The Taste of Others (2000)

***^½
Country: France
Director: Agnès Jaoui


In 2000 Agnès Jaoui, who had been a film, television, and stage actress for more than fifteen years, ever since she was a teenager, directed her first film, The Taste of Others, which she also co-wrote with her husband Jean-Pierre Bacri and, along with Bacri, acted in. The Taste of Others established the essentials of Jaoui's style in all three movies she has written and directed. Jaoui treats plot as a process of discovery, using incident to illuminate character. Each of her films is constructed around a set of characters loosely connected by circumstances. They interact in a variety of shifting combinations in what might seem a casual, almost semi-improvised plot but is actually a skillfully engineered series of incidents that cumulatively reveal more about these people than we first saw or were shown. We may believe we immediately recognize these people, who seem straightforward types conforming to a set of self-defined behavioral patterns. But placed before the observing lens of Jaoui's camera, they gradually become real people with distinct identities and deeper personalities than at first seemed possible.

The Taste of Others opens in a restaurant. In the main dining room, three people are having a business lunch, while in the smaller room at the front of the restaurant, two men dressed in anonymous dark suits have a desultory conversation—at one point comparing how many women they have slept with during their lives—while sipping drinks. The three executives get up to leave, and as they pass through the smaller room, the two men follow them out. It is only when they all get into the same car, the executives in the back seat and the two other men in the front seat, that we realize they are together. One of the men in the rear is Jean-Jacques Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a wealthy middle-aged industrialist. The men in the front are his driver Bruno and his bodyguard Franck Moreno.

Later we meet Castella's wife, an interior designer whose main preoccupations seem to be imposing on others her inflexible opinions on correctness in décor (the rooms she decorates are hideous in their oppressively fussy idea of tastefulness) and her spoiled, snappish pet dog. When the Castellas go to the theater that evening to see a performance of Racine's Bérénice—something Castella sees as a frivolous waste of time but submits to because his niece has a small role in the play—Castella becomes fascinated by the lead actress, Clara Devaux (Anne Alvaro). He recognizes her because that afternoon he interviewed her as a candidate to teach him conversational English and, quickly taking a dislike to her, dismissed her. Now he sees her in a different light and not only insists on meeting her backstage but decides to hire her to tutor him after all.

Clara barely tolerates the conservative, bourgeois Castella, who lives in a utilitarian world of business and finance untouched by aesthetics or ideas. But Castella, growing more and more infatuated with Clara, begins insinuating himself into her bohemian world, hanging out in the evenings at the bar frequented by Clara and her friends in the theater and art worlds. Here we meet the worldly barmaid Manie (played by Jaoui herself), a spontaneous, independent woman who supplements her income by dealing hash and grass on the side. Bruno and Franck, who accompany Castella to the bar, also become acquainted with her and both end up sleeping with her. For the chauffeur Bruno, a sad sack whose fiancée is away in the US and who spends his spare time playing the flute in an amateur ensemble, this is a fleeting dalliance. But Franck, an ex-policeman and compulsive womanizer, and the free-spirited Manie soon fall into a relationship and it begins to look as though these two emotional gypsies might settle down together.

As the film proceeds, we begin to see the characters in new ways. But more important, they begin to see one other in new ways, and these unanticipated insights have a subtly transformative effect on them. People from very different worlds find their worlds beginning to overlap, and the result of this is that by the end of the movie each of them has been altered in some way. These alterations don't particularly result in momentous shifts in personality. Rather the events in the film lead the characters incrementally to less obvious changes—greater self-awareness and a deeper understanding of others, and above all a more willing acceptance of both the virtues and the shortcomings in themselves and in others.

The central relationship is that of Castella and Clara. The hidebound, emotionally repressed Castella finds his outlook on life broadened by his association with Clara more than he ever imagined possible. Clara inspires him to find within himself a previously unexpressed sensitivity and a new openness to the unconventional. For her part, Clara is forced by the eventual recognition of her dismissive stereotyping of Castella to see that despite what she fancies as her liberal mindset, she is just as capable of judgmental narrow-mindedness as philistines like Castella. This realization spurs her to develop a more tolerant attitude toward those less attuned to their inner lives than artists like herself. The other characters in the movie—Madame Castella and Bruno the driver, Franck the bodyguard and Manie the fiercely self-reliant barmaid—have similar, if less dramatic, effects on each other. The film was nominated for the Oscar as best foreign language film and for numerous Césars. Bacri, Alvaro, and Gérard Lanvin, who plays the bodyguard Franck, won well-deserved Césars for acting, and Jaoui received a César for best film and shared another with Bacri for best screenplay. (She was also nominated for directing and for her acting in the small but plum role of Manie).

Jaoui's two later films follow the same pattern as The Taste of Others. In Look at Me (2004) a group of writers and musicians become involved in the lives of one another. The main characters are Lolita (Marilou Berry), an aspiring young classical singer with a weight problem and a bad case of low self-esteem, and her father (Bacri), a self-absorbed celebrity novelist with severe writer's block who is completely blind to the needs and feelings of his daughter and everyone else around him. Jaoui, who plays Lolita's singing teacher, is herself married to a writer who wants to use Lolita's father to break into the big time. Jaoui addresses the issue of the demands that an artist's striving for career success place on one's treatment of other people and the difficulty of maintaining one's basic humanity in this situation. In Let It Rain (2008) Jaoui plays Agathe Villanova, a feminist politician who has been chosen by her party to stand for office in her home district in the south of France and returns there to campaign. There she visits her family home, where she must contend with her resentful sister and unemployed brother-in-law and two filmmakers who want to shoot a documentary about her—an annoying scatterbrain played by Bacri and his ambitious assistant, a young Frenchman of North African origin whose mother happens to be the longtime housekeeper of Agathe's own family.

Like The Taste of Others, Jaoui's later films showcase her strengths as a writer/director—the ability to juggle multiple story lines gracefully, clearly observed characters, and an emphasis on carefully devised interactions between those characters that succinctly articulate their essential natures. Not surprisingly, given her background in acting, Jaoui proves to be a most sympathetic director of actors, eliciting truthful performances that make the characters seem thoroughly inhabited. All three of Jaoui's films plainly show her to be a director whose vision is that of a classical humanist filmmaker. When it comes to her characters, she eschews facile categorization in favor of probing beneath surface identity to find both the strength and weakness, the petty and the generous, the nice and the not-so-nice in each person in the movie. What she wants from the viewer above all is not to like or dislike her characters, but to understand them in all their complexity, confusion, and contradiction and to accept each of them as a unique individual.

Pickpocket (1959) / Classe Tous Risques (1960)

Pickpocket
***^½
Country: France
Director: Robert Bresson

When I took a cinema course in college, the instructor showed the class Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, a film in which a young priest finds himself assigned to a diocese in rural France. He struggles in vain to make a spiritual impression on his thoroughly hateful parishioners, enduring the mental anguish of his failure as he suffers the physical torment of slowly dying from cancer. I understood that Bresson intended the young curate's anguish as an expression of transcending earthly pain and failure to a higher level of spirituality. Yet for me watching the film was a grim, torturous, almost masochistic experience in which the contemplation of suffering became an end in itself. I have never been able to watch this type of movie with any enjoyment, and I felt little desire ever to see another film by Bresson. Reading about his later works like Au Hasard, Balthazar and Mouchette only strengthened this feeling. But when I watched Pickpocket recently, I found it a rewarding, if predictably somber, experience.

The main character in Pickpocket is a young man named Michel (Martin La Salle, who resembles the young Montgomery Clift). Unemployed, disaffected, but apparently well educated, he lives a solitary, bleak, and impoverished life in a grungy one-room apartment in Paris. One day in the Métro, he observes someone picking the pocket of a fellow passenger and decides to give it a try. Encouraged by the success of his first attempt, he continues. But he's not a professional and is soon arrested. The police don't have enough evidence to press charges, though, and an inspector who recognizes that Michel is no ordinary petty criminal releases him. The two strike up a curious relationship as friendly adversaries in which the inspector tries to convince Michel that crime is not a valid way of life, while Michel tries to convince him that some people are by nature above the law. It's hard to say whether Michel's attraction to thievery arises from practical necessity or really is a philosophical stance; there is probably a bit of each in it. In either case, there is plainly more than a little defiance and self-centeredness in Michel's personality.

Things get really interesting when Michel attracts the attention of a pair of professional pickpockets who then recruit him to work as a third member of their team and teach him the tricks of the trade. At this point the film becomes a fascinating semi-documentary on the techniques of pickpocketing, culminating in a brilliant sequence in which Bresson temporarily abandons his minimalist filmmaking style, which consists largely of lengthy conversations alternating with contemplative shots of his actors' faces, to illustrate the three men at work in a train station. Watch the following clip to admire Bresson's ability to advance the narrative solely through masterful framing and editing. I don't think you'll ever feel safe in a large crowd again.



Running only seventy-five minutes, Pickpocket has the compression of a short story, concentrating exclusively on Michel and eschewing any narrative embroidery like subplots, its only embellishment the stately music of Lully. Michel is given virtually no backstory, expresses few emotions, has no strong emotional attachments, and dwells almost obsessively on a single idea, the Nietzschean one that the concepts of good and evil are relative and do not apply universally to everyone. Bresson preferred to use non-professional actors, and the passive, slightly wooden acting of Martin La Salle seems wholly congruent with the anomie of the character he plays. Nothing in the film is in the least glamorized, and that includes Bresson's direction, which is devoid of cinematic gimmickry or artistic pretension. This austerity of style combined with an emphasis on ideas over action and emotion gives Pickpocket a kind of surface purity. The film has a quality that is difficult to put into words, but if pressed, I would say it seems in some way turned inward upon itself. This introspective quality in Bresson's work seems to be what most strongly appeals to his admirers, and Pickpocket presents it with what I take to be rather greater palatability than most of his films. Only the upbeat ending, which somehow doesn't ring true, keeps me from giving the film a full **** rating.


Classe Tous Risques
***^½
Country: France-Italy
Director: Claude Sautet

Sautet's Classe Tous Risques, released only one year after Pickpocket, is in many ways its polar opposite—a visceral, noirish crime thriller to Bresson's cerebral meditation on crime and punishment, the yang to Bresson's yin. In Sautet's film, Lino Ventura plays Abel Davos, a career criminal who has already been condemned to death in absentia, who has been hired along with his partner Raymond to rob a bank courier in Turin before fleeing to France with Abel's family. The robbery is successful, but the proceeds are far less than expected. Their elaborate plans to escape to France end in disaster, with Raymond and Abel's wife being killed in a shootout with police and Abel on the run with his two young sons. Abel has no choice but to seek help from his old criminal cronies in Paris, who send a young man, Eric Stark (Jean-Paul Belmondo, in his first role after his breakthrough performance in Breathless), to help him escape. Along the way, Eric picks up a young actress (Sandra Milo), with whom he begins a relationship. The rest of the film deals with Abel's attempts, aided by Eric, to escape the police.

The film sits squarely in the tradition of French film noir of the 1950s and 1960s, the kind of movie directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Becker and was in fact written by José Giovanni, who also wrote Melville's Le Deuxième Souffle (1966) and Becker's Le Trou (1960), both excellent films I highly recommend. Like many American and French noirs, Classe Tous Risques places great emphasis on the issue of loyalty among a group of criminals, while taking the genre in unusual directions (the most interesting of which is making Abel a family man). Abel's former cronies in Paris are all criminals who have redirected their energies into legitimate businesses and are now members of the law-abiding establishment—one a bar owner, another a hotelier, a third a jeweler (played by Marcel Dalio). One reason they hire the inexperienced Eric to go to the south of France to bring Abel back to Paris is that none of them is willing to take the risk of doing so himself, the first indication of their ambivalence toward their former ally. When the police locate them and press them to betray Abel, they must grapple directly with the conflicting demands of loyalty and self-preservation.

Abel, by contrast, is an idealist for whom the concept of loyalty is absolute, and in the young Eric he finds a man who shares this attitude, in a sense a younger version of himself who becomes his protégé. In this way, the film resembles those Westerns where the hero finds that his ethos has become outdated and that his inability to adapt to changing times dooms him. Of course, from the beginning of the film there is already the strong air of fatalism endemic to the genre—Abel's status as a wanted criminal and condemned man, the unsuccessful heist, the botched escape, the dependence on unreliable allies, his increasing desperation as the police close in.

As Abel, Lino Ventura is flawless. He combines ruthlessness with honor, toughness with sensitivity in the same way as exemplars of this type of role like Humphrey Bogart and Jean Gabin. Ventura's Abel accepts his fate with the stoicism of the classic film noir antihero, while still persisting in his futile attempts to avoid the circumstances ensnaring him, playing the game right up until the end even though there is little doubt of its outcome. Sautet's direction is also admirable. Unlike Melville, he was not a specialist in this type of film, yet he seems perfectly comfortable with the genre. Classe Tous Risques might not be as well known as more familiar examples of similar movies, but it compares favorably with the best of them and is certainly worth seeking out by anyone with an affinity for French film noir of this era.

The Lovers (1958)

***
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle

Even though Louis Malle was a contemporary of Truffaut, Godard, and Resnais and began directing films in the late 1950s, just as the New Wave began to dominate French filmmaking, I've never really thought of him as part of that movement. His first movie, Elevator to the Gallows (1957), with its nod to the anarchy of American films like They Live by Night and Gun Crazy in its subplot of young punks on a crime spree, did bear a resemblance to the early work of Godard and Truffaut. But his next projects were all quite different from one another—what David Thomson refers to as his "moving rather aimlessly from one subject to another"—and for the rest of his long career he never seemed to settle into a favored theme or easily identifiable style. The Lovers strikes me as almost his version of the Douglas Sirk women's pictures of the 1950s and reminds me in some ways of the film I think of as the archetypal Sirk movie of that kind, All That Heaven Allows.

The credits of The Lovers open over a map, which looks as though it might date from an earlier century, of an estate with a large lake labeled Lac de l'Indifférence in the the middle (the Criterion website identifies this as the Carte du tendre, "a 'map' of amorous relations drawn by Madeleine de Scudéry in the seventeenth century"), and with sensuous music of Brahms playing on the soundtrack. In some ways, the movie plays like an update of a romantic novel of the 19th century—Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, for example. (According to various sources, the film is loosely derived from a French novel, Point de Lendemain by Dominique Vivant, published in 1777.) In The Lovers, Jeanne Moreau plays a character not unlike Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, Jeanne Tournier, the young wife of an older man, Henri Tournier (Alain Cuny), the publisher of the major newspaper in Dijon. Trapped in a dull, loveless marriage to a man engrossed in his career and marooned in a remote country house, Jeanne is the epitome of the bored, neglected, and aimless upper middle-class housewife.

She has a daughter whom she appears to love, but who is cared for largely by her nanny. The house, almost a mini-château, is her husband's family home staffed by longtime family servants, and she has little to do with the running of it, her role limited to things like planning the menus. She lives for her frequent visits to Paris, where she stays with her rich friend Maggy doing the things idle women of their social class do to pass the time—shopping for clothes, getting her hair done, going to nightclubs, and carrying on an affair with Raoul Flores (José Villalonga), a polo player. When Jeanne's husband persuades her to invite Maggy and Raoul for the weekend, the scene seems to be set for a country weekend psychodrama. But the unforeseen happens when Jeanne's car breaks down on the way home on the day her friends are to arrive, and unable to get it repaired, she accepts a ride home from a young archaeologist, Bernard (Jean-Marc Bory), whom her husband invites to spend the night also.

Malle and Moreau emphasize the satiric possibilities in Jeanne and her lifestyle, painting a sardonically exaggerated picture of a vapid woman living a life of mindless consumerism. Appropriately, this part of the film minimizes narrative incident to concentrate instead on surfaces and appearances, and as photographed by the great Henri Decaë, those appear immaculately polished and ordered. Jeanne's house looks like an illustration from a glossy coffee table book on the traditional French country house, and Moreau, costumed and coiffed in the most chic manner imaginable, looks sensational. Her style-worshiping Jeanne, preoccupied with her image, what she calls her genre, is at once ridiculous and pathetic—ridiculous in her obsession with the superficial, pathetic in her blindness to the shallowness and aridity of her life. Her devotion to the trivial reaches its fullest and most comic expression on the way back to her home with Bernard—he refuses to drive any faster, saying "J'ai horreur de la vitesse" (I have a dread of speed)—in her petulant agitation that she will be late for the arrival of her best friend and lover.

That evening, when Jeanne, feeling vaguely unsettled, wanders outside for a moonlight stroll dressed in her nightgown and still wearing her pearls from dinner, she unexpectedly encounters the hunky young intellectual who until now has only irritated her with his nonconformity and his ridicule of her bourgeois values. As he pursues her through the garden, the atmosphere becomes charged with a surging current of eroticism, and her dislike of him gradually transforms into something she at first doesn't acknowledge but soon surrenders herself to: sexual attraction. At this point the film switches gears completely and becomes a voluptuous, ultra-romantic love story with a seduction in a rowboat on that ironically named Lake of Indifference, followed by a night of rapturous lovemaking in Jeanne's room. The sudden, almost disjunctive tonal contrast between this part of the film and what preceded it is the one element of The Lovers that places it squarely in the tradition of the New Wave.
Even with the floridly romantic tone of this part of the movie, it's obvious that Jeanne's attraction to Bernard is not only emotional but strongly physical and that the main thing missing from her life, and which until this point she seems to have been completely unaware of, is sexual fulfillment. Today this may seem innocuous enough, but in the 1950s it was sufficient to make The Lovers highly controversial, causing a stir both when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and when it opened commercially in France. In the U.S. it was banned in Ohio, becoming the subject of a court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the ban. The sex isn't even explicit (although there is a clear suggestion that Bernard introduces Jeanne to oral sex), but that, combined with the subversive idea that women actually have sex drives like men, was enough to make the film as notorious as D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterly's Lover had been in its day.

If this kind of plot was hardly new territory for the movies, the attitudes expressed in the film were. In the movies, a woman who behaved in this way—who abandoned her husband, children, and stable middle-class existence for the thrill of a sexual fling—typically had to pay for her transgression of prevailing societal values. Sexual fulfillment was shown to be transient and ultimately meaningless, and the affair was fated to end badly. Malle was having none of this, though. In The Lovers, sexual fulfillment is equated with emotional fulfillment, and at the conclusion of the film Jeanne tells us that even if it doesn't last, she doesn't care. Ultimately, the most shocking thing to viewers in the 1950s might not have been the film's candor about sexuality, but the threat implicit in its rejection of the traditional notion that women achieve satisfaction through marriage, children, and conformity to the chaste and repressive behavioral ideals of the time.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

***^½
Country: France
Director: Georges Franju

When I was in high school, one of the most notorious parts of the driver education course was a slide show of gruesome car crashes, a fright tactic intended to discourage teenagers from dangerous driving. So graphic were these slides that before beginning, the teacher gravely told the class that anyone too disturbed by them could leave the room at any time. One of the slides was of a boy who had been run over by a car and whose face had been sliced off by the car's sharp bumper. The slide showed the boy's face, looking as if it had been surgically removed, lying next to the upper part of his body. The most unsettling thing about the slide, though, was not the face, but that the boy's head minus the face had been completely whited out. This could mean only one thing—that in this presentation designed to horrify, what remained after the face had been sliced away was just too grisly to show. The juxtaposition of that mask-like face and the blank head next to it is a chilling image I'll never forget.

That high school classroom stunt is what came to mind as I watched George Franju's horror classic Eyes Without a Face, the story of a young woman, Christiane Génissier (Edith Scob), whose face has been horribly damaged in a car accident that happened while her father (Pierre Brasseur) was driving. The father is Docteur Génissier, an experimental transplant surgeon, in reality a modern mad scientist who kidnaps young women and attempts to transplant their faces onto his daughter's to restore her beauty. In the meantime, Christiane is kept secreted in the attic of a rambling mansion adjoining her father's private clinic in the suburbs of Paris and forced to wear an expressionless, corpselike mask modeled on her own features. Unfortunately, her body keeps rejecting the transplants, so aided by his devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli), whose looks he has restored with what appears to be the removal of a disfiguring goiter, Dr. Génissier must keep kidnapping more victims. Eventually Christiane's fiancé Jacques, also a doctor at the clinic, becomes suspicious about what is happening and goes to the police, who persuade a young shoplifter to help them entrap the doctor by becoming his next victim.

This is understandably a film whose eeriness—the way it blurs the distinction between dream and nightmare, the way it finds beauty in the grotesque—created an intense and unsettling impression while I was watching it. What is not so easy to understand is why that impression not only stuck with me afterward, but continued if anything to grow, evoking strongly eidetic memories every time I thought of the movie—what Robert Taylor writing on Eyes Without a Face recently at Wonders in the Dark referred to as its "haunting" quality. Part of the reason is almost certainly what I would call the film's atavistic nature. Elements of the film seem so familiar that even while watching it, I had a sense of déjà vu—and I mean this in a good way.

The very first sequence, of Louise driving the body of the first victim to the Seine to dump it, lets us know this is going to be a movie that acknowledges its origins. The body, slumped in the back seat of Louise's car with a man's hat on its head and wearing a trench coat with the collar pulled up so that it completely obscures the missing face, immediately brings to mind The Invisible Man. Throughout the film, references to many other works in the horror genre are invoked. The mask seems a reference to The Phantom of the Opera; the mad scientist, faithful assistant, and laboratory to Frankenstein; Louise in her car trawling for victims to Boris Karloff in The Body Snatcher, or to any of the other characters based on Burke and Hare; Christiane gliding around the spooky house in her white, shroud-like peignoirs to everything from Dracula and The Bride of Frankenstein to I Walked with a Zombie. I'm sure dedicated aficionados of the genre could spot far more than I did. There are even allusions to films not strictly in the genre. A portrait of Christiane dressed in white and holding a white dove on the back of her hand over the fireplace put me in mind of Laura. (Remember that the reason the body in Laura was misidentified was that its face had been blown off with a shotgun. Moreover, a crucial misidentification of one of Dr. Génissier's faceless victims happens early in this movie too.) Anyone who has seen Broken Blossoms will surely be reminded of that film in the dinner scene, which I'll get to in a bit.

Another reason the film sticks in one's mind so tenaciously is that even though it contains many visual elements that might have lodged in the memory of anyone who has watched a lot of movies, it presents these images in unexpected and sometimes jarring ways. In that opening sequence, the music by Maurice Jarre—nothing like his romantic scores for movies like Doctor Zhivago, but instead a dead ringer for the jaunty, carnivalesque scores Nino Rota wrote for Fellini—forms a weirdly anomalous counterpoint to what we're seeing on the screen: an anxiety-wracked woman driving through a foggy night with a dead body in the back seat of her car and clearly terrified she is going to be discovered before she can get rid of it. Later, in a sequence that might at first seem out of place in this movie, Dr. Génissier examines a little boy who is losing his eyesight. He reassures the boy's mother that he can cure the boy, but the glances exchanged between him and his assistant made me think that the case was hopeless and his assurances a benign falsehood. This sequence, which shows him in a sympathetic light, is immediately followed by one in which he visits a laboratory where that young shoplifter is undergoing tests with wires attached to her head that make her look like the victim of some kind of bizarre torture, rather like those photos of Abu Ghraib. Outwardly, he shows the same solicitude to her as he had to the little boy, yet we already know he is planning to abduct and mutilate her.

This is not the only scene that shows what a paradox Dr. Génissier is, and that emphasis on showing the main people in the film as psychologically well-defined characters rather than the flat stereotypes of the typical horror film is another thing that distinguishes Eyes Without a Face. A pioneering researcher working in a field with the potential to be of immense benefit to humanity, Dr. Génissier no doubt performs many good works at his clinic. Yet he has a dark side brought out by Christiane. Just what is his motivation in devoting himself to restoring his daughter's beauty to the extent that it becomes an obsession compelling him to commit the most horrible crimes? Is it guilt because he feels responsible for the accident? Is the situation one that piques his medical curiosity and gives him an opportunity to advance his life's work, with his own daughter the ultimate test subject? Is he driven by vanity, the godlike need to control? Whatever his motivation, love barely seems to enter into it. Look at the unfeeling way he manipulates the adoring Louise to help him commit his atrocities. Even though he shows devotion to his daughter, he never displays any real affection for her.

When Christiane tells Louise early in the film that her father is driven by the reckless need to control, that this is precisely what caused the car accident, she probably is close to the truth about him. This is especially evident in the dinner scene with Louise, Dr. Génissier, and Christiane that takes place shortly after a transplant appears to have succeeded and Christiane has indeed regained her beauty. Louise tells her that she is even more beautiful than before, that there is something angelic about her, to which Christiane replies that when she looks in the mirror she sees a face which resembles her own, but it's like looking at a different person who seems far away. In response, the controlling Dr. Génissier lays out his elaborate plans for her future then coldly tells his daughter not to be so negative and instructs her to smile. Christiane, compliant but clearly experiencing emotional stress, immediately does so. At this point I couldn't help thinking of the brutal Donald Crisp and the gentle Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, and I wondered if the same dynamic of control and victimization might be at play here, only with the sadism concealed under a veneer of civility and concern.

Christiane is just as much an enigma as her father. It's impossible to say with certainty what she was like before the accident, although her relationship with Jacques indicates she probably led a normal life. But now she seems in many ways as blank as the mask that conceals her face, and as incapable of registering emotion. Restricted by the mask and her long, shapeless gowns, Edith Scob must concentrate her performance in her body—in her posture and the way she moves. With her rail-thin physique and elongated, birdlike neck and hands, she does a tremendous job of creating an almost spectral presence, silently drifting through the house like a ghost. She also conveys through her characterization the marked impression that Christiane has in a sense grown into her mask. That remark at the dinner table about what she sees in the mirror suggests that she feels she has lost her identity, that she has come to regard that inexpressive mask as more reflective of her present self than is her true face.

When it comes, the movie's conclusion is the result of the passive Christiane's reclaiming her free will when she spontaneously empathizes with that young shoplifter, her father's intended next victim. Regaining her sense of self-identity, she becomes an avenging angel who wreaks retribution on her father before he can do any further harm. Afterward, Christiane is at last free, but all alone except for the one white dove she carries. The last scene completes the movie's blurring of dream and nightmare as Christiane is swallowed up by the darkness and fog like a vanishing wraith.

Le Boucher (1970)

****
Country: France-Italy
Director: Claude Chabrol

In his book "Have You Seen . . . ?" David Thomson calls Le Boucher "a picture to be seen repeatedly over the years." In my experience, such movies tend to fall into two groups. In one group are the most complex films—Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Persona, 8½, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—the convoluted products of a great filmmaker's overcrowded imagination that invite you to savor their technical and narrative intricacies again and again, but even after many viewings still remain resistant to ever being fully known. In the other group are the simplest films—Bringing Up Baby, The Naked Spur, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Pather Panchali—movies made not without style, but with an absolute economy of style that reduces film storytelling to its essentials. If Thomson is right about Le Boucher, then it is definitely of the latter type.

The film begins at a wedding in the Périgord, in south central France, where Hélène (Stéphane Audran), the principal of the village elementary school, and Popaul (Jean Yanne), the local butcher, find themselves seated next to each other at a banquet table. It's obvious from the beginning that a special rapport exists between them, and the two strike up an immediate friendship that soon develops into an easy camaraderie that stops just short of romance. Both are in a sense outsiders, and both have experience of the greater world beyond the rather insular village.

Popaul, a native of the village, has spent the last fifteen years in the Army in both Southeast Asia and Algeria, returning only recently to take over the local butcher shop. Hélène, who comes from Paris, is clearly much more sophisticated and better educated than other women in the village. Her chic hair style and clothes set her apart here, where a woman who smokes in the street, which she does, is considered daring and unconventional. When Popaul walks Hélène home—she lives in an apartment over the school—it's obvious these two will be seeing more of each other. Popaul seems a bit more eager to pursue the friendship than Hélène, boldly showing up in her classroom to bring her a special leg of lamb, offering to paint her apartment. But she doesn't resist the charming and persistent butcher, inviting him to dine with her when she cooks the lamb and later to go mushrooming with her and two of her students.

Life in the dozy village is soon shattered when two women are murdered, stabbed to death apparently at random and without motive, and it becomes apparent that there is a serial killer in the region. Hélène's comfortable, predictable life is also shattered when she becomes involved in the crimes. After taking her students on a field trip to the nearby caves to see the prehistoric cave paintings, she discovers a third victim. This happens after one of the students, a young girl sitting under an overhanging rock, notices something dripping on the piece of bread she is eating and it turns out to be not what it seems at first—raspberry or strawberry jam—but blood, an image that graphically conveys a chilling juxtaposition of the ordinary and the horrifying. That this is the first and only time in the film Chabrol uses such visual shock tactics makes the scene all the more jolting.

Chabrol doesn't equivocate about casting suspicion on Popaul. A loner without any friends aside from Hélène, he seems to dwell on the grisly details of the war atrocities he has witnessed in the Army. When Hélène finds the cigarette lighter she bought Popaul as a present lying near the body, her alarm grows, but rather than tell the police, she takes it home and hides it. Soon after this, Popaul shows up outside Hélène's window late one evening with a jar of brandied cherries he has brought her from Périgueux and asks to come up to her apartment. The five-minute long sequence that follows is a marvel of directorial virtuosity—masterful in the union of image and sound, the succession of apparently functional but subtly artistic shots, and especially the play of expressions on the faces of the solicitous Popaul and the anxiety-ridden Hélène as they eat cherries and carry on a desultory conversation that eventually works its way to Hélène's distress over finding the body. The scene finally resolves itself with Popaul taking from his pocket the lighter Hélène thought she had found near the body and Hélène in her relief asking him to stay the night. The entire sequence is a model of meticulous attention to detail used to create mounting tension that culminates in abrupt release.

In fact, Chabrol's direction of the entire movie could be characterized by his meticulous and unfailingly apt selection of detail. Hélène's apartment over the school, a picture of stylish domesticity with its tasteful, cozy furniture and eclectic array of art prints covering the walls; the unpretentious but faintly bohemian Citroën Deux Chevaux she drives; the tidy, picturesque rustic village with its pollarded trees and place with a central fountain; the surrounding landscape with its idyllic woods, eerie caves filled with stalactites and Cro-Magnon wall paintings, and misty river and fields—Chabrol orchestrates all these surface details to create an atmosphere so specific and real that it is almost palpable. Moreover, he works the same kind of artful magic with his deceptively simple direction, which uses all these things not as visual ends in themselves but as visual aids to propel the narrative through its trajectory. Throughout the entire film there is a fascinating tension between the sensational subject and Chabrol's almost contemplative directing style, entirely free of unnecessary embellishment without ever seeming austere or clinical.

Along with Chabrol, the film belongs to Stéphane Audran, who was at the time married to Chabrol, and Jean Yanne. It's difficult to imagine two actors who could have so convincingly inhabited the characters of Hélène, living in the village almost in self-exile, and the enigmatic and needy Popaul. Like the film itself, these are characters who at first appear simple enough. But as Chabrol adds more layers, revealing details about their backgrounds and showing the ways they interact with other people and especially each other, we begin to see them as quite intricate and individualized human beings. As their friendship develops, it brings out things each has consciously repressed, in the end resulting in an emotional catharsis as draining for the viewer as for the characters in the film. In both subject and style, Le Boucher is something of a paradox—a film that is stark without being bleak, stoical without being grim.

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The death of Claude Chabrol at the age of eighty was announced on September 12. Because this is the first film of his I've seen, I hesitated to give it a full **** rating. But the more I reflected on its virtues—its concision, restraint, absolute surety of technique, strong sense of character and place, and tolerant view of human fallibility—the more I felt it deserved my highest rating. I've added more of Chabrol's movies to my Netflix queue and will be watching them in the coming weeks and months.

The Fire Within (1963)

****
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle

Louis Malle's The Fire Within begins in medias res when we meet the main character, Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet), in a hotel where he has spent the night with a former girl friend. As the film unfolds, more is gradually revealed about Alain. We learn that he is a recovering alcoholic, a patient at what appears to be a very swank private sanatorium in Versailles, just outside Paris. The fees are being paid by his rich wife, who lives in New York and from whom he is separated. When his doctor tells him the cure is complete and it is time to leave, Alain insists he wants to stay at the clinic, that without its regimen to restrain him, he believes he will immediately begin drinking again. Alain's cryptic comments to the doctor about the futility of his life and about death suggest he is suicidally depressed, something which seems quite plain to the viewer but which his doctor dismisses with upbeat platitudes. Later, alone in his room, he opens his brief case, takes out a pistol wrapped in a handkerchief, and contemplates it before putting it back, then walks to the mirror, on which he has written the date July 23, and looks at himself. There can be little doubt about his intentions.

The rest of the film follows Alain through his last day, as he goes to Paris and looks up old friends before returning to the clinic. From these encounters we discover more about him—that he is a writer who is no longer able to write, has been involved in the war in Algeria, has led a dissolute life among rich bohemians, that he invariably rejects suggestions of ways he might repair his life. We also learn that he is well-liked by his friends and that quite a few attractive women—and even some men—find him sexually appealing, while others find his spiritual torpor merely pathetic. Yet even as these details about his life accumulate and our picture of him becomes more complete, one thing is unchanging: our sense of the hopeless, unshakable despair he feels.

While discussions of The Fire Within tend to stress the role of alcoholism in the film, I would say that this is more than a movie about the evils of alcohol. In fact, Alain consistently refuses offers of alcohol and is never shown drunk. In the entire film he takes only one drink, when he furtively gulps down one small glass of cognac that has been left at the next table in a sidewalk cafe. The only effect of the liquor is to make him violently ill. Alain's problems go beyond his dependence on alcohol, which may actually be as much a symptom as a cause—all the way to a pervasive disenchantment with life that colors every moment of the movie. His despair is quite different from both the intellectualized and rather rarefied ennui being explored at the time by Antonioni in films like L'Avventura and L'Eclisse and the almost celebratory alcoholic self-destruction of Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Malle depicts real mental pain here—not melodramatic agonizing, but the quiet resignation of a man whose life has been drained of all hope. The usual diversions that can pull a person out of such a depressive frame of mind or deaden the pain for a while—love, work, intoxicants—no longer have any effect on Alain.

The Fire Within is what might be called a dramatically level film, its lack of strong emotional highs and lows reflecting Alain's own emotional numbness. Rather than dramatic situations, the film presents a series of subdued encounters between Alain and people from his past. In these encounters, his every action makes it obvious that like many intended suicides, he is revisiting his old haunts to say goodbye. Yet only once—when he visits his friend Eva, an artist played with great sympathy in a cameo by Jeanne Moreau—did I feel any real connection between Alain and these people. For the rest, there seems to be an almost palpable sense of estrangement between them and Alain. At one point he figuratively demonstrates the isolation he feels by reaching out to touch the face of one of his friends but stopping with his fingertips just an inch or so away, explaining that he can reach out but can never actually touch another person. It is this terrible sense of psychic solitude that seems to be the genesis of his withdrawal from life.

From beginning to end, the mood of The Fire Within is one of melancholy. Director Louis Malle works in a muted, unemphatic style, avoiding obvious directorial intrusion as he objectively observes Alain's depression without overdramatizing or sentimentalizing Alain's situation. Interestingly, Malle began shooting in color but quickly switched to black and white, a prudent artistic decision that underscores the colorlessness of Alain's life. The sparing use of pensive piano music by Erik Satie also contributes a great deal to the picture's theme of Alain reflecting on his life before ending it.

But the greatest credit for the the film's success must go to Maurice Ronet, whose deeply affecting performance is the movie's core. In a film of such intimate focus on his character that the camera would surely reveal the least trace of dishonesty in his performance, his Alain seems absolutely genuine. Ronet immediately establishes Alain's state of mind (and his state of mind is the movie), somehow externalizing and making visible what is essentially interior and invisible, and then sustains it scene by scene for the duration of the film, surely the most difficult thing for a film actor to do. Ronet completely disappears inside Alain, fusing so thoroughly with him that actor and character become one. Wholly internalized and without gimmickry or actorly mannerisms, this is film acting of the highest order.

Aside from a few flashes of dark humor at the clinic near the beginning, The Fire Within is an unrelievedly somber film. Yet Malle's low-key directing style and Ronet's unsentimental performance, entirely without self-pity, create enough emotional distance to make the movie bearable without making it seem cold or aloof. On the contrary, The Fire Within is a film that in its understated treatment of alcoholism and depression, subjects which could easily have become trite and overwrought, manages in its restraint to be all the more moving.

Bay of Angels (1963)

***^½
Country: France
Director: Jacques Demy

"Of all the New Wave directors who once professed their joy in cinema, Demy remained most faithful to the delights of sight and sound and to the romance of movie iconography."

—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

Bay of Angels opens with an iris shot of Jeanne Moreau striding purposefully down the seafront promenade at Nice early in the morning, the camera tracking in front of her and slowly away from her. After a few moments the iris opens out to a full-screen shot, lush piano-and-orchestra music wells up on the soundtrack, and as the credits begin, the camera speeds away in a burst of surging momentum that matches that of Michel Legrand's theme music until Moreau disappears in the distance. The whole shot, which lasts a little more than a minute, is one of those that makes you ask yourself even as you watch it, "How did they do ever that?" (My best guess: the camera operator was in the back seat of a convertible with the camera mounted on the trunk of the car as it raced down the promenade.)

After this opening credit sequence, the tone of the film changes completely as the location shifts to Paris, where we meet Jean Fournier (Claude Mann), a staid young man in his early twenties who works as a bank clerk and lives a sedate life with his widowed father. After a co-worker confesses to Jean that he is a compulsive gambler and invites Jean to accompany him to the casino at Enghien near Paris, Jean sees a means of escape from his dull, conventional life. When his vacation comes up, he seizes his chance to "break out" by defying his father and heading for the Riviera and its casinos for a gambling holiday. In the casino he meets Jackie Lemaistre (Jeanne Moreau), a chain-smoking, careworn-looking denizen of the casino who appears to be in her early thirties, and for the next two weeks the two embark on an impromptu love affair and gambling spree that takes them from Nice to Monte Carlo and back again.


Like many of the early French New Wave films—Breathless, The Lovers, Jules and Jim, Pierrot le Fou—Bay of Angels is about what the French call l'amour fou—crazy, wild, impulsive love. Here it's a case of the sexual attraction of opposite personalities. The difference in their natures is apparent from their behavior in the casino, Jean quietly observant and methodical in contrast to Jackie's fervent concentration and capricious spontaneity. It's easy to see the appeal of the impetuous Jackie to a strait-laced, inexperienced young man like Jean, but less easy to fathom the attraction Jean holds for her. Is he simply a docile protégé? A companion in her folly? A convenient source of betting money when she runs out?

He may be all those things at first, but as the film proceeds and we learn more about Jackie, we begin to see that she might actually have a deep emotional need for him. In her life Jackie has lost all: she has sacrificed her rich husband, her young son, her friends to her all-consuming passion for gambling. Demy has said he wanted to make a film that showed gambling as an addiction, like alcohol or drugs. It is true that Jackie seems to have no control over her obsessive need to gamble, yet like much addictive behavior, her gambling seems not so much a weakness of character or a disease as a kind of self-medication, a desperate attempt to erase life's pain by immersion in some sort of compulsive behavior.

The more she tells Jean about herself, the more we see that despite her vivacity, she seems to be trying to escape something—a sense of failure and inadequacy, an inability to achieve any sort of stability in her life, or perhaps the haunting possibility that her life has no significance outside the casino. Highly strung, mercurial, irresponsible, Jackie is all hyperkinetic emotionalism. You can see this in the way she walks down the promenade in that opening shot. Her whole approach to life is like her walk: she moves with the purpose of a person on her way to an important rendezvous, yet she is obviously heading nowhere.

For Jackie, life is lived completely in the moment. Win or lose, risk is all. Every moment of her life is simply a temporary stop on her way up or down, and her destiny is never to arrive anywhere. What she seems to be avoiding even at the peril of self-destruction is stasis. Tellingly, her preferred game is roulette, the wheel pausing only briefly before it resumes its perpetual spin, for in Jackie's world, the only thing of importance—both literally and metaphorically—is the next spin of the wheel. Jackie quickly becomes the center of the movie, and Moreau seizes the role for all it's worth, giving a fierce performance reminiscent of those by the most intense American actresses of the studio era such as Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. Like Davis and Stanwyck at their most incandescent, Moreau suggests that although Jackie is a damaged woman life-hardened on the outside, she still harbors deep within her a vulnerability that can be reached by a naïf like Jean.

Moreau's real co-star in the film is her director, Jacques Demy. Unlike some New Wave directors, though, Demy never tries to upstage his actors and his story with self-indulgent stylistics. Demy dedicated his first film, Lola (1961), to Max Ophüls, in part for Ophüls' renowned use of tracking and crane shots. Although he clearly favors such shots, Demy uses them in a more restrained, less baroque manner than Ophüls, who specialized in period pictures. Still, the key characteristic of Demy's visual style is the sensuous, balletic fluidity of his camera. In a single shot Demy holds the camera in place, pans, and tracks for as long as possible, finally cutting only when absolutely necessary. These lengthy, precisely choreographed shots result in a flowing narrative technique of hypnotic beauty, the whole film in a sense a nearly continuous pas de deux between the camera and the actors.

The other inspiration Demy takes from Ophüls is devotion to the belief in both the destructive and the redemptive power of love. Bay of Angels ends abruptly and rather ambiguously, with Jackie storming away from Jean in the casino after an argument. Jean hesitates briefly then follows her outside and takes her in his arms, and after resisting a moment, Jackie surrenders to his embrace. The film ends with no clear indication of the future course of the relationship. Will Jean's love act as a calmative on the erratic Jackie, or will his placidity be overwhelmed by her galvanic energy? Demy leaves it entirely up to the viewer to decide what comes next. But for the moment at least, Jean's love seems to have subdued the chaos in Jackie.

Le Corbeau (1943)

***^½
Country: France
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

The French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977), best known for two films he made in the mid-1950s—The Wages of Fear (1953), which won the Grand Prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, and Les Diaboliques (1955)—is often referred to as "the French Hitchcock." In those two films, Clouzot's signature use of suspense acts not just as a means of achieving moments of heightened tension and excitement, but as a sustained mood that barely lets up until the movie's shocking conclusion. In his second full-length film, Le Corbeau (1943), the suspense, while just as effective, is derived more from the conventional "whodunit" approach of the classic mystery.

Based on a true incident that had happened years earlier, Le Corbeau concerns a rash of poison pen letters signed "Le Corbeau" (The Raven) that tear apart the fictional Saint-Robin, a small village in provincial France. At first the letters are aimed at a relative newcomer to the village, Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay), accusing him of performing abortions, which he denies. Soon others in the village start receiving vicious anonymous letters too, and not only do the accusations seem believable, but in some cases we know they are true. Clearly the writer of the letters not only knows a great deal about the secret lives of the villagers, but is also a cunning judge of character able to accuse people of things they might not actually have done but are only too capable of. The number of suspects is large, for nearly everyone in the village has a grievance against someone else. But who in the village is so filled with generalized malice that he or she would go to such extremes to destroy its social fabric?

In a 1974 series on the history of French film made for French television, Clouzot explained the importance of suspense in his movies by saying that suspense is the element that keeps the viewer watching "everything else." In Le Corbeau that "everything else" consists of quite a lot. For one thing, there is Clouzot's strong sense of visual theatrics (another trait he shares with Hitchcock), beginning with the shots of the village cemetery that open the film, suggesting that this is a dark place with many buried secrets. Although most of the letters are delivered by post, a couple of times they are publicly delivered in passages of great visual drama. One time this happens at the funeral of a man who has been driven to suicide by one of the letters, a funeral the entire village attends, when a letter accusing a female villager of being responsible for his death tumbles from a funeral wreath on the back of the horse-drawn hearse bearing his coffin to the cemetery. The entire village then becomes a frenzied, vengeful mob who chase her through the streets of the village to her home and nearly kill her. Another time, in the local cathedral where the priest is sermonizing about the evil of the letter-writer, the entire congregation looks up to the highest gallery and watches in stupefied fascination as another letter slowly flutters to the floor.

A key scene in the film occurs when Dr. Germain discusses the evil behind the letters with his friend Dr. Vorzet, a psychologist (and ironically the man with whose wife he is secretly having an affair). The scene is staged in a darkened room illuminated by one overhead light—a lamp with one naked bulb and a small shade that directs the light downward—hanging just above Germain and Vorzet. Vorzet tries to convince Germain that any of the villagers might be The Raven because good and evil co-exist in all people and it is impossible to suppress the evil in one's nature completely. He illustrates this by reaching up to start the overhead lamp swinging lamp back and forth, casting each man now in darkness, now in light. When Germain reacts skeptically to Vorzet's ideas, the psychologist asks him to reach up and stop the swinging light. When he does, he immediately burns his hand and instinctively withdraws it, while the lamp keeps on swinging, continuing to cast each man in an unstoppable alternation of light and shadow. The scene uses dialogue, staging, lighting and photography to focus the overriding theme of the movie—that in the right circumstances everyone is capable of evil, a theme that given what we now know of the ignoble actions of many ordinary French citizens during the Nazi occupation, must have had extra resonance at the time.

Mirroring Dr. Vorzet's cynical view of humanity, Clouzot's depiction of life in the small town is relentlessly caustic. Aside from Dr. Germain, who seems sincere although hardly without flaws (besides the affair with Madame Vorzet, he also gets a handicapped young woman pregnant after a one-night stand), nearly everyone else in the movie—no matter how sympathetic they seem at first—is corrupt in some way. These nasty small-town provincials are driven by the basest, most petty, most selfish of human impulses. Narrow-minded and suspicious of outsiders like Germain, they are also filled with envy, lust, and greed directed at one another. Above all, they are hypocrites who conceal their true natures while projecting their vilest urges and motives onto their fellow villagers. The greatest effect the letters have on the community is to lead its inhabitants to expose their true selves, an ugly and dismaying sight indeed.

Although Le Corbeau was a big hit in France when it was first released, it was not without controversy. Leftists and the Resistance denounced it not only because it was made by Continental Films, a German-controlled production company established during the Occupation by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, but also because of the savage—and in their eyes unpatriotic—way it depicted life in provincial France. Likewise, the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy government were displeased with the film because they felt it surreptitiously condemned the practice of denouncing those working for the Resistance, a practice the Nazis encouraged. Clouzot suffered reprisals from both groups of the film's detractors. Just days before the movie's release, Continental fired Clouzot, who had also been in charge of the studio's screenwriting division. After the war, he was accused of collaboration because of his association with Continental Films and banned from the French film industry for life. Later this was reduced to two years.

Le Corbeau is a very accomplished work and in its perversely bleak way quite enjoyable. Its unsparingly negative view of human nature, plainly the product of a filmmaker of a highly pessimistic temperament, and its expert manipulation of audience response through the precisely targeted use of suspenseful situations as the film works its way to its grim conclusion anticipate Clouzot's later and better-known masterpieces. It is well worth seeking out, especially for those interested in pre-New Wave French cinema or in the suspense genre.

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For more about Continental Films and the French film industry during the Occupation, I recommend Bertrand Tavernier's excellent film Safe Conduct (2002), which details the experiences of two men working in the French film industry during this time.

Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 3

Monsieur Hulot in the Brave New World

Jacques Tati was not a hurried or haphazard filmmaker. His third feature-length film, Mon Oncle (1958), was released five years after his second, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, and the five years Tati spent making Mon Oncle is apparent in its meticulous conception and execution. One remarkable thing about Tati's films is the clear sense of evolution from one to the next. In each successive film he seemed to take elements he had perfected in the previous film and add new ones to the mix. In this way, his movies grew progressively more complex, more sophisticated, and more ambitious, in both the technical and the thematic sense.

Tati's first movie, Jour de Fête (1949), with its emphasis on physical comedy and the precision timing of its physical gags, has much in common with the work of Buster Keaton. His second movie, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, continues the physical comedy of Jour de Fête, although not in such a purely kinetic way, and builds on that film by intensifying the emphasis on characterization. It takes the concept of that earlier film's main character (François the village postman) as comic outsider and applies it even more assiduously to Tati's new creation, M. Hulot. Leaving in his wake a trail of comic chaos, M. Hulot becomes by the end of the movie the kind of social pariah Harold Lloyd played in movies like The Freshman.

Tati recognized that in M. Hulot he had created a perfect Everyman character, one whose simultaneous universality and individuality enabled Tati to devise nearly any conceivable comic situation around this versatile character. Keeping M. Hulot as the main character of Mon Oncle, Tati added to Keaton's physicality and Lloyd's use of character as the starting point of the story a new element: the topicality of Charles Chaplin. If Modern Times (1936)—admittedly, inspired at least in part by René Clair's A Nous la Liberté (1932)—is Chaplin's take on modernity, then Mon Oncle is the first of two movies in which Tati tackled head-on the same subject: the tribulations of the ordinary man alone and alienated in the mystifying modern world.

Yet in fact the germ of those two elements—modern life and alienation—is present in Tati's two earlier films. Consider François's flirtation with modernity in Jour de Fête, in which his disastrous experimentation with what he believes are modern American methods of postal delivery ends with his abandoning the idea and returning to traditional methods. Consider also the rather melancholic ending of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, in which M. Hulot, shunned by the adults at the seaside resort where he is vacationing, ends up on the beach with the children, just about the only people in the movie who will accept his childlike but well-intentioned misbehavior. In this ending there is a sense that M. Hulot is for the first time in his life consciously aware of his apartness from other people. With such awareness inevitably comes the onset of existential alienation, and that is precisely the state Tati explores in a satirical way in Mon Oncle.

Mon Oncle opens on a construction site with the sound of jackhammers heard behind the credits. The film immediately switches to a deserted early morning street in an old section of Paris, with mellow, jazzy Parisian popular music playing on the soundtrack. To the sounds of accordion, banjo, and vibraphone, a group of dogs—several mongrels and one purebred dachshund—are cheerfully roaming, romping with one another, scrounging through the street refuse, and marking their territory. The dogs make their way through a transitional zone with the rubble of razed buildings in the foreground and newly constructed apartment buildings that look like concrete boxes in the background, eventually ending up in a new suburban neighborhood in front of an ultra-modern bungalow with a modernistic metal gate. At this point the dachshund squeezes underneath the gate and is home. This is the house of the Arpels—M. Hulot's sister, her husband, and their son, his nephew Gérard.

In the first few minutes of the film, Tati has staked out his thematic territory: the contrast between the modern world of the Arpels and the traditional world of M. Hulot. Like Tati's earlier movies, Mon Oncle is loosely constructed as a series of episodes filled with sight and sound gags. But unlike Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, where M. Hulot is at the center of each episode, here the episodes are linked conceptually, by the idea of the conflict between modernity and tradition. From the beginning it is clear where Tati's sympathies lie: Everything about the modern world is depicted as soulless, characterless, and spiritually enervating as it relentlessly destroys the old to make way for the new, as it consumes the traditional world and dehumanizes its inhabitants like M. Hulot.

M. Hulot's neighborhood, where the movie starts, is colorful and lively. It is filled with people, activity, and life lived in the open. Everywhere we hear the sounds of life—of dogs barking, music playing, and people chatting with their neighbors and with the vendors in the market stalls of the square. In the streets we see eccentric characters—a deliveryman with a horse-drawn cart; a man sweeping the streets with a crudely fashioned broom; a tipsy man in a raincoat, pajamas, slippers, and beret walking his dog on a leash; a group of disheveled schoolboys who have ditched school playing practical jokes on unsuspecting strangers.

The world of the Arpels couldn't be more different. In their neighborhood the streets are empty except for automobiles. The buildings either present blank facades to the street or, like their own house, are sequestered behind fences. While M. Hulot either walks or rides his motocyclette, M. Arpel drives his huge American Oldsmobile everywhere, delivering his son to his newly built school that looks more like a factory or prison than a school, or to his own modern factory, where his company, Plastac, manufactures plastic pipes and hoses.

In Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Tati used locations to convey moods, and more specifically he used the Hôtel de la Plage, where M. Hulot spent his vacation, essentially as a character in the movie. In Mon Oncle, Tati also uses architecture and buildings as characters. M. Hulot's apartment building is a rambling, improvised structure clearly added to many times over the years without any thought of overall design. M. Hulot's apartment, on the top floor, is reached by a circuitous route up staircases, across an interior landing, down another flight of stairs, across an exterior terrace, around the side of the building, and up another flight of stairs that leads to his apartment, which appears to be a series of small rooms perched on a former rooftop.

M. Hulot's apartment building

The Arpel house, perhaps the most striking modern residence ever seen in a non-science fiction movie (it easily outdoes the houses in Leave Her to Heaven and North by Northwest), stands in total contrast to M. Hulot's building. To call this house futuristic would be an understatement. The yard leading to the front door is fragmented into geometric shapes that are paved or filled with gravel or tiny patches of precisely manicured grass. In this environment artificial flowers are preferred to real ones because "they're made to last." The few examples of real vegetation are topiary pruned into rigidly geometric forms—cubes, spheres, cones. Two plant-like structures espaliered on the wall of the house appear to be made of barbed wire, the barbs imitating leaves. Dominating all is a hideous fountain with a large, upright metal fish that vaguely resembles a marlin, spewing water dyed a cyanic blue color.

The house itself is a streamlined, two-story, block-like structure with two round windows resembling eyes in the main room of the second floor. The rooms in the uninviting, minimalist interior of the house are boxy, nearly empty of furnishings, and relentlessly colorless and monochromatic. In this house even a single leaf that has blown in from outdoors mars the perfect order and must be gingerly picked up and disposed of by the obsessively tidy Mme. Arpel. Everything in the hi-tech house that can be automated, mechanized, or turned into a gadget has been; even opening a kitchen cupboard is a complicated mechanical procedure that thoroughly confounds M. Hulot. To call this setting sterile would be putting it mildly.

The Arpels' futuristic house

But more importantly, this environment precisely reflects the way its inhabitants think and live. Theirs is a totally planned and controlled world with no room for spontaneity, a humorless place where playfulness is inappropriate, where every thing and every activity must be serious, practical, and functional. Being tidy, methodical, and productive are the most highly prized personal traits in this world. Having wholly internalized this ethos, M. and Mme. Arpel are the ultimate conformist consumers, with an almost worshipful attitude toward modernity and a fetishistic devotion to all things fashionable and up-to-date.

Only two people seem uncomfortable in this environment: M. Hulot and Gérard, the Arpels' young son. Gérard's parents attempt to instill in him their own belief in the value of the totally regimented life—scheduling his day, urging him to apply himself to productive pursuits like school and study, and discouraging him from any activities they deem frivolous. Naturally, the last includes most of the things Gérard would prefer to be doing. Just as the Arpels' dachshund Daqui enjoys roaming the streets with the mongrels of H. Hulot's shabby but colorful neighborhood, Gérard understandably prefers to play hooky and loaf with his uncle or the street kids in M. Hulot's neighborhood.

When Mme. Arpel decides that her brother is a bad influence on Gérard, she urges her husband to find M. Hulot a job in his plastics factory. This results in a long set piece—one of several in the film—that is essentially an extended version of one of the series of small misadventures in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. Assigned a simple, mind-numbingly routine job—to oversee a self-regulating machine that extrudes lengths of what appears to be red plastic garden hose—M. Hulot turns an apparently foolproof job into a comic disaster. As his attention wanders, his lengths of hose, rather than being of regular and unvarying diameter, begin to resemble a string of sausages, all bulges and pinches. M. Hulot is unable either to keep up with the speed of the machine or to stop it before it extrudes a tremendous length of irregular hose that must be discarded.

Unable to perform this simple task, M. Hulot is in the end exiled by the Arpels, sent off to a new job at another factory in a different part of France. The last we see of him is as he is dropped off at the airport by M. Arpel and Gérard. It will be nine years before M. Hulot lands—in Tati's next film, Play Time (1967)—in a world even more unsettling than this one. In the brave new world of Mon Oncle, we at least see vestiges of a recognizably human environment precariously enduring the onslaught of modernity. In Play Time even those last vestiges of humanity will be gone forever.

Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 2

Bonjour, Monsieur Hulot!

Jacques Tati was hardly a prolific filmmaker. In the twenty-four years between 1947 and 1971, he made only five feature-length movies. The fact that so much time elapsed between films suggests the extreme amount of thought and preparation that went into the conception, filming, and post-production of each of those works.

Tati's second movie, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), set a pattern that Tati would pretty much follow for the rest of his career. It takes up where his previous film left off (not in the narrative sense, but in cinematic terms) and then makes significant advances in many areas. Tati seemed never to want to repeat himself but always to move forward with his next movie, to take what he had already done and build on it to create something new and more ambitious. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday still has the rather loose structure of Tati's first movie, Jour de Fête (1949), consisting of a series of set pieces not strongly linked by a linear or chronological plot. The title character goes on vacation at the seaside in Brittany, becomes involved in a series of comical misadventures, and at the end returns home. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet so fertile was Tati's imagination that within this episodic theme-and-variations structure, he managed to create a movie that is fondly remembered and even loved by nearly everyone who has seen it.

The reasons for the movie's brilliance are two-fold. One is the impeccable conception and execution of each of the many brilliant gags in the movie, whether a brief sight gag or an elaborately detailed comedic set piece. These are done with the precision of a Buster Keaton or Charles Chaplin, and Tati's fusion of the physicality of Keaton and the whimsy of Chaplin is bound to remind the viewer of both of those comic geniuses. But in the absence of a strong narrative continuum, what really holds the movie together is the character of Monsieur Hulot, making his first appearance in this film. M. Hulot, who became Tati's alter ego and the main character of all his subsequent movies, is a unique creation who contains elements of Tati's idols, the trifecta of American silent comedian/filmmakers—Keaton, Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. Like the characters those three greats tended to play, M. Hulot is an oddball whose individuality causes him to be the underdog or the outsider in every situation.

The movie opens with the credits seen over shots of a peaceful, deserted beach, the only sounds those of waves breaking on the shore and mellow music playing on the soundtrack. Without warning, the scene shifts to one of pandemonium. It is August in France, and the entire country is going on vacation. In a train depot we hear loudly amplified crowd noises and see frazzled families desperately attempting to find the right train. Confused by the incomprehensible gibberish coming from the loudspeakers (it resembles the blathering noises of the dignitaries dedicating the monument at the beginning of City Lights), frenzied holiday-goers race from platform to platform.

Meanwhile on a country road we first see M. Hulot puttering along in his tiny, sputtering car as more affluent vacationers in their more powerful cars hurtle past him, leaving him in a cloud of dust. M. Hulot's ancient little car, backfiring like crazy, struggles to make it up a steep hill and comes to a dead stop before it reaches the top. Finally making it down the hill, he coasts at a leisurely pace through a quiet village the other cars have sped through, stopping for a dog sleeping in the middle of the road, and even taking time to pat its head before continuing on. This first introduction to M. Hulot succinctly tells us practically everything we need to know about him. In any competition, he will be last, for competition is not in his nature. Nor is haste or unkindness, even to dogs sleeping in the road. And unlike the other holiday-makers, he travels alone and apart from the crowd.

When M. Hulot arrives at his destination, the seaside Hôtel de la Plage, we get our first good look at him. Unlike the short Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd, M. Hulot is a tall, gangly man. He has a way of walking as distinctive as Chaplin's swaying, shuffling gait. M. Hulot walks using not just his feet and legs, but with his entire body, leaning forward and lurching ahead purposefully, bouncing on the soles of his feet with each step, at once both stiff and loose. In his dress, he is also as distinctive as his idols. Like Keaton with his pork pie hat and Chaplin with his bowler, M. Hulot wears a funny hat too. Lloyd always wears glasses; M. Hulot is seldom seen without his pipe. Chaplin's baggy clothes seem too large for such a small man; M. Hulot's clothes seem too small, the sleeves and hem of his jacket and the legs of his trousers far too short for such a large man, as though he has somehow outgrown them.

When M.Hulot walks into the lobby of the hotel to register, we get a preview of his future relationship to the staff and other guests. The lobby is filled with guests sitting and relaxing, reading novels or newspapers, sipping drinks, playing cards, listening to the hotel radio. As M. Hulot opens the door, a ferocious wind rises, and as he props the doors open, stashes his pipe in his mouth, and struggles to get two suitcases, a fish-landing net, and a tennis racquet into the hotel, the wind roars through the lobby, turning the peaceful scene into a maelstrom,

This incident creates a bad first impression from which he never recovers. The other guests, who already seem to have formed a cliquish sort of community, are united in their snobbish dislike and suspicion of the man. Even the hotel staff find him a nuisance, wondering what problem he will cause next and giving him constant dirty looks. Their watchfulness actually distracts them to the point that is causes them to do things like drop a fountain pen in an aquarium, for which, of course, they silently blame M. Hulot.

By the time he reaches the hotel, only a few minutes into the movie, the film's structure is set. The rest of the movie will consist of the comic scrapes M. Hulot gets into and the inventive means he uses not to get caught. Comparing his movies to Chaplin's, Tati once said that Chaplin's Little Tramp makes things happen, whereas things happen to M. Hulot. And he is indeed like the child who is always inadvertently getting into trouble: he may be technically responsible for the problems he causes, but he remains blameless because it is all either unintentional or the result of good intentions gone awry.

M. Hulot quickly becomes a benignly disruptive force on this little community, continually causing mischief and aggravation without meaning to. He accidentally launches a boat whose owner is painting it on the shore. He causes a shark scare on the beach (an incident that seems inspired by the boat gag in Keaton's The Balloonatic). He drives into a cemetery during a funeral, where his spare inner tube is mistaken for a funeral wreath, and to avoid embarrassing the mourners enters the receiving line and shakes hands with those attending. He kicks a man he thinks is spying on a young woman through a knothole in a changing cabin on the beach, only to find the man was really peering through the viewfinder of a tripod-mounted camera taking a picture of his family (a purely cinematic gag based on the two-dimensionality of the movie screen). He exasperates the hotel staff by leaving wet footprints in the lobby without ever being seen doing it. With one brief ill-timed push of a swiveling chair, he causes two tables of card players to believe that everyone else is cheating and to erupt into a heated fracas. His unforgettable and hilariously aggressive tennis serve defeats all who attempt to play against him: "Le tennis, c'est pas ça!" breathlessly exclaims one exhausted young opponent.

Tati links these incidents together with the periodic repetition of certain actions that essentially become unifying motifs. Two of the guests we first meet are a well-dressed elderly couple who apparently do little but take walks—she always leading, he following a few steps behind—and every few minutes we see them taking another leisurely stroll. M. Schmutz is a chubby, rather tyrannical businessman who, even though on vacation with his family, is summoned regularly to the telephone to confer with his company or his stockbroker. M. Hulot is repeatedly seen peering at the beach from the open skylight in the roof of his attic room in the hotel. The waiter rings the dining room bell for another meal. Several people have unfortunate encounters in a dark side room with a loud phonograph that is turned on by the light switch, always at the most inopportune time. M. Hulot repeatedly wakens the sleeping hotel in the middle of the night, and every time he does, we see lights in the windows of the darkened building coming on one by one.

One element Tati added to Monsieur Hulot's Holiday that wasn't in Jour de Fête is a girl, an element he kept in all his subsequent movies except Mon Oncle. The Girl was something always present in the films of the great American silent film comedians. Typically the hero's getting the girl was the motivation for his actions and provided the conclusion for the movie. But in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, as in Tati's following movies, the girl is not so much a romantic object as a chaste ideal, a representation of tolerance and non-judgment and one of the few people who relate to M. Hulot and whom he can relate to in return.

Here the girl is called Martine (Nathalie Pascaud), and she is staying in a very picturesque traditional timbered house across from the hotel. As the most attractive young woman around, she receives a lot of attention from the young men, but it is in M. Hulot's company that she seems to feel most comfortable. She appears to be amused by his child-like enthusiasms, his imperviousness to the patronizing attitude of others, and his innocent ability to deflate pomposity and self-importance. During that memorable tennis game, only Martine, looking on from the side, is amused by M. Hulot's good-natured ability to exasperate all his opponents. She even allows him to walk her home afterward.

It is M. Hulot she allows to take her to the costume dance at the hotel, one of the most delightful sequences in the movie. What a comically odd couple they make. He looks absurd in his corny pirate's costume with a bandeau, eyepatch, and one gold hoop earring. She looks lovely in her diamond-patterned Harlequinesque party dress, high heels, and Harlequin mask. And the way he dances is indescribably unique, and indescribably funny.

One of the big advances of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday over Jour de Fête is Tati's ability to succinctly define minor characters in just a few visual strokes—their clothing, facial expressions, body language, and above all reaction to M. Hulot. Martine, the strolling couple, M. Schmutz, the vacationing Englishwoman who befriends M. Hulot, the other guests at the hotel, even the hotel staff are vividly limned in no time at all, so carefully does Tati select the few details about them we're shown.

Another big advance over Jour de Fête is the refinement in Tati's use of sound. In Jour de Fête Tati was almost like a child so enamored of a new toy that he was quite unrestrained in his use of sound, at times saturating the soundtrack to the point that it threatened to overwhelm the images. In Monsieur Hulot's Holiday he takes a very different approach, one he would continue in later films. Here sound is used selectively and very deliberately. There is little dialogue, and what there is often occurs in the background; the primary means of telling the story is always visual. M. Hulot himself speaks only three times in the movie and even then utters little more than a single word. Tati once explained to an interviewer why he preferred to use dialogue so sparingly. He observed that because it's easier to be funny in one's own country using dialogue, humor based on speech tends to be national, whereas humor based on situation and movement tends to be international.

But it is Tati's use of non-spoken sounds that constitutes the most remarkable advance over Jour de Fête. The contrast between the beach and the train depot in that opening sequence, M. Hulot's car backfiring and sputtering, the phonograph suddenly blaring out the "Tiger Rag" at high volume, the frequent ringing of the dinner bell, the distinctive sound of M. Hulot's ping pong ball as he plays table tennis in the room next to the crowded but otherwise completely silent hotel lobby, the metallic "bong" the door to the dining room makes every time it is opened, even the sound of the waves breaking on the shore—all these noises are used to create specific atmospheric and comical effects. This targeted use of sound effects within silence is something Tati would continue to do with great effectiveness in the films made after Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

The most brilliant use of sound and the most brilliant set piece in the whole movie takes place just before the end. The entire hotel decides to go on a group outing for their last day together, and M. Hulot is part of the carpool that will ferry the revelers to the picnic spot. Car trouble prevents him from arriving on time, delaying the group's departure and upsetting all their careful organization. Then on the way his car has a flat tire and while he is trying to fix it slips off the jack and rolls away, taking his two passengers with it, and leaving him stranded.

That evening he has still not returned to the hotel. In the middle of the night, still trying to find his way back to the hotel, he wanders into a storage shed on the beach and lights a match to get his bearings. The shed happens to be packed with fireworks, and as the various fireworks explode in the otherwise soundless night, they fizz, crackle, boom, whiz, and squeal. They shoot into the air, burst in spectacular patterns, cascade through the night sky, whirl in circles, and bombard the hotel, wakening the entire hotel and throwing it into a panic.

The next day is the end of the vacation, and the holiday-makers gather in front of the hotel to say good-bye to one another—exchanging addresses, promising to keep in touch, expressing hopes of seeing one another next year. But for M. Hulot there are no fond farewells, for the fiasco of the night before has been the last straw, and he is pointedly excluded from the fulsome camaraderie. Shunned, he makes his way to the beach and sits with the children, with whom his temperament has more in common than with their uptight parents. Two people, however, do make a point of saying good-bye to him: the Englishwoman who has never really been part of the group and the henpecked little man who has been strolling with his wife the entire time. M. Hulot's friends are dogs, children, and the other pariahs of the group. At the end of the movie, the beach concessions are being boarded up, the beach is once again deserted, and M. Hulot drives away alone in his little car, the last to leave. We don't know where he came from, and it will be five years, until Tati's next movie, Mon Oncle (1958), before we learn where he is returning to.