Uncategorized – Page 2 – R. Emmet Sweeney

The Swashbuckling Lover: Bardelys the Magnificent (1926)

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October 17, 2017

By 1926 director King Vidor and star John Gilbert were one of MGM’s most bankable duos, thanks to the massive success of their WWI drama The Big Parade (1925). They were immediately thrust into the similarly high-minded period piece La Bohème (1926), and were cast in The Glory Diggers, about the construction of the Panama Canal. But MGM had to drop the latter project, and to keep them working swiftly re-assigned both of them to Bardelys the Magnificent (1926) instead, a tongue-in-cheek romantic adventure in the Douglas Fairbanks mold. It was a departure for the duo, but they proved to have the appropriately light touch, and Gilbert flies across the screen as if sprung from a trampoline. Gilbert pokes fun at his “Great Lover” persona, here pushed into a seducer caricature of Casanovian proportions. Once thought lost, an incomplete print was discovered in France in 2006 and restored by Lobster Films. The third reel is missing, with that section filled in with inter-titles and stills. It is this version that is on DVD from Flicker Alley and is now streaming on FilmStruck.

King Vidor was “a little ashamed” of Bardelys the Magnificent, while John Gilbert considered it to be “Applesauce. With one John Gilbert providing the sauce.” It didn’t have the cachet of their previous films together, though seen today it’s a vibrant and funny film, one adapted from the 1905 novel by Rafael Sabatini. John Gilbert is the title character Bardelys, a womanizing adviser to King Louis XIII, he warns his servant to always let him know which husbands are in town before he schedules his assignations. But even when angry spouses drop in and challenge him to a sword fight, he flatters them so relentlessly (both their looks and their fighting skill), that they go away happy. Bardelys is such a well-known lover that almost every woman in town has been called “dark enchantress” and received a locket with a piece of his hair, meant to symbolize his devotion – they are assembled in bulk by his servants and dispensed with impunity.

The Comte de Châtellerault (Roy D’arcy) has no such luck with women. He was very publicly rejected by Roxalanne de Lavedan (Eleanor Boardman, to become Vidor’s wife after filming) before tripping over a precisely placed lunchbox and falling on his behind. The Comte becomes the laughingstock of Paris, and in a fit of pique, he makes an impossible wager with Bardelys – if Bardelys can get Roxalanne to marry him, he will receive all of the Comte’s wealth. And if he fails, Bardelys must give up his entire fortune. Bardelys is in no mood to marry, but accepts the bet anyway, as a test of his desirability. In order to win the anti-monarchy Roxalanne’s heart, Bardelys pretends to be famed revolutionary Lesperon. It is in this guise that Roxalanne’s reserve begins to crack, but soon Bardelys will have the King’s guards on his tale, and it’s more than money he has to put on the line.

Vidor films with great agility, moving his camera in inventive ways, including dropping down with Bardelys out of a window. The most memorable shot is a ravishingly romantic one, of a canoe ride with Bardelys and Roxalanne, weeping willow branches drooping down over them like a caressing lover. King Vidor recalled the construction of the scene in his memoirs, as quoted in a post on TCM.com:

“I saw a property man wading in the lake pushing an old rowboat he had brought along just in case the director asked for one. He brushed past the lone branch of a weeping willow tree hanging in the water. I asked the head grip: ‘How long will it take you to make a tunnel of willow branches one hundred feet long?’ The leaves threw a moving pattern of light and shadow which played moodily across the faces of the lovers. The arrangement, movement and lighting of the scene were in complete harmony. The total effect was one of magic.” Vidor added that he was often asked about that scene. “They have forgotten the title, the actors, the author, even the melodramatic plot, but the magic of the camera made its indelible impression.”

Also making an impression is Bardelys’s wild escape from the gallows, a remarkably inventive bit of madcap action that has Gilbert springing around with uncanny mobility. In my favorite bit, he is trying to escape back up through a hatch, but a group of soldiers are thrusting their scythes into the opening below him. Taking this as an opportunity, when the scythes all clash together, it forms a kind of floor which Bardelys uses as leverage to leap up and out of the hatch. It is a brilliant bit of stagecraft, and manages to display the wit of Bardelys solely through action.

Arthur Lubin, who plays King Louis XIII, recalled that the set was a happy one, and speculated that “I think the reason King was so well liked was that he left the actors alone.” That convivial atmosphere really comes across on the screen, though Gilbert himself expressed unhappiness with the whole production. He told Alma Whitaker of the Los Angeles Times that “I don’t want to be portraying this incredible ‘magnificent’ stuff. Whenever they talk ‘costume picture’ to me again, I am going to mentally translate all the characters into modern clothes and see how they would work out in say, Pasadena, today. If they don’t ring true, they are out.”

The film was a minor success, bringing back a profit of $135,000 on a cost of $460,000. But for all involved it was a minor affair, a diversion from the other work they’d rather be doing. MGM felt similarly, for when their rights to the Sabatini novel expired in 1936, they destroyed the negative. The movie would have been lost forever if not for the miraculous discovery of that print in France. Thankfully, we can now see the film for what it is, an impressively mounted off-the-cuff adventure that could give Fairbanks a run for his money.

Eternal Recurrence: Revenge (1989)

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October 10, 2017

Revenge (1989) concerns a vengeance that cannot be contained by time. It floats through the centuries, traveling from 17th century Korea to 20th century Sakhalin Island, a much fought over spit of land squabbled over by Russia and Japan. A free-form mass of condensed hate emerges during this period, one which causes the death of a little girl and the mission of her doomed half-brother, who is conceived and raised only to avenge her murder. A major work of what became known as the Kazakh New Wave, Revenge is elusive and incantatory due in part to the script by the Korean-Russian poet Anatoli Kim that does not provide as much of a narrative as it does a striking collage of decay. Add to this the fact that director Ermek Shinarbaev was born in Soviet controlled Kazakhstan, but after Revenge was filmed the Soviet system collapsed and Kazakhstan became a sovereign state. The film reflects the rootlessness, uncertainty and bitterness of no longer having a place to call home. Restored in 2010 thanks to the efforts of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, it is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion (in Volume 2 of their World Cinema Project series), and is now streaming on FilmStruck.

Shinarbaev studied at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (aka VGIK), the oldest film school in the world, having been founded in 1919. He was there for eleven years (1970 – 1981), but his time there didn’t overlap with the future Kazakh New Wave filmmakers (Serik Aprimov, Sergei Dvortsevoy, Ardak Amirkulov, Amir Karakulov, Darezhan Omirbaev) who all joined a workshop with filmmaker Sergei Soloviev in 1984. Shinarbaev would be lumped in with them anyway, as it was good publicity for all involved. After graduation Shinarbaev spent, as noted in Tanner Tafelski’s essential interview at The Brooklyn Rail, “three years in Kazakhstan trying to do something as a filmmaker,” and after no funding, he “decided to quit forever.”

But then he discovered the work of Anatoli Kim, who he blindly started harassing in an effort to adapt his work. They would make three films together, and their third and final collaboration, Revenge, was buffeted more than usual by bizarre production circumstances. Kim had originally written the script for a famous Russian actor to make, but it had been definitively rejected. Shinarbaev accepted the project sight-unseen, inherently trusting Kim’s talent. But the Russian state funding arm was reluctant to give money to a Kazakh filmmaker working on a Russian subject, so he was only given 30% of his proposed budget, a total of 800,000 rubles. Two directors of photography quit weeks into production, and the assistant DP Sergei Kosmanev would finish the job – astonishing considering the film’s hieratically beautiful lighting, which in his Criterion essay Kent Jones describes as the film’s “awed respect for the sheer power of light.”

The story is split into seven parts, and the main thread follows the aftermath of a senseless murder of a young girl by her schoolteacher Yan (Nikolai Tacheyev). Seemingly unmotivated, it is an act of pure evil. The girl’s father, Tsai (Kasym Zhakibayev), vows revenge at any cost, and after his first attempt fails, he has a child with a younger woman, vowing that this boy, named Sungu (Aleksandr Pan) will be trained to seek revenge in the face of his father’s failure (this plot is strikingly similar to that of Lady Snowblood [1973], which I wrote about earlier this year). Sungu’s entire life will be focused on the murder of Yan. There is a prologue that lends a cosmic dimension to this tragic tale. It is set in 17th century Korea, during which a trifling king sentences a loyal subject to be beaten to death. His friend, and court poet, is also named Sungu, and is suitably disgusted by this act and requests to leave the kingdom. He is doomed to exile, wishing to depart “as a nothing remembering nothing, to become once again the nothing that means nothing, as I was before my birth.” Then he walks over the horizon into the blazing sun.

Violence follows Sungu across generations, to be reborn in the 19th century as a weapon of vengeance, though still touched with the spirit of poetry. Briefly anyway, for the weight of his mission grows so heavy that he makes his way eastward to Sakhalin Island, the contested spit of land that was split 50/50 between Japan and Russia, with a large population of Korean laborers. Sungu throws himself into a lumber splitting job, hoping to disappear into the routine, among other men trying to disappear in this non-place. But his past emerges as a wound, one that opens up and bleeds him dry. The film in this final section becomes ritualistically symbolic, as if Sungu had anticipated his own humiliation and was acting it out to fulfill a duty. Aleksandr Pan plays him as a blank, a tool rather than a human. The further Sungu heads toward his destiny, the darker the film gets. While his 17th century self departed into the sun, here is expires into darkness. The lights dim, flickering over the ghosts that he passes on his way to Yan’s house, surrounding a vision of his father, as well as the sister he never knew. He travels to Yan’s house the site of final reckoning, where he can collapse at last.

To Have and To Hold: Losing Ground (1982)

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October 3, 2017

Losing Ground (1982) is a shape-shifting drama of an imploding marriage, insinuating itself into the diverging head-spaces of a pair of quarreling intellectuals. Shot on a shoestring budget in 1982 by City College of New York professor Kathleen Collins, it was one of the first features directed by a black woman since the 1920s. Distributors didn’t know what to do with a black art film, so after a few festival screenings and an airing on public television, it disappeared from view. Thanks to the efforts of Kathleen Collins’ daughter Nina and Milestone Films, this remarkable feature was finally released into theaters in 2015, and now it’s available on a lovely DVD and Blu-ray, and is streaming on FilmStruck.

Collins wrote and directed Losing Ground, shooting in New York City and Rockland County on a budget of $125,000. The film centers on the relationship between literature professor Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) and her painter husband Victor (Bill Gunn). Sara is cold, calculating and withholding, while Victor is impulsive, bombastic and outgoing. She has strict routines of writing and researching while Victor goes on instinct. His latest instinct is to spend a month in a house upstate so he can paint the local Puerto Rican community (especially, and exclusively, the women). All Sara wants is a library nearby so she can continue researching her book on aesthetics. Victor expects her to figure out study arrangements on the fly, placing his job, his art, before hers. The trip only exacerbates their differences, and neither gives any ground to the other. This is a movie in which neither spouse is completely sympathetic.

This was Collins’ second feature after the 50-minute The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980, available as an extra on the Losing Ground DVD/Blu-ray), in which she adapted Henry H. Roth’s short story collection The Cruz Chronicles about a Puerto Rican family. Made for only $5,000, Collins recalled it was “terribly hard” to make, but it laid the groundwork for Losing Ground. She made both while a professor at the City College of New York, teaching film history and screenwriting. She had a masters in French literature from the Sorbonne, but a course she took there on adapting literature into film ignited her interest in cinema (previous to her academic career, she was a civil rights activist for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Collins began writing scripts while making a living as an editor for the BBC and a variety of other television stations. But she couldn’t secure any funding for her projects, recalling that “nobody would give any money to a black woman to direct a film. It was probably the most discouraging time of my life.” It was through the encouragement of one of her students, Ronald K. Gray, who would be her cinematographer, that she stubbornly carried on, and was able to scrape together enough funds for Losing Ground.

Victor is working through a personal and artistic crisis, as he shifts from abstract to figural canvases, he spends most of his time with a young dancer he meets in town, his model and mid-life crisis muse. Sara yearns for escape, so accepts an offer from one of her students to act in his student film, a loose adaptation of the “Frankie and Johnnie” lovers-on-the-run folk blues song. It is on that shoot that she enjoys her own awakening.

Sara asserts control of her environment from the first shot of her lecture on existentialism. She speaks with emphatic enunciation, seeking clarity and directness. After the talk, a student clumsily tries to flirt with her by telling her he hoped her husband appreciated her. Sara pauses, a little shocked at this intrusion of her home life into this workspace – that pause indicates the barriers she erects between the two. Victor is introduced working on a canvas while drinking champagne at their apartment, totally collapsing his art and his life. It is essential for him to intertwine his work and his personal life, as one informs the other. As played by Bill Gunn (a fine filmmaker in his own right – see Ganja and Hess [1973]), Victor has bought into the idea that virility is the key to his inspiration, a machismo that he uses to justify all kinds of indelicate actions. His first act is to suggest to trip upstate, a journey that would aid his artistic practice, and one sure to delay Sara’s book project.

As Victor’s retreat looks more and more like a way for him to have an affair by other means, Sara’s reserve begins to crack. Her carefully drawn barriers between work and life collapse as Victor keeps intruding. She escapes into the film production, letting her hair down and dancing with a charismatic out-of-work actor named Duke (Duane Jones, Night of the Living Dead [1968]). This performance seems to free something in her, and allows her to discover creative ways out of her collapsing marriage. She begins to see Victor for what he is, and in the most brutally honest line in the movie, she spits out, “Don’t you take your dick out like it was artistic, like it was some goddamn paintbrush!” That is a line too harsh and too true to come back from. The film ends in a scene of creative violence, a gunshot in the film-within-a-film providing a definitive end to their affair. Tragically, this would be Collins’s final film, as she would die in 1988 of breast cancer at age 46.

It is thanks to Nina Lorez Collins that we are able to see her mother’s brilliant work. In 2010, DuArt was closing it’s film processing lab, and disposing of their vast archive of material. It included the original 16mm negative of Losing Ground. DuArt contacted Nina, and with the assistance of Milestone Film, the material was preserved and scanned for home video and digital distribution. It could have so easily been trashed at any step along that path, so any viewing of Losing Ground is a gift, and should be welcomed as such.

Black Sheep: Mon Oncle (1958)

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September 26, 2017

“That would be the ideal film. I would like people to see Hulot less and less and to see other people or characters more and more.” – Jacques Tati

With Mon Oncle (1958), Jacques Tati gets closer to making his ideal film. The character of Hulot gets pushed further and further into the background until he often disappears, letting nearly everyone else in town take center stage. Hulot’s role is to set a disastrous mechanism into motion, then stroll offscreen with charming obliviousness. He is inimical to the quickly modernizing world of the film, able to find the flaw in any advanced doohickey and reduce it to a smoking, blubbering mess in a matter of minutes. Hulot is forever putting the brakes on technological advancement, while the rest of his family is installing the latest and greatest in household tech, from a motion-sensor garage door to a fish water fountain. While his family tries to automate and smooth out their lives, Hulot prefers to live in the grit and grime, in an old rickety house covered in dust and layered with history. Tati uses set and sound design to separate Hulot from his contemporaries, going from the squeaky clean lines of his sister’s ultra-modern home to the clatteringly labyrinthine staircase of his apartment building. Hulot is a man of out of time, trying to impart his destabilizing spirit to his little nephew, the only relative susceptible to his charms.

Mon Oncle opens and closes with scenes of stray dogs fanning out into an alley, eating garbage, urinating and making the world their home. The title appears in chalk on a brick wall, as if this was a post-apocalyptic thriller rather than a slapstick comedy. But all of Tati’s films have this “out-of-time” feeling, since Tati himself felt so upset about the massive re-development changing the French cityscape. Tati told Bert Cardullo (quoted in World Directors in Dialogue): “What bothers me today is that Paris itself is being destroyed. This really aggravates me. If we need additional housing, and God knows we do, let’s build new cities. There is enough room. But we should not demolish nice old buildings in Paris for the sake of new apartment buildings. Paris will end up looking like Hamburg. And it is uniformity that I dislike.” And it is uniformity that he skewers relentlessly in his design of Charles and Madame Arpel’s home (Hulot’s brother-in-law and sister played by Jean-Pierre Zola and Adrienne Servantie), a boxy glass-walled modern edifice in which everything is connected but nothing functions. It is an especially dour place for Hulot’s nephew Gérard (Alain Bécourt), who finds few places to play in the ascetic setup. Even the backyard is landscaped to an inch within its life, and one hopscotches over it rather than walks through it.

It is Tati’s first film released in color (he shot Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday [1953] in color but it was distributed in B&W), and he uses it to further establish a sense of place. The Arpel home is weak pastel, gray-blue with a smidge of green in the yard. Rather institutional in its color scheme. Hulot’s neighborhood though, is all earth tones, what Tati called, “old, velvety colors.” Hulot lives in what seems like a simulacrum of a small French village, on which probably no longer existed when Tati made the film. But he is a nostalgist for this kind of place, having fond memories of going to delis with his grandmother, “there was some sawdust on the floor, they cut us some thin slices of salami to give us a taste of it, the room smelled deliciously of oak and pepper.” Today, Tati said, “when you go to a restaurant it’s as if you were eating in a clinic.” Hulot’s home is a remarkable construction meant to channel these childhood memories. It is shot head-on in long shot, so when Hulot descends the stairs we can make out his entire journey from top-to-bottom in one sequence, tracking his progress through windows and balconies, his bopping head giving him away. This kind of “dollhouse” shot is one that Wes Anderson liberally borrowed in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

This set is not just that one trick-shot though, it is a living organism that Hulot has to manipulate to keep people happy. In order to make a caged bird sing it’s morning song, he has to manipulate one of his windows so it reflects a beam of sun onto the animal – only then will it start its song. And every day upon departure he provides the girl on the bottom floor with candy or a kind word (by the end of the film she’s grown from a tween to an adolescent while his nephew never seemed to age at all – time does strange things in Hulot’s world). Hulot is always leaving the apartment to pick up Gérard from school. Gérard is a cooped up kid who has found an escape with his ne’er do well uncle and a group of prankster kids. Their favorite routine is to wait for a pedestrian to walk near a lamp post, whistle as if calling them and betting on whether they will run into the post.

Eventually though, Hulot has to take the boy home, and the construction of that home is one of Tati’s great achievements, a totem to conspicuous consumption without a thought to functionality. And Tati uses sound design to activate multiple levels of the screen space. In one segment Madame Arpel is complimenting a neighbor on her hat in the foreground, while in the background Gérard is cleaning his shoes on the welcome mat, that scraping sound nearly blotting out his mother’s conversation. Everything in a Tati frame matters, there is no centering character. While your eye automatically drifts to Hulot, since Tati is such a master of pantomime, he often wanders out of frame, so you are forced to find other jokes – like the two circular windows that look like eyelid-less eyes, or the great sucking sound of the fish fountain, which Madame Arpel turns on and off depending on the importance of the guest. There is a whole rhythm to the house’s apparatus, the fountain “sucking,” the front door buzz, the soft “thunk” of a glass door closing, one might be able to map the comings and goings of each character just based on the sound design.

Needless to say when they have a dinner party Hulot starts breaking down the Arpel’s much sought-after order. He does the same at the rubber hose factory they get him a job at – the hose ends up looking like sausage, the disposal of which is an adventure on its own. There are so many visual gags, layered into each intricately arrayed sequence, it’s almost enough to be distracted by the solitude of it all. For while Hulot was the center of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, here he seems more peripheral, his final expulsion a natural extension of the plot. The final images, rather touching ones, find Charles and his son Gérard ultimately bonding over the lamp post prank. What had been a completely combative relationship has softened in a shared bond over slapstick violence. But Hulot is gone, and they don’t miss him.

Summer Daze: Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

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September 19, 2017

The first screen appearance of Jacques Tati’s Hulot character is inside of a car: a clattering, jittering wreck making its way to a seaside hotel in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953). Tati cuts from the sound of a train horn to the pitter-putter of Hulot’s gasping car engine as it turns the corner of a country lane. The train is carrying the middle-class vacationers to their summer home, but Hulot always travels his own circuitous path. He yearns to be part of the group, but is forever getting sidetracked, by everything from funerals to fireworks. The character of Hulot, established here and elaborated on in three more films (Mon Oncle [1958], Playtime [1967] and Trafic [1970]), is baffled by modern technology and remains continually tangled up in it, reaching an apotheosis in the shimmering urban Hulot-trap of Playtime. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is a gentler affair, though it establishes the unsteadiness and peculiar launching qualities of his springlike body. Like his car, he is as unsteady as a reed in a wind, and the slightest stumble will launch him into the next zip code. But he will always circle back home, hoping to get a few moments’ peace before getting launched once again.

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was shot in St. Marc-sur-mer in Brittany, on France’s northwestern coast. It was, and reportedly still is, a sleepy seaside resort town – you can still rent rooms in the same (extensively remodeled) Hotel de la Plage, now part of the Best Western chain. Tati shot on location during the summer and autumn of 1952, with the crew staying at the hotel. It remained open to the public, so if you were staying there during that year, you probably made it into the film as an extra. The rest of the cast was filled with relative unknowns (Lucien Fregis as the hotel manager) or acquaintances (Nathalie Pascaud, who plays the young blond Martine, was a friend of a friend). As with Jour de fête(1949), which I wrote about last week, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday doesn’t have much of a plot, but instead is a series of vignettes documenting a day in the town, slices of life that are then shredded by Hulot’s bumblings and stumblings (Tati made multiple edits to the feature, the final cut in 1978 – the original 1953 cut is offered as a bonus feature on FilmStruck).

The film begins, not with Hulot, but with a visual gag at a train station. A group of heavily packed vacationers wait on a middle platform. A noisy unintelligible voice on the intercom starts babbling, and the group, as one amorphous blob, runs to the platform at the bottom of the screen. But then a train starts rolling in at the platform at the top of the screen, and so on and so forth until the rabble finally gets on their train of choice. Shot with a static locked camera, Tati makes the train station look alien, almost inhuman, and the vacationers like a panicked mob. Later, a packed bus ride gets the same treatment – it is so filled with humanity a little boy is sitting inside the opening in the steering wheel. Compared to that, Hulot’s shivering little car doesn’t seem so embarrassing. He putters along at his own pace, breaking down every few miles, sure, but he’s not packed in like sardines. In these travel sequences you can really appreciate Tati’s manipulation of the soundtrack, the cut from a train horn to Hulot’s clattering car immediately emphasizes its fragility and its unconventional nature. The car sounds like it has emphysema, whereas the train is all brawn and strength.

When Hulot finally levers his reedy body out of the vehicle and into the hotel, it is already full with social circles fully formed, and it is near impossible for him to ingratiate himself. And it is here we first see Hulot in full, with the peaked cap, bobbing pipe and that angled, bouncing walk. Biographer David Bellos describes Hulot’s posture as a “‘corporeal structure’ vaguely reminiscent of Giacometti’s spidery lines.” He is spread out in all directions but somehow with a solid center of gravity. Then there is that unchangeable expression on his face which scholar Michel Chion described as “indefinable, somewhere between worry, stupidity, and polite neutrality.”

In the early going Hulot cannot manage the space of the hotel, he is just spilling all over the place. Each door he opens lets in a gale force wind, as if a twister had hit in the lobby. At check-in the tobacco in his pipe is so overflowing the hotel manager has to pluck it out of his mouth so he can speak. This is just the first of endless incursions into other people’s personal space. Even when he’s alone he annoys – during the post-dinnertime lull, he sits alone and plays an absurdly loud jazz record, jolting everyone out of their restful state. Hulot, both by accident and by design, is something of a prankster, so the only people who gravitate towards him are a little boy who gives him a run for his money at ping-pong, and the young beauty Martine, for whom Hulot is a charming respite from incessant male flirtation (from both insufferable Marxists and capitalists alike).

The most moving vignette depicts a scantily attended masked ball – there are a few children napping in their seats, Hulot and Martine. Hulot shows up in an elaborate pirate outfit, while Martine swoops in wearing a mask and skirt. She enters while he is futzing with the record player behind a curtain – and, just before she is about to depart, he emerges, and they giddily dance around the empty room. It is a moment when the two souls in the town seeking adventure have found each other, and Hulot does not stumble or collapse. In fact he is quite nimble as they skip around the dance floor. It is a short-lived moment, but an exquisite one, showing that the Hulot character, though aloof and oblivious to the world so much of the time, is capable of joining it in full when he discovers someone with the same out-of-step sensibility. It is a transitory moment, and Hulot is swept along by his own momentum as he crashes a funeral, and in the final spectacular stunt, sets off a whole shed of fireworks in a display of sublime idiocy. He ends the summer with a bang, but leaves much as he began, alone in that fussy old car. He gives Martine’s empty room one final look (she left without a goodbye), and drives offscreen, leaving us with an image of the emptied out town. It ends with a stamp being placed on a picture, turned into a postcard, a memory Hulot will keep close to his heart during the further solitary adventures that await him.

The Postman: Jour de Fête (1949)

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September 12, 2017

After a decade-long career as a music-hall performer, Jacques Tati transitioned to feature filmmaking witha comedy about a remarkably gullible postman. Before Tati invented the iconic bumbling bourgeois Hulot (in M. Hulot’s Holiday, 1953), he experimented with a clumsy working class letter carrier, prone to insecure bouts of drinking and falling flat on his face. Jour de fête (1949) exhibits Tati’s elastic expertise at mime, including a tour-de-force drunk bike ride, as well as displaying his immediate talents as a director, constructing brilliantly funny gags through choreography and sound design. All of the gags generate from a small town’s resistance to and obsession with technological advancement, especially as trumpeted by the Americans. Tati eyes all this talk of modernization with a gimlet eye, preferring instead to linger on the absurdities of small town life before they disappear forever.

Having made a name for himself on the music hall circuit, Tati made his way into short films, and gained some notoriety under René Clément, who directed him in the boxing comedy Soigne ton gauche (1936, for which Godard punned on the title for his Keep Your Right Up/Soigne ta droite). It was in this short that Tati took note of the bicycle riding postman played by Max Martel. This character would be the inspiration for his 1947 script The School For Postmen (1947), though in the interim he would be trying to avoid the German occupation government forces, who were seeking him out to work in Berlin for the Nazi organization “Strength Through Joy” as part of the compulsory work service. Instead he ditched them and hid out in the middle of the country in Le Marembert, four miles from Sainte-Sévère, which would be the location of Jour de fête. Tati and his friend Henri Marquet (a co-writer/actor in Jour de fête) chose Le Marembert as a town to hide out in because, Tati’s daughter explains in the documentary A L’Americaine (also on FilmStruck as a supplement to Jour de fête), “They jabbed a pencil into a map of France, Sainte-Sévère is smack in the middle.”

Tati himself continued that “once there, I was surprised. It was wartime, but in Sainte-Sévère, you’d never have known it. It’s fantastic to see people who know how to live. I thought if I made a film one day, I’d shoot it there.” He would stay true to his word, and retained the image of Max Martel’s postman. This would lead to the 1947 short The School For Postmen, a trial run for Jour de fête, in which his bicycling letter carrier is obsessed with proving that he can deliver the mail as fast as modern American technology allows. Originally slated to be directed by René Clément, his dropping out allowed Tati the opportunity to get behind the camera. And it was this experience that led him to believe he could extend this character out to feature length. He shot from May to December of 1947 in Sainte-Sévère, using it as his outdoor set. It was to be shot in a new color process called Thomsoncolor, but it was unstable and acceptable prints could not be struck. So it was distributed in B&W and that is how it is widely known today. However, in 1964 Tati did a re-edit with some painted in color by his friend Paul Grimault, and in 1994 a full color version was struck from the original negatives. All three versions are available to view on FilmStruck.

The story, such as it is, involves the fair coming into to Sainte-Sévère and upsetting the natural tempo of the town. The café owner starts re-painting all his tables and chairs, a tad upsetting to his newly stained patrons, while one of the carnies flirts with one of the local girls. Through these side stories stumbles the insecure postman François (Tati), who endures spitballs from the local kids and endless gibes and pranks from the adults, mostly egging him into drinking games. Too eager to please to ever really object or fight back, he instead complains softly to himself. His track through town becomes an obstacle course of townspeople, carnies and kids all trying to distract him or rile him up, and he either ends up blackout drunk in a train car or roped into helping out someone else with their work (setting up a flagpole, cleaning up farmland, fixing a player piano). These are all intricately arranged set pieces that choreograph a whole village in motion (while the camera remains fairly static). The movement in the frame is never ending, and Tati is ever-eager to cede the frame to a better punchline, whether it’s the cross-eyed spike-driver (he needs to be positioned just a bit to the side) or the hunchbacked old gossip who fills in the details of every nook and cranny of the neighborhood; this 90 minutes feature somehow maps the whole town while also finding time to sketch each individual personality.

What François values above all is his job, so when he views a newsreel of all the new U.S. postal delivery technology, from helicopter drops to automated sorting machines, he blows a gasket and tries to prove he can match the Americans’ speed with his own two-wheeler. What ensues is nothing less than a Buster Keaton-esque study in human transportation gone awry, like in Sherlock Jr. (1924) when he loses his driver and rides a motorcycle side-saddle to a series of death-defying near misses. In Tati’s case he just loses his bicycle, which starts riding down the road on its own, as if possessed by a demon. Tati chases it down as if his life depended on it because his reputation hinges upon this mere mode of transportation. His bike goes through all forms of indignities – losing wheels, getting caught on a railroad crossing gate, getting dunked in a river. But it’s all for the greater good (or so François believes), of delivering the mail with speed, “American-style,” he keeps saying. So he is sticking the mail in grain sorters, shoving it on a butcher’s cutting board (which swiftly gets chopped), and sticking it under a horse’s tail. No time for customer service, as long as the mail gets delivered, no matter the condition, he will be satisfied. That is, until he can move no more, and the old hunchback drags him out of the water and tells him, “News is rarely good, so let it take its sweet time.”

Tati prefers the town stay as it is. But his depiction is already old-fashioned, as these towns became more mechanized, less personable. And so he had found a theme that would carry him through the films to follow, though he would need a new character, one more upwardly mobile to explore the ever dehumanized city, if not less prone to pratfalls. So Monsieur Hulot was born: the latest, and certainly the most oblivious cog in the industrial machine.

New Weird America: Something Wild (1986)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 5, 2017

To view Something Wild click here.

Something Wild (1986) is a road movie with a penchant for detours, keeping its eyes on the side roads and rest stops instead of the highway in front of it. A shapeshifting romantic-comic thriller, it adjusts its tone to the landscape, paying as a romcom in NYC, a chase film in Pennsylvania and a horror movie in Stony Brook. The only thing that ties together the film are the rest stops and delis the movie’s increasingly unhinged characters stop into for snacks, robberies, and a break from the world outside. Each location provides more subcultures for the insatiable eye of director Jonathan Demme to explore, whether it’s the tiny liquor store manager with a giant pipe or a duo of style conscious old thrift store biddies, Demme imbues every scene with indelible personalities, making the film a kind of American oddball panorama in which two star-crossed lovers keep criss-crossing through.

Jonathan Demme wasn’t sure he would make another big narrative film after Swing Shift (1984) was taken away from him by Warner Bros. It didn’t seem all the time and effort was worth it if he didn’t have any control over the final product. But he took another chance on Something Wild because he loved the script by E. Max Frye, about hip con artist Lulu (Melanie Griffith) who picks up and seduces a square banker named Charlie (Jeff Daniels) and encourages him to indulge his wild side, from childish dine-and-dash to slightly more dangerous subversions. It spins off into more intense and violent digressions from there, as Lulu’s sociopathic husband Ray (Ray Liotta) rages into the story, eager to seek vengeance on Charlie for absconding with his wife. Ranging from NYC to Pennsylvania to Virginia and back.

The further they get from NYC, the more their wardrobes shift – Charlie’s goes from drab brown suit to shorts and skeleton sunglasses, while Lulu transforms even more, from her severe black bangs and endless bracelets, to a spiky short blonde cut and a blue-and-white peasant dress. But while their outfits get more innocent, their actions tiptoe around legality. It is a film about the relationship between personality and place, how much we define ourselves by our past and present homes, and how much of what we thought was our true selves can shift when thrust into a new town, new clothes, and sitting next to a new girl. What seemed like a promising career track back in the city might now seem like prison.

Demme loved to scour the locations of his shoots (Tallahassee stood in for PA) for local color, and the film is bursting with side characters I would be eager to watch a whole movie about. Such as the roly-poly biker who rides along with his dog, or the gas station attendant who recommends that Charlie buy some shorts. Jeff Daniels spoke to People Magazine in 1987 about the atmosphere on the set:

“‘Jonathan listens to any idea, no matter how idiotic. And he tries a lot of them, because sometimes they work,’ says Jeff Daniels, who co-starred in Something Wild with Melanie Griffith. “I might turn around and see this dog on a motorcycle or a black hitchhiker wearing a cowboy hat. You know you’re walking through a Jonathan Demme movie because of the things he puts behind you and around you. There’s an improvisational feeling to everything he does.”

That feeling translates to the screen, as it bursts with activity. As Charlie, Jeff Daniels channels Demme’s affable people person – he insists on calling strangers by their first name, trying to make each purely commercial transaction more of a personal one. Early on this just means he speaks to waitresses with a solicitous tone – but later on it plays a pivotal part in Charlie’s recovery. He has had his nose broken by Ray, and needs to change out of his bloody shirt. Ray Liotta, by the way, is a demonic ball of coiled energy, and in an interview with David Poland Frye recalled how Daniels was scared by him during their first rehearsal. He can seemingly flex his entire body into a fist – and he plunges it at Charlie repeatedly. Anyway, back to the present, with Charlie at the gas station. He addresses “Nelson” by name to fill up his career, and, bemused by this weird white guy in skeleton glasses, Nelson asks Charlie about his bloody shirt.

Charlie realizes the state of his outfit, and requests a whole new change of clothes, stripping down to his skivvies in the store while Nelson just deadpans, “Charlie, attempt to be cool.” That line is Charlie’s entire existence in a nutshell, straining to be cool but instead landing flat on his face. At least until Lulu showed up. Lulu is an enigma when we first see her, dressed like an extra in a Bangles video with a jangling array of bracelets and necklaces covering up her arms while her face is framed by jet black bangs. She looks like danger, and she is, but the further Lulu and Charlie drive, the more their lies start to wear out, and they begin to learn the truth about each other. By the end very little is left of either of them, both reduced to essential parts, Charlie retaining his gentle nature and Lulu her shapeshifting unpredictability. The NYC they return to is no longer the one they left – having lost the ability to lie about themselves they will have to reinvent themselves anew, adapting to the shifting city around them.

The World’s a Stage: The Golden Coach (1953)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

August 29, 2017

The Golden Coach (1953) begins with a red curtain raising on a stage, the camera pushing in until the edges of the theater disappear and the story proper begins. Jean Renoir’s feature about an Italian theatrical troupe setting up shop in Peru foregrounds its artificiality, a play within the film that is a performance for our benefit. Near the end the troupe’s star actress asks, “where does theater end and life begin?” a question Renoir had been asking since his beginnings in cinema. It is a question without an answer, but indicates the space in which Renoir prefers to operate, within that intersection where playfulness and improvisation meet the social structures that try to contain them. The Golden Coach focuses on Camilla (Anna Magnani), a dynamic stage presence who bewitches three of Peru’s most eligible bachelors, but cannot decide who she ultimately desires. She can only find clarity while on stage, and heartache off of it. So in an extraordinary conclusion, the film makes an argument for perpetual performance, instead of turning your life into art, make art of your life, regardless of the consequences.

Following the completion and success of The River (1951), which I wrote about here, Renoir was eager to get another project off the ground, preferably one where he could do a similar job of location shooting. After many starts and stops, including a drawn-out pre-production on a never made adaptation of Camus’s The Stranger, he received an offer from producer Robert Dorfmann, with a project ready to shoot. It was an adaptation of Prosper Merimee’s Carrosse Saint-Sacrement, which had been in development with Luchino Visconti, who had left after arguments over the script. Anna Magnani had already been cast in the leading role and production money had been lined up, so Renoir agreed, with the understanding it would be shot in dual French and English versions, and have some location shooting performed in Italy and Mexico. After some reshuffling of the budget, it turned out it would only be shot in English, which Magnani could only speak phonetically, and it would be shot entirely in studio.

Renoir reluctantly adapted to the lessened circumstances, and it’s quite possible having more authentic locales would have worked against the film’s ode to artificiality. But though it worked out artistically, the director complained mightily beforehand, and was also struggling with a wound in his leg that had become infected. This delayed shooting for months, and in the meantime he had growing doubts about his star, writing to producer Prince Francesco Alliata that (as quoted in Jean Renoir: A Biography, by Pascal Merigeau), “In my discussions with her, I’ve had the impression that Anna didn’t understand my screenplay. Moreover, she has had so much work that she wasn’t able to work seriously on her English. That represents such a handicap that I feel discouraged about it already.” But despite all of these pains, worries, and concerns, filming “made him forget his weariness and fatigue, and then he would display a staggering amount of energy, carried away as he was by the pleasure of making films, the enthusiasm of those around him, and his confidence in the film he was making.”

Renoir’s treatment of the Merimee play is very fanciful – the play takes place entirely in a Viceroy’s office and runs barely over an hour. Renoir pushed it more in the direction of the burlesque libretto by Meilhac and Halevy, from which came Jacques Offenbach’s comic opera La Perichole. The story concerns a troupe of Italian actors who are traveling to the New World, landing in Peru to put on some shows. Their lead actress is Camilla (Anna Magnani), a magnetic performer who draws men’s attentions regardless of their station. Spanish officer Felipe (Paul Campbell) had followed her from Europe, making the journey along with a garish golden coach. The coach is intended for Viceroy Ferdinand (Duncan Lamont), who hopes to deploy it as a symbol of Spanish power. But instead it becomes a pawn in his affections for Camilla, after he sees her bewitching performance in the palace. And finally there is the local top toreador named Ramon (Riccardo Rioli), a handsome brute who charms with his straightforward style. Camilla juggles the three men around until they are all ready to snap. The Viceroy is close to getting usurped by an aghast clergy, newly spiritual Felipe wants her to run away to India and Ramon simply wants to manhandle her. But Camilla cannot choose, they each offer her varied parts for her to play, so instead they engage in an increasingly frenetic farce in which she keeps stashing men in different rooms until they stumble upon each other and erupt in jealous swordfights. Camilla will either have to choose a man to settle down with or just stay true to her inauthentic self and continue to perform for everyone.

The closing sequences are a tour de force for Magnani, who overcame all of Renoir’s fears. Though not fluent in English, she managed to speak it well phonetically (as she did in Bellissima, 1951), and at 44 years of age is more than enough woman for all of the male actors of the film combined. In the final sequence she first plays a willowy pushover to flatter Ramon’s battering ram approach, then a sensitive artist to inflame Felipe’s Indian awakening (“They are better than us”) and finally a calculating manipulator with the Viceroy, trying to flirt him into a fight. But despite all her best efforts, the men discover her ruse and leave disconsolately, desolately aware none of them will be enough for her. Her one final trick is to appear as a religious penitent, donating the titular golden coach to the church to help the Viceroy out of a scrape. Camilla doesn’t seem to have a true self, but Renoir suggests that that is her glory – an acceptance of inauthenticity allows for more freedom, not less. In the final scene the troupe leader calls Camilla to the front of the stage, as she is saying goodbye to reality and returning to the theater:

Don’t waste your time in the so-called real-life. You belong to us, the actors, acrobats, mimes, clowns, mountebanks. Your only way to find happiness is on any stage, any platform, any public place, during those two little hours when you become another person, your true self.

Camilla says the names of those she has lost: Felipe, Ramon, the Viceroy. They have disappeared, become part of the audience. Does she miss them, the troupe leader asks? Magnani looks straight into the camera, and with a look of Mona Lisa-like inscrutability softly says, “a little.” It is one of the great line readings, encompassing the bone-deep sadness of abandoning her multiple loves as well as expressing the immense power she possesses by standing center stage ready to take on her next role.

This is the fourteenth and final part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, sixteen of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

La Bete Humaine (1938)

La Marseillaise (1938)

The Southerner (1945)

The River (1951)

Elena and Her Men (1956)

Picnic on the Grass (1959)

Another Day in the Country: Picnic on the Grass (1959)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

August 22, 2017

For Jean Renoir Picnic on the Grass was both a return and a departure. It was filmed in and around the country estate of Les Collettes, his late father’s land, where he had grown up as a child. It is the perfect setting for this back-to-nature comedy in which a scientist (and hopeful presidential candidate), is lured away from the world of the mind for that of the flesh. But instead of using this return to indulge in nostalgia or reiterate the naturalistic style of his still-famous triumphs – Renoir pushes further into farce and caricature. Picnic on the Grass is a broad and joyful comedy that was inevitably compared with Rules of the Game (1939) and Grand Illusion (1937), which had been restored and re-released around the same time, and so Renoir was compared to his previous self, and found wanting. Jonas Mekas, writing in The Village Voice in 1960, had a profound experience watching Picnic on the Grass and was baffled by its failure – he wrote: “I hear the critics did not like it. Who are the critics? Critics like to talk big – poor nearsighted things! They do not see beauty even when it is there.” FilmStruck presents us with another opportunity to see this beauty, so I attempted to find it there.

Picnic on the Grass was marked by the death of Gabrielle Renard, the nanny who raised Jean Renoir and became one of his father’s models. She brought Jean to see his first film in 1897 at the Palais des Nouveauté. Biographer Pascal Merigeau relates that the screening “threw him into a panic” and that Gabrielle had to rush him outside to calm down. She was a beloved figure in his life, and he devotes many tender passages to her in his memoirs, including these memorable closing lines:

As I bid farewell to the landscape of my childhood I think of Gabrielle. Certainly it was she who influenced me most of all. To her I owe Guignol and the Theatre Montmartre. She taught me to realize that the very unreality of those entertainments was a reason for examining real life. She taught me to see the face behind the mask, and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the cliché. My farewell to childhood may be expressed in very few words: ‘Wait for me, Gabrielle.’

Gabrielle passed away on February 26, 1959, and Picnic on the Grass began shooting in July in Les Collettes, where they had originally formed their bond so many years before.

Renoir had been working on the script since 1958, when he registered a 32-page treatment. The story concerns Etienne Alexis (Paul Meurisse), a television-famous scientist whose main political position is mandatory artificial insemination as a way to increase intelligence in children. Despite this frightening proposition, through complete voter apathy he is likely to be the next president of Europe. That is, until he takes a fateful picnic with his equally ascetic bride-to-be/girl scout leader Marie-Charlotte (Ingrid Nordine). A satyr-like shepherd plays his flute for his goat, conjuring up a strong wind that blows past Etienne’s party and magically juices their libidos. As friends and assistants start canoodling under the trees (reminiscent of the scene in Elena and her Men [1956] with a mass-peasant makeout session), Etienne and his new chambermaid Nénette (Catherine Rouvel) begin an extended flirtation that might bring down his entire candidacy. While his advisers continue to set-up a wedding with Marie-Charlotte, Etienne’s eyes keep roaming to Nénette, a disarmingly direct farm girl who was seeking artificial insemination because she had never found a man worth her time.

Renoir cast Catherine Rouvel after being introduced to her after a screening of Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948). She had just turned nineteen, and Pascal Merigeau believes she reminded him of Gabrielle: “Returning to Les Collettes and his father’s house, among the olive trees, on the banks of the river, Renoir recommuned with his youth, rediscovered Gabrielle’s former features and soft curves, as well as Dedee’s, his first love, in Catherine Rouvel.” There is a resemblance, at least going by Auguste Renoir’s many portraits of Gabrielle, and Rouvel dazzles in the part, presenting Nénette as supremely self-confident in her naïveté – a completely charming creation.

Now in the twilight of his career, he was struggling to secure funding for new projects, and would end up producing Picnic on the Grass himself, necessitating a lower budget and tight shooting schedule. It was filmed over 20 days, reusing the studio and crew from The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment (1959), his TV adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which he had completed earlier in the year. Precise blocking was drawn out with chalk on the floor, and the actors had to follow them. Renoir later regretted the restrictions the budget required, complaining that working in this way “kills something extremely important, which is the actor’s surprise at being faced with the scenery.”

But Renoir tended to rate his own features based on financial returns, and the film was essentially ignored upon release, and gave Renoir “a pathological distaste for all the processes relating to film or television.” But looking at it outside of the pressure cooker of Renoir’s box office expectations, it’s a film that lives in the zone between the ridiculous and the sublime, happy to look the fool in search of what Renoir valued in life – which according to this film is, in no particular order: lazing about the riverside, eating heartily and sex (preferably outside). Renoir is deeply discouraged by modernity, opening on a parody of the evening news – which spends more time on his pending nuptials than his grotesque plan for population control. It is prescient in depicting how news was sliding ever closer towards entertainment.

Renoir’s POV comes through most clearly in a monologue by a priest out on a walk, telling Etienne what he thinks about his technocratic capitalism.

“Tomorrow you’ll send us to the moon. And, pray tell, what will we do up there on the moon? Do you think we’ll be happier there than under the shade of our olive trees? Scientific dictatorship will be a fine mess. We built the Notre-Dame, we built Chartres. We covered the Earth with cathedrals and churches. You? You’re covering it with factories. You must admit that the smoke from our incense is less damaging to the atmosphere than your atomic radiations. It appears that men enjoy being poisoned.

But, as Renoir well knows, whether or not he disapproves of the flow of history, it will flow on anyway, so you might as well get pleasure where you can. So Etienne and Nénette find themselves in each other, and that will have to be enough.

This is the thirteenth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, sixteen of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

La Bete Humaine (1938)

La Marseillaise (1938)

The Southerner (1945)

The River (1951)

Elena and Her Men (1956)

Wrapped Around Her Finger: Elena and Her Men (1956)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney2 Comments

August 15, 2017

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In its time Elena and Her Men (1956) was something of a disaster for Jean Renoir, a succession of problems (contested rights, fevers, bad accents) for which he struggled to find solutions. It was a box office and critical dud, and ended any hope of Renoir returning to Hollywood. To read its production history in Pascal Merigeau’s Jean Renoir: A Biography is akin to attending a wake. And yet the film itself is an effervescent thing, an improbable farce about a coup d’etat that positively shimmers with invention. For years Renoir had tried to find a project for Ingrid Bergman, and attracted her with a chance to do light comedy, not something she’d had many opportunities to perform. But due to the stresses of filming both French and English versions of the film (in the U.S. it was titled Paris Does Strange Things), Renoir was miserable during its production and considered its box office failure the final word, dismissing it in interviews. But I would tend to agree with Jean-Luc Godard, one of the film’s only contemporaneous defenders (along with André Bazin), who wrote that Elena and Her Men is the “French film par excellence.”

Jean Renoir had wanted to work with Ingrid Bergman since 1944 during his time in Hollywood, when he considered adapting Mary Webb’s Precious Bane with Bergman as the hare-lipped lead. She was eager to work with him, but it never worked out, and she recalled in her memoirs that Renoir said, “they’d have to wait until her career was in decline and then, when she was falling, he would be there to catch her.” Her remarkable films with then husband Roberto Rossellini were commercial failures, so Renoir was true to his word and offered her Elena and Her Men. It came to life in 1955 after the success of French Cancan, as producer Henry Deutschmeister was eager to get another Renoir film into production. Originally titled The Red Carnation, it was to be a loose adaptation of the life of General Boulanger, the French minister of defense from January 1886 to 1887. A widely admired figure with the public, when he was fired from his position there was a huge groundswell of support, enough to execute a coup d’état and seize power. But instead of listening to his advisers he ran away with his mistress Céline de Bonnemains, choosing love over politics. He would commit suicide at her grave, after she died of tuberculosis.

Renoir wrote the screenplay with Jean Serge – the credit to Cy Howard was purely to give the faulty impression that this was an American co-production. But close to the shooting date Boulanger’s daughters threatened to sue, and major changes had to be made to the script. All the names were changed and any reference to Boulanger was scrubbed – Renoir claims that most of the film had to be improvised. The Boulanger figure was now called General Rollan, and was played by Jean Marais. Bergman said she was happy to have a leading man who was an out homosexual, because “Those people are the only ones who play love scenes perfectly because neither prudery nor sensuality embarrasses them.” Rollan is a conquering hero who is beloved by the common folk – he is introduced first via offscreen audio, as a military march distracts Elena from the dull Abelard and Heloise composition she is playing on the piano with her composer boyfriend. Though it will premiere at La Scala, Elena couldn’t care less, she just wants to rush outside and see what the hullabaloo is about. This little bit of sound mixing brilliantly establishes Elena’s and Rollan’s characters simultaneously – she an endlessly curious student of humanity, he an embodiment of pomp and circumstance.

Elena is a Polish princess and the target of every eligible bachelor in France. She bounces from rich suitor to rich suitor, teasing marriage until she can’t tease anymore. FilmStruck presents the French version of Elena and Her Men, and while Bergman had to brush up on the language, her performance is like a hummingbird, flittering, trilling and fidgeting as she masterminds the attempted downfall of the French republic. Elena is introduced to Rollan by Henri (Mel Ferrer), one of Rollan’s old friends, a member of the idle rich whose entire job seems to be made up of flirting. New Jersey’s own Mel Ferrer got by with his French, though he was ultimately dubbed. According to Merigeau’s biography, it was the English version that imposed the greatest headaches, as the French actors just didn’t understand the language: “They had to speak their lines based on what they could understand of them phonetically, and Renoir ended up having to simplify the dialogue ceaselessly, and then do the same for the shots, and then the scenes.” This version, released in the U.S. as Paris Does Strange Things, was savaged by critics, and is no longer in general circulation.

Elena, though an incorrigible flirt, gets more pleasure out of being a muse than a girlfriend, usually dumping a beau after they achieve some goal, like the completion of the symphony or the overthrow of the government. She gives her man a daisy, which if he keeps it close to his chest, guarantees success in his venture. For Elena it is a way to make a game out of life and remain in the black. General Rollan is her greatest test yet, as he is very reluctant to embrace his inner despot, though the many yes men around him push him toward becoming dictator. While Rollan is pondering treason, Henri is more of a sensualist, his philosophy of life is “universal idleness for everyone, rich or poor.” He spends one Bastille Day evening with Elena, and becomes smitten for life. She runs off before he can get his emotions all over her. His love, it seems, is the only thing that scares her. Godard interpreted Elena to be a Greek Muse, and that to love a man would be to ensure her own death: “To be sure of living, one must be sure of loving; and to be sure of loving, one must be sure of dying. This is what Elena discovers in the arms of her men.”

ElenaandHerMen_Paris_Strange_1956_m

Elena and Her Men ends in a joyous chain reaction of lovemaking, as a deep kiss between Henri and Elena inspires everyone on-screen, from dour advisers to little street urchins, to grab the neighbor next to them and plant a kiss (very similar to the joke in The Naked Gun [1988] where the whole stadium starts making out). It is love as anarchy, as this orgy takes place the police have the building (a bordello) surrounded, and are waiting to arrest the General. But this is one of Renoir’s sweetest films, without the bitter sting of his other group farces, like The Rules of the Game (1939). So Boulanger’s death is unaddressed, and the film chooses instead to live in a fable-like present where a giddy destabilizing love sweeps the populace, preserves the republic and brings Elena down to earth.

This is the twelfth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, sixteen of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

La Bete Humaine (1938)

La Marseillaise (1938)

The Southerner (1945)

The River (1951)