Friday, March 31, 2017
090 - The Red Circle (Le Cercle Rouge), 1970, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Two days ago, in Le Samurai (1967) (088, March 29), Melville quoted from The Book of Bushido.
Today, in Le Cercle Rouge (1970), he quotes from the Buddha.
Neither one of those quotations exist.
The Book of Bushido does not exist.
Melville is a storyteller. He made them up.
But he puts both of them to good use.
Today's quotation states that when two men are destined to come together, they will come together no matter what obstacles may try to separate them, inside the red circle.
You may be familiar with the story of Oedipus from Greek mythology. He is told that one day, when he is older, he will kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus desperately tries to avoid this prophecy. He goes the other direction, lives in another place, becomes another person. Yet one day it happens, because it is supposed to happen. It is his destiny.
Let us watch The Red Circle and see if Melville finds in his imaginary quotation some similar kind of destiny for his protagonists.
Is it inevitable that they will come together? Will they come together in the Red Circle?
We begin by meeting two jailbirds.
One is named Corey, and he is played by none other than our friend Alain Delon, the protagonist from that very movie two days ago, Le Samourai. Of Le Samourai we spoke of his piercing eyes. He was young, lean, clean-shaven, silent, and alone.
Today he is a character actor, disguised behind a moustache and full hair, more social, still cool, still detached, but not a Samurai. This man, Corey, is approachable. He has a life. He has a heart. He has feelings.
The other is named Vogel, and he is played by Gian Maria Volonté, with big, bushy, curly hair and a body over which he does not seem to have full control. This is our first time to see Volonté, and we are glad of it. He comes to us from the Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965).
Corey is being paroled, let out of jail early for good behavior. He wants to return to a normal life, leave crime behind, start anew. But one of the guards has a job for him, a jewelry heist, a big score. Corey says No. The guard says Yes. Corey does not want to come back, meaning he does not want to get arrested again. The guard does not either, meaning he wants to make enough money not to have to work this crummy job anymore.
Nice way to begin your new life on the outside. Just when you decide to be good, it is a law enforcement officer who tempts you to back into crime.
They give him his things back. Including some pictures. Pictures of a girl. He does not want them. He is bitter. We are about to discover that his girlfriend moved on to a new man while he was in jail. One of his former gangmates, a man named Rico. They were not loyal to him.
Meanwhile, Vogel is getting out of jail too. Only he is using more creative methods. He is walking handcuffed wrist-to-wrist with police inspector Mattei. They arrive at the train. They enter their sleeping car. Mattei is transporting Vogel. He places Vogel in the top bunk. Removes the handcuff from his own wrist and attaches it to the iron bar. Locks Vogel in.
Mattei is no dummy. He has Vogel handcuffed to the bedpost but he plans to stay awake all night anyway. To keep an eye on him. He sits upright and watches. He moves to the lower bunk and reclines. But he stays awake and alert.
Vogel has a pin inside his pocket. Like a safety pin without the safety. He removes it. He presses it against the wall to bend it a certain way. He shapes it. While remaining completely quiet, completely still. He inserts the pin into the locking mechanism. He springs the handcuff. Frees himself. But he remains still, quiet, slowly removing the ladder rope from its hook, moving his legs out from behind it, getting himself into position.
Mattei sits up and rubs his face. Vogel kicks the glass out of the window and jumps out of the moving train.
Mattei pulls the Stop lever and stops the train.
Time for a manhunt.
Vogel races through the woods. Mattei uses up his bullets trying to shoot at him. He hits a tree a couple times and long range. Vogel is behind the tree. Mattei is a good shot, but Vogel is too far away and protected.
Mattei finds a local resident quickly. Borrows his phone. Calls in. Orders help. In no time he has a line of what seems like a hundred men walking side-by-side through the woods with two dogs leading the charge. K-9.
They sniff for the scent. They pick up the scent. They follow the scent.
Vogel reaches the river. He strips and bundles his clothes. Throws them across. They land on the opposing bank. He wades across. Dresses. Runs with his shoes untied.
The dogs reach the river. Lose the scent.
Meanwhile, Corey has gone to Rico's house. He rings his buzzer. Rico wakes up. Answers the door. Corey speaks politely. Asks for a loan. Rico answers politely. Asks him to wait until the banks open. But both know what is really happening. Corey's old girlfriend is on the other side of the door, in the bedroom, in Rico's bed, now behind the door, listening.
Corey does not ask. He does not check. He knows it. He simply asks for the money. Rico tries to stall him. Rico is nervous. Pretending to be cool.
Corey makes him open the safe. He knows the safe is there. Hidden behind the painting. Built into the wall. When Rico opens the safe Corey lunges forward. Gets to the gun. Takes the cash. Leaves pictures. The pictures of his old girlfriend given to him at the jail. Returned to him with his personal items. He leaves the pictures. He no longer needs them. He takes the cash. He leaves.
When Rico returns to the bedroom, Corey's old girlfriend is back in bed, pretending to be asleep. Rico calls in his men.
Corey goes to a pool hall. It is early morning. They are closing. He sleeps the worker some money. Now he has money. Lots of money. He took it from Rico's safe. He is rich. The worker lets him in.
He goes to a pool table without pockets. Like the one in Melville's second movie Les Enfants Terribles (1950), the one in Elisabeth's dream. It is called Carom Billiards, or French Billiards. The object is not to sink any balls, because you cannot, but to carom the cue ball into both the other white ball and the red ball, scoring points as you go.
Corey plays with the two white balls and the one red ball. A red ball is a red circle.
Two henchmen appear. Sent by Rico. From his phone call in the bedroom. He wants his money back. They draw. Corey draws. Corey is faster. Corey shoots first. Corey wins. The two men go down. Corey leaves.
Corey buys a car. He pays cash. He drives out to the country. He stops at a diner. He orders breakfast.
Meanwhile, Vogel comes up out of the woods. On this side of the river. He comes up to the highway. He looks for a hiding place. He sees the diner. He tries all the cars in the parking lot. One trunk is unlocked. He gets inside the trunk. It is Corey's trunk.
Corey pays for his breakfast and leaves. He gets inside his car. He drives.
We now have two criminals riding in a car together. Both have just gotten out of jail, one by parole, one by escape. The one driving is a free man, but he has been asked to do one more score, a big score. The one in the trunk is a fugitive, on the lamb.
Their destinies have brought them together.
You can be sure that Corey will discover Vogel in his trunk.
You can be sure that Corey will give in to temptation and go for the big heist, the big score.
You can be sure that Vogel will go in on it with him.
You can be sure that Mattei will be after Vogel, and that after the heist he will be after both of them.
They will need an expert marksman. The will hire a man named Jansen. Jansen is a former cop.
Wait a second. The man who started this heist was a guard at the jail. The man who is going to enable it to happen is a former police officer. Whose side are they on, anyway?
Jansen is played by none other than Yves Montand!
We first saw Yves Montand in the beginning of the year, in January, in the great action film by Henri-Georges Clouzot, The Wages of Fear (1953) (004, January 4).
Montand went on to become one of France's great film stars. He also appeared in some American movies with international casts, including George Cukor's Let's Make Love (1960), starring Marilyn Monroe and Tony Randall; the war film Kelly's Heroes (1970), starring Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas; Vincente Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), starring with Barbra Streisand and Bob Newhart; and John Frankenheimer's racing adventure Grand Prix (1966), starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, and Toshiro Mifune.
The heist will become a major part of this movie. A scene that lasts for half an hour. In silence. As we follow the men working with logistical precision, with the finesse of a fine engineer.
It is the kind of scene that Melville had wanted to film fourteen years earlier, in Bob Le Flambeur (1956), and which his screenwriter had written. But his screenwriter at the time, Auguste Le Breton, had written two screenplays with such a scene in them. One was Bob Le Flambeur. The other was Rififi (1955), a heist film directed by American director in France, Jules Dassin, starring Jean Servais as Tony le Stephanois. A scene that was so well filmed and so well received that Melville felt it would appear that he was copying it. So with Bob Le Flambeur he went another direction and focused on other things. Now, fourteen years later, he feels free to film the kind of scene he had wanted to film before. And he does a fine job with it.
When you watch a film like Mission Impossible (1996) or Ocean's Eleven (2001), you are watching film that stands in a tradition of heist films going back to these great classics, The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Rififi (1955), Bob le Flambeur (1956), Ocean's 11 (1960), Topkapi (1964), The Red Circle (1970). What others can you name?
The heist will succeed, but that does not mean that Corey and Vogel are out of the woods.
Mattei has something to prove. He allowed a criminal to escape under his watch. His boss believes in him but others are questioning his competence. He has cost the department a lot of money. A lot of embarrassment. And the good will of the public. He has also allowed a man to go free who might commit a crime again.
He is determined to get his man.
He has an ace up his sleeve. A nightclub owner named Santi. A man who owes him a favor. Because Mattei helped Santi out awhile ago. Helped him get out of some trouble. He can call in that favor any time. And he does. He puts the heat on Santi. Santi resists. He pretends to arrest him, bring him in, save Santi's reputation in the underworld so that it appears coerced, so that he does not come across as an informant.
But Mattei gets Santi's family involved. His son. And it becomes personal.
Melville coming off his epic masterpiece Army of Shadows has made another epic film. This one at two hours and twenty minutes. Yet he is back in his home turf, the crime drama. And nothing is wasted.
It will all come to a head. A final showdown.
Inside the red circle.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Thursday, March 30, 2017
089 - Army of Shadows, 1969, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
089 - Army of Shadows, 1969, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
In Cameron Crowe's 2001 remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 science fiction thriller Open Your Eyes, renamed as Vanilla Sky (and starring Penelope Cruz in both films), Tom Cruise runs through an empty Times Square.
An empty Times Square.
Someone running through it.
That image alone is worth seeing.
Cameron Crowe successfully got the City of New York to shut down Times Square on an early Sunday morning for a few hours in order to get this shot.
A filmmaker clearly has pull when he can pull off a feat like that.
In 1969 Jean-Pierre Melville pulled off the equivalent feat in France.
He shut down the Champs-Élysées and had actors dressed as German soldiers march past the Arc de Triomphe.
Not only was it an equivalent challenge financially and logistically--in a city about as large and equally world renown--but also politically and emotionally.
This was not a science fiction fantasy, as Vanilla Sky. It was a historical reality, and millions of people had died in the Holocaust. Furthermore, Germany had invaded Paris not only in World War II, but also in World War 1, and this sort of thing had not been allowed in decades. It was too close to home.
But Melville was at the top of his game.
And while working alone, independently of the large studios, he was still widely popular and financially bankable. He had just made his masterpiece crime drama. He had support. He had money. Now it was time to make his masterpiece Resistance film.
Philippe Gerbier is placed in the back of an enclosed truck. It has bars in it. A moving jail.
He sits quietly, humbly. He listens to the small talk of his guard.
They stop. They are at a farmhouse. A man gets out and goes in. Gerbier's guard explains that they are picking up some produce. Provisions.
He is acknowledging a Black Market operation. They are getting things off the record, under the table, below the radar. He smiles nervously as he tells Gerbier. Gerbier smiles in return.
The truck arrives at the internment camp. Gerbier is taken into his barracks. A room of Frenchmen. In France. Arrested under German occupation. For being members of the French Resistance. For saying, This is my country.
One of the prisoners has assumed command of the room. He introduces himself to Gerbier. Gerbier responds politely. They are playing dominoes. Each introduces himself. Except for two lying on mats in the corner. Withering. The leader assigns Gerbier a mat in the opposite corner. Gerbier thinks to himself, He is not stupid. He has cornered him. Contained him.
Gerbier befriends a young Communist. The boy asks if he is a Communist. No. But he has comrades. They hatch a plan for escape. But before they can execute it, Gerbier is taken away. Taken to Paris. To the Gestapo.
In the Gestapo, he and another man are sitting on a bench. A guard is in the room watching them. The leader is in the other room on the telephone. Distracted. Gerbier tells his fellow prisoner that this is their only opportunity for escape. Gerbier will distract the guard while the other man runs.
They sit for a long time.
Watching the guard.
The guard watches them.
They wait. The timing must be perfect.
Gerbier has seen a knife in the guard's boot. When he makes his move, he seizes the knife and lunges for the guard's throat. His motion is clean and true. He has the guard on the floor within seconds. The boy is running.
Gerbier runs. He exits the building. He hears the shots of the machine guns outside the courtyard straight ahead.
He does not go straight ahead. He turns right. He runs. We follow him.
Melville sits on this scene for awhile. And it works.
Remember the opening shot of Le Doulos (1963) (086, March 27)?
The camera moves steadily on a dolly track for more than two football fields, in measured pace, moving along as Maurice Faugel walks steadily along the walkway in the underworld.
Here we move steadily alongside Gerbier's running, in hurried pace, moving as Gerbier runs determinedly down the Paris streets. An older man. Overweight. Not in the best shape. Though he was exercising yesterday morning at the internment camp. Running for his life.
He ducks inside a barbershop.
And Faugel himself, or shall we say the actor who played Faugel, Serge Reggiani, now known simply as The Hairdresser, appears and stares at him.
What a moment.
On the filmmaking side you have two of Melville's leading men, each the star of his own gangster picture, each having carried a film on his shoulders to wide success, each having played ruthless rulers of the underworld, now together in one scene playing very different roles under very different circumstances.
The bad-boy Faugel from Le Doulos stares down the bad-boy Gu from Le Deuxieme Souffle. A star in a supporting role. A role without a name. Working as a character actor. Lending truth to a scene.
On the story side you have Gerbier in quite a predicament. He is in his own country, in his own city, functioning as a fugitive, looking at a fellow Frenchman, wholly unsure of where his sympathies lie, completely unguarded, wholly vulnerable. Gebier may have just ducked into a trap. A sitting duck.
The men stand still. Silent. Gerbier is breathing heavily. His whole body heaves. He cannot hide it. He does his best to stay calm.
The Hairdresser stares at him. Sizes him up. It is obvious he knows. Something, anyway.
What do you want?
Silence. Then--
A shave.
The Hairdresser takes him.
Seats him.
Covers him.
Lathers him.
And Gerbier the fugitive, an escaped prisoner of war in an occupied territory, can do nothing but lean back and allow an unknown man to hold a sharpened blade to his neck.
The blade glimmers in the light.
The razor strokes across his face.
An air of heaviness fills the room.
As these two great stars stand and sit respectively, and except for the motions of the shaving, they are mostly still. And completely silent.
An amazing scene.
The Hairdresser finishes. Gerbier pays him. The Hairdresser goes to get his change. Gerbier insists he keep it and tries to flee the store almost as quickly as he came.
But The Hairdresser returns with his change and with a change for him. A khaki trenchcoat. To replace the black one he is wearing.
Take this.
It is not much, but maybe it will help.
Whew.
The Hairdresser understands. Sympathizes. Helps.
Gerbier puts on the khaki coat.
Merci.
He returns into the night.
Now that Gerbier is free, he sets up shop in Marseilles. In a talent agency. At a dance studio.
He runs a network with three assistants--Felix, Guillaume, the Bison, and Claude, the Masque.
One of their members has betrayed them, committed treason, and they must kill him. They are not killers. They have never killed. They are citizens trying to fight a war. But they have a duty to do. They had rented a house with an empty house beside it, so that no one would hear the gunshots. But since then someone has moved into the adjoining house, and they cannot risk the neighbors hearing. They must devise a way to do it quietly. They figure it out. It is not pretty. They do not like it. It is sobering.
Felix runs into a friend, Jean-Francois, in a bar. Jean-Francois will join them. He will take a radio through customs, ingeniously getting through, and deliver it to Mathilde, played by the great Simone Signoret. And we will begin to see the operation come into view.
Jean-Francois will go and meet his brother Luc, a mathematician, a scholar, a man who lives a private life in a his book-lined library in his Paris mansion, a man who knows nothing about weapons, a man who has published five great volumes of mathematics, logic, and philosophy, a man who keeps himself separated from the war.
A man whom we will learn is the head of the entire Resistance. The Chief.
And his brother himself does not know it.
And never will.
Luc must do everything covertly.
He is, after all, just a peaceful scholar.
They are so organized that they bring a submarine to the shoreline. And Gerbier and Luc and a group of others escape France for England.
And while in London Luc will invite Gerbier to an important evening event. Where Gerbier will need a new suit. Tailored. Where he will witness Luc's receiving of an award from Charles de Gaulle himself.
And in a moment that should not be overlooked, they go to the cinema.
They are at this moment free men. In a free country.
And in the grand picture palace they see the grandest picture ever made. The Great One.
Gone with the Wind (1939).
And as we see the light flickering on their faces, we hear the familiar chords of the epic Max Steiner score.
And we think of another occupation. During another war. Another army invading another land. Living in their homes. Burning their homes. Killing their men. Raping their women. And the determination those citizens had to Resist.
They exit the theater. And make an off-hand comment.
Maybe one day France will be free again. And can show this movie.
Felix will be arrested.
And tortured.
Gerbier will hear about it.
And return.
The only way to return is to jump from a plane. He has never parachuted before. He rides in the plane. The soldier helps him. Another stunning scene.
Gerbier lives on an estate for awhile. With a Baron. And the Baron's land functions as a landing site for Resistance planes.
Mathilde now runs things. She is practical and intelligent. She is good and true.
They will help Felix escape. They will go into the bowels of the prison and help him themselves.
What courage. What commitment.
How will she do it? Will they pull it off?
Things do not always work out for our heroes.
They are private citizens with limited resources trying to fight a war.
They approach their duties with courage. They know that any moment they can be caught. Any moment they can be arrested. Any moment they can die.
And they will.
And they do.
This is an epic film. Running 2 hours and 25 minutes, it covers a lot of ground in the lives of these people. It is beautifully shot, in deep color, in muted tones, with sweeping cinematography, with moments of great action alternating with moments of quiet, sober-minded drama.
It is a serious film. A beautiful film. A journey worth taking.
It is the kind of film that exemplifies what film can do, what film is for.
It achieves what Aristotle wrote of the theatre, the ministrations of catharsis.
Melville lived it. And in his opening statement he says that these are unhappy memories, bad memories.
"Yet I welcome you. You are my long-lost youth."
* * * * *
With this film Melville brings back several of his stars.
Lino Ventura, who played tough guy Gu in yesterday's film Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), returns as our protagonist Philippe Gerbier. He really is a wonderful actor. We will get to see him again in Louis Malle's 1958 film Elevator to the Gallows and in Claude Sautet's 1960 crime drama Class Tous Risques. He would go on to play Jean Valjean in a 1980 version of Les Miserables. Wouldn't you love to see that!
Paul Meurisse, whom we met originally on Diabolique (1955) and who played Gu's nemesis, Commissioner Blot in yesterday's film Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), returns as the secret head of the resistance Luc Jardie.
Serge Reggiani, who we saw as the tough guy protagonist Maurice Faugel in Le Doulos (1963), returns as the barber, or The Hairdresser, who gives Gerbier a shave after he escapes the gestapo, and then gives him a khaki jacket to help him go out into the streets under cover. He too played in a version of Les Miserables, in 1958, with our favored star Jean Gabin playing Jean Valjean. We will see him again, along with yesterday's Alain Delon, in Luchino Visconti's masterpiece The Leopard (1963).
Paul Crauchet, who plays Felix, will appear in the next Melville film, tomorrow's The Red Circle (Le Cercle Rouge) (1970) and in Melville's last film Le Flic (1972), which is not available on Criterion.
Jean-Marie Robain, who played the Uncle in The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer) (1949), the headmaster in Les Enfants Terribles (1950), a poker player in Bob le Flambeur (1956), returns here as the Baron. We will later see him in Jacques Rivette's mystery Paris Belongs to Us (1961).
Denis Sadier, who appeared in The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer) (1949), returns twenty years later here as the Gestapo doctor.
There are others who return in smaller roles.
Jean-Pierre Cassel is new to Melville. He plays Jean Francois Jardie, Luc Jardie's brother. He will go on to star in Luis Bunuel's class The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and on both French and American films throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. You may know him from Julian Schnabel's 2007 biographical drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
The film is anchored by France's great star Simone Signoret. We were introduced to her in Henri-Georges Clouzot's thriller Diabolique (1955), where she played Paul Meurisse's mistress. They reteam here as fellow members of the Resistance. She worked for forty years in both France and America, and in 1959 she won the Oscar for her role in the British film Room at the Top. She would be nominated again for her role in Sidney Lumet's film Ship of Fools (1965).
Here Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani are fighting the Resistance together, intimately bonded by their love of country and freedom. Seventeen years before this film, they were dancing together in Jacques Becker's film Casque d'Or (1952), in un coup de foudre--an idiomatic expression signifying love at first sight, but literally meaning a shot of lightning. And one could see then in Signoret's character, Marie the Casque d'Or (the golden helmet, the woman with the beautiful golden hair), and in Reggiani's character, Georges Manda, the coup de foudre at work. As their outward expressions and physical postures remain formal to the requirements of the dance. And their eyes, the windows to their souls, reveal the lightning that has just struck them, their lives now forever linked, their destinies intertwined, on a path on which fate will take them, and which they cannot change. And here they are in this film, together again, seventeen years later, two great colleagues, speaking from their hearts, living in their characters, the lives of unknown French heroes, taking their courage with them silently to the grave so that others might be free.
089 - Army of Shadows, 1969, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
In Cameron Crowe's 2001 remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 science fiction thriller Open Your Eyes, renamed as Vanilla Sky (and starring Penelope Cruz in both films), Tom Cruise runs through an empty Times Square.
An empty Times Square.
Someone running through it.
That image alone is worth seeing.
Cameron Crowe successfully got the City of New York to shut down Times Square on an early Sunday morning for a few hours in order to get this shot.
A filmmaker clearly has pull when he can pull off a feat like that.
In 1969 Jean-Pierre Melville pulled off the equivalent feat in France.
He shut down the Champs-Élysées and had actors dressed as German soldiers march past the Arc de Triomphe.
Not only was it an equivalent challenge financially and logistically--in a city about as large and equally world renown--but also politically and emotionally.
This was not a science fiction fantasy, as Vanilla Sky. It was a historical reality, and millions of people had died in the Holocaust. Furthermore, Germany had invaded Paris not only in World War II, but also in World War 1, and this sort of thing had not been allowed in decades. It was too close to home.
But Melville was at the top of his game.
And while working alone, independently of the large studios, he was still widely popular and financially bankable. He had just made his masterpiece crime drama. He had support. He had money. Now it was time to make his masterpiece Resistance film.
Philippe Gerbier is placed in the back of an enclosed truck. It has bars in it. A moving jail.
He sits quietly, humbly. He listens to the small talk of his guard.
They stop. They are at a farmhouse. A man gets out and goes in. Gerbier's guard explains that they are picking up some produce. Provisions.
He is acknowledging a Black Market operation. They are getting things off the record, under the table, below the radar. He smiles nervously as he tells Gerbier. Gerbier smiles in return.
The truck arrives at the internment camp. Gerbier is taken into his barracks. A room of Frenchmen. In France. Arrested under German occupation. For being members of the French Resistance. For saying, This is my country.
One of the prisoners has assumed command of the room. He introduces himself to Gerbier. Gerbier responds politely. They are playing dominoes. Each introduces himself. Except for two lying on mats in the corner. Withering. The leader assigns Gerbier a mat in the opposite corner. Gerbier thinks to himself, He is not stupid. He has cornered him. Contained him.
Gerbier befriends a young Communist. The boy asks if he is a Communist. No. But he has comrades. They hatch a plan for escape. But before they can execute it, Gerbier is taken away. Taken to Paris. To the Gestapo.
In the Gestapo, he and another man are sitting on a bench. A guard is in the room watching them. The leader is in the other room on the telephone. Distracted. Gerbier tells his fellow prisoner that this is their only opportunity for escape. Gerbier will distract the guard while the other man runs.
They sit for a long time.
Watching the guard.
The guard watches them.
They wait. The timing must be perfect.
Gerbier has seen a knife in the guard's boot. When he makes his move, he seizes the knife and lunges for the guard's throat. His motion is clean and true. He has the guard on the floor within seconds. The boy is running.
Gerbier runs. He exits the building. He hears the shots of the machine guns outside the courtyard straight ahead.
He does not go straight ahead. He turns right. He runs. We follow him.
Melville sits on this scene for awhile. And it works.
Remember the opening shot of Le Doulos (1963) (086, March 27)?
The camera moves steadily on a dolly track for more than two football fields, in measured pace, moving along as Maurice Faugel walks steadily along the walkway in the underworld.
Here we move steadily alongside Gerbier's running, in hurried pace, moving as Gerbier runs determinedly down the Paris streets. An older man. Overweight. Not in the best shape. Though he was exercising yesterday morning at the internment camp. Running for his life.
He ducks inside a barbershop.
And Faugel himself, or shall we say the actor who played Faugel, Serge Reggiani, now known simply as The Hairdresser, appears and stares at him.
What a moment.
On the filmmaking side you have two of Melville's leading men, each the star of his own gangster picture, each having carried a film on his shoulders to wide success, each having played ruthless rulers of the underworld, now together in one scene playing very different roles under very different circumstances.
The bad-boy Faugel from Le Doulos stares down the bad-boy Gu from Le Deuxieme Souffle. A star in a supporting role. A role without a name. Working as a character actor. Lending truth to a scene.
On the story side you have Gerbier in quite a predicament. He is in his own country, in his own city, functioning as a fugitive, looking at a fellow Frenchman, wholly unsure of where his sympathies lie, completely unguarded, wholly vulnerable. Gebier may have just ducked into a trap. A sitting duck.
The men stand still. Silent. Gerbier is breathing heavily. His whole body heaves. He cannot hide it. He does his best to stay calm.
The Hairdresser stares at him. Sizes him up. It is obvious he knows. Something, anyway.
What do you want?
Silence. Then--
A shave.
The Hairdresser takes him.
Seats him.
Covers him.
Lathers him.
And Gerbier the fugitive, an escaped prisoner of war in an occupied territory, can do nothing but lean back and allow an unknown man to hold a sharpened blade to his neck.
The blade glimmers in the light.
The razor strokes across his face.
An air of heaviness fills the room.
As these two great stars stand and sit respectively, and except for the motions of the shaving, they are mostly still. And completely silent.
An amazing scene.
The Hairdresser finishes. Gerbier pays him. The Hairdresser goes to get his change. Gerbier insists he keep it and tries to flee the store almost as quickly as he came.
But The Hairdresser returns with his change and with a change for him. A khaki trenchcoat. To replace the black one he is wearing.
Take this.
It is not much, but maybe it will help.
Whew.
The Hairdresser understands. Sympathizes. Helps.
Gerbier puts on the khaki coat.
Merci.
He returns into the night.
Now that Gerbier is free, he sets up shop in Marseilles. In a talent agency. At a dance studio.
He runs a network with three assistants--Felix, Guillaume, the Bison, and Claude, the Masque.
One of their members has betrayed them, committed treason, and they must kill him. They are not killers. They have never killed. They are citizens trying to fight a war. But they have a duty to do. They had rented a house with an empty house beside it, so that no one would hear the gunshots. But since then someone has moved into the adjoining house, and they cannot risk the neighbors hearing. They must devise a way to do it quietly. They figure it out. It is not pretty. They do not like it. It is sobering.
Felix runs into a friend, Jean-Francois, in a bar. Jean-Francois will join them. He will take a radio through customs, ingeniously getting through, and deliver it to Mathilde, played by the great Simone Signoret. And we will begin to see the operation come into view.
Jean-Francois will go and meet his brother Luc, a mathematician, a scholar, a man who lives a private life in a his book-lined library in his Paris mansion, a man who knows nothing about weapons, a man who has published five great volumes of mathematics, logic, and philosophy, a man who keeps himself separated from the war.
A man whom we will learn is the head of the entire Resistance. The Chief.
And his brother himself does not know it.
And never will.
Luc must do everything covertly.
He is, after all, just a peaceful scholar.
They are so organized that they bring a submarine to the shoreline. And Gerbier and Luc and a group of others escape France for England.
And while in London Luc will invite Gerbier to an important evening event. Where Gerbier will need a new suit. Tailored. Where he will witness Luc's receiving of an award from Charles de Gaulle himself.
And in a moment that should not be overlooked, they go to the cinema.
They are at this moment free men. In a free country.
And in the grand picture palace they see the grandest picture ever made. The Great One.
Gone with the Wind (1939).
And as we see the light flickering on their faces, we hear the familiar chords of the epic Max Steiner score.
And we think of another occupation. During another war. Another army invading another land. Living in their homes. Burning their homes. Killing their men. Raping their women. And the determination those citizens had to Resist.
They exit the theater. And make an off-hand comment.
Maybe one day France will be free again. And can show this movie.
Felix will be arrested.
And tortured.
Gerbier will hear about it.
And return.
The only way to return is to jump from a plane. He has never parachuted before. He rides in the plane. The soldier helps him. Another stunning scene.
Gerbier lives on an estate for awhile. With a Baron. And the Baron's land functions as a landing site for Resistance planes.
Mathilde now runs things. She is practical and intelligent. She is good and true.
They will help Felix escape. They will go into the bowels of the prison and help him themselves.
What courage. What commitment.
How will she do it? Will they pull it off?
Things do not always work out for our heroes.
They are private citizens with limited resources trying to fight a war.
They approach their duties with courage. They know that any moment they can be caught. Any moment they can be arrested. Any moment they can die.
And they will.
And they do.
This is an epic film. Running 2 hours and 25 minutes, it covers a lot of ground in the lives of these people. It is beautifully shot, in deep color, in muted tones, with sweeping cinematography, with moments of great action alternating with moments of quiet, sober-minded drama.
It is a serious film. A beautiful film. A journey worth taking.
It is the kind of film that exemplifies what film can do, what film is for.
It achieves what Aristotle wrote of the theatre, the ministrations of catharsis.
Melville lived it. And in his opening statement he says that these are unhappy memories, bad memories.
"Yet I welcome you. You are my long-lost youth."
* * * * *
With this film Melville brings back several of his stars.
Lino Ventura, who played tough guy Gu in yesterday's film Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), returns as our protagonist Philippe Gerbier. He really is a wonderful actor. We will get to see him again in Louis Malle's 1958 film Elevator to the Gallows and in Claude Sautet's 1960 crime drama Class Tous Risques. He would go on to play Jean Valjean in a 1980 version of Les Miserables. Wouldn't you love to see that!
Paul Meurisse, whom we met originally on Diabolique (1955) and who played Gu's nemesis, Commissioner Blot in yesterday's film Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), returns as the secret head of the resistance Luc Jardie.
Serge Reggiani, who we saw as the tough guy protagonist Maurice Faugel in Le Doulos (1963), returns as the barber, or The Hairdresser, who gives Gerbier a shave after he escapes the gestapo, and then gives him a khaki jacket to help him go out into the streets under cover. He too played in a version of Les Miserables, in 1958, with our favored star Jean Gabin playing Jean Valjean. We will see him again, along with yesterday's Alain Delon, in Luchino Visconti's masterpiece The Leopard (1963).
Paul Crauchet, who plays Felix, will appear in the next Melville film, tomorrow's The Red Circle (Le Cercle Rouge) (1970) and in Melville's last film Le Flic (1972), which is not available on Criterion.
Jean-Marie Robain, who played the Uncle in The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer) (1949), the headmaster in Les Enfants Terribles (1950), a poker player in Bob le Flambeur (1956), returns here as the Baron. We will later see him in Jacques Rivette's mystery Paris Belongs to Us (1961).
Denis Sadier, who appeared in The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer) (1949), returns twenty years later here as the Gestapo doctor.
There are others who return in smaller roles.
Jean-Pierre Cassel is new to Melville. He plays Jean Francois Jardie, Luc Jardie's brother. He will go on to star in Luis Bunuel's class The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and on both French and American films throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. You may know him from Julian Schnabel's 2007 biographical drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
The film is anchored by France's great star Simone Signoret. We were introduced to her in Henri-Georges Clouzot's thriller Diabolique (1955), where she played Paul Meurisse's mistress. They reteam here as fellow members of the Resistance. She worked for forty years in both France and America, and in 1959 she won the Oscar for her role in the British film Room at the Top. She would be nominated again for her role in Sidney Lumet's film Ship of Fools (1965).
Here Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani are fighting the Resistance together, intimately bonded by their love of country and freedom. Seventeen years before this film, they were dancing together in Jacques Becker's film Casque d'Or (1952), in un coup de foudre--an idiomatic expression signifying love at first sight, but literally meaning a shot of lightning. And one could see then in Signoret's character, Marie the Casque d'Or (the golden helmet, the woman with the beautiful golden hair), and in Reggiani's character, Georges Manda, the coup de foudre at work. As their outward expressions and physical postures remain formal to the requirements of the dance. And their eyes, the windows to their souls, reveal the lightning that has just struck them, their lives now forever linked, their destinies intertwined, on a path on which fate will take them, and which they cannot change. And here they are in this film, together again, seventeen years later, two great colleagues, speaking from their hearts, living in their characters, the lives of unknown French heroes, taking their courage with them silently to the grave so that others might be free.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
088 - Le Samourai, 1967, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
088 - Le Samourai, 1967, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
A movie star versus a classically-trained character actor.
The movie star still. Silent. Detached. Cold. Doing nothing. Allowing the light to reflect off his piercing eyes. Reflect back into the camera.
The eyes are the windows of the soul. What if you look through the window and see nothing? Nothing but the deep. The depths of darkness. The dark of nothingness.
The character actor active. Expressive. Engaged. Alive. Walking and talking. Employing his methods. Describing his theories. Working on witnesses. Copping for a confession.
Jean-Pierre Melville is at the top of his game.
With his fourth crime drama in a row. A gangster picture. Suspenseful. Taut. A thriller.
Working on the tightest of tightly written scripts.
With every element of production design under complete control.
American film noir repurposed as a French gangster film.
Japanese samurai cinema retold in the life of a French contract killer.
Italian Western remade as a French detective story.
Let us see if we can work our way backwards.
It is 1967. We are in France. We are looking at the contemporary city. We are watching a few days in the life of a loner. A man detached from his emotions. Detached from the world. Willing to kill for no reason other than the money. He lives frugally. He rarely speaks.
Three years earlier this idea was made in Italy, as a Western. In 1964 in Italy Sergio Leone made a Western starring an American television actor named Clint Eastwood, titled A Fistful of Dollars. It is a few days in the life of a loner. A man with no name. Called Joe because he is an American. Detached from the world. Willing to kill for no reason other than the money. He lives frugally. He rarely speaks.
Three years earlier this idea was made in Japan, as a Samurai picture. In 1961 in Japan Akira Kurosawa made a Samurai movie starring his great international star Toshiro Mifune, titled Yojimbo. It is a few days in the life of a loner. A man with a name. But called The Samurai. Detached from the world. Willing to kill. He lives frugally. He rarely speaks.
Nineteen years earlier, in 1942 in America, Frank Tuttle directed a film titled This Gun for Hire about the life of a contract killer.
Six years before that, in 1936 in England, Graham Greene published the novel on which This Gun for Hire was based, a novel entitled This Gun for Sale.
Seven years before that, similar themes were published in America, as hard-boiled detective fiction. In 1929 in America Dashiell Hammett published a novel titled Red Harvest. It is a few days in the life of a loner. A man with no name, called The Continental Op. Detached from the world. Accused of killing for no reason, though he does not. He lives frugally. He controls his emotions. He rarely speaks.
Dashiell Hammett also wrote The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1932).
His influence on world cinema is large.
We have already stated that Jean-Pierre Melville loved America. He loved American culture. He loved American music. He loved American cars. He loved American movies.
But he made these American crime movies--which had gone around the world from American crime novels--through England, through Japan, through Italy--not as American but as French. He made them his own.
Sparse. Elegant. Logical. Pure.
And this one is in color.
Jef Costello sits alone on his bed, in his apartment furnished with almost nothing but a bird.
In a cage in the middle of the floor.
The camera sits still. We look in the room. It takes us a moment to realize Jef is on the bed, that he is in the room at all. He makes the room seem empty when he is in it.
Eventually, he gets up, gets his gun, gets his gloves, puts on his coat, puts on his hat. He looks in the mirror. Adjusts his hat. Slides his index finger and thumb across the brim. He leaves.
Jef goes to a hotel room. Men are playing cards. He greets them. Says he will play later. A man tells him to bring cash for when he loses. Jef says he never loses. He creates an alibi. He says he will be back. He leaves.
Jef goes to Jane's place. She gets up. Greets him at the door. Lets him in. He coordinates with her. Concocts a story. Comes up with the arrival and departure times. Creates an alibi.
She agrees. She adjusts the times because her other boyfriend will be arriving. Jef's departure time will need to coincide with it. He agrees. He is not jealous. He shows no emotion. He leaves.
Jef arrives at the club. He leaves his car running. The pianist is playing. Smiling. Always smiling. He goes backstage. Down the hall. Into an office. A man sits at a desk. He asks what Jef wants. Jef answers. Jef shoots. He leaves.
The pianist is on a break. She goes backstage. She walks down the hall. Jef enters the hall. Stops. They stare. She sees him. Gets a good long look at him. He says nothing. He walks past her. He leaves.
He walks through the open stage and dining room of the club, with many eyes upon him. Many eyes, many witnesses. Watching him leave.
The police call in the usual suspects. They will have all night Saturday and all day Sunday to question twenty people per precinct. They bring in six people from the club as witnesses. One of them is the pianist.
They go to the hotel room. Find the card game. Find Jef. Check everyone's papers. Bring Jef in.
Back at the line-up, the six witnesses agree on some people--he is not the one--but are unsure of others. When they look at Jef, one man remembers and says Yes, but others do not remember sand say Maybe not. The pianist looks at him squarely. She remembers. And knows. Yes, it is he. But she shakes her head. Says no. Says it with confidence. Lets him off the hook.
They call in Jef's girlfriend. She sticks to the story. Stands firmly. Gives the alibi.
They call in the man who went to her apartment after Jef. A man named Wiener. Try to test him. Make Jef switch hats with one man and coats with another. Wiener says he saw a man there. Claims he cannot remember details, but points to the hat on one man, the coat on another, and to Jeff's face.
He claims he is not observant, but without intending it, he provides Jef with another failsafe alibi.
The police are forced to let him go. But the commissioner is smart. He senses Jeff did it. He has him followed. Jef senses it. Loses them. Goes to where his hiring contact said to meet him. The hiring contact betrays him. Shoots him. Tries to eliminate him. But Jef is too good with a gun. He wounds the other man as the other man wounds him.
Now Jef is on the lamb from both the police and the men who hired him.
What will he do?
He finds the pianist. Talks to her. She lets him get in her car. Takes him to her house. He asks her why she did not turn him in. Watch the film to find out her answer.
The police are on his tail. They find his garbage. They follow him into the Metro. They try to bug him.
It is a master game of cat and mouse. Who will win?
The moral logic of this kind of story tells us that the mercenary, the samurai, the contract killer, the hari-kari must die a ritualistic death in the end.
He is in a sense death-driven.
We shall see.
Will he succeed? Will he fail?
Will he live? Will he die?
Will he end up with his girlfriend Jane? Or with the pianist?
Or alone?
The lone wolf.
The loner.
Or dead?
Watch and see.
And enjoy the journey.
088 - Le Samourai, 1967, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
A movie star versus a classically-trained character actor.
The movie star still. Silent. Detached. Cold. Doing nothing. Allowing the light to reflect off his piercing eyes. Reflect back into the camera.
The eyes are the windows of the soul. What if you look through the window and see nothing? Nothing but the deep. The depths of darkness. The dark of nothingness.
The character actor active. Expressive. Engaged. Alive. Walking and talking. Employing his methods. Describing his theories. Working on witnesses. Copping for a confession.
Jean-Pierre Melville is at the top of his game.
With his fourth crime drama in a row. A gangster picture. Suspenseful. Taut. A thriller.
Working on the tightest of tightly written scripts.
With every element of production design under complete control.
American film noir repurposed as a French gangster film.
Japanese samurai cinema retold in the life of a French contract killer.
Italian Western remade as a French detective story.
Let us see if we can work our way backwards.
It is 1967. We are in France. We are looking at the contemporary city. We are watching a few days in the life of a loner. A man detached from his emotions. Detached from the world. Willing to kill for no reason other than the money. He lives frugally. He rarely speaks.
Three years earlier this idea was made in Italy, as a Western. In 1964 in Italy Sergio Leone made a Western starring an American television actor named Clint Eastwood, titled A Fistful of Dollars. It is a few days in the life of a loner. A man with no name. Called Joe because he is an American. Detached from the world. Willing to kill for no reason other than the money. He lives frugally. He rarely speaks.
Three years earlier this idea was made in Japan, as a Samurai picture. In 1961 in Japan Akira Kurosawa made a Samurai movie starring his great international star Toshiro Mifune, titled Yojimbo. It is a few days in the life of a loner. A man with a name. But called The Samurai. Detached from the world. Willing to kill. He lives frugally. He rarely speaks.
Nineteen years earlier, in 1942 in America, Frank Tuttle directed a film titled This Gun for Hire about the life of a contract killer.
Six years before that, in 1936 in England, Graham Greene published the novel on which This Gun for Hire was based, a novel entitled This Gun for Sale.
Seven years before that, similar themes were published in America, as hard-boiled detective fiction. In 1929 in America Dashiell Hammett published a novel titled Red Harvest. It is a few days in the life of a loner. A man with no name, called The Continental Op. Detached from the world. Accused of killing for no reason, though he does not. He lives frugally. He controls his emotions. He rarely speaks.
Dashiell Hammett also wrote The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1932).
His influence on world cinema is large.
We have already stated that Jean-Pierre Melville loved America. He loved American culture. He loved American music. He loved American cars. He loved American movies.
But he made these American crime movies--which had gone around the world from American crime novels--through England, through Japan, through Italy--not as American but as French. He made them his own.
Sparse. Elegant. Logical. Pure.
And this one is in color.
Jef Costello sits alone on his bed, in his apartment furnished with almost nothing but a bird.
In a cage in the middle of the floor.
The camera sits still. We look in the room. It takes us a moment to realize Jef is on the bed, that he is in the room at all. He makes the room seem empty when he is in it.
Eventually, he gets up, gets his gun, gets his gloves, puts on his coat, puts on his hat. He looks in the mirror. Adjusts his hat. Slides his index finger and thumb across the brim. He leaves.
Jef goes to a hotel room. Men are playing cards. He greets them. Says he will play later. A man tells him to bring cash for when he loses. Jef says he never loses. He creates an alibi. He says he will be back. He leaves.
Jef goes to Jane's place. She gets up. Greets him at the door. Lets him in. He coordinates with her. Concocts a story. Comes up with the arrival and departure times. Creates an alibi.
She agrees. She adjusts the times because her other boyfriend will be arriving. Jef's departure time will need to coincide with it. He agrees. He is not jealous. He shows no emotion. He leaves.
Jef arrives at the club. He leaves his car running. The pianist is playing. Smiling. Always smiling. He goes backstage. Down the hall. Into an office. A man sits at a desk. He asks what Jef wants. Jef answers. Jef shoots. He leaves.
The pianist is on a break. She goes backstage. She walks down the hall. Jef enters the hall. Stops. They stare. She sees him. Gets a good long look at him. He says nothing. He walks past her. He leaves.
He walks through the open stage and dining room of the club, with many eyes upon him. Many eyes, many witnesses. Watching him leave.
The police call in the usual suspects. They will have all night Saturday and all day Sunday to question twenty people per precinct. They bring in six people from the club as witnesses. One of them is the pianist.
They go to the hotel room. Find the card game. Find Jef. Check everyone's papers. Bring Jef in.
Back at the line-up, the six witnesses agree on some people--he is not the one--but are unsure of others. When they look at Jef, one man remembers and says Yes, but others do not remember sand say Maybe not. The pianist looks at him squarely. She remembers. And knows. Yes, it is he. But she shakes her head. Says no. Says it with confidence. Lets him off the hook.
They call in Jef's girlfriend. She sticks to the story. Stands firmly. Gives the alibi.
They call in the man who went to her apartment after Jef. A man named Wiener. Try to test him. Make Jef switch hats with one man and coats with another. Wiener says he saw a man there. Claims he cannot remember details, but points to the hat on one man, the coat on another, and to Jeff's face.
He claims he is not observant, but without intending it, he provides Jef with another failsafe alibi.
The police are forced to let him go. But the commissioner is smart. He senses Jeff did it. He has him followed. Jef senses it. Loses them. Goes to where his hiring contact said to meet him. The hiring contact betrays him. Shoots him. Tries to eliminate him. But Jef is too good with a gun. He wounds the other man as the other man wounds him.
Now Jef is on the lamb from both the police and the men who hired him.
What will he do?
He finds the pianist. Talks to her. She lets him get in her car. Takes him to her house. He asks her why she did not turn him in. Watch the film to find out her answer.
The police are on his tail. They find his garbage. They follow him into the Metro. They try to bug him.
It is a master game of cat and mouse. Who will win?
The moral logic of this kind of story tells us that the mercenary, the samurai, the contract killer, the hari-kari must die a ritualistic death in the end.
He is in a sense death-driven.
We shall see.
Will he succeed? Will he fail?
Will he live? Will he die?
Will he end up with his girlfriend Jane? Or with the pianist?
Or alone?
The lone wolf.
The loner.
Or dead?
Watch and see.
And enjoy the journey.
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
087 - Second Wind (Le Deuxieme Souffle), 1966, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
087 - Second Wind (Le Deuxieme Souffle), 1966, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Homework assignment: Write a story featuring characters with the names Gu, Blot, Fardiano, Orloff, and Manouche.
Go!
Jean-Pierre Melville is up to the challenge.
Of course he had a lot to live up to with the original Melville using names such as Bartleby, Billy Budd, Babo, Atufal, Hunilla, Oberlus, Ishmael, Queequeg, Mapple, Bildad, Peleg, Ahab, Stubb, Tashtego, Flask, Daggoo, Fedallah.
And Starbuck.
Yes, Starbuck. Your coffee was named for a Herman Melville character, the chief mate of the Pequod in Moby Dick.
After they rejected calling it Pequod's.
Starbuck's was founded by an English teacher, a history teacher, and a writer. Thank you, gentlemen, for honoring great American literature with your name.
But enough about Herman. Let us return to Jean-Pierre.
This Melville is returning to his bread and butter. His oeuvre.
The crime drama.
Jean-Pierre Melville loves American crime dramas. He makes them in France. He Frenchifies them. And he is good at it.
NOVEMBER 20, 5:58 am
Three men have scaled a wall. They look over the two guards walking to the other wall opposite them.
We remember a movie made ten years before, which we saw last week, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956) (079, March 20).
They jump from their wall to the opposite wall. One man overshoots the second wall and falls over the other side. The other two men scale down by rope and grappling hook. When they get to the ground, they find their friend deceased.
They pull out changes of clothes and change clothes.
They run through the woods.
They jump a freight train.
Gustave Minda sits in the freight car in the dark. He takes a moment to catch his breath. He lights a cigarette.
Gu has escaped.
MARSEILLE, MOVEMBER 20, 11:00 pm
A club. Jo Ricci's place. Jazz music. Dancing women.
Are we still on for December 28?
Yes.
They are going to pull a job on December 28.
Please do not leave town until then. You are indispensable.
No one is indispensable.
PARIS, NOVEMBER 21.
What is wrong? Gu's escaped. Let us go home. I . . .
Manouche, the owner, is talking to Alban, the bartender. They seem to be more than owner and bartender.
The second bartender is named Marcel le Stephanois. He is called by his last name, le Stephanois. This is a shout-out to Jules Dassin's 1955 French crime thriller, Rififi, featuring the lead character Tony le Stephanois. We will be seeing that movie later this year, and you will love it.
Some men come in and shoot up the place. They knock out Jacques the Lawyer. He was Manouche's date.
Alban, the bartender, immediately pulls out his gun and fires back. He hits one of them.
He picks up Manouche off the floor. He helps her to a chair. He places a phone call. Clear everyone out within five minutes.
Commissioner Blot arrives. He asks questions. No one answers them. No one provides help. Commissioner Blot is unmoved. He will find out what happened. He will find his man. He will get his job done. He will get justice.
Earlier this year we saw the film Diabolique (1955) (012, January 12). The actor Paul Meurisse played Michel Delassalle, the head of a boarding school, who openly kept both a wife and a mistress, who was cruel to them both, and who was the object of their mutual displeasure. The women teamed up and removed him from their lives. The rest of the film was about what happened to him afterwards. And how it affected them.
Now, eleven years later, in Le Deuxieme Souffle, Paul Meurisse plays Commissioner Blot. This time, he is likeable, hard working, intelligent. He is good at what he does.
MARSEILLE, NOVEMBER 22
He's been in a coma for two days. Didn't you call a doctor? Yes, but he's been calling your name. He's delirious. I'm going to Paris with you.
PARIS, NOVEMBER 23, 12:25 am
Manouche and Alban close up and drive off. She drives. She tells him that Jacques kept asking her to go away with him. Maybe he really did love me.
When they arrive at the house two men accost them. They handcuff Alban and leave him on the floor. They take Manouche inside. They are about to begin interrogating her when . . .
Gu to the rescue.
He enters the building, surprises the men, has Manouche get the handcuff keys and free Alban, asks the men questions, puts them in their own car.
Takes care of them.
If you shoot someone while the car is driving at high speed on the open road in the middle of nowhere, nobody hears the report.
Alban and Gu leave the two dead men in their own car, parked in the woods out in the open. No one heard a gunshot. No one saw anything. The men will be found in their own car.
Manouche picks them up in her car.
Alban and Manouche have a place where they can hide Gu for awhile.
NOVEMBER 25
Blot knows what is going on.
He talks to his people, has it figured out.
He goes to Jo Ricci, at his club, and warns him.
Blot's warning provides a good plot summary for the rest of us. He has everything figured out.
The two men were small-time burglars. They walked into Jo Ricci's club. They overheard talking. They thought they could go muscle Alban and Manouche. They got in over their heads. Gu came and took care of them. Small time bandits knocked off by a big-time professional. Blot finds the file where the same kind of killing happened 15 years ago, and everyone suspected Gu then. He sees Gu's hand in this.
Blot knows that Gu will probably try to skip town, try to skip the country, but that he will come to Jo Ricci's place first to eliminate him. He warns Ricci that he knows where you are but you do not know where he is.
He advises Ricci to be safe. Your son is graduating soon. You will want to be alive to attend his graduation.
The story is now set up nicely.
Gu is a world-class gangster.
Blot is a world-class investigator.
We are building to the final showdown. The championship game between the greatest offense and the greatest defense.
It could be Robert De Niro versus Al Pacino in Michael Mann's masterpiece Heat (1995).
The tension is building.
The pacing is increasing.
The showdown is coming.
Grab your popcorn, fasten your seatbelts, and come along for the ride.
087 - Second Wind (Le Deuxieme Souffle), 1966, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Homework assignment: Write a story featuring characters with the names Gu, Blot, Fardiano, Orloff, and Manouche.
Go!
Jean-Pierre Melville is up to the challenge.
Of course he had a lot to live up to with the original Melville using names such as Bartleby, Billy Budd, Babo, Atufal, Hunilla, Oberlus, Ishmael, Queequeg, Mapple, Bildad, Peleg, Ahab, Stubb, Tashtego, Flask, Daggoo, Fedallah.
And Starbuck.
Yes, Starbuck. Your coffee was named for a Herman Melville character, the chief mate of the Pequod in Moby Dick.
After they rejected calling it Pequod's.
Starbuck's was founded by an English teacher, a history teacher, and a writer. Thank you, gentlemen, for honoring great American literature with your name.
But enough about Herman. Let us return to Jean-Pierre.
This Melville is returning to his bread and butter. His oeuvre.
The crime drama.
Jean-Pierre Melville loves American crime dramas. He makes them in France. He Frenchifies them. And he is good at it.
NOVEMBER 20, 5:58 am
Three men have scaled a wall. They look over the two guards walking to the other wall opposite them.
We remember a movie made ten years before, which we saw last week, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956) (079, March 20).
They jump from their wall to the opposite wall. One man overshoots the second wall and falls over the other side. The other two men scale down by rope and grappling hook. When they get to the ground, they find their friend deceased.
They pull out changes of clothes and change clothes.
They run through the woods.
They jump a freight train.
Gustave Minda sits in the freight car in the dark. He takes a moment to catch his breath. He lights a cigarette.
Gu has escaped.
MARSEILLE, MOVEMBER 20, 11:00 pm
A club. Jo Ricci's place. Jazz music. Dancing women.
Are we still on for December 28?
Yes.
They are going to pull a job on December 28.
Please do not leave town until then. You are indispensable.
No one is indispensable.
PARIS, NOVEMBER 21.
What is wrong? Gu's escaped. Let us go home. I . . .
Manouche, the owner, is talking to Alban, the bartender. They seem to be more than owner and bartender.
The second bartender is named Marcel le Stephanois. He is called by his last name, le Stephanois. This is a shout-out to Jules Dassin's 1955 French crime thriller, Rififi, featuring the lead character Tony le Stephanois. We will be seeing that movie later this year, and you will love it.
Some men come in and shoot up the place. They knock out Jacques the Lawyer. He was Manouche's date.
Alban, the bartender, immediately pulls out his gun and fires back. He hits one of them.
He picks up Manouche off the floor. He helps her to a chair. He places a phone call. Clear everyone out within five minutes.
Commissioner Blot arrives. He asks questions. No one answers them. No one provides help. Commissioner Blot is unmoved. He will find out what happened. He will find his man. He will get his job done. He will get justice.
Earlier this year we saw the film Diabolique (1955) (012, January 12). The actor Paul Meurisse played Michel Delassalle, the head of a boarding school, who openly kept both a wife and a mistress, who was cruel to them both, and who was the object of their mutual displeasure. The women teamed up and removed him from their lives. The rest of the film was about what happened to him afterwards. And how it affected them.
Now, eleven years later, in Le Deuxieme Souffle, Paul Meurisse plays Commissioner Blot. This time, he is likeable, hard working, intelligent. He is good at what he does.
MARSEILLE, NOVEMBER 22
He's been in a coma for two days. Didn't you call a doctor? Yes, but he's been calling your name. He's delirious. I'm going to Paris with you.
PARIS, NOVEMBER 23, 12:25 am
Manouche and Alban close up and drive off. She drives. She tells him that Jacques kept asking her to go away with him. Maybe he really did love me.
When they arrive at the house two men accost them. They handcuff Alban and leave him on the floor. They take Manouche inside. They are about to begin interrogating her when . . .
Gu to the rescue.
He enters the building, surprises the men, has Manouche get the handcuff keys and free Alban, asks the men questions, puts them in their own car.
Takes care of them.
If you shoot someone while the car is driving at high speed on the open road in the middle of nowhere, nobody hears the report.
Alban and Gu leave the two dead men in their own car, parked in the woods out in the open. No one heard a gunshot. No one saw anything. The men will be found in their own car.
Manouche picks them up in her car.
Alban and Manouche have a place where they can hide Gu for awhile.
NOVEMBER 25
Blot knows what is going on.
He talks to his people, has it figured out.
He goes to Jo Ricci, at his club, and warns him.
Blot's warning provides a good plot summary for the rest of us. He has everything figured out.
The two men were small-time burglars. They walked into Jo Ricci's club. They overheard talking. They thought they could go muscle Alban and Manouche. They got in over their heads. Gu came and took care of them. Small time bandits knocked off by a big-time professional. Blot finds the file where the same kind of killing happened 15 years ago, and everyone suspected Gu then. He sees Gu's hand in this.
Blot knows that Gu will probably try to skip town, try to skip the country, but that he will come to Jo Ricci's place first to eliminate him. He warns Ricci that he knows where you are but you do not know where he is.
He advises Ricci to be safe. Your son is graduating soon. You will want to be alive to attend his graduation.
The story is now set up nicely.
Gu is a world-class gangster.
Blot is a world-class investigator.
We are building to the final showdown. The championship game between the greatest offense and the greatest defense.
It could be Robert De Niro versus Al Pacino in Michael Mann's masterpiece Heat (1995).
The tension is building.
The pacing is increasing.
The showdown is coming.
Grab your popcorn, fasten your seatbelts, and come along for the ride.
Monday, March 27, 2017
086 - Le Doulos (The Hat), 1963, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Monday, March 28, 2017
086 - Le Doulos (The Hat), 1963, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
The credits show. White on black. The music starts. A beating sound. A metronome. A ticking clock. Time is ticking. Time is running out.
A man walks down a walkway in the dark side of the city. Walking as if to the ticking. Walking as if to the tocking. Walking as if to his destiny.
Who is this man?
Some people call him Maurice.
He walks. In a hat. In a trenchcoat. Down the walkway in the dark side of the city.
A raised sidewalk with railings. Under bridges. In the half-world. The demi-monde.
The camera follows him. A tracking shot. Without a cut. For two minutes, thirty-four seconds.
The average man walks 3 miles per hour. If this man is walking this speed, then for this length of time he travels 677.6 feet, or 225.867 yards.
That is two and a quarter football fields.
Imagine laying down dolly track that long. And pushing a camera dolly that far. And holding a camera that steadily for that long. And walking in character that far at that pace. As if to the music. Without flinching.
In the middle of the walk the camera tilts up at the underside of the bridge. The railroad bridge. The steel bridge. The steel trestles. Held by trusses. Trusses holding trestles. Trestles and trusses. The bars above him. Like prison bars. The bars beside him. On the railing. The railing beneath the railway. More bars. More prison bars. The light beaming through.
The camera tilts back down.
The man walks.
Through the light. Through the darkness.
To the Avenue Mozart.
To the house with the stairs. Remember those stairs. Not for this movie. But for others.
He enters the house.
He looks at his reflection in the cracked mirror.
His reflection is cracked.
He walks up the stairs.
A voice asks him if he has eaten.
No.
Get some food.
The man is Gilbert Varnove. His friend. Gilbert works at his table. His workbench. On jewelry. The bijoux.
If you ever hear of a theater called The Bijoux, it means The Jewels.
Gilbert works on the jewels. Lots of jewels. 800,000 in jewels. He works for the fences. The men who will sell the jewels. One fence for the gold. One fence for the gems. He separates the gems from the gold.
Rene Lefevre plays Gilbert. We saw Rene Lefevre the other day. In Le Million (1,000,000) (1931) (069, March 10). As Michel. The painter who won the lottery but left the ticket in his jacket pocket. Which has now been passed through five pairs of hands. And for which he spends the film chasing in madcap hijinks with his fiancée Beatrice.
It is now thirty-two years later. Rene Lefevre does not play a young man. Racing in madcap hijinks. He plays an old man. Sitting at a table. Working on jewels. Quietly. Steadily. With purpose. He brings older-generation star power to this film. And gravitas.
He asks Maurice to get something to eat.
He sits at the table facing the window.
With his back to Maurice.
They talk.
Maurice asks to borrow his gun.
That is unlike Maurice.
Maurice does not carry a gun.
He wants to borrow it for protection.
Gilbert tells him to look in the upper-right drawer for the gun. In the back-right corner for the ammo.
He asks Maurice to get some food. For the third time.
He stands up. He turns around. He sees Maurice. He sees the gun. He sees betrayal.
Bam!
Gilbert falls to the floor. Taking the table with him. Spilling the jewels all over the floor. Knocking over the lamp. Which swings upside down. Hanging by the cord. Hanging. And swinging.
The light moves like a pendulum across the room. A metronome. A ticking clock. Time is ticking. Time is running out.
A car is coming. With two men and a lady. Nuttheccio, the owner of the Cotton Club. Fabienne his girl. Who used to be with a man named Silien. Who might now be a rat. An informant. A doulos. And Nuttheccio's partner Armand.
Maurice looks out the window. He sees the car. He sees the men. He sees that he must get out of there fast.
But he must get the jewels first. Which are scattered all over the floor. And the cash. And the gun.
The men leave the car parked with Fabienne waiting. She hears a train pass by. She remembers the train.
The men see the swinging light in the upper window. The swinging lamp.
Maurice pockets the jewels. The cash. And the gun. He runs downstairs. Tries to open the back door. The back door will not open.
He cannot go to the front door. The front door is about to open.
He opens a window. Jumps out the window. Runs around back. Runs away.
Maurice makes it to a quiet place. A street lamp. He digs a hole. Buries the gun. Buries the jewels. Buries the cash.
He goes home.
This film is a thriller. And it is thrilling.
It is written in a taut mathematical narrative structure.
With two protagonists. And two interrogations. And three hoods. And four partners. And four cops. And three jobs. And three women.
And more twists than a French braid.
With an ending. Followed by an ending. Followed by an ending.
With future German star director Volker Schlondorff working as Melville's 1st AD.
Produced by the great Carlo Ponti.
Starring Nouvelle Vague darling Jean-Paul Belmondo. Who steals the show.
Starring Italian born Serge Reggiani. Who steals the show.
Two years after this movie, Reggiani, in his mid-40s, will begin a new career as a singer. And go on in his second career to popular and critical acclaim. He will also continue acting in film through 1990.
Le Doulos is easily one of the most entertaining films we have seen so far this year.
Intelligent. Complex. Tense. Mathematical. Surprising.
086 - Le Doulos (The Hat), 1963, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
The credits show. White on black. The music starts. A beating sound. A metronome. A ticking clock. Time is ticking. Time is running out.
A man walks down a walkway in the dark side of the city. Walking as if to the ticking. Walking as if to the tocking. Walking as if to his destiny.
Who is this man?
Some people call him Maurice.
He walks. In a hat. In a trenchcoat. Down the walkway in the dark side of the city.
A raised sidewalk with railings. Under bridges. In the half-world. The demi-monde.
The camera follows him. A tracking shot. Without a cut. For two minutes, thirty-four seconds.
The average man walks 3 miles per hour. If this man is walking this speed, then for this length of time he travels 677.6 feet, or 225.867 yards.
That is two and a quarter football fields.
Imagine laying down dolly track that long. And pushing a camera dolly that far. And holding a camera that steadily for that long. And walking in character that far at that pace. As if to the music. Without flinching.
In the middle of the walk the camera tilts up at the underside of the bridge. The railroad bridge. The steel bridge. The steel trestles. Held by trusses. Trusses holding trestles. Trestles and trusses. The bars above him. Like prison bars. The bars beside him. On the railing. The railing beneath the railway. More bars. More prison bars. The light beaming through.
The camera tilts back down.
The man walks.
Through the light. Through the darkness.
To the Avenue Mozart.
To the house with the stairs. Remember those stairs. Not for this movie. But for others.
He enters the house.
He looks at his reflection in the cracked mirror.
His reflection is cracked.
He walks up the stairs.
A voice asks him if he has eaten.
No.
Get some food.
The man is Gilbert Varnove. His friend. Gilbert works at his table. His workbench. On jewelry. The bijoux.
If you ever hear of a theater called The Bijoux, it means The Jewels.
Gilbert works on the jewels. Lots of jewels. 800,000 in jewels. He works for the fences. The men who will sell the jewels. One fence for the gold. One fence for the gems. He separates the gems from the gold.
Rene Lefevre plays Gilbert. We saw Rene Lefevre the other day. In Le Million (1,000,000) (1931) (069, March 10). As Michel. The painter who won the lottery but left the ticket in his jacket pocket. Which has now been passed through five pairs of hands. And for which he spends the film chasing in madcap hijinks with his fiancée Beatrice.
It is now thirty-two years later. Rene Lefevre does not play a young man. Racing in madcap hijinks. He plays an old man. Sitting at a table. Working on jewels. Quietly. Steadily. With purpose. He brings older-generation star power to this film. And gravitas.
He asks Maurice to get something to eat.
He sits at the table facing the window.
With his back to Maurice.
They talk.
Maurice asks to borrow his gun.
That is unlike Maurice.
Maurice does not carry a gun.
He wants to borrow it for protection.
Gilbert tells him to look in the upper-right drawer for the gun. In the back-right corner for the ammo.
He asks Maurice to get some food. For the third time.
He stands up. He turns around. He sees Maurice. He sees the gun. He sees betrayal.
Bam!
Gilbert falls to the floor. Taking the table with him. Spilling the jewels all over the floor. Knocking over the lamp. Which swings upside down. Hanging by the cord. Hanging. And swinging.
The light moves like a pendulum across the room. A metronome. A ticking clock. Time is ticking. Time is running out.
A car is coming. With two men and a lady. Nuttheccio, the owner of the Cotton Club. Fabienne his girl. Who used to be with a man named Silien. Who might now be a rat. An informant. A doulos. And Nuttheccio's partner Armand.
Maurice looks out the window. He sees the car. He sees the men. He sees that he must get out of there fast.
But he must get the jewels first. Which are scattered all over the floor. And the cash. And the gun.
The men leave the car parked with Fabienne waiting. She hears a train pass by. She remembers the train.
The men see the swinging light in the upper window. The swinging lamp.
Maurice pockets the jewels. The cash. And the gun. He runs downstairs. Tries to open the back door. The back door will not open.
He cannot go to the front door. The front door is about to open.
He opens a window. Jumps out the window. Runs around back. Runs away.
Maurice makes it to a quiet place. A street lamp. He digs a hole. Buries the gun. Buries the jewels. Buries the cash.
He goes home.
This film is a thriller. And it is thrilling.
It is written in a taut mathematical narrative structure.
With two protagonists. And two interrogations. And three hoods. And four partners. And four cops. And three jobs. And three women.
And more twists than a French braid.
With an ending. Followed by an ending. Followed by an ending.
With future German star director Volker Schlondorff working as Melville's 1st AD.
Produced by the great Carlo Ponti.
Starring Nouvelle Vague darling Jean-Paul Belmondo. Who steals the show.
Starring Italian born Serge Reggiani. Who steals the show.
Two years after this movie, Reggiani, in his mid-40s, will begin a new career as a singer. And go on in his second career to popular and critical acclaim. He will also continue acting in film through 1990.
Le Doulos is easily one of the most entertaining films we have seen so far this year.
Intelligent. Complex. Tense. Mathematical. Surprising.
Sunday, March 26, 2017
085 - Bob le Flambeur, 1956, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Sunday, March 26, 2017
085 - Bob le Flambeur, 1956, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
When somebody loves you, it makes it easier to love him or her back.
France has long loved America.
The French Revolution came shortly after the American Revolution.
France adopted the American colors: red, white, and blue became blue, white, and red.
France gave the United States the Statue of Liberty.
The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) styled itself after the American movies they discovered when the War was over.
It is a common saying that they love Jerry Lewis in France.
America in return has long loved France.
Everyone dreams of going to Paris.
Hemingway and the ex-patriots set up shop on the west bank of the Seine and created a Romantic dream and made history.
France features prominently in American culture, from An American in Paris (1951) to The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) to Gigi (1958) to Charade (1963) to Paris When It Sizzles (1964) to How to Steal a Million (1966) to Last Tango in Paris (1972) to Frantic (1988) to Forget Paris (1995) to Before Sunrise (1995) to 2 Days in Paris (2007) to Ratatouille (2007) to Taken (2008) to From Paris with Love (2010) to Hugo (2011) to this past year's best picture La La Land (2016).
And of course Casablanca (1942), an American movie set in French Morocco, with one of the greatest lines (many of the greatest lines) in film history. "We'll always have Paris."
How many more are there which are not listed here?
Woody Allen made the movie Hollywood Ending (2002), where the film's ending is itself a Hollywood ending, which includes being loved by France and moving to France.
Then he moved to France and made movies there.
He spent a lifetime making movies about Manhattan, yet his greatest hit is Midnight in Paris (2011).
Quentin Tarantino styled himself largely after the Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave), including the naming of his production company A Band Apart, after Jean-Luc Godard's classic French film Bande a part (Band of Outsiders).
We eat French fries.
So how about Jean-Pierre Melville.
Melville loved America.
He named himself after one of America's greatest novelists. His birth name was Grumbach. His chosen name was Melville.
He drove American cars, wore American hats, wore Ray-Bans, listened to the Armed Forces Network (AFN), and drank in American music, from big band to jazz.
He loved Glenn Miller.
Bob le Flambeur (1956) is the now fourth film by Jean-Pierre Melville that we have seen.
We saw Leon Morin, Priest (1961) (012, January 12), The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer) (1949) (083, March 24), and The Terrible Children (Les Enfants Terribles) (1950) (084, March 25).
But this film is the first film we have seen that feels like a Jean-Pierre Melville movie.
The Terrible Children was a work for hire. And the other two belong to a trilogy of films about the French Resistance during the War. We will see the other one, the third in the trilogy, soon.
Melville's bread and butter, his home turf, the world he inhabits, the stuff his dreams are made on, is the French version of the American crime drama. We will see four more of these kinds of films over the next few days.
They are gritty, taut, and full of tension and release.
Crime drama is genre filmmaking. It has a vocabulary. It has elements that recur. It is a great topic for the movies because the stakes are high and there is great conflict--conflict between the thieves and law enforcement, conflict between the thieves and each other, conflict between the thieves and their women, and inner conflict, within themselves.
These kinds of films never get old to the movie-going public. They sell tickets because they work.
What kinds of shows are always on television? Doctors, lawyers, and detectives. Often with the doctors and lawyers functioning as detectives. Who dunnit? Or, we know who dunnit; now, how will they get caught? Or, will they get caught?
Melville here is four years ahead of the New Wave, and eleven years ahead as a director.
When Truffaut and Godard burst onto the scene like a rocket, they owed everything to Melville. Whatever they did that was new, he did first.
In fact, Godard owes the launching of his legacy to Melville. When we get to the film Breathless (1960), we will discover Godard's innovative style that put him on the filmmaking map, making him an international star director. That style came about when a problem needed to be solved. The problem was solved for Godard by Melville.
Melville loved cinema. He loved everything about it. He watched a lot of movies. He knew the cinematographers of those movies. He understood the style of the directors. He understood the art of the craft.
Because of his love of movies, he was willing to make movies under difficult circumstances, with little money, filming here and there when he could, making choices that would work within his budget.
He took two years to make Bob Le Flambeur. He would save some money, call the cast and crew, and shoot for three days. Then he would go back to work finding money. The cast and crew were loyal to him--because he was loyal to them and because he was passionate about what he was doing. So they would make other movies in the traditional way and then give two or three days to him when he was filming. They stuck together until they were finished.
As a result, they made a classic.
There is nothing about Bob le Flambeur that belies that it was made this way. It seems like a movie with a budget.
Luc Sante in the liner notes notes that while Melville's methods paved the way for the New Wave, he remained at heart a classicist. Sante says, "Bob le Flambeur may be the most elegantly rigorous movie ever made about a cockeyed heist."
Years later in an interview, Melville would cite at least seven movies that he believed openly plagiarized his, including Ocean's 11, and he states that some even lifted exact lines of dialogue. When he first wrote the script of Bob le Flambeur, he put more detail into the heist itself. But before he could make the movie, John Huston came out with The Asphalt Jungle, which did the same thing. So Melville reduced the heist portion and brought out more of the relationships. This decision proved to benefit the film.
Bob is a gambler.
Years ago he tried to rob a bank but was caught and sent to jail. Since then he has laid low.
He once saved the life of a police officer, and now they are friends. The officer keeps tabs on him to make sure he does not get back into trouble.
Bob is a gentleman. A cultured man. A man of honor and principle.
He may be a hood, but he approaches life a certain way.
He lives in a painter's loft with a view of Montmartre in Paris.
He frequents certain restaurants and bars.
He is a man about town.
He hates pimps, and he protects prostitutes, trying to help them escape.
He becomes a father figure to a young man and a daddy figure to a young woman.
The young man loves the young woman. The young woman laughs at the young man. He is too sincere for her. She wants Bob. He is older, more mature, able to provide her with lifestyle she desires.
Bob cannot shake his vice.
He keeps a coin with him at all times, flipping it to make decisions.
He keeps a slot machine inside his own apartment, and drops a coin every time he enters, always in search of those three lemons, those three cherries.
In one day he will win big at the horse track and then lose it all at the card table.
This will lead to his being tempted to make just one more robbery, just one more play.
He assembles his team, pays a croupier for floor plans of the casino, installs a copy of the safe for his safecracker to practice on, lays out the entire floor plan of the casino in an open field so that the men can practice.
The big score will take place at Deauville.
Bob will be the lookout man. He will stand at the gaming tables and pretend to gamble.
He will decide whether to move forward or call it off.
But some people just cannot keep their mouths shut.
The young man, his protégé, so sincere in trying to win the young woman's heart, promises her the moon when he scores big.
The young woman, clueless in her confidence, relays the news to the pimp.
The pimp has already promised the police he will give them a lead in order to get himself out of a jam. Now a lead has fallen into his lap.
If that were not enough, the croupier tells his wife and she gets greedy. They will turn on Bob, turn him in, and keep the dough for themselves.
Greed sure does have a way of getting in the way of a big score.
With so many people talking to so many people, things just might not turn out the way they planned it.
And to top things off, Bob, will standing guard, pretending to gamble, will really gamble--after all he cannot help himself--and will have the biggest winning streak of his life.
He could call of the entire thing.
And walk away with the casinos money anyway.
Having earned it.
But will he see it in time?
085 - Bob le Flambeur, 1956, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
When somebody loves you, it makes it easier to love him or her back.
France has long loved America.
The French Revolution came shortly after the American Revolution.
France adopted the American colors: red, white, and blue became blue, white, and red.
France gave the United States the Statue of Liberty.
The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) styled itself after the American movies they discovered when the War was over.
It is a common saying that they love Jerry Lewis in France.
America in return has long loved France.
Everyone dreams of going to Paris.
Hemingway and the ex-patriots set up shop on the west bank of the Seine and created a Romantic dream and made history.
France features prominently in American culture, from An American in Paris (1951) to The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) to Gigi (1958) to Charade (1963) to Paris When It Sizzles (1964) to How to Steal a Million (1966) to Last Tango in Paris (1972) to Frantic (1988) to Forget Paris (1995) to Before Sunrise (1995) to 2 Days in Paris (2007) to Ratatouille (2007) to Taken (2008) to From Paris with Love (2010) to Hugo (2011) to this past year's best picture La La Land (2016).
And of course Casablanca (1942), an American movie set in French Morocco, with one of the greatest lines (many of the greatest lines) in film history. "We'll always have Paris."
How many more are there which are not listed here?
Woody Allen made the movie Hollywood Ending (2002), where the film's ending is itself a Hollywood ending, which includes being loved by France and moving to France.
Then he moved to France and made movies there.
He spent a lifetime making movies about Manhattan, yet his greatest hit is Midnight in Paris (2011).
Quentin Tarantino styled himself largely after the Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave), including the naming of his production company A Band Apart, after Jean-Luc Godard's classic French film Bande a part (Band of Outsiders).
We eat French fries.
So how about Jean-Pierre Melville.
Melville loved America.
He named himself after one of America's greatest novelists. His birth name was Grumbach. His chosen name was Melville.
He drove American cars, wore American hats, wore Ray-Bans, listened to the Armed Forces Network (AFN), and drank in American music, from big band to jazz.
He loved Glenn Miller.
Bob le Flambeur (1956) is the now fourth film by Jean-Pierre Melville that we have seen.
We saw Leon Morin, Priest (1961) (012, January 12), The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer) (1949) (083, March 24), and The Terrible Children (Les Enfants Terribles) (1950) (084, March 25).
But this film is the first film we have seen that feels like a Jean-Pierre Melville movie.
The Terrible Children was a work for hire. And the other two belong to a trilogy of films about the French Resistance during the War. We will see the other one, the third in the trilogy, soon.
Melville's bread and butter, his home turf, the world he inhabits, the stuff his dreams are made on, is the French version of the American crime drama. We will see four more of these kinds of films over the next few days.
They are gritty, taut, and full of tension and release.
Crime drama is genre filmmaking. It has a vocabulary. It has elements that recur. It is a great topic for the movies because the stakes are high and there is great conflict--conflict between the thieves and law enforcement, conflict between the thieves and each other, conflict between the thieves and their women, and inner conflict, within themselves.
These kinds of films never get old to the movie-going public. They sell tickets because they work.
What kinds of shows are always on television? Doctors, lawyers, and detectives. Often with the doctors and lawyers functioning as detectives. Who dunnit? Or, we know who dunnit; now, how will they get caught? Or, will they get caught?
Melville here is four years ahead of the New Wave, and eleven years ahead as a director.
When Truffaut and Godard burst onto the scene like a rocket, they owed everything to Melville. Whatever they did that was new, he did first.
In fact, Godard owes the launching of his legacy to Melville. When we get to the film Breathless (1960), we will discover Godard's innovative style that put him on the filmmaking map, making him an international star director. That style came about when a problem needed to be solved. The problem was solved for Godard by Melville.
Melville loved cinema. He loved everything about it. He watched a lot of movies. He knew the cinematographers of those movies. He understood the style of the directors. He understood the art of the craft.
Because of his love of movies, he was willing to make movies under difficult circumstances, with little money, filming here and there when he could, making choices that would work within his budget.
He took two years to make Bob Le Flambeur. He would save some money, call the cast and crew, and shoot for three days. Then he would go back to work finding money. The cast and crew were loyal to him--because he was loyal to them and because he was passionate about what he was doing. So they would make other movies in the traditional way and then give two or three days to him when he was filming. They stuck together until they were finished.
As a result, they made a classic.
There is nothing about Bob le Flambeur that belies that it was made this way. It seems like a movie with a budget.
Luc Sante in the liner notes notes that while Melville's methods paved the way for the New Wave, he remained at heart a classicist. Sante says, "Bob le Flambeur may be the most elegantly rigorous movie ever made about a cockeyed heist."
Years later in an interview, Melville would cite at least seven movies that he believed openly plagiarized his, including Ocean's 11, and he states that some even lifted exact lines of dialogue. When he first wrote the script of Bob le Flambeur, he put more detail into the heist itself. But before he could make the movie, John Huston came out with The Asphalt Jungle, which did the same thing. So Melville reduced the heist portion and brought out more of the relationships. This decision proved to benefit the film.
Bob is a gambler.
Years ago he tried to rob a bank but was caught and sent to jail. Since then he has laid low.
He once saved the life of a police officer, and now they are friends. The officer keeps tabs on him to make sure he does not get back into trouble.
Bob is a gentleman. A cultured man. A man of honor and principle.
He may be a hood, but he approaches life a certain way.
He lives in a painter's loft with a view of Montmartre in Paris.
He frequents certain restaurants and bars.
He is a man about town.
He hates pimps, and he protects prostitutes, trying to help them escape.
He becomes a father figure to a young man and a daddy figure to a young woman.
The young man loves the young woman. The young woman laughs at the young man. He is too sincere for her. She wants Bob. He is older, more mature, able to provide her with lifestyle she desires.
Bob cannot shake his vice.
He keeps a coin with him at all times, flipping it to make decisions.
He keeps a slot machine inside his own apartment, and drops a coin every time he enters, always in search of those three lemons, those three cherries.
In one day he will win big at the horse track and then lose it all at the card table.
This will lead to his being tempted to make just one more robbery, just one more play.
He assembles his team, pays a croupier for floor plans of the casino, installs a copy of the safe for his safecracker to practice on, lays out the entire floor plan of the casino in an open field so that the men can practice.
The big score will take place at Deauville.
Bob will be the lookout man. He will stand at the gaming tables and pretend to gamble.
He will decide whether to move forward or call it off.
But some people just cannot keep their mouths shut.
The young man, his protégé, so sincere in trying to win the young woman's heart, promises her the moon when he scores big.
The young woman, clueless in her confidence, relays the news to the pimp.
The pimp has already promised the police he will give them a lead in order to get himself out of a jam. Now a lead has fallen into his lap.
If that were not enough, the croupier tells his wife and she gets greedy. They will turn on Bob, turn him in, and keep the dough for themselves.
Greed sure does have a way of getting in the way of a big score.
With so many people talking to so many people, things just might not turn out the way they planned it.
And to top things off, Bob, will standing guard, pretending to gamble, will really gamble--after all he cannot help himself--and will have the biggest winning streak of his life.
He could call of the entire thing.
And walk away with the casinos money anyway.
Having earned it.
But will he see it in time?
Saturday, March 25, 2017
084 - Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children), 1950, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Saturday, March 25, 2017
084 - Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children), 1950, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Snowball fight!
The boys are throwing snowballs after school.
They look as though they are having a great time.
Until Dargalos hits Paul with a snowball in the face. It knocks him down and makes him bleed. Dargalos put a rock in it.
Dargalos is a beautiful boy. All the boys love him. The teachers love him. Paul loves him. He gets away with everything.
In fact, Paul was seeking him out, looking for him. When Dargalos hit him.
Gerard is Paul's friend. He loves Paul's sister. He loves Paul. He will take Paul home.
The teachers ask what happened. Gerard states that Dargalos put a rock inside the snowball. The teachers ask Dargalos if that is true. Dargalos smugly tells them to ask Paul.
Paul wakes up and defends Dargalos. He says it was just a snowball. Nothing more.
The teachers cannot see how a mere snowball could cause bleeding. But Paul has insisted. They let it go.
Why did Paul defend Dargalos? As it turns out, he will never see him again.
The snowball fight takes place at the school where Jean Cocteau really attended.
Remember Jean Cocteau?
We first met him when we watched Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et le Bette) (003, January 3)!
He directed Beauty and the Beast in 1946.
Before that, he wrote this novel, Les Enfants Terribles, in 1929. It featured a snowball fight.
Then he directed his first feature film, The Blood of a Poet, in 1930. It also featured a snowball fight. In fact, he invited an audience to come watch the filming of it.
Jean Cocteau was a fascinating person.
When it came time to make the film version of Les Enfants Terrible, instead of directing it himself, he hired the young director Jean-Pierre Melville.
Jean-Pierre Melville at this time had made only one movie, yesterday's The Silence of the Sea (1946).
Jean Cocteau was impressed with the young director, and since this film is about young people and even contains the word children in the title, he thought it would be good to have a young person direct it.
Jean-Pierre Melville apparently kept much of Jean Cocteau's imagery and style. As we get to know Melville, you will believe this, because this film does not seem like a Melville film at all.
Melville is best known for thrilling crime dramas. After that, he is known for his dramas of the French resistance.
One does not think of him as a director of staged family bedroom dramas.
But imagine the honor of being a young director and being asked by a beloved older director to direct for him.
Cocteau supplied both the screenplay and the voiceover narration for the film.
Gerard brings Paul home.
At home we meet Paul's sister, Elisabeth.
And we enter into a world of dysfunction.
A world without adults.
A world where brother and sister, led by older sister, allow their thoughts and words to go anywhere they will no matter how frivolous or foolish, manipulating each other, belittling each other, cohabiting codependently with each other, living lives without honor or purpose, until they eventually spiral downward to destruction.
It is a kind of Lord of the Flies of the bedroom.
The father is gone, an alcoholic who used to beat the mother. The mother is in another room, on her deathbed, almost completely absent from their lives.
Elisabeth complains that she has to wait on the mother hand and foot while the boys are out having a snowball fight. Then she complains that she will have to wait on Paul hand and foot.
Gerard seems to be an upstanding, emotionally healthy person.
But he attaches himself to the siblings and becomes a part of their dysfunctional world.
He begins to sleep in their room. Elisabeth sleeps in the bed on the left; Paul, in the bed on the right; Gerard, on a pallet on the floor.
The siblings indulge in something they call The Game. It is exclusive to the two of them. It enables them to shut out the rest of the world and enter into a psychological space for them alone. But it involves a series of jabbing insults and verbal abuses. It is not clear what benefit one would gain from this activity.
They also call it Getting Lost. Getting lost means playing their game. "I'm getting lost. I've gotten lost."
When one is playing the game, you do not disturb him.
Gerard and his uncle take the two on a vacation to the sea.
They have never been out before, so they put on airs. By trying to look sophisticated, they look foolish.
They act out on the train.
They shoplift at the beach and force Gerard, against his protests, to do it with them. When he comes out with a hairbrush, they make him do it again, as a brush is something useful. So they make him take a large watering can.
They fight at the hotel. They argue over who will take the bath and end up taking it together. This is not shown, and they are wearing clothes when the bathroom door is closed. After the door is closed, all one hears is shouting.
Back home they argue some more. Gerard overlooks it because he loves Elisabeth, and all he notices or remembers is that during the conversation Elisabeth refers to him as Dear.
The Mother dies.
Elisabeth needs a job. She gets a job as a live model for a department store. They teach her to walk with haughtiness and disdain. She does it naturally.
The supervisor says it is as though you have modeled your whole life.
Is this a compliment or an insult?
She is not talking about her beauty or form or technique. She is talking about her haughtiness and disdain.
Elisabeth meets a girl name Agathe and brings her home. She looks strikingly like Argalos. In fact, the actress who plays Agathe also played Argalos. And pulled it off.
Paul falls in love with Agathe at first sight.
Agathe sees a picture of Dargalos in their room and thinks it is herself. Paul is smitten by her
Elisabeth realizes all the pictures on his wall--boxers, American movie stars--look like Dargalos and Agathe.
Elisabeth moves Agathe into the Mother's empty bedroom.
Now there are four of them.
Elisabeth meets a rich man, or "a man with a car." Michael.
They get engaged.
Michael has the ability to change everything for them. And he does. He invites the whole gang to come hang out at his big house.
They come hang out.
He sings and plays the piano for her. In English. A clever song that may symbolize the whole film. On each refrain the singer says of his lover, "You were smiling at me," until the last refrain when the singer realizes, "You were smiling at him and laughing at me."
Michael is killed in a car crash on the road from Cannes to Nice.
Elisabeth inherits 18 rooms and a gallery. She calls herself a widow. She wears a veil.
The voiceover narrator tells us that that is why she married Michael. Not for his money but for his death.
To be a widow.
Not that she knew or had anything to do with it, but that her personality somehow intuited it ahead of time.
The four of them end up in the house together.
And the downward spiral escalates. Until the final, logical conclusion.
You may read this write-up and wonder why. What is the point?
This may not be your idea of a good time on a Friday night with a cup of Coke and a tub of popcorn.
It may be one of the least entertaining films we have seen so far this year, as far as entertaining goes.
It certainly made less money than La Silence de la Mer did before it.
But it appeals to a different kind of taste, and it has had a lasting influence on other filmmakers.
Films may be made with different goals.
Sometimes a filmmaker is working out a technique.
Sometimes a filmmaker is conducting a character study.
Sometimes a filmmaker is just telling a story, and this is the story he has.
Sometimes a filmmaker is trying to tell the truth.
Art holds up a mirror to nature.
Does something occur naturally in nature?
If it occurs naturally in nature and art holds up a mirror to it, then the mirror reasonably will capture it and reflect it back.
This is the human condition.
084 - Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children), 1950, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Snowball fight!
The boys are throwing snowballs after school.
They look as though they are having a great time.
Until Dargalos hits Paul with a snowball in the face. It knocks him down and makes him bleed. Dargalos put a rock in it.
Dargalos is a beautiful boy. All the boys love him. The teachers love him. Paul loves him. He gets away with everything.
In fact, Paul was seeking him out, looking for him. When Dargalos hit him.
Gerard is Paul's friend. He loves Paul's sister. He loves Paul. He will take Paul home.
The teachers ask what happened. Gerard states that Dargalos put a rock inside the snowball. The teachers ask Dargalos if that is true. Dargalos smugly tells them to ask Paul.
Paul wakes up and defends Dargalos. He says it was just a snowball. Nothing more.
The teachers cannot see how a mere snowball could cause bleeding. But Paul has insisted. They let it go.
Why did Paul defend Dargalos? As it turns out, he will never see him again.
The snowball fight takes place at the school where Jean Cocteau really attended.
Remember Jean Cocteau?
We first met him when we watched Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et le Bette) (003, January 3)!
He directed Beauty and the Beast in 1946.
Before that, he wrote this novel, Les Enfants Terribles, in 1929. It featured a snowball fight.
Then he directed his first feature film, The Blood of a Poet, in 1930. It also featured a snowball fight. In fact, he invited an audience to come watch the filming of it.
Jean Cocteau was a fascinating person.
When it came time to make the film version of Les Enfants Terrible, instead of directing it himself, he hired the young director Jean-Pierre Melville.
Jean-Pierre Melville at this time had made only one movie, yesterday's The Silence of the Sea (1946).
Jean Cocteau was impressed with the young director, and since this film is about young people and even contains the word children in the title, he thought it would be good to have a young person direct it.
Jean-Pierre Melville apparently kept much of Jean Cocteau's imagery and style. As we get to know Melville, you will believe this, because this film does not seem like a Melville film at all.
Melville is best known for thrilling crime dramas. After that, he is known for his dramas of the French resistance.
One does not think of him as a director of staged family bedroom dramas.
But imagine the honor of being a young director and being asked by a beloved older director to direct for him.
Cocteau supplied both the screenplay and the voiceover narration for the film.
Gerard brings Paul home.
At home we meet Paul's sister, Elisabeth.
And we enter into a world of dysfunction.
A world without adults.
A world where brother and sister, led by older sister, allow their thoughts and words to go anywhere they will no matter how frivolous or foolish, manipulating each other, belittling each other, cohabiting codependently with each other, living lives without honor or purpose, until they eventually spiral downward to destruction.
It is a kind of Lord of the Flies of the bedroom.
The father is gone, an alcoholic who used to beat the mother. The mother is in another room, on her deathbed, almost completely absent from their lives.
Elisabeth complains that she has to wait on the mother hand and foot while the boys are out having a snowball fight. Then she complains that she will have to wait on Paul hand and foot.
Gerard seems to be an upstanding, emotionally healthy person.
But he attaches himself to the siblings and becomes a part of their dysfunctional world.
He begins to sleep in their room. Elisabeth sleeps in the bed on the left; Paul, in the bed on the right; Gerard, on a pallet on the floor.
The siblings indulge in something they call The Game. It is exclusive to the two of them. It enables them to shut out the rest of the world and enter into a psychological space for them alone. But it involves a series of jabbing insults and verbal abuses. It is not clear what benefit one would gain from this activity.
They also call it Getting Lost. Getting lost means playing their game. "I'm getting lost. I've gotten lost."
When one is playing the game, you do not disturb him.
Gerard and his uncle take the two on a vacation to the sea.
They have never been out before, so they put on airs. By trying to look sophisticated, they look foolish.
They act out on the train.
They shoplift at the beach and force Gerard, against his protests, to do it with them. When he comes out with a hairbrush, they make him do it again, as a brush is something useful. So they make him take a large watering can.
They fight at the hotel. They argue over who will take the bath and end up taking it together. This is not shown, and they are wearing clothes when the bathroom door is closed. After the door is closed, all one hears is shouting.
Back home they argue some more. Gerard overlooks it because he loves Elisabeth, and all he notices or remembers is that during the conversation Elisabeth refers to him as Dear.
The Mother dies.
Elisabeth needs a job. She gets a job as a live model for a department store. They teach her to walk with haughtiness and disdain. She does it naturally.
The supervisor says it is as though you have modeled your whole life.
Is this a compliment or an insult?
She is not talking about her beauty or form or technique. She is talking about her haughtiness and disdain.
Elisabeth meets a girl name Agathe and brings her home. She looks strikingly like Argalos. In fact, the actress who plays Agathe also played Argalos. And pulled it off.
Paul falls in love with Agathe at first sight.
Agathe sees a picture of Dargalos in their room and thinks it is herself. Paul is smitten by her
Elisabeth realizes all the pictures on his wall--boxers, American movie stars--look like Dargalos and Agathe.
Elisabeth moves Agathe into the Mother's empty bedroom.
Now there are four of them.
Elisabeth meets a rich man, or "a man with a car." Michael.
They get engaged.
Michael has the ability to change everything for them. And he does. He invites the whole gang to come hang out at his big house.
They come hang out.
He sings and plays the piano for her. In English. A clever song that may symbolize the whole film. On each refrain the singer says of his lover, "You were smiling at me," until the last refrain when the singer realizes, "You were smiling at him and laughing at me."
Michael is killed in a car crash on the road from Cannes to Nice.
Elisabeth inherits 18 rooms and a gallery. She calls herself a widow. She wears a veil.
The voiceover narrator tells us that that is why she married Michael. Not for his money but for his death.
To be a widow.
Not that she knew or had anything to do with it, but that her personality somehow intuited it ahead of time.
The four of them end up in the house together.
And the downward spiral escalates. Until the final, logical conclusion.
You may read this write-up and wonder why. What is the point?
This may not be your idea of a good time on a Friday night with a cup of Coke and a tub of popcorn.
It may be one of the least entertaining films we have seen so far this year, as far as entertaining goes.
It certainly made less money than La Silence de la Mer did before it.
But it appeals to a different kind of taste, and it has had a lasting influence on other filmmakers.
Films may be made with different goals.
Sometimes a filmmaker is working out a technique.
Sometimes a filmmaker is conducting a character study.
Sometimes a filmmaker is just telling a story, and this is the story he has.
Sometimes a filmmaker is trying to tell the truth.
Art holds up a mirror to nature.
Does something occur naturally in nature?
If it occurs naturally in nature and art holds up a mirror to it, then the mirror reasonably will capture it and reflect it back.
This is the human condition.
Friday, March 24, 2017
083 - The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer), 1949, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Friday, March 24, 2017
083 - The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer), 1949, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
The United States Constitution contains the Bill of Rights, which comprises the first ten Amendments.
Amendment III states that no soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in manner to be prescribed by law.
James Madison, its author, may have had in mind the Quartering Act of 1765. It was passed by the British Parliament, when the United States were still British colonies, and stated that the local colonies were to provide British soldiers with accommodations, or quarters, and that the colonists were to provide British soldiers with food.
The Quartering of Soldiers.
Some of us cannot comprehend such a thing. We have never been placed in a position where we have had soldiers--foreign soldiers!--live in our homes. We are blessed.
France has been in such a situation.
In 1942, during the German occupation of France, a writer named Jean Bruller published an underground novel under the pen name Vercours. The events take place in 1941, and feature the quartering of a German soldier in the home of an Uncle and his Niece.
In 1949, Jean-Pierre Melville would release it as a film, his first film, and launch his career as one of France's great movie directors.
Imagine a soldier fighting for your country's enemy living in your house.
For months.
It is a difficult and tedious situation. For the Uncle and Niece, it is like a prison.
Yet if one must endure such a situation, one could not find a more delightful and considerate guest than the one who billets in this film.
Our soldier, Werner Von Ebrennac, is a delightful man, educated and idealistic. He is a composer in real life, a lover of culture, warm-hearted and magnanimous.
He spends evenings in the living room of the Uncle and the Niece, delivering monologues of cultural desire while warming himself by the fire.
We are watching the film 70 years after the War is over while sitting on the other side of the world, safely in our own homes.
Von Ebrennac's musings are infectious and inspiring. We want to get caught up in them. Not in his vision of marrying Germany and France through war, but his appreciation for French culture. His love of language and the arts. His desire for beauty.
The film begins with a voice-over by the Uncle. He explains the arrival first of German soldiers to his home and how he and his Niece handle it. Then comes the one soldier who ends up staying.
The Uncle sits in his chair by the fire and drinks his coffee and smokes his pipe, while the Niece sits in the opposing chair and sews.
Someone knocks on the door. The Niece answers it.
A handsome man enters, politely bows, introduces himself--my name is Werner Von Ebrennac--and apologizes.
He will be living with them.
They sit in silence.
We, through the camera, look down at them. We look up at him.
We will spend the film looking through different angles, Dutch angles, even from the point of view of inside the fireplace, looking up and out through the flames.
Symbolizing the power differential in the room.
Yet he shows deference. "I have great respect for those that love their country."
He wants to go to his room but he does not know the way.
The Niece shows him the way.
Von Ebrennac is polite, courteous, social, and engaged. He seems prepared to be a good guest.
The Uncle and Niece do their best to ignore him. They behave in their own way as members of the Resistance.
They resist through silence.
The Uncle tells us in voiceover:
"By unspoken agreement, my niece and I decided to change nothing in our lives, not the slightest detail, as if the officer didn't exist. As if he were a ghost."
The officer will get used to the silent treatment. He will do all of the talking for them.
When he returns to the house from his duties one day, he enters through the back door so that they will not see his damp and dirty uniform. He changes clothes before appearing in the living room to warm himself by the fire. He wants to look his best for them.
He compliments French winters, French forests, French literature.
"I've always loved France."
He talks of his father, a great patriot, who believed in the Weimar Republic, and of Briand, who would have united the countries but who was defeated.
He calls himself a musician, not a performer but a composer, and how strange now to see himself as a soldier. Yet he believes in the War, believes in it because he does not understand it, does not understand what Hitler is doing. He believes France and Germany will be united.
He looks at the books on the Uncle's shelf.
Balzac, Baudelaire, Corneille, Descartes, Fenelon, Gautier, Hugo, Moliere, Racine, Rabelais, Pascal, Stendhal, Voltaire, Montaigne.
(Funny that he cites Montaigne out of order.)
Later he will mention Peguy, Proust, and Bergson.
He stands with his arm caressing a large globe. I keep waiting for him to fall forward as Inspector Clousseau does in The Pink Panther.
After listing so many great writers from France, he can list only one from other countries.
For England, Shakespeare.
For Italy, Dante.
For Spain, Cervantes.
For Germany, Goethe.
But for France, who comes to mind? There are so many.
"Names jostle like crowds outside a theater, each trying to enter first."
What a great point! Standing in his double-breasted wool suit, now by the organ, he seems so pleasant.
He draws us in.
Like sitting on a comfy couch by the fire with one's favorite professor discussing great ideas. Nursing wine and eating sweetbreads.
A book club. A salon.
He continues.
France dominates literature because it has so many great authors.
But for music, it is Germany.
Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart.
He longs for something grand and beautiful to happen. This will be the last war. We will never fight again. We will marry.
Good luck with that, sir.
One day the Niece walks her dog down the road in the snow. She passes the soldier, Von Ebrennac. He is dressed in uniform. He looks at her formally, officially. He salutes her respectfully, bending forward slightly, tilting courteously. He never says a word.
He never mentions it back at the house. He never mentions it at all.
One night the soldier tells the story of Beauty and the Beast.
Fairy tales come from different countries. Charles Perrault was French. Hans Christian Anderson was Danish.
But a great many fairy tales are German. From the Black Forest. The Brothers Grimm.
Yet Von Ebrennac chooses Beauty and the Beast. Beauty and the Beast is French. Written by a Frenchwoman. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve.
He seeks to honor his French hosts.
He compares his hosts, the Uncle and the Niece, to Beauty. Beauty is refined, delicate, cultured, genteel.
He compares himself to the Beast. The Beast is boorish, awkward, clumsy, a brute. But inside, the Beast longs for elevation, aspires to greatness, wishes that Beauty would love him.
If he could just get Beauty to see his soul, she would see what a great soul he is.
One night the soldier praises Chartres Cathedral.
And our director, Jean-Pierre Melville, whip pans the camera from the soldier's face, across the room, to an exterior long shot of Chartres Cathedral. In the distance through the tall grass.
Then he pans again and tilts up to a muzzle. And slowly moves down the barrel. Past the mantlet. To the turret of a tank. A German soldier stands in the open hatch. He looks through his field glasses. He fires. Fires upon Chartres Cathedral.
Dispelling our drunken dream.
Juxtaposing our soldier's innocent vision with the reality of the war.
No, we are not having a salon. We are not on a comfy couch listening to our favorite professor. Nursing wine and eating sweetbreads. People are dying.
One day the soldier announces to the Uncle and the Niece that he will be visiting Paris. Earlier he listed the great European countries he has visited. Paris was not in the list. This will be his first time. He has waited a long time. He is happy.
The soldier imagines himself seeing the great culture of Paris.
Instead, we see him visiting the monuments--the Arch of Triumph, the statue of Joan of Arc--reading the inscriptions, discovering that Paris's culture celebrates her freedom. That the monuments tell the story of her resistance to interlopers, her defiance of tyranny, her instructions to intruders to get out.
It begins to dawn on him.
When the soldier returns, he returns quietly and stays in the house for nearly a week before showing himself to his hosts. They do not even hear him. They simply sense his presence.
One day the Uncle will go into town, and he will have his own encounter with the soldier, in uniform, at work. The soldier comes out of an office, speaks to a worker, catches a glimpse of the Uncle in a mirror. He stares at him, caught off guard, hesitating, unsure. The moment is awkward. He nods. He quietly returns to the office and closes the door.
The Uncle says nothing about it, but the Niece knows it happened. "Women's instincts are sharper than a tiger's." Somehow this bothers her and she asks permission to retire to bed early. "And her beautiful gray eyes seemed heavy with reproach and full of sadness."
Werner Von Ebrennac will be completely disabused of his notions, of his idealism, of his Romantic dream.
One day at the office his superior officer will discuss the efficiency of gas chambers. Currently they are able to execute only 500 people per day. With improved design they will be able to execute 2,000 people per day. It all comes down to good engineering.
Von Ebrennac will have an argument with his fellow officers.
They are here to destroy France and not to marry her. To crush her spirit. To remove her culture. To wipe out the memory of her forever.
He is devastated.
For the first time since the first time he enters the living room in uniform. He tells the Uncle and the Niece to forget everything he has said. It is all gone. Gone forever.
He has requested to be sent to the front, to hell. He is disillusioned and given up.
The Niece speaks for the first time. "Farewell."
The Uncle tells us in voiceover that Von Ebrennac saw what was underneath her word.
They have grown, if not to love him, at least to admire him. They will miss him.
When leaving his room, he picks up a book and sees this sentence.
"It is a noble thing for a soldier to disobey a criminal order."
We do not know what happens to him, if he goes to the front or what he does there. Perhaps he will carry this idea with him.
Jean-Pierre Melville himself was Jewish. And he fought for the French resistance. And suffered for it.
This film was personal for him.
083 - The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer), 1949, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
The United States Constitution contains the Bill of Rights, which comprises the first ten Amendments.
Amendment III states that no soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in manner to be prescribed by law.
James Madison, its author, may have had in mind the Quartering Act of 1765. It was passed by the British Parliament, when the United States were still British colonies, and stated that the local colonies were to provide British soldiers with accommodations, or quarters, and that the colonists were to provide British soldiers with food.
The Quartering of Soldiers.
Some of us cannot comprehend such a thing. We have never been placed in a position where we have had soldiers--foreign soldiers!--live in our homes. We are blessed.
France has been in such a situation.
In 1942, during the German occupation of France, a writer named Jean Bruller published an underground novel under the pen name Vercours. The events take place in 1941, and feature the quartering of a German soldier in the home of an Uncle and his Niece.
In 1949, Jean-Pierre Melville would release it as a film, his first film, and launch his career as one of France's great movie directors.
Imagine a soldier fighting for your country's enemy living in your house.
For months.
It is a difficult and tedious situation. For the Uncle and Niece, it is like a prison.
Yet if one must endure such a situation, one could not find a more delightful and considerate guest than the one who billets in this film.
Our soldier, Werner Von Ebrennac, is a delightful man, educated and idealistic. He is a composer in real life, a lover of culture, warm-hearted and magnanimous.
He spends evenings in the living room of the Uncle and the Niece, delivering monologues of cultural desire while warming himself by the fire.
We are watching the film 70 years after the War is over while sitting on the other side of the world, safely in our own homes.
Von Ebrennac's musings are infectious and inspiring. We want to get caught up in them. Not in his vision of marrying Germany and France through war, but his appreciation for French culture. His love of language and the arts. His desire for beauty.
The film begins with a voice-over by the Uncle. He explains the arrival first of German soldiers to his home and how he and his Niece handle it. Then comes the one soldier who ends up staying.
The Uncle sits in his chair by the fire and drinks his coffee and smokes his pipe, while the Niece sits in the opposing chair and sews.
Someone knocks on the door. The Niece answers it.
A handsome man enters, politely bows, introduces himself--my name is Werner Von Ebrennac--and apologizes.
He will be living with them.
They sit in silence.
We, through the camera, look down at them. We look up at him.
We will spend the film looking through different angles, Dutch angles, even from the point of view of inside the fireplace, looking up and out through the flames.
Symbolizing the power differential in the room.
Yet he shows deference. "I have great respect for those that love their country."
He wants to go to his room but he does not know the way.
The Niece shows him the way.
Von Ebrennac is polite, courteous, social, and engaged. He seems prepared to be a good guest.
The Uncle and Niece do their best to ignore him. They behave in their own way as members of the Resistance.
They resist through silence.
The Uncle tells us in voiceover:
"By unspoken agreement, my niece and I decided to change nothing in our lives, not the slightest detail, as if the officer didn't exist. As if he were a ghost."
The officer will get used to the silent treatment. He will do all of the talking for them.
When he returns to the house from his duties one day, he enters through the back door so that they will not see his damp and dirty uniform. He changes clothes before appearing in the living room to warm himself by the fire. He wants to look his best for them.
He compliments French winters, French forests, French literature.
"I've always loved France."
He talks of his father, a great patriot, who believed in the Weimar Republic, and of Briand, who would have united the countries but who was defeated.
He calls himself a musician, not a performer but a composer, and how strange now to see himself as a soldier. Yet he believes in the War, believes in it because he does not understand it, does not understand what Hitler is doing. He believes France and Germany will be united.
He looks at the books on the Uncle's shelf.
Balzac, Baudelaire, Corneille, Descartes, Fenelon, Gautier, Hugo, Moliere, Racine, Rabelais, Pascal, Stendhal, Voltaire, Montaigne.
(Funny that he cites Montaigne out of order.)
Later he will mention Peguy, Proust, and Bergson.
He stands with his arm caressing a large globe. I keep waiting for him to fall forward as Inspector Clousseau does in The Pink Panther.
After listing so many great writers from France, he can list only one from other countries.
For England, Shakespeare.
For Italy, Dante.
For Spain, Cervantes.
For Germany, Goethe.
But for France, who comes to mind? There are so many.
"Names jostle like crowds outside a theater, each trying to enter first."
What a great point! Standing in his double-breasted wool suit, now by the organ, he seems so pleasant.
He draws us in.
Like sitting on a comfy couch by the fire with one's favorite professor discussing great ideas. Nursing wine and eating sweetbreads.
A book club. A salon.
He continues.
France dominates literature because it has so many great authors.
But for music, it is Germany.
Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart.
He longs for something grand and beautiful to happen. This will be the last war. We will never fight again. We will marry.
Good luck with that, sir.
One day the Niece walks her dog down the road in the snow. She passes the soldier, Von Ebrennac. He is dressed in uniform. He looks at her formally, officially. He salutes her respectfully, bending forward slightly, tilting courteously. He never says a word.
He never mentions it back at the house. He never mentions it at all.
One night the soldier tells the story of Beauty and the Beast.
Fairy tales come from different countries. Charles Perrault was French. Hans Christian Anderson was Danish.
But a great many fairy tales are German. From the Black Forest. The Brothers Grimm.
Yet Von Ebrennac chooses Beauty and the Beast. Beauty and the Beast is French. Written by a Frenchwoman. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve.
He seeks to honor his French hosts.
He compares his hosts, the Uncle and the Niece, to Beauty. Beauty is refined, delicate, cultured, genteel.
He compares himself to the Beast. The Beast is boorish, awkward, clumsy, a brute. But inside, the Beast longs for elevation, aspires to greatness, wishes that Beauty would love him.
If he could just get Beauty to see his soul, she would see what a great soul he is.
One night the soldier praises Chartres Cathedral.
And our director, Jean-Pierre Melville, whip pans the camera from the soldier's face, across the room, to an exterior long shot of Chartres Cathedral. In the distance through the tall grass.
Then he pans again and tilts up to a muzzle. And slowly moves down the barrel. Past the mantlet. To the turret of a tank. A German soldier stands in the open hatch. He looks through his field glasses. He fires. Fires upon Chartres Cathedral.
Dispelling our drunken dream.
Juxtaposing our soldier's innocent vision with the reality of the war.
No, we are not having a salon. We are not on a comfy couch listening to our favorite professor. Nursing wine and eating sweetbreads. People are dying.
One day the soldier announces to the Uncle and the Niece that he will be visiting Paris. Earlier he listed the great European countries he has visited. Paris was not in the list. This will be his first time. He has waited a long time. He is happy.
The soldier imagines himself seeing the great culture of Paris.
Instead, we see him visiting the monuments--the Arch of Triumph, the statue of Joan of Arc--reading the inscriptions, discovering that Paris's culture celebrates her freedom. That the monuments tell the story of her resistance to interlopers, her defiance of tyranny, her instructions to intruders to get out.
It begins to dawn on him.
When the soldier returns, he returns quietly and stays in the house for nearly a week before showing himself to his hosts. They do not even hear him. They simply sense his presence.
One day the Uncle will go into town, and he will have his own encounter with the soldier, in uniform, at work. The soldier comes out of an office, speaks to a worker, catches a glimpse of the Uncle in a mirror. He stares at him, caught off guard, hesitating, unsure. The moment is awkward. He nods. He quietly returns to the office and closes the door.
The Uncle says nothing about it, but the Niece knows it happened. "Women's instincts are sharper than a tiger's." Somehow this bothers her and she asks permission to retire to bed early. "And her beautiful gray eyes seemed heavy with reproach and full of sadness."
Werner Von Ebrennac will be completely disabused of his notions, of his idealism, of his Romantic dream.
One day at the office his superior officer will discuss the efficiency of gas chambers. Currently they are able to execute only 500 people per day. With improved design they will be able to execute 2,000 people per day. It all comes down to good engineering.
Von Ebrennac will have an argument with his fellow officers.
They are here to destroy France and not to marry her. To crush her spirit. To remove her culture. To wipe out the memory of her forever.
He is devastated.
For the first time since the first time he enters the living room in uniform. He tells the Uncle and the Niece to forget everything he has said. It is all gone. Gone forever.
He has requested to be sent to the front, to hell. He is disillusioned and given up.
The Niece speaks for the first time. "Farewell."
The Uncle tells us in voiceover that Von Ebrennac saw what was underneath her word.
They have grown, if not to love him, at least to admire him. They will miss him.
When leaving his room, he picks up a book and sees this sentence.
"It is a noble thing for a soldier to disobey a criminal order."
We do not know what happens to him, if he goes to the front or what he does there. Perhaps he will carry this idea with him.
Jean-Pierre Melville himself was Jewish. And he fought for the French resistance. And suffered for it.
This film was personal for him.
Thursday, March 23, 2017
082 - Mouchette, 1967, France. Dir. Robert Bresson.
Thursday, March 23, 2017
082 - Mouchette, 1967, France. Dir. Robert Bresson.
Mouchette is a pretty girl. She has ribbons in her hair. She sings with a pretty voice, when she sings. She helps her sick mother, takes care of her baby brother, cleans, and does the dishes. She is intelligent and insightful. She has something to offer.
But Mouchette is an outcast.
Her father is an alcoholic.
He never seems to be around except just when something good is about to happen to her. He shows up and pushes her. Scolds her. Makes her feel small.
The town talks about her.
Her classmates avoid her.
In their defense, she positions herself in a low place off the school road. When the other girls sit and eat, talk, pull out perfume, she throws dirt clods at them, hits them in the back, in the hands, in the chest, in the face.
She is not doing herself any favors here.
She is responsible here for her own behavior.
But we care about her. We want someone to show her kindness.
She stands in class with the others and does not sing. The teacher yanks her to the front of the classroom, holds her head down to the piano, hits the notes.
What is wrong with you?
Why will you not sing?
Sing!
Mouchette begins to sing but she hits a note flatly.
The teacher is annoyed. Mouchette tries again. The teacher hits the key hard. Pound, pound, pound. This is the note. Why can you not hit it?
What is wrong with you?
Mouchette goes to the amusement park, the county fair. She rides the bumper cars. A boy hits her with his car. He smiles at her. She smiles back. She hits him back. Hitting on by hitting. Flirting by bumping.
When the ride is over they walk out. She goes to him, stands by him, smiles at him.
He smiles at her and is about to say something. She smiles at him and is about to say something.
And in this moment Mouchette has hope. And we have hope for her.
But her father arrives and smacks her. Pushes her. Calls her a name. Drags her away.
The song they were singing in school began with the line, "Hope is dead."
She will never see this boy again.
Robert Bresson shows us difficulty, hardship. With yesterdays movie, Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) (081, March 22), and today's, he focuses on suffering.
And he does it in such a way that the viewer is willing to go along with him. He does not indulge in sentimentality. He tells the story.
There are few things more dishonest than playing the victim. Pointing the finger. Refusing to take personal responsibility. Claiming everything bad in your life is someone else's fault.
And some film directors attempt to manipulate their audiences with that point of view. Playing with the public. Toying with its heart. Cloying.
Bresson states the facts.
Arsene the poacher sets traps for wild game. Mathieu the gamekeeper watches him from behind the trees. Arsene catches a wild bird in his trap. The bird is caught. There is nothing the bird can do.
Mouchette lives in a world of traps. She tries to make her way. She gets caught, trapped, ensnared. There is nothing Mouchette can do.
Louisa the barmaid serves Arsene the poacher. She serves Mathieu the gamekeeper. Each man orders a drink from her. Each man has a crush on her. (Strangely, this story line with Louisa has little to do with the rest of the film and will simply disappear. Why is it in here? Because it was in the novel? Bresson seems to fumble with it.)
Mouchette's father and brother arrive at the bar with bootleg liquor. The police stop and look. The men cover the liquor with a blanket. The police do not seem to care. The police move on.
One day Mouchette gets lost in the woods in a rainstorm. She stumbles upon Arsene the poacher. She sees Mathieu the gamekeeper confront him. She witnesses their fight. Arsene sees her. Takes her to his hovel. Tells her a story to tell. Asks for her alibi. He takes her to a closed bar. He takes her.
It is all downhill from here.
082 - Mouchette, 1967, France. Dir. Robert Bresson.
Mouchette is a pretty girl. She has ribbons in her hair. She sings with a pretty voice, when she sings. She helps her sick mother, takes care of her baby brother, cleans, and does the dishes. She is intelligent and insightful. She has something to offer.
But Mouchette is an outcast.
Her father is an alcoholic.
He never seems to be around except just when something good is about to happen to her. He shows up and pushes her. Scolds her. Makes her feel small.
The town talks about her.
Her classmates avoid her.
In their defense, she positions herself in a low place off the school road. When the other girls sit and eat, talk, pull out perfume, she throws dirt clods at them, hits them in the back, in the hands, in the chest, in the face.
She is not doing herself any favors here.
She is responsible here for her own behavior.
But we care about her. We want someone to show her kindness.
She stands in class with the others and does not sing. The teacher yanks her to the front of the classroom, holds her head down to the piano, hits the notes.
What is wrong with you?
Why will you not sing?
Sing!
Mouchette begins to sing but she hits a note flatly.
The teacher is annoyed. Mouchette tries again. The teacher hits the key hard. Pound, pound, pound. This is the note. Why can you not hit it?
What is wrong with you?
Mouchette goes to the amusement park, the county fair. She rides the bumper cars. A boy hits her with his car. He smiles at her. She smiles back. She hits him back. Hitting on by hitting. Flirting by bumping.
When the ride is over they walk out. She goes to him, stands by him, smiles at him.
He smiles at her and is about to say something. She smiles at him and is about to say something.
And in this moment Mouchette has hope. And we have hope for her.
But her father arrives and smacks her. Pushes her. Calls her a name. Drags her away.
The song they were singing in school began with the line, "Hope is dead."
She will never see this boy again.
Robert Bresson shows us difficulty, hardship. With yesterdays movie, Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) (081, March 22), and today's, he focuses on suffering.
And he does it in such a way that the viewer is willing to go along with him. He does not indulge in sentimentality. He tells the story.
There are few things more dishonest than playing the victim. Pointing the finger. Refusing to take personal responsibility. Claiming everything bad in your life is someone else's fault.
And some film directors attempt to manipulate their audiences with that point of view. Playing with the public. Toying with its heart. Cloying.
Bresson states the facts.
Arsene the poacher sets traps for wild game. Mathieu the gamekeeper watches him from behind the trees. Arsene catches a wild bird in his trap. The bird is caught. There is nothing the bird can do.
Mouchette lives in a world of traps. She tries to make her way. She gets caught, trapped, ensnared. There is nothing Mouchette can do.
Louisa the barmaid serves Arsene the poacher. She serves Mathieu the gamekeeper. Each man orders a drink from her. Each man has a crush on her. (Strangely, this story line with Louisa has little to do with the rest of the film and will simply disappear. Why is it in here? Because it was in the novel? Bresson seems to fumble with it.)
Mouchette's father and brother arrive at the bar with bootleg liquor. The police stop and look. The men cover the liquor with a blanket. The police do not seem to care. The police move on.
One day Mouchette gets lost in the woods in a rainstorm. She stumbles upon Arsene the poacher. She sees Mathieu the gamekeeper confront him. She witnesses their fight. Arsene sees her. Takes her to his hovel. Tells her a story to tell. Asks for her alibi. He takes her to a closed bar. He takes her.
It is all downhill from here.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
081 - Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966, France. Dir. Robert Bresson.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
081 - Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966, France. Dir. Robert Bresson.
Balthazar, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Amen.
The priest pours the water over Balthazar's head. It runs down his face. Down his beard.
Like the precious oil poured on the head, running down the beard, running down on Aaron's beard, down on the collar of his robe.
Marie! Marie!
The priest calls to the virgin.
Her father walks with her. She comes.
The priest gives the virgin a candle.
Lit.
She holds it.
Receive the salt of wisdom.
The priest takes a pinch of salt. He brings it to the mouth of the supplicant.
Salt both flavors and preserves. It is given to guests as a mark of friendship and hospitality. It symbolizes the binding of the contract.
The covenant.
You are the salt of the earth.
Be opened. For a savor of sweetness.
The priest is a boy around 10 years old.
The virgin is a girl around 8 or 9.
The supplicant, Balthazar, named after the magi, after the legendary name of one of the three wise men (Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar), is not a person.
Balthazar is a donkey.
A donkey.
If you are not already familiar with this film, then you may be discovering for the first time something unique in cinema. Something that stands alone.
A film about a donkey. Whose life runs in parallel with a girl.
Which follows the stations of the cross.
Robert Bresson was raised Catholic. I do not know, nor would I speculate, his status during the making of this movie. Perhaps somewhere on a continuum between devout and agnostic.
He may be like James Joyce, whose Jesuit upbringing gave him the education and tools necessary to create his secular masterpieces.
Regardless of Bresson's personal beliefs at this stage in his life, the film is available to people in a wide range of theological points of view.
On one level, Au Hasard Balthazar demands a lot of its viewers.
On another level, it does not.
You may conceivably watch this movie the way you watch a movie about the life of a girl or about the life of an animal. Say, a Lassie or a Benji movie.
Only with more suffering and tragedy.
At least, you may follow the story line and empathize with the protagonists, joining them on their emotional journey, without having to decode the complex symbolism contained in the film.
Jacques and Marie are children. Marie's father works for Jacques's father.
Jacques's father owns the land. Marie's father farms the land.
The children get a baby donkey. They name him Balthazar. They christen him. Baptize him. Love him.
They play with him in the barn. Life is good.
Jacques loves Marie. His love is innocent and pure. He carves their names in a heart on a bench. He tells her one day he will marry her.
He means it.
But Jacques has a sister who is sick. She dies. Their father is heartbroken. He moves.
Jacques's father leaves a note for Marie's father. I am heartbroken and have to move away. You run the farm, using modern methods as you have desired to do, and do not bother to send me the accounts. I trust you.
Jacques is taken away from Marie.
Marie will love the donkey.
Marie's father proves trustworthy. He works the land. He is honest with the accounts.
But people talk and rumors fly and someone writes to Jacques's father, accusing Marie's father of dishonesty.
Jacques's father will question Marie's father. Marie's father will refuse to defend himself. He is stubborn. He is proud. He is insulted that he would be doubted.
When Jacques returns a few years later he tells her he still loves her. She has not seen him in awhile, so she does not know for sure. She is honest with him. She does not wish to lie. This hurts him.
He goes to her father, perhaps to get work, perhaps to state his intentions. We do not see the exchange. But her father is resolute in his offense and rejects Jacques's requests.
Jacques drives away, again taken from Marie.
Meanwhile, Marie lives in the village with some bad hombres in it.
Including Gerard. One of the cruelest, most sadistic people ever put on screen.
He oils the streets so that he can watch cars lose control and crash.
He ties a rag to Balthazar's tail and sets it on fire to watch the donkey suffer. He kicks the donkey. Beats it.
He punches a drunk man, Arnold, in the face. Beats him. Plants a gun in his house just before the police arrive, hoping that Arnold will be caught with the gun. Or that he will even shoot and kill the police. And get arrested.
He destroys a bar at a party, throwing all the expensive liquor bottles to the floor. He makes someone else pay for it.
He steals from his own mother.
And he, let us say, moves upon Marie with great aggression.
It is hard to say exactly what these French filmmakers of this period intend to suggest. They are of a time where things are implied rather than shown, so we do not see it, and they seem to be of an opinion that a good bit of aggression is sometimes welcome.
I think in our day we would say he rapes Marie. But in the time of the movie they might have said he just keeps at it until she finally gives in. I do not know.
But he is a person of such low moral character that one could easily assume the worst of him.
And we do know that later in the movie he and his gang will strip her, beat her, and lock her in a room, while running away, throwing her clothes to the wind, and celebrating.
He is a reprehensible character.
Whatever the case at this moment, Marie gives in. And she gets used to it. And her heart gets intertwined with him as girls' hearts can do. She gets confused. She believes she loves him. She tells her mother she will go with him anywhere and do anything for him. He continues to be cruel to her. And to Balthazar.
OK, forget Lassie and Benji. You cannot watch this movie on that level. Only parts of it. Only the parts where you see a donkey and your heart connects to his.
Balthazar will go through the hands of several owners. No one will love them like Marie. They will use him. From the poor man to the rich man. To the circus man. And he will remain steadfast. Always loyal. Always faithful. Always serving. Despite the abuse.
Jacques returns a third time. Now they are older. Adults. He still loves her. He still intends to marry her. She thinks about it.
She decides he is too earnest, too sincere. He bores her. He does not provide the excitement that the bad boy gives her. So she will return to Gerard. She has a date with him. She cannot be late for it.
What is wrong with people?
Why can they not see love when it is standing right in front of their faces?
Why do they settle for abuse and heartache?
We live in a town full of engineers. Middle-aged men with big bellies and receding hairlines. Dull. Nerdy. Boring.
And faithful to the end.
My wife tells younger women those are the kinds of men you want. Steadfast. Loving. Loyal.
But they are just not exciting enough. Why be loved when you can have the thrill of a player?
And get your heart broken over and over?
And lose your self-esteem?
And feel like dirt?
Marie keeps her date.
It is at this "date" where Gerard and his gang will strip her and beat her. Jacques will stand by her still.
Will Marie ever turn to Jacques?
Will she ever let him love her?
Or will she even survive the beating?
He has been standing there her whole life.
Loving her.
No matter what.
Well, let us just say this is not a romantic drama.
It is a story of suffering.
The Passion of the Christ. The passion of Balthazar. The passion of Marie.
The word passion comes from the Latin passio, meaning death.
And in the theology of Bresson's upbringing, passion, suffering, loss, death, brings redemption.
And maybe somehow, some way, this donkey, upon whom Marie placed a crown on his head when they were younger, can represent some kind of redemption.
And when you have time to view this movie on that other level, that deeper level, and decode its symbolism, you may find something beautiful or hopeful or good.
In the stations of the Cross.
081 - Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966, France. Dir. Robert Bresson.
Balthazar, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Amen.
The priest pours the water over Balthazar's head. It runs down his face. Down his beard.
Like the precious oil poured on the head, running down the beard, running down on Aaron's beard, down on the collar of his robe.
Marie! Marie!
The priest calls to the virgin.
Her father walks with her. She comes.
The priest gives the virgin a candle.
Lit.
She holds it.
Receive the salt of wisdom.
The priest takes a pinch of salt. He brings it to the mouth of the supplicant.
Salt both flavors and preserves. It is given to guests as a mark of friendship and hospitality. It symbolizes the binding of the contract.
The covenant.
You are the salt of the earth.
Be opened. For a savor of sweetness.
The priest is a boy around 10 years old.
The virgin is a girl around 8 or 9.
The supplicant, Balthazar, named after the magi, after the legendary name of one of the three wise men (Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar), is not a person.
Balthazar is a donkey.
A donkey.
If you are not already familiar with this film, then you may be discovering for the first time something unique in cinema. Something that stands alone.
A film about a donkey. Whose life runs in parallel with a girl.
Which follows the stations of the cross.
Robert Bresson was raised Catholic. I do not know, nor would I speculate, his status during the making of this movie. Perhaps somewhere on a continuum between devout and agnostic.
He may be like James Joyce, whose Jesuit upbringing gave him the education and tools necessary to create his secular masterpieces.
Regardless of Bresson's personal beliefs at this stage in his life, the film is available to people in a wide range of theological points of view.
On one level, Au Hasard Balthazar demands a lot of its viewers.
On another level, it does not.
You may conceivably watch this movie the way you watch a movie about the life of a girl or about the life of an animal. Say, a Lassie or a Benji movie.
Only with more suffering and tragedy.
At least, you may follow the story line and empathize with the protagonists, joining them on their emotional journey, without having to decode the complex symbolism contained in the film.
Jacques and Marie are children. Marie's father works for Jacques's father.
Jacques's father owns the land. Marie's father farms the land.
The children get a baby donkey. They name him Balthazar. They christen him. Baptize him. Love him.
They play with him in the barn. Life is good.
Jacques loves Marie. His love is innocent and pure. He carves their names in a heart on a bench. He tells her one day he will marry her.
He means it.
But Jacques has a sister who is sick. She dies. Their father is heartbroken. He moves.
Jacques's father leaves a note for Marie's father. I am heartbroken and have to move away. You run the farm, using modern methods as you have desired to do, and do not bother to send me the accounts. I trust you.
Jacques is taken away from Marie.
Marie will love the donkey.
Marie's father proves trustworthy. He works the land. He is honest with the accounts.
But people talk and rumors fly and someone writes to Jacques's father, accusing Marie's father of dishonesty.
Jacques's father will question Marie's father. Marie's father will refuse to defend himself. He is stubborn. He is proud. He is insulted that he would be doubted.
When Jacques returns a few years later he tells her he still loves her. She has not seen him in awhile, so she does not know for sure. She is honest with him. She does not wish to lie. This hurts him.
He goes to her father, perhaps to get work, perhaps to state his intentions. We do not see the exchange. But her father is resolute in his offense and rejects Jacques's requests.
Jacques drives away, again taken from Marie.
Meanwhile, Marie lives in the village with some bad hombres in it.
Including Gerard. One of the cruelest, most sadistic people ever put on screen.
He oils the streets so that he can watch cars lose control and crash.
He ties a rag to Balthazar's tail and sets it on fire to watch the donkey suffer. He kicks the donkey. Beats it.
He punches a drunk man, Arnold, in the face. Beats him. Plants a gun in his house just before the police arrive, hoping that Arnold will be caught with the gun. Or that he will even shoot and kill the police. And get arrested.
He destroys a bar at a party, throwing all the expensive liquor bottles to the floor. He makes someone else pay for it.
He steals from his own mother.
And he, let us say, moves upon Marie with great aggression.
It is hard to say exactly what these French filmmakers of this period intend to suggest. They are of a time where things are implied rather than shown, so we do not see it, and they seem to be of an opinion that a good bit of aggression is sometimes welcome.
I think in our day we would say he rapes Marie. But in the time of the movie they might have said he just keeps at it until she finally gives in. I do not know.
But he is a person of such low moral character that one could easily assume the worst of him.
And we do know that later in the movie he and his gang will strip her, beat her, and lock her in a room, while running away, throwing her clothes to the wind, and celebrating.
He is a reprehensible character.
Whatever the case at this moment, Marie gives in. And she gets used to it. And her heart gets intertwined with him as girls' hearts can do. She gets confused. She believes she loves him. She tells her mother she will go with him anywhere and do anything for him. He continues to be cruel to her. And to Balthazar.
OK, forget Lassie and Benji. You cannot watch this movie on that level. Only parts of it. Only the parts where you see a donkey and your heart connects to his.
Balthazar will go through the hands of several owners. No one will love them like Marie. They will use him. From the poor man to the rich man. To the circus man. And he will remain steadfast. Always loyal. Always faithful. Always serving. Despite the abuse.
Jacques returns a third time. Now they are older. Adults. He still loves her. He still intends to marry her. She thinks about it.
She decides he is too earnest, too sincere. He bores her. He does not provide the excitement that the bad boy gives her. So she will return to Gerard. She has a date with him. She cannot be late for it.
What is wrong with people?
Why can they not see love when it is standing right in front of their faces?
Why do they settle for abuse and heartache?
We live in a town full of engineers. Middle-aged men with big bellies and receding hairlines. Dull. Nerdy. Boring.
And faithful to the end.
My wife tells younger women those are the kinds of men you want. Steadfast. Loving. Loyal.
But they are just not exciting enough. Why be loved when you can have the thrill of a player?
And get your heart broken over and over?
And lose your self-esteem?
And feel like dirt?
Marie keeps her date.
It is at this "date" where Gerard and his gang will strip her and beat her. Jacques will stand by her still.
Will Marie ever turn to Jacques?
Will she ever let him love her?
Or will she even survive the beating?
He has been standing there her whole life.
Loving her.
No matter what.
Well, let us just say this is not a romantic drama.
It is a story of suffering.
The Passion of the Christ. The passion of Balthazar. The passion of Marie.
The word passion comes from the Latin passio, meaning death.
And in the theology of Bresson's upbringing, passion, suffering, loss, death, brings redemption.
And maybe somehow, some way, this donkey, upon whom Marie placed a crown on his head when they were younger, can represent some kind of redemption.
And when you have time to view this movie on that other level, that deeper level, and decode its symbolism, you may find something beautiful or hopeful or good.
In the stations of the Cross.
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