With arthouse cinemas in the early 1970s unequipped to handle multi-track stereo sound, Dominique Benicheti’s documentary Cousin Jules lingered in relative obscurity for four decades before its eventual release by Cinema Guild in 2013. It’s somewhat fitting that such a singular film—unlike most documentaries of its era, it was also shot in CinemaScope—about a vanishing way of life would reappear decades later, arriving as a ravishing cinematic time capsule that effortlessly erases the massive rift between our fast-paced modern times and the deliberate yet unhurried pace of life in rural France a half-century ago.
Shot between April 1968 and March 1973, Cousin Jules meticulously traces the daily toils of Benicheti’s cousin, Jules Guiteaux, a blacksmith and small-plot farmer, and his wife, Felicie, as they go about life in a remote corner of Burgundy. It’s a simple concept and one that could easily have slipped into unchecked reverence toward both its subjects and the simplicity of their existence. But Benicheti repeatedly resists sentimentalizing the rural life, capturing it with a rigorous, Bressonian precision that is completely attuned to the materiality of their tasks. The heightened focus on hands, feet, and faces, along with their movements and gestures, often depicted fragmented in the frame, lends a much-needed balance between the demanding effort Jules and Felicie expend every day and the serene qualities that emanate from the exactitude of their repetitions.
The film opens with Jules in the midst of his blacksmithing work. The clinks of his hammer, the crackles of the flame used to heat the iron he works on, and the shuffles of his wooden clogs are all that fill the soundtrack. This minimalist approach is remarkably effective and surprisingly compelling, both visually and aurally. And it’s used throughout the film as Benicheti avoids non-diegetic music, instead finding a consistent sonic rhythm in the couple’s tasks, which are often presented in real time.
Benicheti’s film in some ways anticipates Chantal Akerman’s unblinking focus on domestic labor just two years later in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. But Akerman’s static camera and almost exclusive use of long takes and wide shots presents the work in Dielman’s home from an insurmountable distance, making its repetitive nature feel all the more stifling and deadening. Benicheti’s style is just as exacting, but his interest lies in the intense physicality of Jules and Felicie’s existence—something within which, through editing, he finds a sort of poetic harmony, even as the work itself appears quite challenging in both the amount of skill and effort expended and the patience every last task demands.
Whether it’s Jules shaping a piece of iron or Felicie peeling and chopping vegetables, Benicheti never hurries past their actions. He instead luxuriates in the process, viewing them from different camera angles as a means of dissecting them for the audience, and replicating the extremely measured flow of time that defines life on their little farm. With only a handful of lines of dialogue, Cousin Jules then unfolds as something of a wordless Zen koan, celebrating the beauty and simplicity of their self-contained world as well as the arduousness that inevitably accompanies it.
At the halfway point, Cousin Jules shifts subtly yet noticeably as Felicie no longer appears on-screen. A brief shot of a graveyard hints at her fate, but it’s only as time passes that this becomes apparent to the audience. Her death is confirmed as the credits roll at the end, but we see no jarring disruption to Jules life, either in his routine or his demeanor. As the two were shown several times enjoying one another’s company, sharing a cup of coffee on a break or eating with one another, it’s not a matter of Jules being callous or unaffected. As her death and funeral are kept off-screen, passed over by the film’s overarching elliptical structure, it’s just as likely he did have some sort of breakdown, or at least expressed some form of visible sorrow.
But Benicheti isn’t particularly interested in the ebbs and flows of Jules’ emotions—and from what we see, both Jules and Felicie are of a stoic breed of rural workers that have only increasingly disappeared over the subsequent 50 years. No, the second half of Cousin Jules finds the old man once again wrapped up in the demands of the quotidian duties that must continue to be done for his survival. But without Felicie, he is all more isolated, with his only interaction with another human being coming from the daily visit of the truck that brings him a loaf of bread and the newspaper.
If this half of the film appears to be underscored by a deep sense of sorrow, it’s primarily coming from the perspective of the audience’s own sympathy rather than any sentimentality coming from the filmmakers or sorrow expressed by Jules himself. His isolation is readily apparent, but his life-long self-sufficiency, so exquisitely captured in the film, clearly makes him more ready and able to meet the challenges that are innately tied to this modus vivendi. The film’s final image of Jules—a nighttime exterior shot that frames him through a window as he eats alone—encapsulates the man’s life quite succinctly. Peaceful quietude and hard labor remain intertwined as do the suffering and the simple joys that come from living almost completely divorced from society.
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