6 Eyes Without a Face (1960)

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


Note: This post was originally published in 2010 and is one of the most popular posts ever at The Movie Projector.

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 female 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 strong visual memories every time I thought of the movie. 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 an allusion 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 forcing a smile from 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 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 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.

2 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.

6 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.

0 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.

5 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.

1 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.

1 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.

0 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?

0 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.

0 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.

0 Hiroshima, Mon Amour: The Necessity of Remembering

Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour—along with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless—is one of the three films that in 1959 launched the French New Wave movement in cinema. Although lumped together as New Wave films, each has a distinct character that expresses the personal vision of its director, an illustration of the auteur theory the New Wavers believed in so ardently. But as different from each other as these movies are, what they all have in common is the way they take the conventional elements of film narrative and synthesize them in unconventional ways—if you will, the way they take the language of movies and rearrange its syntax in unexpected and inventive ways.

Truffaut's The 400 Blows is in style the most conventional of the three. Godard's Breathless is more daring in its startling modulations of tempo: uptempo passages of rapid action filled with jump cuts are juxtaposed with mid-tempo passages of long, fluid tracking shots and slow, nearly static passages consisting largely of lengthy conversations between Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Of these three seminal films, Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the most innovative departure from cinematic conventions and the most highly stylized.

The movie concerns a French actress (she is never named) played by Emmanuelle Riva, who is in Hiroshima, Japan, to play a nurse in a movie about the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of the city, and the brief romance—two nights and one day—she has with a Japanese architect (also never named) played by Eiji Okada. In the first section of the movie, Resnais, at the time a well-known maker of documentary films, creates a long montage composed of several elements: tight close-ups of the intertwined limbs and torsos of Riva and Okada, archival newsreel-style footage of the ruined city (along with what appears to be some re-creations, possibly intended to be from the movie Riva is making), documentary shots of the victims of the bombing—burned, maimed, and deformed from birth defects as a result of the radiation—more documentary shots of the historical museum and its exhibits of the effects of the bombing on the city and its inhabitants, and shots of the modern city taken from a moving vehicle.

During this section of the movie, Riva narrates in voice-over the horrifying details of the bombing, which were followed in the days afterward by spontaneous demonstrations by the residents of Hiroshima, in which she says they expressed their "anger against the inequality advanced by one people over another . . . by certain races against other races . . . by certain classes against other classes." These sentiments, taken with the scarifying images of the devastated city and the horribly mutilated victims of the bombing, leave no doubt about the anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons sentiments of Resnais and Marguerite Duras, who wrote both the screenplay and the novel on which it is based.

It is only well into the movie that the camera finally pulls back to reveal the faces of Riva and Okada; until this point they have existed only as isolated body parts and disembodied voices without identity. This second section of the film, which begins around daybreak, concentrates on the romance between its two main characters, and gradually something resembling a plot begins to emerge. The next morning they breakfast, bathe, dress, and leave the hotel together—she in her costume, a nurse's uniform—for the movie set, where it is her last day of filming. Later that day they return to the hotel, and during this third section of the film we learn from their pillow talk much more about the two characters.

From this point on, the focus of the movie becomes Riva's character. Earlier that morning, just after she got out of bed but while Okada was still in bed, she walked back into the room and saw him lying stretched out on the bed. Just for an instant we saw, from her point of view, another man stretched out in the same position, this time clothed and with what appeared to be blood on him. Now as the two lovers spend their last day together in the hotel room, we begin to learn more about Riva's past as she tells Okada about herself, her reminiscences initiated by the confession that she once had a nervous breakdown.

Scenes from the present in the hotel room alternate with scenes from Riva's past as a teenager in rural France during World War II. The scenes set in the present are presented chronologically, while the scenes from the past are presented in a non-linear, stream-of-consciousness order. The details Riva tells Okada about her past allow the viewer to piece together incrementally a complete backstory that explains her present psychological state. Resnais and Duras do this in such a way that what might have been a confusing jumble slowly becomes a coherent narrative as bits and pieces of her experiences are revealed.

Today such an approach doesn't seem all that startling; it's even seen in more artistically daring television shows. But when this movie was made, it must have seemed a radical experiment. Movies had been starting at the end of the story, using frame stories and flashbacks, and jumping back and forth in time for quite a number of years. (Think of Le Jour se Lève and Citizen Kane, the more intricate screenplays of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, or any of a number of movies from the 1940s.) But such shifts were carefully cued to viewers by devices like voice-over narration, slow fades or dissolves, the image going out of focus, montages, or superimposed titles. Hiroshima, Mon Amour was perhaps the first movie to expect the viewer to follow the spontaneous stream-of-consciousness shifts of twentieth-century literature.

The character Riva plays is a fascinating and complex one. As she reveals more about herself, she becomes more agitated and more disinhibited, and we are able to see that she is a mercurial person subject to sudden moodswings and that the origins of her present emotional instability lie in her wartime experiences. Her intimacy with Okada and her presence in Hiroshima have liberated buried emotions and allowed her to relate them, possibly for the very first time, to another person. Like the city of Hiroshima itself, she is still suffering the devastating aftereffects of almost unimaginable wartime trauma.

The ultimate revelations—which involve a love affair with a German soldier, his killing by the Resistance, her discovery of his body (the brief flash we saw earlier), being shunned by the villagers as a collaborator, having a nervous breakdown, and being locked in a cellar—are made to Okada that night in a tea room in the city. During this episode, the film reaches its climax when Riva becomes hysterical and begins to lose control of herself. Up to this point, Okada has been essentially a passive character, acting as a catalyst to encourage Riva to tell her story and confront the horrific memories that have had such a devastating effect on her. Now he takes an active role to prevent her from going over the edge into madness again.

In desperation, he suddenly reaches out and gives her two sharp slaps on the face. These slaps resound on the soundtrack like thunderclaps. and at that moment all the ambient sounds of the tea room—the noises from the kitchen, the conversations of the other patrons, the juke box, the street noises from outside—are suddenly heard at quite loud volume. We realize that during the last parts of this sequence the only thing on the soundtrack has been Riva's voice. In a kind of aural equivalent of the subjective camera technique, where the camera shows the viewer what a character is seeing, the soundtrack has taken on the aural subjectivity of Riva. So hypnotized has she become by the experience of finally telling her story that she has withdrawn completely into her memories. With the slaps that break her reverie, we literally hear her re-enter the present, the here and now.

The concluding section of the movie shows the aftermath of the experience in the tea room. Shattered and disoriented, Riva wanders the nighttime streets as Okada follows her. For the last day he has been imploring her not to return to Paris but to stay in Hiroshima with him, and she has consistently refused. Around dawn she returns to her hotel room, where Okada finally catches up with her. Here she confesses to him that losing him would have as profound an effect on her as losing her first lover did; in a way, her emotional state has taken on a circular aspect, her emotional past merging with her emotional present.

In the enigmatic final scene, the couple are finally given identities of a sort: he says that he will call her Nevers (the name of the French village she came from), and she says that she will call him Hiroshima. Is it possible that the emotional gulf she has placed between them is at last closing? Whatever else this exchange may mean and whatever it may foreshadow for the future of the couple, it clearly indicates that at last they grasp the point Resnais and Duras have been aiming for: that we are—each of us—our own past, that our present identities are inseparable from our past experiences.

To say that Hiroshima, Mon Amour is about recovering repressed memories would, I think, be an oversimplification. It is more accurately about finding memories that have been lost, about rediscovering memories that have been forgotten. "Like you," Riva says to Okada at one point, "I have struggled with all my might not to forget. . . . I forgot." In the years since the events of her girlhood, Riva's traumatic memories have been assimilated and relegated to the background. But the experience of being in Hiroshima, where the reality of the past is inescapable, compels her to see that the same is true of her own life, that her past will always coexist with her present. "Why deny the obvious necessity of remembering?" she asks.

This is why the idiosyncratic style of Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not just a contrived stunt. Resnais's blending of documentary and fictional film and his non-linear and non-logical intermingling of events from Riva's present and her past replicate the subject and theme of the movie. Whereas Truffaut and Godard looked to American movies for inspiration, Resnais looked to literature. Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a very conceptual and very literary movie. It attempts to translate the literary techniques of the writers of the French nouveau roman movement, with their extreme authorial subjectivity and stream-of-consciousness fusion of past and present, into cinematic terms. Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the screenplay for Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961), was the initiator of the movement, and Marguerite Duras one of its best-known practitioners. There is moreover a history of preoccupation with the nature of time and memory in both French philosophy (Henri Bergson) and French literature (Marcel Proust).

Hiroshima, Mon Amour was not the first film in which Resnais explored the way the past coexists with the present and constantly exerts influence on it. His best-known earlier documentaries Night and Fog (1955) and Toute la mémoire du Monde (1956) explored variations of this theme: the former in its examination of the Holocaust as viewed from a contemporary perspective, the latter in its examination of the Bibliothèque Nationale of France in its role as repository of the history of written knowledge. Nor would Hiroshima, Mon Amour be the last film in which Resnais dealt with the complicated relationship between past and present, forgetting and remembering.

With its unexpected shifts in time and place, tone, emphasis, and style, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not a movie to watch casually. The only way to watch it is to surrender yourself to the film, to let it carry you along until you become acclimated to its style and rhythms and its story begins to emerge. This is not a filmmaking approach I would care to see often, particularly in less capable hands than those of Resnais. Occasionally both the forcefulness of the style and the sometimes overwrought pitch of the narration do threaten to overwhelm the emotions expressed in the story. But it is a unique movie, a real one-of-a-kind, a movie which is not only part of a historically important movement in film, but which has in its own right had great influence that can still be seen in movies today. As such, it should be watched by anyone seriously interested in film as an art form.

0 Brief Reviews: Film Noir, Américain et Français

THE DARK CORNER (1946) ***
If you've ever yearned to see Lucille Ball in a film noir, this movie, directed by Henry Hathaway, will give you the chance. Lucy plays Kathleen Stewart, secretary to a P.I. who has just opened an office in New York City, Brad Galt (Mark Stevens). In no time at all Galt tangles with a crew of weird, menacing characters. One is his former partner, Anthony Jardine, who had Galt framed in San Francisco and sent to prison. Jardine is now a lawyer and one of his clients is Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb), the owner of a ritzy art gallery, whose much younger wife is having an affair with Jardine. We know this because in their first scene together the radio in the background is playing "The More I See You (the More I Want You)." In fact, the movie is filled with ambient sound—music from orchestras or juke boxes heard through open doorways of night clubs and bars or on radios and phonographs in rooms, and street noise of all kinds, including traffic and the rumble of subway trains, heard even through open windows when the action moves indoors. In a moment of bizarre contrast, a lovely version of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" plays while a brutal murder is taking place.

Galt is framed for the murder of his former partner, and Lucy, who has fallen in love with Galt, must help him find the real killer before the police find him. I love Lucy, but she doesn't seem ideally cast here. She handles with aplomb the wisecracking banter with Galt as she deflects his sexual advances at the beginning of the movie, but after that her character becomes a bit bland and she doesn't really get the chance to shine. Stevens doesn't have enough heft as an actor to put across his cynical lines, which sound like they come directly from a Raymond Chandler novel. They really need somebody more forceful, like Humphrey Bogart. Webb is delightful, spouting arch witticisms like "The enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither illegal nor immoral" (actually a variation on a quip by Robert Benchley).

But the whole movie has an air of familiarity, from the predictable plot to the well-worn characters, including Webb, channeling his Waldo Lydecker from Laura, and William Bendix, playing a thuggish P.I., who seems to be reprising his role in The Glass Key. One element, though, dominates the movie: Joe MacDonald's astonishing cinematography, a perfect exemplar of the film noir look. I've seldom seen a movie shot with such high-contrast lighting. This is a black-and-white film in the most literal sense, a film with virtually no tonal gradation: the blacks and shadows are as dark, and the whites as bright, as imaginable, with few shades of gray in between. This extreme lighting, along with the use of mirrors and windows as recurring visual motifs, gives the film great visual appeal. One final note: the set decorators should be commended for their audacity in furnishing the Cathcart Gallery. It is as full of art treasures as the National Gallery in London or the Louvre, filled with Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Van Goghs, even Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.

BORN TO KILL (1947) ***½
A few months ago, in his blog Maximum Strength Mick, San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle asked his readers what they would present as guest programmers on Turner Classic Movies. I chose four undervalued genre pictures from the studio era, and for my film noir I chose this movie. Directed by Robert Wise in a less genre-influenced style than his later near-classic The Set-Up (which I previously reviewed at The Movie Projector), it nonetheless has several effectively atmospheric sequences, especially one that takes place on a foggy night in a remote area of the dunes at the beach. Despite Wise's restrained direction, the movie's plot and characters unmistakably make it a noir.

It opens in Reno, where Helen Trent (Claire Trevor, in an atypically posh role) is just completing her divorce. On her last night in town, at a casino she encounters a man, Sam Wild (!) (Lawrence Tierney), whose good looks and sexual charisma spark her interest. Little does she know he is a paranoid psychopath dating another resident (Isabel Jewell) of the boarding house where she has been staying and that later that night he will savagely murder both Jewell and the man she has been two-timing him with. When Helen discovers the bodies in the kitchen of the boarding house, she calmly walks around to the front door, enters the house, and calls the train depot to reserve a seat on tomorrow's train to San Francisco, where she lives. Later she explains that she didn't call the police because "it's a lot of bother." Within ten minutes the tone of the movie has been established by the gory double murder, and the corrupt nature of its two main characters clearly revealed by their roles in it. When Wild boldly picks up Helen at the train station the next day and follows her back to San Francisco, we can see where the plot is heading: it is inevitable that these two forces—he all uncontrolled impulse and she all cold calculation—will collide like matter and anti-matter, creating an explosive reaction that after minor detonations along the way will end in mutual annihilation.

Along for the ride is a great supporting cast. Esther Howard, who had small roles in seven films directed by Preston Sturges, plays the blowsy, beer-guzzling landlady of the boarding house in Reno. Walter Slezak plays the sly P.I. she hires to track down the killer. Best of all, Elisha Cook, Jr. plays Wild's best friend, Marty, for five years his roommate and protector. After finding out about the double murder in Reno, he patiently tells Wild, "You can't just go around killin' people when the notion strikes you. It's not feasible" and explains exactly what must be done to avoid getting caught. To say that there is an implicitly homoerotic element to the relationship between these two would be an understatement.

We can predict how the movie will end but not the twists and turns it will take on its way there, and watching the scenario play out to its inevitable end—witnessing the thrust-and-parry relationship between Trevor and Tierney as she attempts to control an essentially anarchic force—provides an hour and a half of immensely satisfying entertainment, especially for lovers of the genre.

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1955) ****
Although nearly unknown in the U.S. until recently, the French director Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) has long been recognized in Europe as a precursor of, and major influence on, the French New Wave. Traces of his style and sensibility are easily recognized in early works by Godard and Truffaut, especially Breathless (which incorporates references to the plot of Bob le Flambeur and even features a cameo by Melville) and Shoot the Piano Player. In fact, a convincing case could be made the Bob le Flambeur is actually the first movie of the New Wave.

This is a heist movie—a type of film considered by many a sub-genre of film noir—in the vein of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, but I would say that as good as those movies are, Bob le Flambeur is even better. Even though it is a heist movie—the object is the casino at Deauville—the plan for the heist isn't hatched until well into the movie, and the (naturally) unsuccessful heist never actually happens. The movie clearly occupies film noir territory with its almost exclusively nocturnal action; its cast of petty crooks, hustlers, gamblers, and gendarmes who keep tabs on them; and its settings in bars, night clubs, card rooms, race tracks, and casinos both legal and illegal. The whole movie has an aura of life lived on the edge, outside of conventional society and in an atmosphere of risk and unpredictability. Over all hangs an air of fatalism, of men and women driven by internal forces to behave in ways that will inevitably lead to their doom.

Movies of this type invariably have an ensemble cast of colorful characters, but here it is the main character, Bob Montagné, the flambeur or compulsive gambler of the title (he even keeps a one-armed bandit in a small closet in his living room just to amuse himself with), who lifts the story into the stratosphere. As portrayed by Roger Duchesne, Bob is a slick, sophisticated man, a middle-aged ex-con who enjoys the good things in life—a quality wardrobe, a snazzy American Plymouth convertible, and a cool bachelor pad with a loft and picture-window view of the Sacré-Coeur—and maintains his comfortable lifestyle through the tireless pursuit of all sorts of gambling coupled with an unshakable belief in his own good luck. For the first part of the movie, his good fortune always seems to hold. But around midway through, his luck turns and, broke, he is forced to devise the scheme to rob the casino. His plan, so complex and so intricately engineered down to the least detail, clearly indicates a formidable intelligence and organizational ability that channeled into legitimate pursuits would probably have made Bob a very rich businessman.

Melville directs with the flair and personal authority that would later come to be considered hallmarks of the New Wave directors. As well as the conventional flat cuts, dissolves, and fade-out/fade-ins, he revives transitional devices such as iris-ins, iris-outs, horizontal wipes, and at one point even a vertical wipe—just the kind of retro flourishes later used by Truffaut and Godard in their early films. He and his cinematographer, the great Henri Decaë, film the deserted early-morning streets of Paris and the dives frequented by his characters in a near-documentary way that makes the viewer feel like an observer of reality. Melville, who also co-wrote the movie, gives Bob a concisely revealed backstory and places him in situations—such as his avuncular interactions with both Paulo, his young protégé and the son of his former partner-in-crime and Anne, a foolish, uninhibited, but charming teenager living on the streets—that succinctly limn a fully developed, fascinating, and sympathetic character.

In typical noir fashion, the movie ends in irony: waiting for several hours in the casino for the robbery to begin, Bob whiles away the time gambling and manages to win a fortune. He doesn't really need the money any more and feels his self-confidence restored, yet he still carries through with the robbery even though he knows it is destined for failure. I can think of no other movie that so obviously acts as a transition between the American films noirs of the 1940's and early 50's and their offspring, the French New Wave films of the late 1950's and early 60's.

BREATHLESS (1959) ***
After watching this movie—one of the seminal films of the French New Wave—with friends the other night, I asked one (not a cinephile, just an ordinary movie watcher) what he thought of it. His answer: "Merde." I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but I must say that afterward I felt a distinct sense of letdown, a sort of cinematic petite mort. I have to confess that I have never been that fond of Jean-Luc Godard, the film's director. Although I had never seen Breathless before, I have seen several of the movies that immediately followed it. In each of those movies I found some things to like, but with the exception of Weekend (1967) and possibly Contempt (1963), they never struck me as unified works of art or even film narrative. And I always felt that they were keeping me at arm's distance, almost as though Godard was daring the viewer to tolerate his idiosyncrasies.

In Breathless, Godard has an annoying way of taking a stylistic quirk and repeating it ad nauseam. A couple of examples: 1) Those vaunted jump cuts. Exactly what was their purpose? Just to show that he could defy the conventions of film storytelling if he wanted to, as if he could by the power of his ego turn a flaw into a virtue and exhibit his individualism by a refusal to stick to the rules, even when there is a perfectly good reason for the rules? I could understand the cuts that covered major ellipses in the narrative to speed things along, but I found all the small jump cuts (or maybe jumpy cuts would be more accurate), when just a second or so of action was missing, to be distracting. 2) Belmondo's tic of rubbing his lips. Those are magnificent lips—in a way they are the real star of the movie. Is Godard trying to show what a narcissist Michel (the character Belmondo plays) is? The time he did this in front of Patricia's (Jean Seberg) dressing table mirror, I actually thought he was putting on some of her lipstick. These examples beg the question: At what point does novelty become tedium, cleverness become self-indulgence, hommage become pretension? The answer provided by this movie is, around the tenth repetition. But don't worry, you'll get the chance to see this answer confirmed by another ten or so repetitions.

So why watch Breathless? I can offer three reasons (hence the *** rating): 1) The film is historically important. Breathless is—along with The 400 Blows and Hiroshima, Mon Amour—one of the three earliest full-blown examples of the French New Wave, a movement that had tremendous impact on the history of film. 2) Several dazzling extended tracking shots by cinematographer Raoul Coutard, including a 360-degree shot of Seberg circling the room that is repeated a second time, then repeated again with Belmondo circling in the opposite direction. 3) Jean-Paul Belmondo. His performance is as revolutionary as Marlon Brando's in A Streetcar Named Desire—unique, charismatic, and completely riveting. From little more than a sketchy case study of a self-absorbed young man with severe personality disorder, he creates a compelling character. If you can stay with this movie—considered by many Godard's most accessible work—to the end, you might want to seek out more of his films. But as Breathless attests, be prepared to accept the inevitable annoyances and excesses of Godard to enjoy his moments of inspiration.

0 Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 1

For a man who directed only five full-length films released between 1949 and 1972, the French director Jacques Tati (1907-1982) has a huge reputation among cinephiles. Two of his movies, Play Time (1967) and Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), were in 2008 named by the French publication Cahiers du Cinéma among the 100 greatest films of all time. Predictably, only a handful of movies on the list were comedies, including the two by Tati. He was recognized along with other comic masters like Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Woody Allen, a pretty impressive group of people to be included among. While most Americans who know anything at all about movies and popular culture are familiar with those names, I wonder how many know of Tati, much less recognize that among aficionados of film comedy his reputation is the equal of those other well-known geniuses.

Tati was born Jacques Tatischeff in France in 1907, the son of a Russian father and Dutch mother. As a young man he served in the French cavalry and was for a while a professional sports player. These are important facts to keep in mind because in his films the 6' 3" tall, gangly Tati often portrayed an ungainly klutz. Yet like that trifecta of silent comedians—Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd—he was an extremely agile man whose awkwardness was entirely—and brilliantly—simulated in remarkable feats of physical acting that rival those of his illustrious predecessors.

This was made clear in a short film he made in 1967, Cours du Soir (Night Class), filmed on leftover sets from Play Time (and included in the Criterion edition of Play Time). Here he portrays his famed alter ego, M. Hulot, as an instructor conducting a night class on comic acting for aspiring comedians. In the course of the 30-minute long film, Tati reveals some remarkable insights into his professional technique.

At the beginning of the class and at times throughout it, he succinctly summarizes the gist of the lesson. "Observe! Observe!" he keeps telling his students: Watch carefully the way people express themselves through their body language, and draw your inspiration from that. In character, he demonstrates to his students how to convey character types through facial expressions, physical gestures, and posture and bearing. What we have is essentially a simulation of his direction of the actors in his movies, with Tati acting the parts to show his performers what he wants them to do. He also demonstrates his still impressive horse-riding skills (remember that he was 60 years old at the time) while showing the students how to use various styles of horsemanship to convey character.

Most tellingly, he demonstrates to his students how to take a pratfall while walking up a short flight of stairs, about three steps. Tati makes it look so effortless that all the students are eager to give it a try. One student even attempts to analyze and diagram M. Hulot's movements mathematically. Yet every single student fails to do successfully what seemed so simple when Tati did it. Their attempts at reproducing his pratfall are truly inept and not in the least comic. Although real, their pratfalls don't seem at all realistic. Only Tati is able to act with his body, to simulate clumsiness, in such a convincing way as to produce humor. What he makes appear so easy to his students is actually a feat of accomplished acting skill and great physical control.

After being in the cavalry and playing sports, Tati eventually became a music hall performer. He performed one of his acts in the movie Parade, which he directed for Swedish television in 1974. Portraying a horse rider in a circus act, he plays the parts of both the rider and the trained horse. From the waist up he is the rider, from the waist down the horse, and he simultaneously imitates both with absolute precision. The French writer Colette described Tati as a centaur in this act, and it is a truly impressive demonstration of his physical and mimetic skills.

Tati first became a film maker when he filmed some of his acts and later co-directed a short film, Gai Dimanche (Jolly Sunday) in 1935. He wrote and acted in small roles in a few movies from the mid-1930's to the mid-1940's, including a short about boxing directed by René Clément, Soigne Ton Gauche (Watch Your Left), made in 1935 and two full-length features directed by Claude Autant-Lara, notably Devil in the Flesh (1947). That same year Tati directed his first solo short film, L'Ecole des Facteurs (School for Postmen). (He reproduced part of this film in Cours du Soir.)

In 1947 he also directed his first full-length film, Jour de Fête (released sixty years ago in 1949), a movie about a village postman, played by Tati himself, that included some ideas inspired by L'Ecole des Facteurs. The movie began as a short film about an overly enthusiastic postman who sees a newsreel feature about modern methods of mail delivery in the U. S. (a very funny film-within-a-film) and tries to adapt them to his own situation, with comically disastrous results. Tati then took the character he created and built around him an entire movie that runs 79 minutes in its restored version and integrates the original short that inspired it as a concluding set piece.

The postman's name is François, and he is quite a character. François is in many ways a forerunner of M. Hulot, the comic persona Tati would assume in his next four feature-length films. François is in all ways extreme. An unusually tall man, he is in constant motion, and his movements are awkward, jerky, and very funny. Even the way he rides his bicycle is comical. He is enthusiastic about everything, and his enthusiasms are all oversized. The movie opens with a traveling carnival arriving in a small provincial French town and setting up for the Bastille Day celebrations. The first thing they do is try to set up a large flagpole in the town square.

As soon as François rides into the scene, he throws himself zealously into helping set up the flagpole and has soon commandeered the process, directing everyone else in a scene full of physical comedy built around the ungainliness of the huge flagpole. After the flagpole is finally set up, François walks over to the café-bar for a coffee, and the flagpole collapses, just missing him as he walks through the door, in a moment clearly reminiscent of the house facade falling on Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr.

The thing François is most enthusiastic about—almost to the point of fanaticism—is his job as the village postman. So officious is François that he behaves as though he truly believes his job is the most important thing in the village. When he sees that newsreel about the American postal service, he immediately throws himself with nearly manic fervor into adapting its aims of efficient and speedy mail delivery to his own job. "Rapidité!" becomes his mantra, and he repeats it until it becomes absurdly funny.

Because of his inflated sense of enthusiasm and his belief in his own significance to the fabric of village life, the other villagers treat him as a "character," joking about him behind his back and making him the object of gentle ridicule in much the same way Harold Lloyd was treated in many of his movies (and here I'm thinking particularly of The Freshman). At one point they conspire to get him drunk under the pretense of playing pool with him for beer. This gives Tati the opportunity to demonstrate his skill at physical comedy by doing a drunk routine, much as Chaplin and W. C. Fields did in many of their movies, always a sure-fire way of getting laughs.

François is essentially the classic comedy outsider, the oddball who doesn't fit in with conventional society. In this way François foreshadows Tati's later creation M. Hulot, whose essential character trait is this same sense of apartness, a sense that became more pronounced with each successive film. It's not exactly alienation, for he never seems completely aware of it, nor does it seem to distress him unduly. Yet there is an implicit element of melancholy in this state of comic outsiderhood. This same sense of melancholy is also present to a degree in the characters played by Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. If I mention them, it is to show that Tati knew his American silent film comedians thoroughly and synthesized aspects of their work with his own original inspiration.

In its final form Jour de Fête is beautifully constructed. It begins with a wizened old lady leading her goat around the village and talking to it, acting like a chorus, introducing us to each of the villagers. This is followed by the arrival of the carnival. The movie concludes the next day with the carnival being dismantled and leaving town. At the same time, François is trying out his new techniques of mail delivery, an effort that ends with his riding his bicycle at full speed into a canal in an arduous physical stunt reminiscent of Buster Keaton. The movie closes with François getting a ride with the little old lady and her goat, now driving a cart into the village.

One remarkable thing about Jour de Fête, particularly when compared with Tati's later movies, is how much sound there is in it. In later films, Tati used sound quite sparingly and used both it and silence in very deliberate ways to create specific effects. But Jour de Fête is filled with sound—jaunty, jazzy music on the soundtrack, ambient sounds and music, sound effects, and lots of dialogue, both essential dialogue in the foreground and nonessential dialogue in the background. In a night scene that takes place in the country, the soundtrack is even filled with the natural night sounds of the countryside.

One final observation about Jour de Fête: With its location filming and largely non-professional cast, it gives the viewer a vivid picture of a traditional small village (Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre) in post-World War II southern France almost untouched by modernity. In the entire movie, an automobile appears only once, briefly speeding through the village. Jour de Fête captures a time, a place, and a way of life that have vanished forever. Considering the film in this light makes both it and the movies that followed it—with their recurring theme of rampant modernity draining the humanity and soul from contemporary life—all the more poignant.

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This is the first of a multi-part retrospective of the career and films of Jacques Tati. Other installments will appear in future editions of The Movie Projector.