French Ups and Downs
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen FRENCH UPS AND DOWNS BY JOHN SIMON Here are two attempts by the French cinema to shake off its current torpor. The first is Borsa-lino, a gangster film by Jacques Deray. Deray is known...
...There are the happy times on the He de Re off La Rochelle where his wife continues to maintain their summer house...
...Is the message Keats's "I have been half in love with easeful Death...
...Though Boffety's camera works wonders, Sautet's film merely flits from one kind of surface to another...
...His kinfolk and friends converge on the hospital at Le Mans, where he dies on the operating table, while envisioning himself as drowning to the accompaniment of imaginary organ music that slows down (actually se detraque: gets out of whack) because a musician is missing...
...But obsession there is...
...Beyond that, there are Belmondo's always nimble, always vital performing and Delon's satanic good looks, although his face has become a trifle chubby of late...
...Deray is known to me only for having been, back in 1955, one of two assistant directors to Bufiuel on Cela s'appelle I'Aurore (the other was Marcel Camus, who made the vastly overrated Black Orpheus, and sank back into oblivion...
...Sautet's film—with Borsalino, one of the two overwhelming hits of Paris—emerges more pretentious and less remarkable...
...Borsalino has been pounced on by American auteur critics, presumably because it poaches on preserves their memories like to haunt undisturbed...
...With numerous flashbacks and flashfor-wards, as well as generally rapid-fire editing, the film presents snippets of Pierre's memories, expectations and quandary...
...And there are multitudes of other objects, from shirts to oxygen masks, that the camera caresses, hovers over, burrows into...
...This is shown first in slow motion, then repeated at natural speed...
...But it adds up to little insight, drama, or poetry...
...Objects are the carriers of one's history: wallpaper, a quilt, cigar stubs seen in Catherine's apartment spell out for Pierre her past and present...
...Claude Sautet, a director in his own right about whom more anon...
...The lighting of cigarettes and the smoke oozing from them ritualistically punctuates every utterance, envelops every step of the action, and would drive the American Cancer Society insane...
...Yet this is as superficial as the treatment of people—unlike Rilke's Dinggedichte, where things are explored, interpreted, made to yield up their secret inner life...
...Everything else is portrayed with scrupulous, documentary attention to detail...
...But, as mosaics will, it all remains two-dimensional...
...what the friendship between Francois (dully played by Jean Bouise) and Pierre is really about...
...It chiefly provides the truly brilliant cinematographer, Jean Boffety, with opportunities to display his artistry —as in an extreme closeup of a bystander's boot smack in front of Pierre's eyes as he lies crumpled in the grass: alongside the boot, swaying cornflowers and poppies...
...It reminds us indeed of something Raoul Walsh or Douglas Sirk might have directed for the delight of yesterday's unwashed and today's auteurists, and, being epig-onous, may seem inferior...
...is still torn between his old love and his new...
...the somewhat strained relations with his son, who invents silly but lucrative electronic gadgets (e.g., a bird machine that can twitter with adjustable gaiety and requires no feeding or cage-cleaning...
...Finis...
...The two brawling, competitive, mutually admiring and mistrustful brothers-in-may-hem, played by Jean-Paul Belmon-do and Alain Delon, arc commonplaces of both the American and the European film, but Belmondo's rambunctious bonhomie and De-Ion's waxen suavity complement each other as neatly as heads and tales—as a matter of fact, one of the running gags of the film involves a couple of rigged coins: one all heads, one all tales, side by side in Belmondo's pocket...
...Its philosophical overtones are insufficient or excessive, and there are improbabilities such as people with reasons to believe themselves targets for gunmen not taking the least precautions...
...Add to this a supporting cast that looks like real people, a background score by Claude Boiling that is extremely catchy (though the main theme is reprised to a faretheewell), highly competent color photography by Jean-Jacques Tarbes, and straightforward direction, and you have the stuff of sound entertainment...
...There is one flaw: In one shot of the accident, the stunt driver in his crash helmet is plainly visible...
...the auctioning off of a Renaissance commode brings together Pierre and his future mistress...
...Jean Cau, best known for his first novel...
...Michel Piccoli, Romy Schneider, and the admirable Lea Massari, are flattened by the film into facades...
...In fact, the whole last part of the film is an almost fanatical documentary about what it is like to be involved in a fatal accident on a French highway...
...But he does have those looks, and he wears fancy clothes with the ultimate of conviction...
...The abundance of vintage cars, period furniture, authentically costumed extras is inexhaustible yet not, to my eye, ostentatious...
...The title is a clue: Les Choses de la vie...
...and his ambivalent tolerance of a cadging father...
...I don"t know what he has done in the intervening 15 years, but judging from Borsalino, Deray may have been constantly watching Hollywood gangster films of the Cagney-Bogart-Raft-Robinson variety, a composite of which he recreates in a more lavish, up-to-date fashion...
...But the fact that it recreates the Marseilles of 1930 impeccably while slightly kidding its generic models adds a certain spice to it...
...I think not...
...the mistress is shattered...
...his friendship with Francois, a rather demanding companion...
...Throughout, people are obsessed with objects: Pierre's son with his trues (gizmos), Helene's father with rare first editions, Francois with a special wine he gushes about, and so on...
...Dying, Pierre thinks less of his wife or mistress than of the shutter on the Ile-de-Re house that needs fixing, the oval table that has been damaged, the beloved sailboat that requires some repairs...
...whether Pierre is in fact a dedicated architect and a genuine artist (there are brief indications pointing in contradictory directions...
...When Pierre, after a tiff with his mistress, drives off on a rainy night to a business meeting in Rennes, these "things" of his life impinge on his consciousness until he gets involved in a freak accident that leaves him hovering between life and death...
...The point seems to be that dreary chosisme that has taken over so much of recent French thought and art: the worshipful scanning of choses, things...
...Perhaps the idea was to show that famous business of an entire life flashing past the eyes of a drowning man: In the film, the pieces of Pierre's life are neatly mosaicized and accounted for...
...The carefully choreographed collision, involving two trucks, shows Pierre's gunmetal Alfa Romeo performing an elaborate ballet—skidding, hurtling into a ditch, tumbling, tossing out its driver, crashing into a tree and, finally, bursting into flames...
...A film that does so aspire, however, is The Things of Life, by Claude Sautet, one of Borsalino's coscenarists...
...and Deray himself...
...It concerns the last day in the life of a successful middle-aged architect before he dies in a car accident...
...a lovers' quarrel is summed up in the violent overturning of a glass of red wine...
...The reason may be inaction: In an interview, Delon spoke of his regard for Montgomery Clift, who "never moved a muscle unnecessarily," something Delon improves on by never moving a facial muscle even necessarily...
...It is far from clear what Sautet thought he was saying with this film, which he co-adapted from a novel...
...and, in another sense, is bored and exasperated by both...
...otherwise, it is a script that flows along nicely without ever soaring...
...It is hard to say what Sautet is obsessed with most: the violence of the accident, death (though it proves not gloriously instantaneous but, rather as in Celine, on the installment plan), or the immolation of an expensive sports car...
...The script has four co-authors: Jean-Claude Car-riere, novelist, playwright, and Bunuel's scenarist...
...The Mercy of God...
...Considering that the two real-life gangsters who inspired the story ended up as Nazi collaborators, it is too bad that the film opts for a more romantic ending, yet that may be legitimate for a movie that does not aspire to the condition of art...
...What makes Borsalino good fun to watch is the mood it generates and sustains: a cannily doled out mixture of meaning it and not meaning it, of nastiness and nostalgia, ferocity and charm...
...Or Sautet may want to tell us more about dying than about life...
...on its vamp, a fat bee disporting itself...
...Pierre, divorced from his wife, Catherine, now lives with a much younger girl, Helene...
...It also appeared behind the opening credits, and fragments of it are imbedded in the body of the film...
...The wife takes it stoically...
...The ensuing traffic bottleneck, every type of reaction from the crowd, each thought of the dying man, all the ministrations of the police, priest, doctor, ambulance drivers and hospital staff, is minutely recorded...
...Relationships are not revealed to us beyond the donnees, and we haven't the faintest idea, for example, why Helene should be that painfully, irrevocably in love with the rather ordinary, absent-minded, even cold Pierre...
...The hierarchy of the underworld as it shades into superrespect-ability is perfectly captured in Francis de Lamothe's decor and Jacques Fonterey's costumes, which include the famous brand of men's hats that gives the film its title...
...But the mood is sustained even more by a long succession of locations, sets, costumes, sinister or sleazy faces that evokes both a bygone era and a seemingly never-to-be-exhausted theme in consummate detail...
Vol. 53 • September 1970 • No. 18
