A Girl and a Gun

Bad News and Other News

I didn't catch the original Bad News Bears (1976), so am not qualified to say whether Richard Linklater's new version is superior to the original.  I certainly had reason to hope so, based upon my exposure to Linklater last year--Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Waking Life, and Tape were all, to my mind original and engaging.  Even School of Rock, not ordinarily my type of movie, held my interest with its clever treatment and solid pacing, although nearly two hours of Jack Black were a severe test. 

Alas and alack, I found Linklater's update (or remake, or whatever it is) pretty dreary.  It's the basic one-joke movie (cute kids who are also obnoxious) with a dash of redemption tossed in, and though Billy Bob Thornton pretty much carries things for the whole ride, it's a load even for an actor of his talent.  Here's the concept: a washed-out drunk, a sort of Bad Santa turned vermin exterminator, who made it to the major leagues for one game, is brought in to coach a little league team.    The kids are impossibly inept and gifted only in attitude.  They play terribly, then get better, then wind up in the championship game against the team that humiliated them early in the season (a team coached by Greg Kinnear, whose schmuck beneath the good guy pose is getting terribly tedious).  It's really a movie for kids whose parents don't mind a little coarse language.  I don't know quite how to account for the enthusiasm which the new film has generated among critics and in the blogs, but I suspect that many of reviewers saw the original as early or pre-adolescents, loved it, and because Linklater was reasonably faithful to Ritchie (again, I'm guessing here), found this edition nostalgically satisfying.

I  last mentioned the work of French director Lauren Cantet with the estimable Time Out (2001), distinguished by being one of the few contemporary films about the waking activity which consumes more of our lives than any other one: work, or in this case, being out of work.  An early film, Human Resources (1999), is an even more subtle and interesting entry.  A working-class provincial family sends their son off to business school in Paris so that he can have a management career.  He chooses a trainee's position in the company that has employed his father in a shop floor job for decades (an unlikely choice by the son, but you can get past it).  The big issue of the 1990s in French industry was the transition to the 35-hour work week, promoted by government and industry as providing more leisure time, resisted by certain unions--and especially the Communist C.G.T.--as cutting out five paying hours a week.  It is the job of Franck (the son), to devise a program to sell the idea to the workers of his father's shop and their militant, rigid, and very funny union spokesperson (delightfully played by Danielle Mélador).  Franck is successful, only to discover that his father's job is to be eliminated in the consolidation.  He turns coat, exposes management's plan to eliminate jobs all along, and sparks a wildcat strike at the plant.  His father actually opposes him all the way, first in accepting the shorter work week, then in going up against management.  He is the perfect embodiment of the old-line French factory worker for whom any change was bad, worse if it came from management.  Cantet handles the tensions within the plant, and within Franck's family, not to mention the hostility felt by provincials for those schooled in Paris, with great delicacy, and we get a clear and sympathetic statement of each faction's point of view.  Incidentally, in the May referendum by which France rejected the European constitution this year, one of the central issues often cited was the working classes' fear of losing the 35-hour week.

Human Resources announces its seriousness and complexity from early on, although it manages to keep from become heavy-handed or slow.  The Housekeeper (2002) is a pleasant little sex comedy which keeps us smiling until it starts to turn dark--another way of saying "realistic"--in the last twenty minutes or so.  Jean-Pierre Bacri, recently seen in the best of Agnès Jaoui's films, is a mid-forties bachelor whose most recent romance has come to an end.  He suddenly realizes that he's depressed and living like a slob instead of a comfortable Parisian bourgeois with an apartment in the insanely desireable sixth arrondissement, and so hires a housekeeper--a femme de ménage, which is the film's French title--who turns out to be an extremely attractive young woman of no more than about twenty.  He resists the attraction, she promotes it, and ultimately she wins out.  They start sleeping together, living together, going on vacation together.  It all looks idyllic until, at the seaside, she shows greater appetite for dancing and contemporary music than he does.  Pretty soon, she is spending more time with a young fellow (admittedly gorgeous) than with him.  Finally, a woman his age who knows nothing about his relationship with the girl mentions what a lovely daughter he has.  A look of devastation passes over Bacri's face as he realizes the truth of the maxim that there's no fool like an old fool.  Roll credits.

Claude Berri, who is seventy-one now with more than fifty films to his credit, gave this admittedly slight little picture just the right touch to add some heft.  He is immeasurably aided by Bacri, on of the most talented actors in French film right now, someone who seems to be able to take on any role and find directions in which can be expanded.  The Housekeeper is not great art, but it's thoughtful and nicely executed, demonstrating that the old chestnut about an old fool may apply to men and women, but not necessarily to men and filmmaking.

Last Frontier

Back  in the early 1980s, when Lonesome Dove won Larry McMurtry a Pulitzer and he was all the rage, he observed that all his novels about the west--and for that matter most western literature and films--had the same subject: the end of the west.  He meant that westerns picked up the story of the American frontier just as the frontier was being closed, and most particularly when the people, mostly men, who had tamed it were being phased out by peaceful, law-abiding society.  All of the earmarks of the western movie--the gunplay, the riding, the strong hero with a code of honor, the extermination of what are now called Native Americans--were shown to be no longer necessary in the course of most westerns, and the departure of the hero in one form or another (death, moving on, retirement) was how things customarily ended.

I find it hard to disagree with this assessment, and when I put together a list of what I regard as the best westerns, they all fit snugly into this category.  There are eleven of them, and when listed chronologically (as they are below), the genre itself is pretty definitively eliminated with number ten, 1969's The Wild Bunch.  Peckinpah's film has always polarized people, but I think that's because he set out to explode every--and I mean every--one of the sustaining myths of the western.  From the opening sequence of the children tormenting the scorpion (lifted from Clouzot's The Wages of Fear [1953]) through every distinct group of humans encountered, we find greed, savagery, stupidity, at the best massive illusion.  Some viewers have complained about the sequence when the Bunch, after pulling themselves together with Angel's "people," leave the encampment to highly sentimentalized music and lighting, but given who the Bunch are, and given the behavior we see of Mexicans in general thereafter, that turns out to be something of a sour joke.  It's all blood and thievery and exploitation and there's not much left in the way of heroism by the end.  There are I suppose those who find the Bunch's flame-out at the end somehow glorious; it's always seemed to me that they knew their time was at an end, and decided to butcher as many as they could while going out, not perhaps the ultimate heroic ideal. 

The film is of course flawlessly shot, edited, and acted.  William Holden had to wait until his early fifties for a role that he could fulfill perfectly, and of course Robert Ryan was always wonderful in an ambivalent role.  Warren Oates and Ben Johnson seem to have been Lyle and Tector Gorch in some previous life, and among the bounty hunters Peckinpah regulars Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones set the standard, yet to be exceeded, for the redneck peckerwood.  In sum, The Wild Bunch so exploded the western from within that there was no bringing it back, though Eastwood made a try probably worth making in Unforgiven (1992).

I tried to be severe in making this list.  I had no trouble leaving off Dances with Wolves or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, squirmed a little about the several Anthony Mann-James Stewart collaborations that began with Winchester '73 (1950)--good but not great, the man here says--and will admit to nagging doubts about High Noon and Shane.  Perhaps it's just sentimental attachments from my teen-age years.  But if Red River can get in with that hoked-up happy ending, the faults of these two are no greater.  Anyway, you know where to complain.

Stagecoach (1939)

My Darling Clementine (1946)

Red River (1948)

Fort Apache (1948)

Rio Grande (1950)

High Noon (1952)

Shane (1953)

The Searchers (1956)

Ride the High Country (1962)

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Unforgiven (1992)

Just One More ... Please?

I've always been puzzled by the phenomenon of filmmakers who have commanded a major share of public attention internationally for years only to disappear, abruptly or gradually, from the scene.  Sometimes, I suppose, they grow old, lose their touch or their interest, repeat themselves, although that doesn't account (in the age of the VHS and then the DVD) for their classic work going out of mind.  Public tastes change, of course, which goes with the territory of being an artist in a commerical medium.  But when you consider that Hitchcock, whom I consider a second-rater who made a handful of pretty good films (can we argue about this later? it's not really my point here), is in this sense alive and well, while Fellini seems to be drifting from audience awareness, I can't fathom it.  There are many other examples, and I invite your invocation of them.

One of the big (i.e. inexplicable) ones is Ingmar Bergman.  In the early '80s he pretty much stopped making feature films except for small dramas commissioned by Swedish television (see a few of them and you'll have some idea how truly craven and corrupt American tv is).  But why does he seem to have dropped out of the cinematic vocabulary even of educated film-goers of good taste--i.e. like people who visit this site (well, it's true, dammit).  But for more than thirty years, from the early '50s on, he was widely thought of as one of the greatest writer/directors of the century, equalled by few, outranked by none.  He had an ear and an eye, he had a company of deeply devoted and wildly talented professionals, his pictures were de rigeur  if you took films seriously, each new one prompting from those of us who lived in the provinces during those years moans of "I can't wait" until it gets here.

Bergman first came to attention as part of those European films (mostly Italian and Scandinavian) of the early 1950s which featured snippets of nudity, mostly of the absurdly health, unselfconscious sun-worshipper variety.  Every once in a while, a Hollywood movie house during those years would bring back Illicit Interlude (1951) and the Saturday audience would be packed with high school males, yours truly among them.  It was The Seventh Seal (1957) which brought him to somewhat more respectable adult attention, with its rather heavy allegory and stunning camera work, and it was soon followed by intense domestic dramas about cold, distant husbands and fathers, stories of sexual transgression, agonizing religious doubt, the redemptive power or lack of it possessed by art.  Films such as Wild Strawberries (1957), Virgin Spring (1960), and Through a Glass Darkly (1961) still stand up extremely well from those years--and then things got better.  Bergman began exploring the relationships between the personal and sociopolitical in the staggering Persona (1966) and Shame (1968).  He found a broad audience for Cries and Whispers (1971)--whether because people loved it or thought, given Bergman's mystique at the time, that they ought to remains unresolved in my mind--and another one for Scenes from a Marriage (1973), in this case because I believe people found it so compelling.  After that, it was The Magic Flute (1975), a delightful but much truncated of Mozart's opera; Autumn Sonata (1978), Ingrid Bergman's last film and her first with him; and of course the great family epic and perhaps his most accessible work, Fanny and Alexander (1982).

Bergman could be funny--uproariously funny--when he chose to be: just have a look at The Magic Flute and especially Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), a timeless comedy of great invention.  But for the most part, his work bluntly and unapologetically portrayed intense psychic pain, the emotional violence that people did to one another as a matter of course in the name of love, duty, and God.  Bergman hurts, and if you don't feel it, you've unplugged your antennae.  But he also presents his pain--which you have no doubt he has felt himself many times--with such honesty, clarity, and aesthetic scrupulosity that one can only respect him.  He makes his audience work, not just by enduring the agony, but to find out what is really going on, who is the reliable source and who is not, why people say they are lying when they are actually telling the truth, why they subject themselves to injury needlessly. 

In spite of the subject matter, it all looks and sounds gorgeous.  Bergman first hooked up with DP Sven Nykvist in 1960 and they were still together in Fanny and Alexander; I doubt there was a cinematographer in the twentieth century who could render emotional states by light, shade, framing, and camera positioning with his skill and subtlety.  And the casts?  Well, consider: Harriett Andersen, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva Dahlberg, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Erland Josephson--every one of them willing to do what the boss called for, make it even better, and most of all completely submerge themselves in their characters.  I can do something with Bergman films I almost never do otherwise, which is to watch them for performances only.

Now cames Saraband, a small drama made for Swedish television two years ago which Bergman has announced is his last film.  I hope he reconsiders, but he doesn't really seem the type: this is not likely a Sinatra-esque farewell.  It brings back the principals from Scenes from a Marriage some thirty years later, played again by Josephson and Ullman, now long since both divorced and separated from their post-marital affair.  He is in his eighties, living far into the countryside, she is still a successful lawyer living in the city.  She has come to see him because he has asked her, which he denies--and, characteristically, we come to see two side of this issue.  His sixty-one year old son from another marriage and nineteen-year old granddaughter live in a nearby cottage; the relationship between father and son is as bad as you can imagine, although the son has his own ghastly sins for which to answer.  The story among these four is played out in ten little episodes, all related, but each with autonomous power and dramatic unity.  As it finished, I didn't want to believe this was it, that we wouldn't be seeing anything new from this genius.  All right, he turned eighty-seven just last week, and a man has a right to throttle back.  But I wish he wouldn't.  We need his honesty and mastery more than ever.  Presuming he keeps his word, though, there remains the DVD, and you'll never find a better justification for the technology.

Do We Care? Ken Loach Cares

Film after film, Britain's Ken Loach continues to make films he believes are important, politically and socially important, films he understands comparatively few people will attend but hopes will justify themselves through their impact upon those who do.  I have admired his work ardently for more than thirty years, but it seems to me he hit his stride in his mid-fifties with Hidden Agenda (1990) and has maintained it pretty much ever since.  His best I take to be the brilliant Land and Freedom (1995), a film about the Spanish Civil War which was much criticized for interrupting the narrative flow at an important juncture with a long argument so that the characters could engage in an argument about appropriate strategy for revolutionaries in the midst of a bitter civil war.  The argument does slow the film down, and it is also essential to Loach's insistence (in pretty much every film) upon showing the complications involved, of demonstrating how circumstances that at first looked black-and-white turn out to be shaded, how everyone has an arguable case.

Bread and Roses (2000) has a similar moment when Maya, an illegal Mexican immigrant who lives with her sister in southern California and works in the same building downtown at the same dreadful janitorial job, has a fight with her sister.  At this point in the narrative, the larger argument--between black-hearted employers and their minions and downtrodden illegals trying to get a decent wage, plus perhaps some scrap of health insurance--seems clear-cut.  But Loach brings us up short by introducing an entirely different point of view from Rosa, who had all the appearances of a management scab.  Rosa delivers a shattering, gut-wrenching speech about what she has done to keep her family together and hold onto her job, about the unimaginable costs to her, of which Maya was completely unaware (because for Rosa to talk about them would have meant the ultimate shame).  The speech is unforgettably delivered by Elpidia Carillo, and it drastically deepens the problems with which are dealing here.  Its impact upon Maya is powerful, leads her to some risky and questionable behavior, for which she will pay in the end, but which also redeems her sense of dignity before she gets as far down the path as Rosa had gone.

Pilar Padilla plays Maya and Adrien Brody plays the hip, slightly flaky labor organizer who tries to bring the janitors in this particular union together.  There is a victory at the end, but not a Capraesque victory for the little people, because it is at precisely this point that the bill comes due on Maya for her unwise but understandable decisions.  It's one of those moments you always seem to get in a Loach film: every victory, however small, and however satisfying nonetheless, is one step in a long, uphill battle, and it never comes without casualties. 

I am perfectly willling to accept the notion that not one of Ken Loach's films over the years has persuaded a single person to lift a finger in support of Loach's view of the world or even simply change his or her mind, event though of course I hope this is not the case.  But Loach's value is not as a politician.  It is as a truth teller, one who not only gives us reality as he sees it on the issues with which he deals, but gives us reality in the broader sense: the world and its human inhabitants are imperfect, and it is a legitimate role of films to portray that truth, and not simply lull people into a soda-swilling, popcorn munching oblivion for a couple of hours.  He cares even if we don't, and I think that makes him indispensable.

Them and Us

I've been delightfully surprised at the discussion that has sprung up from my most recent post, "Freedom for What?"  I had no idea response would go in anything like this direction, which makes it all the more interesting.  Let me toss in a few thoughts of my own.

The French and American film industries are certainly the two most successful in the world, successful commercially but also in terms of worldwide audience popularity and creative achievement.  Yet they differ, and have differed historically, in many respects which reflect the cultures from which they spring.  The first thing that strikes me is that while both originated from a strong studio system, the American system was much more powerful than the French.  In the US, from early on, films were like an industrial product which required management sanction before going forward; they were produced by teams, the members of which were pretty much expendable (can't get Gable? I think Tracy is available).  In France, while money from studios made it possible to produce films, the control was not quite as iron; French directors--and, big difference, writers--received much more respect for their individual achievement and therefore received much more latitude.  In the 1930s, there were a few American directors who had a kind of standing of their own: Capra, Chaplin, Hawks to a lesser degree, and much later on Ford.  But none of these men had the comparative freedom and critical prestige of Renoir, Duvivier, Carné, and Clair.  It is hard to imagine Hollywood in the 1950s producing an enigmatic, uncompromising director like Bresson.  The French love artists even if they find them difficult; the Americans like "good movies." 

The French directors understood that art, which many of them tried to create while also making money, required not telling the audience too much.  The great novelists, poets, playwrights, and painters left room for audiences to insinuate themselves into the interaction between characters, to question and interpret motive, to explain or fail to explain personality; the artists understood that treating the audiences in this fashion bound them emotionally that much more to the material, involved them in the creation of the work of art, made them interested (and loyal) collaborators.  In America, the studio fear seemed always to be that audiences "wouldn't understand" what was going on and might leave the theaters unsatisfied; since most studio heads seemed committed to the position that you would never go broke underestimating the American intelligence, films wrapped up as neatly as Christmas packages were the result.  An interesting film which failed to deliver utter clarity, posing and answering all the questions, was a source of consternation: I think of Capra's Meet John Doe, a fascinating political melodrama in which Gary Cooper's title character fails to keep his promise of committing suicide in the final scene for reasons never explained.  (In truth, Capra filmed something like six different endings, couldn't decide which one made sense, and more or less drew straws.)  Americans seemed to like, or at any rate got, movies which resembled those little sound packs you can rent at museums where someone of authority explains to you why the paintings you're looking at are important and why you should enjoy them.  They did all the work for you. 

Another way to put this is that US films are usually plot-driven while French films tend to be atmospheric, depending on mood, feel, and texture rather than story mechanics (this causes this leading to that).  When Godard insisted that he was breaking with decades of French filmmaking experience by emphasizing image over text, he was actually squarely in the mainstream.  Consider an American film full of thematic material with all sorts of atmospheric possibilities, Gone With the Wind (1939).  Here we have war, national crisis, slavery, families broken by tragedy.  The story is told through incident and sequences of events, each laid out clearly with no chance for misinterpretation by the audience.  The visual presentation is competent and perfectly pedestrian.  In the same year, Renoir released The Rules of the Game in France, a story equally abundant in rich themes: social class, adultery, national and social disintegration.  Over these themes, Renoir drapes a sort of story about a dozen people at a country shooting party over a long weekend.  It works, but what gives the film its deep resonance is the themes, the upstairs-downstairs frictions and similarities, the use of deep focus to place people among one another and in the chateau, the use of dialect to emphasize social (and regional) distinctions without hammering at the point, an ambiguous ending with no clear resolution.  Think of, "Tomorrow is another day."  Then think of, "The race is dying out."  Which closing line reverberates in your consciousness longer?

Since this discussion stemmed from a Bresson movie, it is necessarily on a somewhat more rarified plane than Americans with their brainless action spectaculars and uplifting biopics and the French with their vapid sex comedies, their foolish caper movies, and their trance-inducing vehicles for soporific performers like Fernandel.  But on the level of films which have some ambition to be more than mental popcorn, the differences are real, and instructive. 

Freedom for What?

There is a blog called godinruins run by a young man named Paul Moore who pours his passion, curiosity, and moral seriousness into watching and commenting on films.  Very often good films, too, and his comments are frequently thoughtful and provocative.  Recently, however, he posted briefly on Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956) remarks with which I must take severe exception.  Nothing personal, Paul, but perhaps a discussion upon which others might be willing to eavesdrop and contribute will be of interest.  I urge those interested to read the short post first, because I'm not going to take much time explaining Paul's position--he's much better at that than I could hope to be.  But I do draw attention to what I take to be the crux of his position: "It's hard for me to relate to the hero I'm watching when their [sic] only motivation for this doggedly constucted [sic] escape is to be out.  That's it?  I'm in and I must be out?  To be  honest, I consider that motivation a bit selfish."

First, it seems that Paul, by sticking with the title of the US release, has overlooked something important in the original title, although it's an explicit plot point as well.  Bresson called his film  Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé ( literally, A Man Condemned to Death has Escaped).  The protagonist has been sentenced to die; do we really expect him to sit around and think of some ennobling reason for continuing to exist instead of pouring all his energies into survival, which can only be achieved by getting himself free? 

Second, Paul's essay overlooks historical setting.  The action takes place during the German occupation of 1940-44, and in Lyon, famed then and since as "the capital of the resistance."  The story is based upon the exploits of resistance activist André Devigny, whose memoir bore the same title as the film and was published earlier in the year the film was released.  In 1956, with the Fourth Republic (founded in 1944-45) deteriorating rapidly, the resistance was one of the few institutions from France's recent past which retained any lustre of heroism and sacrifice, and Devigny was one of its emblematic figures.  For a man to want to escape from the impregnable Fort Montluc was not for some "selfish" reason, but to rejoin his comrades in the defense of their country against its conquerors and occupiers, doing what they could to prepare for the second front which the Allies would open in 1944.  I dare say that every adult member of the film's French audiences in the mid-'50s would have understood all this without explanation or elaboration.  Missing that fact permits sentences such as: "If . . . I escape a prison for the sake of pure escape, then I've escaped to nothing but my own self-centered desires, which I had back when I was in prison."

Third, in the "about" bio on his home page, Paul describes himself as "passionate about building community . . ."  It's odd, then, that he sees Bresson's hero, named Fontaine in the film, as isolated, "selfish," serving no higher purpose than his own freedom--odd, because it overlooks the relationship between Fontaine and Blanchet in the neighboring cell.  Fontaine is tireless in trying to find a way out, but equally dedicated to making contact with this man, and the connection they ultimately create is (under the circumstances) a pretty impressive instance of community.

Finally, a personal complaint.  I am an acknowledged Francophile, someone who has been going to France for more than forty years, living there for extended stretches, taking some trouble to learn about the history, culture, art, literature, films and psychic texture of this fascinating people, about whom I taught for many years.  In all that experience, I have never encountered anything like "a common belief [among Frenchmen] that the French are born with a chromosome that will activate at puberty and rebel against any authority that asserts its will over an individual."  I don't think that the slightest acquaintance with French government over the last several hundred years, or the educational system in particular, will reveal an excessive "individualism" of this sort, if that is the name for it; the French have always seemed to me staunch in their adherence to tradition, flexible in their openness to ideas, with of course all sorts of variations on the fringes. 

Most of all, I hope anyone not familiar with Bresson's masterwork will instantly remedy that hole in their cinematic experience and do so with an open mind.  Anyone's initial viewing will be enhanced by a look at Doug Cummings's essay here.

Lacombe Lucien (1974)

French films about the occupation of 1940-44 tended for years to skirt the issues of collaboration and resistance somewhat gingerly, with but a few exceptions (such as Claude Berri's The Two of Us, discussed here.)  But once Marcel Ophuls's watershed documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)  and Robert O. Paxton's epochal book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (1971) came out, there was no denying that collaboration was a matter of French initiative, and was widespread compared to resistance, until quite late in the game.  One of the earliest and best of the post-awakening films was Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien.  (The title reflects the bureaucratic tendency of the time, which Lucien picks up quickly, to introduce people to one another with surname first.) 

It is the story of an eighteen-year old peasant boy in southwestern France from the late spring to the early autumn of 1944.  When we meet him, he is swabbing floors and emptying slops buckets in the hospice of a town which is a long bike ride from his village.  He also betrays a cruel side: his response to spying a songbird on a tree branch through a window of the hospice is to take out his slingshot and brain it in a single effort.  At home, he finds his mother has been sleeping with their landlord while waiting for his father to be sent home from a prisoner of war camp.  To escape an uncomfortable situation, Lucien tries to join the resistance; but it's June 14, the western front has opened, and everybody wants in the resistance.  He gets turned down.  Quite by accident, in the town where he works, he stumbles into a group of collaborators associated with the French Milice, or militia, a paramilitary outfit run by rabid anti-Semites who chased down Jews and turned them over to the Germans.  These people flatter him, ply him with drink, make him feel important because he knows the information they want--the name of the resistance leader in his village--without realizing what his revelation will bring.  They arrest that leader, bring him in handcuffed, and then torture him for the names of other leaders in front of Lucien.  The boy is shocked, but clearly can't admit it, and so can only play tough, unflappable, and the part of a loyal new recruit.  As the Milice people offer him power, and a gun, and some petty responsibilities, his loyalty solidifies; these people are giving him the recognition and respect he has always sought but which have eluded him as an ill-educated, somewhat stupid, and decidedly unworldly peasant teenager.  Now he can be a member of a privileged and powerful elite, waving off intrusions from the French police, answering only to the Milice's German masters. 

Malle accomplishes this whole transition with great subtlety and patience; tiny incidents become precedents, commitments Lucien cannot withdraw.  He becomes identified with the collaborators and the Germans; he has cast his lot, and there is no turning back.  One of his responsibilities is to collect what amounts to protection money for his boss being paid by a Jewish tailor in the small town, a man who once had a thriving and wealthy clientele in Paris.  Lucien enjoys pushing the man around, but then discovers he has a beautiful young daughter.  Lucien tries using his new-found power and self-confidence to show off in front of them both, but mostly to impress the daughter, interestingly named France.  She resists, but cannot deny that he has a certain blunt charm, a manner so unpolished and even crude that she laughs in an age when laughter is rare enough.  One thing leads to another, hormones speak up for themselves, and soon Lucien is living with the tailor (and the tailor's mother) and sleeping with the daughter.  It is not a relationship without serious difficulties, even internal contradictions that may be impossible to overcome; France's attraction to him is powerful, but virtually destroys her family--her father has been arrested while she remains free.  She always seems about one step away from bolting from Lucien herself, but she also recognizes that he may be her only hope.  It is as nice a metaphorical statement of France's (the country's) state of mind in much of the occupation era.

In time, of course, the authorities expect Lucien to bring in the family, and he goes to round them up with a German soldier--whom he eventually shoots rather than turn over France to the cattle cars.  They escape into the countryside, making for the Spanish border.  Wordlessly, we see France struggling with her dilemma: go to safety with a man who is in no way safe, make a break for it or give him up to the marauding resistance groups who have had his name on a miniature coffin for weeks.  It's all there in her face, told without a word, but unmistakable.  It is to Malle's everlasting credit that he portrayed this situation as a struggle rather than as a heroic epiphany by the girl/nation, and it allows us to participate in this very human, very complicated, and very difficult situation.

The film was made without name stars.  It was the first movie for Aurore Clément, who played France, and the second (after a bit part) for Pierre Blaise, the twenty-one-year old who played Lucien.  One of the few veterans was Holgen Nöwenadler, a Swede who  who played France's father and who had been acting since the early silents in his own country.  Clément went on to a long and still productive career; she appeared (if memory serves) in the Redux version of Apocalypse Now as Roxanne Sarrault, the woman in the upriver villa who has an overnight dalliance with Martin Sheen.  Blaise was killed the year after Lacombe Lucien's release in an automobile accident.

I have taken a fair amount of space to talk up a movie that is almost nowhere available.  There is a UK-version DVD, but nothing US-compatible, and the film shows only very rarely on the revival circuit in this country.  But if you get the chance, which won't happen often until Criterion or someone like that makes a transfer, don't hesitate.  It's one of Malle's best, which means one of the best, period.

Three Who Passed

Ernest Lehman (1915-2005)

A writer who peaked, in terms of Hollywood success, during the late 1950s.  Most obits led with Lehman's script for Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1958), and truly the script was, along with Cary Grant, the best reason for watching the picture.  It's snappy, tart, just enough of a stretch to keep you smiling throughout (the guy throwing the knife in the UN, for an instance), and altogether satisfactory.  But I think his greatest effort was the year before, with Sweet Smell of Success, a superb movie.  Lehman had written the novel and was hired to direct, but illness put him down and Alexander Mackendrick stepped in--and gave a career effort.  Clifford Odets took on the script.  There aren't many--any?--better American pictures, a diamond-hard, unforgiving look at New York and the publicity business (in which Lehman had cut his teeth as a young man).

June Haver (1926-2005)

Cursed with the expectation that she would step in for Betty Grable when Grable lost a step or two, Haver never quite outgrew it.  But she was also condemned to a dreadful run of D level musicals in the middle and later 1940s; the only one I remember, Three Little Girls in Blue (1945), would by itself have been enough to drive the poor girl into a convent for a year, although it's generally argued that the unexpected and untimely death of a lover precipitated he decision.  Eventually, she emerged, put aside the label of "the pocket Grable," made a few more movies, married Fred MacMurray, and retired. 

Evan Hunter (1926-2005)

Easily the best known of the three, but not--and apparently this was a sore point with him--for any success in the movie world.  Oddly enough, Hunter started with a bang: his script for Blackboard Jungle (1955) had some sharp edges, although it turned mushy toward the end (probably a studio requirement).  Its historical significance is that it launched the careers of Vic Morrow, who was easily the best thing in the film, casting Glenn Ford and the young Sidney Poitier into the shadows, and Bill Haley, whose ""Rock Around the Clock" was the film's theme and went on to sell twenty-five million copies worldwide.  Hunter's greatest successes, critical and financial, came as Ed McBain, author of the 87th Precinct series, which like most series product found its stride after a few books, came up with fine story after fine story, and then became formulaic.  (This is heresy, I appreciate, but then that's how I see it.)  Oddly, Ed McBain's biggest cinematic triumph came when his King's Ransom novel was used by Akira Kurosawa to make one of the triumphant achievements of his career, High and Low (1963).  It remains one of the finest police procedurals (a term Hunter bitterly rejected) in film history.  At the same time, as Hunter, the writer was doing the script for Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), a film whose title I thought perfectly captured the ideal audience (as in "for the . . .").  I used to see Hunter from time to time browsing in Otto Penzler's Mysterious Book Shop on West 56th Street.  Hunter always insisted in interviews that he couldn't be bother reading the competition, which was inferior, but he certainly showed a warm interest in who was producing what. 

The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005)

Another thanks to the French for being the principal salvation of a film-goer's summer this year.  The latest reason to be grateful is Jacques Audiard's The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005), which remakes (with full credit given) James Toback's Fingers (1978), although apparently with some interesting changes.  I have yet to cultivate a passion, or even much of a taste, for Toback's work, so I have not done the appropriate homework by hunting up Fingers to see just what interested Audiard, and doubt if I will do so.   Anyway, it doesn't matter; the French film is perfectly complete in itself and tells (and to a degree, I gather,  re-tells) a story worth telling.

Thomas, a late-twenties Parisian bachelor, is involved with a couple of partners in the crooked side of urban real estate.  (This is to make the rather large assumption that there is a straight side of urban real estate, but let that pass.)  It is the same way his father has made his living, and it involves a fair amount of rough stuff, which Thomas is fully equipped--physically and psychologically--to undertake.  But his deceased mother was a concert pianist, and Thomas had made a little progress at the keyboard before putting it aside and taking up leg breaking.  When he runs across an old rehearsal tape of his mother, he decides--tentatively--to take it up again, and signs up for lessons from a Chinese pianist who has come to Paris on scholarship as an advanced student.  She speaks only Chinese, he speaks only French, with a smidgen of English between them.  Things progress, but slowly.  In the meantime, Thomas's obligations to his business partners spill over into personal areas that cause considerable complication, and the two dimensions of his life begin developing significant conflicts.  We know he'll have to resolve them, but we have very little idea how or in what direction.

Romain Duris plays Thomas with energy and charm, but mostly with an absorbing inwardness that constantly has us guessing which of his lives has--and will maintain--control of him at the moment.  It's all complicated by the fact that his father, though something of a thug and constantly relying on Thomas for muscle, is when all is said and done his father, and Thomas loves him.  So getting out of that part of his past and trying to enter one for which he may not even be suited is tougher still.  Audiard keeps us on this high-wire until the final sequence.  Just as Read My Lips was only nominally a thriller, with much more interesting depth than "will they pull off the caper?", The Beat My Heart Skipped commands our attention because Thomas's internal struggles involve trying to get rid of a life that will destroy him ultimately, but in the process getting rid of deeply ingrained habits and choosing between two powerful influences. 

This and That

How I Got into an Argument (My Sex Life)

Although it's been several weeks since I saw Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen, I doubt a day has passed when I haven't thought about it at least once.  Time finally permitted a viewing of Desplechin's How I Got into an Argument (My Sex Life), released in 1996 with the same two lead performers, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, and a film which represents both a break with the director's previous work (not that there was that much of it) and an anticipation of Kings and Queen. 

The film centers on three male friends, philosophy professors in their late twenties trying to advance their careers--keep in mind that they are French, which means that being a philosopher confers prestige and even rewards beyond the imagination of most of their American counterparts--but also to work out some sort of satisfying relationship with a woman.  Their ambitions, their relations with one another and with their own and their friends' girlfriends, are all fabulously complex; men and women alike are constantly discovering new things about themselves and each other which prompt reevaluations on several levels.  In his faithfulness to this complexity, Desplechin conveys an astounding amount of information within the early minutes of Argument and then keeps it coming for three solid hours (which fly by just the way they can when you're involved in an interesting conversation).  As in Kings and Queen, his respect for detail and its critical importance in our emotional lives is unshakeable.  He never wavers in his trust that he can convey this detail clearly, convincingly, and with great dramatic effect, and his confidence is justified--and bolstered by a wonderful cast (in addition to Amalric, who right now I would have to say is acting as well as anyone in movies, and Devos, I single out Emmanuel Salinger, Thibault de Montalembert, and the always interesting Denis Podalydès among the men, and of the women Marianne Denicourt, Chiara Mastroianni, and Jeanne Balibar). 

We learn at once that all of these characters are smart, attractive, and interesting, but also confused, hard to please because they're not entirely certain of what does or should please them, and most of all completely self-preoccupied.  This has to be the most hopelessly narcissistic group of people--people who have placed themselves at the center of the universe and cannot imagine anything happening anywhere which does not refer to them--that we have seen gathered in one place since Paris Hilton retired to her study with a copy of The Brothers Karamazov.  But they are also charming, bristling with decent human qualities, and we find ourselves pulling for them as often as we are laughing at them, because we can see ourselves or parts of ourselves in them.  That Desplechin and his cast can get us to laugh at ourselves as we identify to a considerable degree with such characters is no small achievement.

I think he accomplishes it by giving us so much detail about them that you can't deny their humanity any more than you can overlook their faults and blind spots.  I am, as I was in Kings and Queen, put in mind of a passage in one of Philip Roth's recent masterpieces, The Human Stain (2000).  It is the story of Coleman Silk, a college professor in western Massachusetts's Berkshire mountains in his early seventies, who has taken a lover, named Faunia Farley, in her mid-thirties.  Faunia is divorced and trying hard to support two children by taking on more than one job.  In the passage I have in mind, some fifty pages into the novel, Roth's narrator and alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, recalls watching Coleman as he looked at Faunia at work on a local dairy farm.  Nathan recounts the scene in great detail: the eleven cows, all of whose names he provides; the sinks and hoses and sterilizing units; the disassembled milking unit she will wash (“every surface of every tube, valve, gasket, plug, plate, liner, cap, disc, and piston”).  We learn then, for the first time, that four months after this moment Faunia and Coleman will die.  Zuckerman applies that knowledge to the scene he recalls, Coleman patiently, quietly watching the woman who has become identical with what is left of his life:

"The light and heat of the day (that blessing), the unchanging quiet of each cow’s life as it paralleled that of all the others, the enamored old man studying the suppleness of the efficient, energetic woman, the adulation rising in him, his looking as though nothing more stirring had ever before happened to him, and, too, my own willing waiting, my own fascination with their extensive disparity as human types, with the nonuniformity, the variability, the teeming irregularity of sexual arrangements—and with the injunction upon us, human and bovine, the highly differentiated and the all but undifferentiated, to live, not merely to endure but to live, to go on taking, giving, feeding, milking, acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living—all was recorded as real by tens of thousands of minute impressions.  The sensory fullness, the copiousness, the abundant—superabundant—detail of life, which is the rhapsody.  And Coleman and Faunia, who are now dead, deep in the flow of the unexpected, day by day, minute by minute, themselves details in that superabundance."

Another Side to Carné

We know Marcel Carné as the director of three films released back-to-back in 1938-39--Port of Shadows, Hôtel du Nord, and Daybreak, which by themselves virtually defined "poetic realism," before going on to Children of Paradise (1945), one the those rare films which everyone, but everyone,  seems to love.  At twenty-eight, however, Carné made a stab at honest work after several years as a film critic with an early feature called Drôle de drame (1937) which gave no indication of where his career would go.  The title doesn't really translate into English (something like "comedy drama," I suppose), which is appropriate, because the story, drawn from an English novel, doesn't really translate into French.  Carné recreated a neighborhood from Edwardian London on sets, then populated them with French actors playing characters with English names but speaking French and playing a traditional English farce.  Uh-uh. 

He might have supposed that, with the cast he had gathered, he could have pulled it off: Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet, and Jean-Louis Barrault, all at or extremely close to the height of their respective powers.  But I kept thinking of a contemporary Japanese play I saw some fifteen years ago on the London stage with a British cast, lead by Alan Rickman (as a character named Miko), and how I sat through it asking myself, "How can the director have sat through five minutes on the first day of rehearsal without seeing this wasn't going to work?"  Parisian audiences of 1937 concurred, and the film played in the capital for only slightly longer than it took to write these two paragraphs.  The three male leads, and for that matter their female support, are game and energetic, but this one was D.O.A.  It's available on a Home Vision DVD with no special features--what was there to add?--and an indifferent sound track.  Fortunately for him and for us, Carné kept at it.   

Modigliani (2004)

In Paris last late summer and early fall, I saw--and wrote up in the film journal for October 10--this turkey.  It was the worst film I took in during the year and one of the worst ever.  It gave me special pleasure to see Stephen Holden eviscerate it in yesterday's New York Times on its American theatrical release, dilating upon several of the same issues that had chapped my glutes.  Read my thoughts, or Holden's, but for heaven's sake don't go anywhere near the movie.  It reduces IQ points upon contact.