After two Filles (Fleur de Tonnere and La Fille de Brest), I gave up on French films, concluding from only two that all French films are terrible. Then an actual fille dragged me to see Eva and L’amour des Hommes, back to back. An effort to dissuade me had merely led to an increase in my sample size.

What’s interesting is not that both of them are genuinely terrible, but they are so in exactly the same way, and furthermore in the same way The Disaster Artist and Tomb Raider and the inspirationally terrible Den of Thieves are. That is to say: the almost perverse desire to avoid even the most basic of storytelling.

You’re not going to see them because you can’t and I’m telling you – emphatically – not to. And so it is left to me to give you some type of vague impression of the icepick lobotomy through the tearducts to save on surgical instruments that was the experience of watching them back to back.

By way of relating what happened, one is tempted to say ‘Eva tells the story of…’ and then continue with the agonizing details of a writer with a girlfriend (DEFCON 5), who steals a play to become a success (4), has to – very slowly – write another play (3) lacks inspiration (What a beat! Imagine all the times he can…stare at things!) (2) and begins to transcribe his conversations with an escort (Mlle. Isabelle Huppert) as dialog…

They usually go nuclear at DEFCON 2, so you’ll never find out.

Fortunately for you, I’m no Alternative History Cuban Missile Crisis, so I’ll just tell you the ending. The writer gets beat up (don’t ask why, because I have no idea, see no story, above), and then sees Mlle. Huppert at a Paris café six months later. A friend of Mlle. Huppert asks ‘Il est qui?’ (‘who is that?’), to which I replied, out loud, thinking that they wouldn’t actually use it as a curtain line, ‘personne’ (‘no one’). Whereupon Mlle. Huppert seemed to actually hear me, said ‘personne’, and the screen went black.

As bad as my French is, theirs is worse.

A few paragraphs back I said ‘one is tempted to say’, meaning anything I have said afterwards doesn’t count. I reserve the right to insert that phrase at the beginning of this entire affair at some point.

In this case, ‘tempted’ because one thing Eva does not do is tell a story. It feels like a first film, and yet it’s made by a veteran. It invokes the troubling conceit that things happening onscreen is the same as knowing what characters, expectations, turns, and god forbid, even acts are. People say stuff, characters are killed, boobies are shown, and yet, somehow you don’t care.

One of the reasons I’ve been away from you, and you’ve missed me so much, is that I’m writing again. And by that, I mean I’m researching. I forget that writing this damnable thing is part of the research, but one of things I unearthed is a quote from Mr. David Milch, which I relate here:

Of course, Mr. Milch never tells us what a story is, but I have a lot less shame, so I’ll just say at least one thing: a goal. One would think that ‘to finish a play’ is a goal, and one would be incorrect. Because the goal needs obstacles. I’d say no one would watch a film where someone needs to get a book off that shelf, and then goes to get a book off the shelf, but the films of JJ Abrams remain very popular.

Unfortunately, things happening (people dying, getting beat up, endings that mirror the beginning etc.) are not the same as a story, any more than wanting things is. He could risk getting caught stealing the first play, a conceit that is never even hinted at, or reveal himself to be a toad. In the stead of story, we are treated to ‘[musique intriquante]’, which is the advantage of having to see things with French subtitles. The fact that detestable music is the only hint of something happening, is, in this case literally, spelled out.

No, you don’t, because I’m not done! L’Amour des Hommes fares considerably worse in this regard, as the goal is ‘to take pictures of men’. The twist coming from nowhere – is that she then proceeds to…take pictures of men.

A potentially interesting tale, as turning around male gaze (ahem – Sonny’s Virtues – ahem) has some heft to it. It meanders and then ends, but it took Eva for me to understand where these films come from: experience.

I hate experience, almost as much as I hate real life. The underlying implication of a writer character (or artists in general) is that we’re seeing the filmmaker, uninspired in every sense of the word, relating things that happened to them. He saw a prostitute once. Good for him! She took some pictures? Who would have thought? In the end, she breaks up with the guy because…it’s the end of the movie, I guess, and we have to symbolize female emancipation without the actual trouble of writing it.

Story is conflict, something we supposedly avoid in real life. That being said, we do seem to be doing a lot of non-avoiding avoiding of late. And maybe that’s where it – and we – settle: conflict makes us feel icky, and there’s only so much to be had. My life, cakes, writing this, doggies, craves conflict in its stories. For others: the Twilight films, where the vague hint of something possibly happening and then – over four films – not, is preferable to be sure.

But the fading of narrative is a devil’s pact – we don’t like to feel bad, and writers don’t want to work hard, to the final humility as Milch puts it. I don’t mind a race to the bottom, as sometimes that produces a The Room or even a Geostorm.

I do mind a race to the middle.