
Architect Paul Thomas (Jean-Louis Trintignant) seduces Frédérique (Stéphane Audran) in Les Biches (dir. Claude Chabrol, 1968).
‘You have a sense of real comfort,’ she says, standing on the quayside, as he pours two glasses of whisky.
Paul Thomas is an architect from Paris completing work on a housing development on the edge of a harbour near St Tropez. On that winter’s afternoon, he attempts to seduce Frédérique, an acquaintance from the area who he met the previous evening. The whisky and Thomas’s brooding charm prove intoxicating. The architect soon embraces his beautiful neighbour. Within an hour, the two are inseparable and embark on an intense relationship.
This scenario offers a rather glamorous picture of the everyday life of a successful architect. But once we realise this episode is taken from Claude Chabrol’s film Les Biches (1968), the situation is bound to take a darker turn.
Architect Paul Thomas is a manipulative playboy. The previous evening, Thomas didn’t seem to be interested in his dinner host Frédérique, but was instead intrigued by Frédérique’s protégée, a young woman named Why. At the end of the party, Why begged Thomas to take her home with him and he obliged without hesitation. The following morning, Why revealed to Frédérique that she loved Thomas. Jealous, Frédérique decides to confront the architect at his waterside development. At first, Thomas denied he spent the night with Why, before admitting he did, but that he didn’t even know the girl’s name. He forgets to meet Why for the date they had arranged for that afternoon and instead seduces Frédérique. Why is devastated to learn about Thomas and Frédérique, but suffers in silence until she finally decides to plot her revenge.
I don’t want to spoil the plot of the film, but, following Patricia Simoes-Aelbrecht’s blog post in October 2010, I am intrigued by Chabrol’s representation of the architect.
Until the upheavals in the French education system in the late 1960s, all architects trained in the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts. The French press and television once paid almost reverential respect to architects, and ordinary citizens would address an architect with the formal title ‘Monsieur l’architecte.’ In Chabrol’s film, cracks begin to emerge in the elite status of the architect. Thomas is not a venerable figure, or the winner of the Prix de Rome, but a manipulative character, driven by his desire for women and work.
The stature the architect in France began to crumble during the 1960s as a number of architects became implicated in property development scandals. If Paul Thomas were a real architect, he would perhaps have been a sympathetic colleague of Fernand Pouillon (1912-1986), another playboy and prolific architect of modernist housing in France, Algeria and Iran. During the late 1950s, tempted by a boom in construction and cheap government loans, Pouillon turned his efforts to property speculation and became embroiled in the infamous ‘Point du Jour’ scandal. In order to finance his lavish lifestyle, Pouillon embezzled deposits made by individual buyers for a luxury housing development on the banks of the Seine. Construction had to be abandoned as Pouillon defaulted on loan payments. He also owed 20 million francs in tax payments. In 1961, Pouillon was arrested and detained to await trial. During a stay in hospital, Pouillon escaped to Italy and was allegedly protected by the Algerian liberation front.
Around the same time, the popular press also began to express dissatisfaction with the architects designing large modernist housing blocks in the suburbs of French cities and harshly criticised the high-rise architecture emerging around Paris. Architects were no longer untouchable.
Even children were discouraged from wanting to become an architect. An illustrated children’s book from 1964 portrays an architect as a man fuelled by ambition, but cut off from the realities of ordinary life. It tells a story that would put off even the most gifted young scribbler from designing buildings:
Once upon a time (however it’s true), there was an architect who built houses and a family who was looking for a house. The architect consisted of a graduated ruler, a set square and a bottle of Indian Ink. The family consisted of a father, a mother and two “so-where-are-those-dreadful-kids?”. The architect, of course, did not know the family. He built houses to show that, with a graduated ruler, a set square and a bottle of Indian ink, he was the smartest architect of all. […] But the architect hadn’t thought about the people, and the people were bored in all this cement, all this glass and all this wind, in these large apartments that were all the same, which looked like cages piled up into the sky.
[Extract from Claude Roy and Alain Le Foll, C’est le Bouquet (Paris: Delpire, 1964). My translation.]
Representations of the architect in France during the 1960s put pressure on the image of a talented and sophisticated creator. The architect might still be glamorous, but he was becoming a villain. It was time for a new generation of architects, but the profession would remain for some time the domain of wealthy, white men.
Further reading:
Danièle Voldman, Fernand Pouillon: Architecte (Paris: Payot, 2006).