The Talkies: The Tender Trap
Bowman, James
This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text. Brave words! But it is a kind of bravery which was once expected of even the most ordinary...
...An armored train, bristling with guns and guards in their familiar German helmets and obviously carrying materiel of vital importance for the German war effort, chugs through a familiar mountain landscape...
...For however unhappy marriages in general may be, and however rare the happy ones, it will always be the latter which look like clichés...
...Who will ever be brave or self-sacrificing if he is continually told that these qualities do not exist in the "real" world...
...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JamesBowman@home.com...
...We're French, Lucie, French...
...Now, with our late-century cynicism, we find it difficult to believe in either kind, and the classic war story has gone the way of the classic romance, dissolved in a corrosive and cynical jokiness that seems to those who engage in it to bespeak sophistication...
...So, for that matter, was military bravery...
...There is even a scene in which Lucie, a history teacher, is asked by a little girl, "What is history for...
...how utterly, almost ostentatiously unashamed about its use of clich...
...he insists) to stroke the thigh of his strikingly Teutonic-looking and imperturbable secretary, Helga—already instrumental in the latter's capture...
...It is not enough for him to tell the story of four adventurers (the fact that one of them dies seems to me a poor reason for failing to include him in the title's total) from Operation Desert Storm who go in search of Saddam's gold and, having found it, are forced to decide whether or not some things are worth more to them than gold...
...Will they be spotted by the guards...
...Didn't he know that we've seen virtually identical scenes dozens of times before...
...Klaus Barbie interrupts his beating of Raymond ("You'll talk...
...The Nazis themselves act with conventional, blatantly cinematic savagery...
...Even a superior war story like Three Kings, which takes what for Hollywood is the revolutionary view that professional soldiers are not mere psycho killers but capable of old-fashioned virtues like courage and self-sacrifice, has to give its audience so many assurances of its cleverness and artistry, its understanding of the real nastinesses of war that its glimpses of brave or noble behavior are almost lost in the shuffle...
...David 0. Russell, who wrote and directed Three Kings and whose earlier films (Spanking the Monkey and Flirting With Disaster) also gave promise of an unusual and interesting independence of mind, is a rising star of the American cinema...
...Every now and then a film like this one allows us the hope that they will forsake self-conscious artsiness and return to doing their job...
...The movies used to recognize that, however rare the ideal might be in our lives as we live them, their job (like that of ancient epic and romance) was to celebrate that ideal—so that we might continue to cling to our belief in it...
...suggests the unstated but implicit patriotic feeling that motivates the noble struggle against Nazi tyranny...
...People get married expecting to The American Spectator • November 19 9 9 be happy, so what's interesting about them if they are happy...
...But the cliché is meant to prepare us for the real subject of the film, which is the cliche of the happy marriage between the title character, played by Carole Bouquet, and one of the Resistance fighters, a man who goes under several names but whose real name seems to be Raymond (Daniel Auteuil...
...L ove and war and romance of an almost Casablanca-like schmaltziness come together without apology in the Movie of the Month, Claude Berri's Lucie Aubrac, which is based on real events in occupied France during the Second World War...
...Lucie's reply—"Who we are is where we came from...
...In fact, believing in them and in the noble ideals that they represent, is almost a precondition of their existence and our humanity...
...are killed by the Nazis...
...In its very first moments it presents us with yet another version of what is perhaps the most familiar of all the images of antiNazi Resistance fighters...
...But it is a kind of bravery which was once expected of even the most ordinary people...
...But most of us will admit that they are clichés we want and need to believe in, like those of romantic love or of heroism and self-sacrifice...
...Will they finish in time...
...Patriotism, marital harmony and happiness, filial love, good triumphing over evil —all these are such clichés that it is a wonder Berri (or anyone else) had the temerity to put them up on the screen in this day and age...
...It is striking, in fact, how unapologetic this movie is, and 44 Most of us will admit that they are clichés we want and need to believe in...
...The plunger is depressed at exactly the right moment and the whole train, stuffed to the rails with high explosive, blows up as the leather-jacketed ones scatter...
...Why did Berri do this...
...Stated baldly like that, the story sounds really corny, so Russell feels obliged to trick it out with cinematic razzle-dazzle, some of which is genuinely original and amusing...
...Cut to a familiar band of leather-jacketed partisans up ahead who are feverishly planting a plastic explosive charge on the track, running the wires from it to the familiar dynamite plunger up in the woods...
...But none adds anything of substance to the basic story...
...Not only are there frequent references to the love between husband and wife, but also to the deep affection that Raymond feels for his parents, who as unconcealed Jews ("We are the fifth generation of Samuels in France...
...You already know the answer to these questions, don't you...
...This is also a brilliant way for Berri to proceed in filming what is obviously an idealized memoir (IL partiront dans l'ivresse by Lucie Aubrac) —that is, deliberately to stress the ideal aspect of it...
...He obviously felt the need to apologize for his momentary lapse from cynicism—something he also does by attacking the Bush administration's conduct of the war...
...If his establishing shot— THESE ARE RESISTANCE FIGHTERS— had to be of blowing up a train, couldn't he at least have tried to be original about it...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online — www.spectator.org...
...But, rather like sweet young Harper in Guinevere, he is seduced by that hideous, corrupt old rake, "art...
Vol. 32 • November 1999 • No. 11
