CALIFORNIA MOVIE JOURNAL (January 2022)

[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.

[Chris Knipp]

BAY OF ANGELS/BAIE DES ANGES (Jacques Demy 1963). Not to be confused with Manuel Pradal's 1997 Marie Baie des anges (in the Favorite Films section). I don't know if it's right to say this is "like a French effort to purify, to get to the essence of, a Warners movie of the thirties" as Kael says in her enthusiastic New Yorker thumbnail review, but she grasps the beauty and perfection of this glittering little portrait of the glamour and destruction of gambling addiction. Everyone rightly dwells on Jeanne Moreau's platinum blonde roulette diva but they miss the importance of her impromptu ingenue male partner, Jean Fournier (Claude Mann), the young bank employee who gets the gambling bug from his colleague and winds up at Cannes and Monte Carlo with "Jackie" (Moreau). Mann is easy on the eyes too: tall, lean, chiseled, loose limbed, slightly resembling Steve McQueen, he is essential to the success of this relentless journey to hell and back with its ambiguous happy ending. Jean gets the bug bad, especially when he falls for Jackie, but we feel he could return to his senses while she can't and that saves this surprisingly elegant and restrained melodrama from teetering into hysteria. This to me is another profoundly distasteful subject, like adultery in Malle's La Peau Douce, but a beautiful film. It shows the irrationality of gambling in a pure form. I have to add Jean Rabier to the list of wonderful Nouvelle Vague cinematographers along with Nestor Almendros and Raoul Coutard. This which I had never seen is both painful to watch and continuous aesthetiC pleasure. Criterion Channel.

[Chris Knipp]

WEST SIDE STORY (Stephen Spielberg 2021). Rewritten by Tony Kushner, Arthur Laurents; acted and sung by Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose. Long anticipated, finally seen in person on the big screen (but in a small auditorious) Sat. Jan. 22 at Berkeley Regal UA Theater with two other people, a couple sitting masked in the corner. This was disappointing, even inexplicable. Despite Kushner's efforts this has little new and nothing new that's good in it. Perhaps best seen as a Spielberg vanity project. As expected there is more Spanish heard: but this is still a Fifties white American musical, so: So what? The songs are altered and their order is rearranged in a manner less effective than that of the Robert Wise film, in particular making the last third feel interminable. As expected I liked Ansel Elgort and he and Rachel Zeglder as Tony and Maria reportedly are singing with their own voices and they sound lovely. But the film as a whole did not have the fresh energy I had expected. I don't know what Spielberg thought he was doing. I don't think you can make a movie that's a revival; stage revival, sure, but not screen. On screen it has to be something new. Worst error: the radical, super-energetic Jerome Robbins choreography of the 1961 film has been replaced by something more conventional, making this a tamer and duller film than the one of sixty years ago. But is that so surprising? Look at the French films of the early Sixties I've been reporting on and look on what we have coming out today.

[Chris Knipp]

CHRONIQUE D'UN ÉTÉ/CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch 1960) A pioneering - Mike D'Angelo calls it "seminal"- work of cinéma vérité (the term coined by Morin in homage to Dziga Vertov's "Kine-Pravda") on which the anthropologist-filmmaker Rouch and sociologist-film critic Morin collaborated in Paris and briefly Saint Tropez first doing street interviews ("Are you happy?") and later embedding with friends, colleagues, an African student, a Renault car factory employee, a French Jewish woman concentration camp survivor, and others including an apparently emotionally disturbed Italian expatriate woman who later becomes involved with filmmaker Jacques Rivette. Notable for a complex self-questioning about whether anyone can be "natural" when on camera and included critique by a preview audience of the edited film. Seems ordinary till you realize it's a pioneering and uniquely self-aware work showing, as D'Angelo says, that "Cinéma vérité originated as a more complicated idea than it subsequently became." The images became an influence on New Wave fiction features. Part of the Criterion Channel's current Nouvelle Vague offering (quite new to me).