or will he squeak by, yet again? Whatever the result, Vernon Subutex ain’t no Hot Tub Time Machine.
Vernon Subutex is now streaming at TOPIC. You can read an excerpt from the book by Virginie Despentes HERE.