Sunday, January 13, 2019
572 - Light Be, or Light Being (Lumière d'été), France, 1943. Dir. Jean Gremillon.
This movie is a misfire.
It has a strong set-up. An inspired location. Dramatic set pieces. The hope of a powerful a climax. And plenty of possibilities for love and longing and loss.
In fact, the story itself is filled with promise. On paper, it has the potential to be epic.
But it has been mishandled.
The script is flawed. The casting is uninspired. And the direction leaves missed opportunities sitting on the table.
Let us begin with the promised premise and then see where that promise is broken.
You have heard of a love triangle. A love rectangle. This is a love pentagon.
Michele loves her fiance Roland.
Cri Cri loves her husband Patrice.
Julien loves Michele.
Roland ends up loving no one.
Patrice does not love but wants to possess Michele.
The film begins as Michele walks a lonesome, winding road up a cliff in the middle of nowhere. The Provençal countryside.
She is on her way to an inn where she will be meeting Roland.
A man on a horse and buggy guesses where she is going, and he offers her a lift. She accepts. As they embark, a large logging truck comes barreling down the mountain road in the other direction. They pass in the crotch of the curve, and the truck charges towards them, turning with the curve, missing them, going on its way. Nothing is amiss. It is the normal flow of traffic that people experience regularly, even today. A small, fragile horse and buggy with is skeletal wheels passing before an extra-long, extra-heavy motorized piece of machinery of steel weighted with uncut tree trunks. Both parties probably think nothing of it. But the camera, having panned right with the buggy, now pans back left with the truck, emphasizing the symbolism of Michele's vulnerability in this world she is about to enter.
The man and Michele arrive at the end of the lonesome road, at the inn atop the cliff.
If there is a luxury hotel at the center of Paris, she is at the lodge that it's farthest from.
The inn sits atop a cliff overlooking a rock quarry. Dynamite blasts. Men ride to work on a cable car from the village below. The car itself is shaped like a giant canister hanging from two cables, so that watching it ride up the mountainside, one expects molten steel to bubble over the sides of it rather than men to be standing inside.
Michele checks in to the inn. She meets Cri Cri. It is quiet. They are alone. They talk. She will be waiting for Roland. She takes Room 12.
The first man to see her is not Roland but Julien. Julien arrives at night. He is a worker in the rock quarry. Cri Cri mistakenly assigns him to Room 12. He enters, and in the darkness Michele sits up to kiss him.
This could have been--should have been--a moment of awkward energy belying an underlying chemistry. But it is a mere polite, Excuse me, I have been given the wrong room, and Julien is back to the lobby to be reassigned. Yes, he experiences love at first sight--at least he is supposed to. It is just that we do not see it carried out in the writing or the acting or the directing.
The same with all the other relationships.
The script seems as though it were written by a college undergrad who believes profoundly in the idea of love but has never experienced it personally himself. It bubbles over with talking about love rather than experiencing. It treats love as a philosophical abstraction.
Yes, I know. The co-screenwriters were both in their forties, and Jacques Prevert was a great poet. But since I am reading the English subtitles (which were probably not translated by a great English poet), I am not provided with Prevert's poetry. Just theoretical ideas.
We know which two people will end up together, because they are the stars of the show, and we are set up for it by Julien's stumbling upon Michele in the dark.
But the two actors have as much chemistry with one another as a piece of cardboard with a piece of plastic. And I am not sure they have a lot of screen charisma in the first place as individuals.
The movie is entertaining the way a TV movie is entertaining. It is paint by numbers. It hits the points.
Which is not to say I hated it. I enjoy TV movies too.
Yet one feels that Gremillon has it in him to make a great film. He just did not do so with this one.
* * * *
When you see the title, you may think of it as a reference to Genesis 1:3: "Let there be light." Or, "Light, be."
The actual French translations of Genesis contain the same construction as the English. The 1744 Martin translation, the 1885 Darby translation, and the 1910 Louis Segond translation, with slight variances in punctuation, all render it as, "Dieu dit: Que la lumiere soit! Et la lumiere fut."
So this is a different conception. Some translate it as "Light Being."
No comments:
Post a Comment