CALIFORNIA MOVIE JOURNAL (January 2022)

[Chris Knipp]

CLÉO FROM 7 TO 7 (Agnès Varda 1961). Another current Nouvelle Vague Criterion Channel offering of a famous film I'd never previously seen. Varda was originally trained as a photographer and the richly contrasty black and white images full of busy Paris streets filmed with fluency and verve are what counts most to me in this film. They recall the work of William Klein; the images are intense and stunning. Structured as a real-time (minus 30-minutes) coverage of two hours in the life of statuesque young blonde pop singer and minor celebrity Flora "Cléo" Victoire (Corinne Marahand) - the usual time when Parisian boys met their girlfriends - who is afraid she may have fatal stomach cancer and at the end of this period she's going to a hospital to get the results of a biopsy, and she fears the worst. Nice moments include seeing a young Michel Legrand informally play and sing and glimpsing a crisp Buster Keaton-style silent film featuring Godard, Anna Karina, Eddie Constantine, and others. Until the last segment, it's not a lot more than the nice visuals, plus Cléo's anxiety. After a lot of ego and fear of dying, finally Cléo casually meets Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), a soft-spoken, preternaturally articulate soldier on temporary leave from the Algerian war, whose company and conversation have a transformative effect. Kael described this as the very rare female-helmed film clearly different from one made by a man.

[Chris Knipp]

SUZANNE'S CAREER (Éric Rohmer 1963). One of his earliest features, black and white, only 55 minutes, about Paris university students and focused on a young woman from the point of view of two young men, Bertrand and Guillaume, narrated by the younger, handsomer one, Bertrand, showing that both undervalue her. In the end Suzanne is getting married and Bertrand is failing in his studies and losing Suzie, the "superior" girl he's now spending time with. Pretty slight, but economical in its narration, this shows how simple Rohmer's beginnings were, but of interest to the Rohmer completist as the second movie in the series of the Six Moral Tales.. A current Criterion Channel offering.

[Chris Knipp]

THE FIRE WITHIN/LE FEU FOLLET (Louis Malle 1963). Wow. Thought rewatching this would be depressing but what's depressing is always bad movies, never good ones, and this is a very good one. It may seem dated or over-stylized at times but this is masterful, clear and simple filmmaking, and Maurice Ronet is playing the psychologically rich role of a man who has partially destroyed himself by drink, not far from the actor himself. I don't know if Malle had brushed personally with alcoholism or been suicidal, but he apparently has Ronet wear his, Malle's, clothes and filled his room at the Versailles sanatorium with his possessions. He had led a nighttime dissolute party life and questioned his existence, but he chose life, not the end of Alain. The added pleasure today is the option of comparing this great New Wave work with another fine recent film based on the same Pierre Drieu La Rochelle book, Joachim Trier's 2011 Oslo: August 31, with the great Anders Danielsen Lie. Trier's, with Lie, is more puzzling and fluid, but Malle's is richer in background. Pauline Kael has written well about this film and Malle in general particularly in her Oct. 23, 1971 New Yorker review of Murmur of the Heart, which sheds some light on Malle's eclectic filmography and why it delayed his acquiring the same reputation as other New Wave directors.

[Chris Knipp]

MURMUR OF THE HEART/LE SOUFFLE AU COEUR (Louis Malle 1971). Due to his documentary interests and his whole other American English language oeuvre Malle's French New Wave development seems arrested. This and his much later, heartbreaking wartime memory Au Revoir, Les Enfants are a long way away from Elevator to the Gallows, Zazie, and The Fire Within in time but close in spirit. Murmur of the Heart maybe needed more time because of the ambiguous autobiographical material. But sensuous, free-spirited Italian mom (Lea Massari) whose affection for young "Renzino" (Laurent) is so physical it pours over into incestuous when she's accompanying him on a spa cure for his heart murmur, as well as the two older brothers' free-wheeling behavior and both parents' efforts at adultery, are all dealt with in such an indulgent manner it's confusing, not to say troubling, especially for someone raised in puritanical America. The free flow is downright disorderly, but this film has an anarchic mediterranean joyousness that's unique and often delightful, a little like Buñuel or Chabrol but much nicer. (Another Criterion Channel Nouvelle Vague offering.)

[Chris Knipp]

SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER/TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE (François Truffaut 1960). We are in purer, more essential Nouvelle Vague territory here: Truffaut right after the delinquent turned André Bazin-mentored Cahiers du Cinéma film critic and director of the very successful radical autobiography, 400 Blows (1959) and his screenplay collaboration on Jean-Luc Godard's equally seminal Breathless (1960) with something quintessentially New Wave, a wild improvisation that starts as a homage to American B Picture crime movies. Pauline Kael, in her contemporary review (reprinted in her important early 1965 collection I Lost It at the Movies) and also in later review-writing for The New Yorker vividly defended Truffaaut's freedom here with genre (comedy, thriller, romance - which more conventional film reviewers like Stanley Kaufman and Dwight McDonald had misunderstood or rejected. The action of Shoot the Piano Player, with its tinny little tune motif and the great Charles Aznavour's sad, durable presence, is easy to recognize but hard to get your head around even today. It's their radical playfulness that makes the most distinctive of the New Wave films, like this one, still inspiring to young filmmakers today. But Kael pointed out in her review those genres aren't really always kept apart, some notable non-B Pictures also being examples of "crime melodrama-romance-comedy," such as "The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not." Of course Truffaut does something different here from those pop classics. Third or fourth viewing, this time from Criterion Channel.

[Chris Knipp]

THE LAST METRO/LE DERNIER MÉTRO (François Truffaut 1980). This is a bore, and surprising to see a feel-good movie about the German occupation of France. Apparently a hit there, also nominated for the Best Foreign Oscar (won by Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, beating out Kagemusha). It's got Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu in lead roles and the story is about a Paris theater company struggling to stay afloat during the Occupation while hiding the Jewish director in the basement with his wife (Deneuve) in charge while Depardieu juggles fighting in the resistance (which we don't see) with playing a lead acting role in the theater (lots of tedious play excerpts). We learn that antisemitic slurs penetrated deeply into French culture, even French crossword puzzles, and everyone was turning in Jewish neighbors. Not in any way a French New Wave film. Truffaut only made four or five of those - but they are signature ones. He also made good films in the Seventies but died at only 52 of brain cancer. The Criterion Channel stuck this in its New Wave program; it's out of place. I wondered what it was and wasted two hours finding out.

[Chris Knipp]

THE SOFT SKIN/LA PEAU DOUCE (François Truffaut 1964). This qualifies as a Truffaut Nouvelle Vague film. As Malle's The Fire Within is wholly focused on an alcoholic's suicidality and Jacque Demy's Bay of Angels looks only at gambling addiction, The Soft Skin concentrates wholly on adultery. The subject is Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly, an actor Truffaut reportedly disliked) - does his last name intentionally have the French word for "coward" in it? - a well known bourgeois intellectual, a publisher and writer and speaker, who gets involved with Nicole (Catherine Deneuve's older sister Françoise Dorléac, who died three years later in a car accident), an airline stewardess. He's not attractive but Nicole is drawn to his prestige. He must seem much more solid than her pilot boyfriend. Lachenay has a little daughter and an elegant, impressive wife who goes on the rampage when she finds out about this. In black and white, this film is simple and precise and unfolds in neat procedural steps. I admire its precision and its look, the cold way it examines Lachenay's weak face. Truffaut reportedly had had some adulterous episodes he wasn't proud of and that inspired him to make a film that looks coldly at the subject. Criterion Channel Nouvelle Vague series.