Architecture and Abjection in Nicole Garcia's Place Vendôme

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Notes

¹Emphasising the sexual meaning of this passage, the next scene of the trailer cuts to a gear-shift as a man moves his hand from the shift column to the slender leg of a woman.

²For an emphasis on inter-textuality and filmic referentiality, see T. Jefferson Kline.

³The irony of specifically Indian buyers might not be lost on an audience. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, an international diamond merchant, purchased in India the hoard of stones he sold to Louis XIV, then auctioned after the Revolution and bought, mainly by American firms, such as Tiffany.

⁴For images of Mireille Polska's sculpture and Deneuve's pleasure at representing the Republic as a woman having children outside marriage, see http://toutsurdeneuve.free.fr.francis/Pages/Carriere_utres/Objets.htm.

⁵The initiator of feminist history research into this kind of question was Joan Kelly, 1977. For the question applied to the French Revolution, see, among others, Karen Offen, 2000: 54–5; Landes, 1988; Hunt 1986.

⁶Whether Garcia was conscious of Mouawad's displacement of French jewellers is not so much my point as that the process continues in that particularly evocative location.

⁷Slavoj Zizek observes ways that the Lacanian concept of the mirror images idealises the subject, but also in the representation of the monster shows the imbalance between the subject gazing and what he sees (55). Thus, Marianne sees her abject self and is repelled, a first step in recognition; then she has to accept her mortality. See also Kathleen Woodward, ‘The Mirror Stage of Old Age’.

⁸Thomas Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus, calls this moment the ‘Everlasting No’—a refusal to be pulled down, swallowed and defined by the laws of Mammon, in the film represented by the allure of jewellery.