The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre
A play by Los Super Elegantes (Martiniano Lopez-Crozet and Milena Musquiz)
Peres Projects, Los Angeles, August 2003
This summer the performance duo Los Super Elegantes debuted their third play, a musical entitled The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre, at Javier Peres' new space in Chinatown. The story unravels within the House of St. Pierre, where the renowned fashion designer, a visionary in sunglasses and an ivory caftan, conjures his newest lines. The period is undetermined, but there are suggestions of late-1960s ambience—skirts are short and protests are erupting across Europe. As the audience—attendees and curious passersby alike—remained sitting or standing outside in the alleyway, the actors performed entirely in the storefront windows of the gallery, posing in the brightly lit nooks like mannequins on display, coming to life to act out the story of the clothes they were draped with.
According to its authors, The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre deals with “sadistic relationships in a working environment,” but that’s really only secondary information. Yes, there are the overworked assistants Penny and Areski (Musquiz and Lopez-Crozet) who go to great lengths to please their master. Areski is persistently buggered and has contracted “every disease possible," while Penny is the busy-body with political aspirations—she wants to go to Berlin with her friends to piss on the Wall. But the play, like the duo’s musical offerings, deals more with isolating moments of style—with identifying cultural triggers and weaving these aesthetically loaded icons into a semblance of narrative—than with developing the characters beyond caricatures. Pierre’s paragon, Gina Fontaine, a freon-blooded teenage model with the look that has made the designer’s frockery a sensation, hides a tortured soul behind her severe wig and chilly demeanor. “If you saw me for one instant as I am,” she warns formulaically, “Terrified you would call a doctor, an ambulance.” The most human face in the House of St. Pierre is Anouk, the overworked French maid, who, starving for both affection and nutrition, subsists on used condoms that are strewn about the castle floor from Pierre and Areski’s trysts.
In this poisoned refuge Los Super Elegantes have hidden clues to their own creative regimen, specifically in the mad methodology that is St. Pierre's free association approach to fashion design. "Chardonnay!” he shouts. “Golden showers!” “Chinese satin!” respond his helpers. “Afternoon maxi dress dipped in lemon juice colors,” suggests the eager Areski to which the pensive designer screams “Bravo!” As in an encounter group setting, a series of images or scenarios are tossed out rapidly, contemplated, and then molded to the right shape to be thrown immediately into the pot or filed away for later use. This is Los Super Elegantes in action.
Thus The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre is less a true narrative than a catalog of stylistic influences, a collage of style. The plot exists mainly to connect the dots between the very “in” icons being referenced—the student protests, the retro high fashion, the elegance and snobbery of the couture house—that LSE have melded into an obscenely romanticized and overly stylish amalgam of their own design. It’s a Fassbinderian mode de operandi wherein aesthetic decisions direct the narrative, sometimes to the point of overshadowing the importance of plot.
That large chunks of the dialogue from Falling Leaves are lifted almost verbatim from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Porcile should come as no surprise to those who witnessed LSE's previous play, Pietro and Paola, a modern remake of Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. The difference here is that Musquiz and Lopez-Crozet are not merely updating a story, but systematically dismantling it, tearing it apart strip by strip and sewing it back together into a completely new pattern. Interestingly, it was Pasolini himself who opined that a standardized cinematographic language has not yet been developed, or at least not perfected. By appropriating the director’s dialogue and archetypes, LSE are making a sly comment on the director’s statement and at the same time contributing to a developing language.
Digging deeper into the milieu, LSE have also provided inescapable links to the romantic chanson world of 1960s France. The young rebellions; the ye ye-ish Gina posing with her acoustic guitar; and the characters’ names themselves—Areski was the bearded partner of chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine, who gives Gina her surname. Anouk may be named after either an obscure French teen singer or more likely Ms. Aimee the actress. The touchy-feely 70s socialism of Lasse Nielsen's You Are Not Alone too is referenced through political slogan signs and homoerotic parleys. But most of all we see the influence of story songs like Chico Buarque’s 1970 “Constructao," and Brigitte Fontaine and Areski’s 1973 duet “C'est Normal,” musical what-ifs?, that are part fantasy and part romance, for it is in the play’s frequent musical interludes, when the performers step forward for their own moment in the spotlight, that we are most touched by their humanness.
In the end St. Pierre’s empire is doomed to crumble, its inhabitants drift off, each a falling leaf on its own trajectory. There is a verse in Fontaine and Areski’s “C'est Normal” wherein the pair discuss their possible fates and futures. Areski, the cool one calmly accepts the possible outcomes as inevitable. Fontaine cannot accept these rigid explanations. They sit on a balcony and discuss matters.
“Are we going to fall?” asks Fontaine. “Well, yes,” replies Areski. “From the 15th floor?” “It’s normal,” Areski assures her, “It’s just the attraction of the earth.”