Looking Back
CAVELL, MARCIA
On Screen LOOKING BACK BY MARCIA CAVELL Michel Drach's Les Ves Violons du Bal is a near-perfect movie on a small scale, flawed only by the cuteness of its film-within-a-film device. It begins in...
...But Drach eventually has his way...
...Stark naked.' Although the girl appears only that one time, her aura is present throughout the film -in the episodes with Michel and a giggly little girl friend, the only genuinely erotic sequences between children I recall ever having seen...
...The story is a tricky one to tell, since for all the horror of the outside world-the vans were coming daily to take Jews to the death camps-Michel's childhood was remarkably loving, even joyous...
...I know," Michel explains...
...Les Violons does romanticize, though not evil or war or suffering, but women-the way a grown man who had been well loved in his youth might romanticize them...
...In one scene, the older brother (Christian Rist) brings home a beautiful red-haired refugee whom he has met at the train station and befriended...
...The true story it derives from is fascinating, and could have been the basis for a number of good features...
...She was wonderful, though I'm not sure it was the person or the acting I admired...
...His friend, Baron Raoul (Charles Boyer), speaks of him as a man of dark and deep feeling...
...We infer that her needs, not his, brought her there, and she looks both vulnerable and voluptuous as she pulls on her stockings, motioning to the watching Michel to be still...
...Still, if one is willing to settle, like its hero, for discrete moments of delight-Arlette Stavisky (Anny Du-perey) in a white nightgown, illumined by pale light slanting into a room crowded with flowers...
...The '30s are currently the most popular decade in movies, and Alain Resnais...
...He asks his mother if she may spend the night...
...Finally, for her portrayal of a woman many women would like to be and the mother all of us would like to have had, Marie-Josee Nat won the Cannes Festival prize last year for Best Actress...
...The movie drops clue after clue that it never picks up...
...scenes of Paris and Biarritz...
...he will sleep with Michel...
...In the process, he comes to realize as well that he will grow up to live alone in this awful place one day...
...To their mutual surprise, his grandmother comes in while he is there...
...The females are sensual, gay, gentle, and strong...
...Stavisky is no different...
...Yet, all we see is a charming, emotionally shallow character who borrows and steals to buy the pleasures he values...
...Who wants to watch a film about a Jewish family of 35 years ago...
...What is special about this movie is its ability to make us feel that for the lucky ones who "made it to Switzerland,' the world with all its pain is worth it...
...Ultimately, Stavisky becomes a national threat and is hunted down by the government...
...he asks...
...In a bourgeois society, the movie says, crime and the law, property and power, are inextricably bound together...
...Tittering like mischievous children, they walk out hand in hand...
...the movie doesn't...
...in the sensuality of the mother...
...It begins in the present with a director (a part played at first by Drach himself, then yielded to Jean-Louis Trintignant) trying to raise money for a picture he wants to do on his own childhood as a Jew in occupied France...
...Even the old grandmother (Gab-rielle Doulcet), who is especially fond of her small grandson, of mirrors and of trying on jaunty hats, is charming...
...who in each of his works has been preoccupied with recovering the past, has taken a famous Jewish swindler of that era as the subject of his latest effort, Stavisky...
...Ironically, however, Drach's film about a flight from the Nazis provides a much more compelling vision of the possibilities of human happiness...
...He stares at her body with pleasure and amazement, later telling his brother how beautiful she was...
...The young hero of Les Violons du Bal is more than a Jew...
...Yes, she knows this is not really "her place," but she wants to pray...
...Nor do we understand why Resnais was interested in the story to begin with...
...We are supposed to make something of this...
...High politics provide the background, as they did for the real affair...
...Similarly, at the end, when the family decides to escape to Switzerland and arranges for just the grandmother to ride-in a coffin in a hearse-the accepts the plan with good humor...
...The script talks about death (the father committed suicide when he heard of his son's disgrace) and about the good life, consisting of moments, Stavisky says, of sunlight on water and flowers and beautiful women...
...When Drach answers "No one," the producer shakes his head and says that the only interesting Jew is a dead Jew...
...It astounds us, as the intimations of it surprise Michel...
...Yet Resnais' penchant for form overwhelms it, turning it into a pretext for gorgeous settings and provocative but unrealized ideas...
...In the next scene, we follow the camera around a room filled with the yellow grains of morning light, past the sun-strips of the shutters, a mirror bordered by peacock feathers, gauzy curtains, to the girl lying in bed with the brother...
...Perhaps he is buying the place in society his father wanted for him, but this is another of those suggestions that goes undeveloped...
...How many people will be killed...
...he is also a small boy discovering violence and sex, and learning that the world is bigger and uglier than the one he had known...
...Quite a few of us, to judge by the number of such movies in the last couple of years...
...Stavisky opens in 1933, with shots of Trotsky's forced immigration into France...
...in the lovely older sister (Nathalie Rus-sel), who gets pregnant and leaves home when her lover's family refuses to let him marry an "Israelite...
...A producer he approaches is skeptical...
...Alexander Stavisky (Jean Paul Belmondo), a dentist's son and small-time crook wanted by the police, has assumed the alias "Serge Alexandre" and the identity of a bigtime gambler attempting to involve the-powers-that-be in his money schemes so that he will be invulnerable...
...The girl can have his bed upstairs...
...he makes his movie, casting his son as himself and his wife (Marie-Josee Nat) as his mother...
...Trotsky too, of course, was a Jew, and one whose fate was not dissimilar to Stavisky's...
...For instance, Stavisky talks a lot about his Jewish-ness and about his father who, as a result of his origins, couldn't have the only thing he wanted-respectability...
...And because the movie and its people are so full of the Jove of life, we do not simply accept the threat to their existence...
...Yet if the movie is to work, it has to render this personal truth without romanticizing the larger reality...
...I saw her naked...
...Alain Resnais had the same problem in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, where the catastrophe of the bomb was essential to the film's substance, though the director focused on a couple who had emerged relatively unscathed...
...Moreover, in recounting events that destroyed millions, while affectingly describing his idiosyncratic experience, Drach has to promise implicitly not to belittle or deny the agony of others...
...The Night Porter ("On Screen,' NL, November 25), for example, is a seedy film, not because it is a tale about a concentration camp victim who "loves" her Nazi torturer-such relationships undoubtedly existed, and there is no reason why they cannot be dramatized movingly and well-but because in innumerable ways it blurred the distinction between history and two individuals' fantasy, offering us World War II as The Story of O. Drach makes and keeps that promise...
...After Michel informs one of his school mates that he has just learned he is Jewish, and gets a beating in response, he goes into the big church on the square where his friends are still playing to try to puzzle out what being a Jew means...
...Stephen Sond-heim's elegant, elegiac score-it's a movie worth seeing...
...In fact, by letting us know at the start that no one will die, he allows us to share intimately in a fear that otherwise, with our hindsight, might be numbing...
...Resnais' films always imply mysterious and complicated inner lives for his men and women that often are not fleshed out by what we observe...
Vol. 58 • February 1975 • No. 4
