It’s My Party
In her book Diane Kurys, the first and only English-language study of the director, Carrie Tarr notes that:
Diabolo menthe could have been the model for the [autumn 1994] series of television films commissioned by Arte under the umbrella title Tous les garçons et les filles de [leur] âge, in which filmmakers addressed the problems of growing up at various moments in postwar France, and were required to include a scene at a party.
Chantal Akerman’s Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles is probably the best-known film of the series, dealing with the radical era of 1968, which Kurys herself would address in her second feature, Cocktail Molotov (1980). As their titles suggest, Peppermint Soda may be less inflammatory, but its effects are as heady. Through her (self) portrait of the soixant-huitarde as early 60s schoolgirl, Kurys suggests how the burgeoning post-war youth culture – comprising bikinis, stockings, pop music, fizzy drinks, sassing teachers, hanging out in cafés, and fighting posh fascists – was the fuse that lit the dynamite of ’68 student activism.
And its influence has been lasting: beyond the Arte series (which also included Claire Denis’ US Go Home, set in the same period as Peppermint Soda), Kurys’ film could be seen as the long fuse that lit the recent explosion in critically-acclaimed French films about girlhood by female filmmakers: its attention to the textures of teenage life – and particularly to sisterhood – seem to linger behind Catherine Breillat’s A ma soeur (2001) and Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy (2011), as well as the Camera d’Or-winning Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016) and Academy Award-nominated Mustang (Denis Gamze Ergüven, 2015).
These girls, whose lives and gazes are turned towards their own girlhood and that of other girls, even as they also experience sexual desire, form a counter-movement to the trope identified by Molly Haskell in her essay on A nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983):
The teenage girl on the cusp of sexual awakening is a beloved icon of French cinema… But over the years, as one transfixing newcomer after another, barely out of braces and backpacks, embarks on the vita sexualis, we have to wonder, whose sexuality is it, exactly? Is this the way they see themselves, are these their yearnings, or is this precocious sensuality a projection of the guilty desires and fears of directors old enough to be their fathers?
Kurys’ sisters Anne and Frédérique were thus a breath of fresh air in French cinema, girls shown in “the way they see themselves,” emerging from the director’s own experience of growing up in Paris in a single-parent family – in fact, Kurys shot the film at her own secondary school, the Lycée Jules Ferry in the eighteenth arrondisement.
Peppermint Soda started life as an autofiction, a novel based on Kurys’ schooldays, which a friend advised her to turn into a screenplay, according to Tarr. She had been working as a bit-part actor in films (including Federico Fellini’s Casanova [1976]) and as a theatre actor and director since 1968, when she had left university. She told Tarr that it was her ‘formidable inconscience’ [incredible foolhardiness] that led her to submit her screenplay – originally titled T’occupe pas du chapeau de la gamine (Never Mind the Girl’s Hat) – to the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC) in the hope of obtaining an avance sur recettes (an advance on box office receipts); and also to name herself as director on the application. She received 500, 000 francs in advance funding after some minor edits (including the change of title), and then persuaded Gaumont to invest in the film. Her partner (they have been together since 1963 and have never married) Alexandre Arcady became her producing partner (with Serge Laski) in Alexandre Films, and they raised 2.8 million francs. The CNC funding was approved in February 1977, and by August, Kurys was shooting, having auditioned over 500 girls to find the right actors to portray Anne, the younger sister, who is just starting at the lycée, and fifteen year old Frédérique.
While the film makes clear reference to two ‘youth in revolt’ classics of French cinema – Les 400 coups (François Truffaut, 1959) and the film to which it has a deep debt, Zero de conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933) – it also points to what those films lack: girls. In fact, it depicts an almost all-female world: Anne and Frédérique live with their divorced mother, and attend an all-girls school at which the only man is the caretaker. Lycee Jules Ferry was built on the foundations of an old convent, and in fact included part of the original buildings until an overhaul in 1932–34. In this predominantly female world, men appear mainly as figures of fantasy, fear, derision or (often misplaced, as in Frédérique’s crush on her schoolfriend Muriel’s widower father) desire. Anne and Frédérique’s own somewhat hapless father, the street harasser with whom Anne collides, Frédérique’s summertime boyfriend Marc, the singer Cliff Richard present on the soundtrack: they all have a slightly unreal air compared to the grounded detail of the sisters’ daily lives at home and at school.
As Judith Mayne notes in Framed: Lesbians, Feminists and Media Culture, ‘all of Kurys’ films are marked by the connection between storytelling and a bond that wavers between the homosocial and the homoerotic,’ not least towards the end of the film when Frédérique and her new friend Pascale almost kiss while on a school trip to an abbey. That they are also playing moustachioed male characters in a school production of Molière’s The Learned Women adds an additional frisson to Kurys’ tentative exploration of desires and gender identities beyond the heteronormative, picking up on the opening (trick) shot in which it looks like – because she is buried in the sand beneath him – Frédérique’s head is attached to Marc’s body.
Peppermint Soda was released in 1977, the same year as Agnès Varda’s hymn to feminism, L’une chante, l’autre pas, although Kurys’ film looks back to an era before popular feminism had emerged from the more academic arguments of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, whose monumental La deuxième sexe had been generating intellectual discussions of inequality since 1949. 1977 marked the year that the magazine des femmes en mouvement was launched by the feminist collective Psychanalyse et Politique du Mouvements de liberations des femmes, and the publishing house Editions des femmes, both led by Antoinette Fouque. Its February 1978 issue carried an interview with Kurys, who described the film’s contrast to the mainstream: ‘il n’y a pas d’action, pas de vedettes, pas de violence, pas de cul, pas de fric’ [There’s no action, no stars, no violence, no sex, no money]. Despite this – or perhaps because it offered such a contrast to the usual fare – the film grossed the second highest box office of 1977 in France (indicatively, Star Wars was #1).
In a radical move, des femmes en mouvement paired this auteur piece with interviews with four schoolgirls who had seen Peppermint Soda, reflecting the film’s own commitment to making the voices of girls heard. Poignantly, Kurys’ film looks back to a time before a momentous change: the admission of male pupils to Jules Ferry, which transformed what had previously been a world that echoed with female voices. Although the decision was reached to become a mixed-entry school in 1957, it took until 1974 for the first male pupils to arrive – and there was continued resistance. As Kurys’ film reflects, the demographics of the school had already begun to change, as in the 1950s it became a state school rather than an élite establishment. This shift is reflected in the teachers’ unease with some of the students, such as a new student from Oran – which the deputy head assumes is a private school, rather than a city in Algeria.
Kurys, as the child of Russian Jews who had met and married in a Vichy detention camp for Jewish refugees during the German Occupation of France, would undoubtedly have been aware that Jules Ferry had a mixed political history: while (according to the school website) a resistance committee that organised at the school in the early years of WWII included many of the staff, there were still several who continued in their jobs without taking part, and the school’s Jewish pupils, in both the primary and secondary classes, were deported by the occupying Nazi in 1943. This history shadows the film’s references to increasing anti-Semitism (Frédérique tells her mother that the deputy head mistress is an anti-Semite) and the rise of neo-Fascism in France, as well as drawing subtle parallels between the Nazi occupation of France and the French occupation of Algeria.
Thus, what sets Peppermint Soda apart from recent films about girlhood is the way in which the intense observation of the girls’ inner lives explicitly entwines their sexual and political awakening. Frédérique’s friend Pascale describes having witnessed the killings that occurred on 8 February 1962 at the Charonne metro station, in which the police killed nine members of the CGT trade union who were demonstrating peacefully against the right-wing nationalist terrorist group, Organisation Armée Secrete (OAS, whose graffiti appears outside the school – ironically, Kurys had to engage the police in holding up traffic so this 1960s graffiti could be applied to the wall). Even though the group had been proscribed by the state, the French National Police committed an attack that echoed a larger-scale police assault on 17 October 1961, in which, according to historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, as many as 300 victims (the government only acknowledges 48) were killed at during a demonstration by pro-National Liberation Front Algerians in Paris, including demonstrators who were drowned in the Seine. The 1961 massacre was effectively hidden by the state for decades, but the Charonne murders were far more public, and hundreds of thousands of people – including, in the film, Pascale and her father – attended the funerals of the nine protestors the following week at Pere Lachaise.
Charonne and Oran act as reminders in the film that the school – which assumes such a huge role in the film – is not detached from the world, or a ‘safe’ space. Its staff and students are involved in, and by, events both local and international, with both current events and historical legacies shaping their day-to-day interactions. Although the film’s ending cycles back to its beginning, finding Anne and Frédérique once more en vacances with their father, it suggests the difference that a year makes: not only have the sisters experienced momentous events, but in doing so, they have grown both together and apart. At the start of the film, despite Frédérique’s relationship with Marc, the sisters are similar. The opening scene of the school year portrays a hydra of girls hugging and touching each other’s coats; shot from above, their homogeneity is only broken up slowly by a range of primary-coloured coats, and by the teachers calling their names. Despite their difference in age, Anne and Frédérique are close at school and at home, and it is a significant moment when Frédérique tells Anne to leave the café opposite the school where the younger sister and her friends have gone to order the titular diabolo menthe in order to celebrate not being suspended. It’s equally significant when Anne is allowed to perch on the sofa and sip the sophisticated beverage at home with her sister and her friend Perrine, after their friend Muriel has gone missing.
But what Anne has not yet grasped is that the finish line of adolescent sophistication does not stay still: in the subsequent scene, Frédérique and Perrine light up, and banish her to her room. Through the pace of adolescence – including the central, incredibly awkward party that Tarr envisages as the inspiration for Arte’s series, which starts with formal dancing to chansons and ends with twisting to rock n roll – Kurys also subtly, intelligently shows the unstoppable pace of political and social change. All the deputy head’s efforts cannot change what Frédérique has learned from joining an anti-fascist group, any less than the deputy head could stop the OAS-supporting teenagers from waiting outside the school to mount their attack. The caretaker might shout “No politics in school – especially the girls!” but it is clear, even as the end of the film resumes its holiday mode, that the battle is lost. Cocktail Molotov is on its way.
When Jules Ferry was modernised during the height of its success in the interwar years, two significant Modernist features were added, both of which appear in the film: the covered gymnasium on the fifth floor, seen in early scenes, and the dramatic cupola above the refectory. Made of glass bricks and reinforced concrete, it is laid down on – rather than fixed to – its pedestal; this allows it to contract and expand with the temperature so that it does not crack. Modern girls, Anne and Frédérique are shown in the process of formation on the model of the cupola: translucent, they admit the light of the world – its politics and its desires – into the ancient all-female space that was once a convent; reinforced with the concrete of modernity, and of Kurys’ material memories of her adolescence, they are political animals able to grow and change with the times. Anne grew up to become filmmaker Diane Kurys, as well as her semi-autobiographical radical firebrand in Cocktail Molotov. And both sisters, and Peppermint Soda itself, have grown up through the tradition they spearheaded in French cinema: sisters doing it for themselves, whether the party is swinging, or political, or – perhaps inevitably – both.