On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon A Demy Paradise AT the meeting of film-maker Jacques Demy and musician Michel Legrand, the best we might have hoped for is Claudelian silence: "Comme un pauvre...
...But Guy is called up for two years' service in the Algerian war...
...The most poetic and profound film of recent times is Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes...
...As her wais...
...If anyone wishes further proof of Demy and Legrand's ineptitude, there is another horror of theirs currently on view, Bay of the Angels...
...Visually, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, maintains its tenor of dishonesty...
...There are one or two shots of the railway station on a wet day, when the colors are natural and the soundtrack actually shuts up for a few seconds— and the eye and ear experience an indescribable sense of relief...
...No, you should play 23...
...Jean Rabier is a good color cinematographer...
...With slight variations—and often without—we get the same monotonous intervals over and over again, now subsiding into recitative, now swelling into a veritable arioso...
...The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which won the 1964 grand prize at Cannes, is distinguished by the fact that its every utterance—from bonjour to "fill up the tank with super"— is subjected to a sonorous deviation alleged to be music and singing...
...expands...
...It would have made a little more sense the other way round...
...His limp miraculou-ly disappears...
...For I douht that two poorer specimens ever found each other, to produce, not dignified silence, but a ludicrous movie musical...
...It is years later, Christmas Eve...
...As for the voices, they were dubbed in later, so that the actors (if it be they who sing) would not have to open their mouths unnaturally wide — a touching, though somewhat extravagant, concern for realism...
...The total effect is of a world of harsh primary phenomena and impulses perceived through a gauze of lyricism and compassion befitting that not quite realistic realism which lifts Woman in the Dunes to the level of timeless parable without the slightest loss in delicacy or texture...
...Our Juliet consents to wed the County Paris, provided he will have her bellyfull...
...Everything in the film is a little stylized and phantasmagoric: the dialogue takes on a dream-like antilogic which is nonetheless ineluctable, the editing is slightly elliptical to convey a disquieting sense of unexpected intensities in the midst of the quotidian, the unobtrusively brilliant photography is infinitely suggestive in its super-close-ups in which every grain of sand and every pore of human skin is obsessively scrutinized until the ripples of flesh and flutters of sand merge in an orgiastic marriage of man and nature...
...There are platitudes in all colors, from chartreuse to shocking pink: "We're so alone since my husband died...
...They want to marry and have a child named François...
...The performances, especially that of Kyoko Kishida...
...The plot concerns two passionately Platonic young lovers of Cherbourg: 16-year-old Geneviève who helps out in her mother's umbrella shop, and 20-year-old Guy who is a garage mechanic...
...then Guy send Geneviève on her way and goes out to meet his returning wife and son...
...Demy's technique here is a kind of imitation Bresson: the most literal-minded, dogged, barren concentration on two stock characters in a cliché plot and the most obvious settings, with no roundedness—no feeling for composition, detail, dialogue, minor characters...
...Tom Takemitsu's music—sparing, acerbic, elemental—acts as a bittersweet hymeneal, stressing the strains and rewards of this union...
...The film has a good—but already somewhat routine—performance by Jeanne Moreau, dull photography by Henri Alekan, and a score by Michel Legrand in the best pseudoRachmaninov manner, vintage 1945, which was, as you may recall, a very good year for soup...
...A snazzy car stops outside for refueling...
...The former lovers exchange polite biographical data...
...Guy marries this angel of charity and they buy a lovely new filling station...
...The images seem to come straight from the crude wirephotos that appear in the daily newspapers and the scenario reads very much like the outline of a shelved Bette Davis vehicle...
...I just know...
...While away, Guy does not write much, for no very good reason, unless it be illiteracy...
...Madeleine, with little François, has gone out shopping...
...Geneviève threatens to die if he leaves, but on the eve of his departure she merely drops into bed with him and presto—I add this only for the benefit of those who have never seen an enchanting movie about young love—gets pregnant...
...He disintegrates: loses jobs, gets into scrapes, goes to the fleshpots, and refuses to shave...
...Geneviève's faith shrinks, and maman, who has been struck by a sudden attack of poverty, urges her to marry a nice, rich jewelry merchant who pops up out of nowhere...
...ON SCREEN By John Simon A Demy Paradise AT the meeting of film-maker Jacques Demy and musician Michel Legrand, the best we might have hoped for is Claudelian silence: "Comme un pauvre qui trouve un plus pauvre et tous deux se regardent en silence...
...But the most painful thing about the film is the dialosue—or should I say libretto?—which is of a banality unsurpassed by the pure dross distilled in the alembics of Hollywood...
...The music consists of three or four sickly little melodies, which would be saccharine but for a bit of fake chromatics to give them a modish plangency...
...The godmother dies, leaving him money and Madeleine...
...We are told that in Paris the opening-night audience wept and the critics were ecstatic...
...adapted by Kobo Abé from his own novel...
...It's Geneviève, with little Françoise...
...The fact that she is old enough to be his mother merely adds a touch of Oedipal gemütlichkeil...
...but here everything is factitious, from fake rain to genuine Cherbourg houses which, however, Demy had painted chartreuse and shocking pink...
...He starts shaving one: again...
...Needless to say, in the midst of their poverty, the heroine and her mother inhabit an apartment worthy of the Ritz, and sport clothes and hairdos as gorgeous as they are anachronistic...
...Here again, what impresses me most is the sheer stupidity of the script, unrelieved by any trace of unpretentiousness...
...as the woman who changes from a homely, self-effacingly cheerful drudge to an irresistible earth (or sand) goddess, are memorable...
...And Teshigahara has directed with a control and imaginativeness that prove judiciousness compatible with experimentation...
...The only reason I have gone into The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at such length is that it won, among its half dozen important prizes, the International Catholic Cinema Award, which I can understand—it is, after all, a songful sermon on the Pauline text about the preferableness of marrying, however lovelessly, to burning, however passionately—and the Louis Delluc Award of the French critics, which I cannot understand, except as the complete collapse of French film criticism...
...Why do you think 23 will come up?' "I don't know why...
...I don't want you to ruin your life as I mined mine" (spoken, naturally, by mother to daughter): or "One dies of love only in the movies" (which makes me wonder whether Jacques Demy has really kept up with the movies since 1930...
...Having no doubt learned from old Marcel Pagnol movies what the right thing to do is in such harbor-town situations, he marries Geneviève and they leave Cherbourg...
...But he pulls himself up and out by his psychic bootstraps, and gets the patently loveless woman to follow him docilely out of the gambling hell into a middle-class paradise of making in a year what one won or lost in an evening...
...Occasionally there is a bit of unintentional comic relief, such as "She hasn't married yet— you know how good she is...
...Now Guy returns from Algeria with nothing worse than a limp to find his dear godmother dying...
...As you leave the theatre with the score oozing out of the back of your head, you are convinced that Legrand has risen from being the Mantovani of France to being the Menotti of Musical Comedy, but, then, so is Menotti...
...Whenever the hero and heroine go gambling together, there is a bit of dialogue going roughly like this: "What number are you playing...
...This is the story of a Tokyo schoolteacher lured by some seaside villagers into spending a night at a cottage in a sandpit where a woman works shoveling sand to keep it from engulfing the village...
...This is a yarn about a young boy who gets sucked into big-time roulette, becomes enamored of a middle-aged divorcee who is a psychotic roulette addict, and is about to go down the drain with her...
...It is the longest snowy-gambol fadeout on record, but why boggle at what is the least of the film's interminabilities...
...neither she nor Madeleine, the lovely girl who has been giving her her camomile and penicillin, has apprised him of Genevieve's betrayal...
...He finds himself trapped and condemned to a life of sand-shoveling, and the film tells of his efforts to escape until, finally, the primeval normality of an existence close to nature, with a simple but sensuous woman, and the chance to carry on scientific experimentation among the dunes, gradually obliterate his need to return to so-called civilization...
...Actually, considering the size and quality of the voices, the cast could have sung the whole thing on location without opening their mouths at all—through their noses...
...After the n-th variation on this inquiry, you'd think it would be time to stop asking...
...It is certainly time to stop watching...
...12...
...As the camera slowly draws away, they gambol jocundly in the snow...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 26
