On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen FAMILY PLOTS BY ROBERT ASAHINA The capacity of sophisticated American audiences to be enchanted by French movies is equaled only by the ability of Gallic filmmakers to churn...
...On Screen FAMILY PLOTS BY ROBERT ASAHINA The capacity of sophisticated American audiences to be enchanted by French movies is equaled only by the ability of Gallic filmmakers to churn out an apparently endless supply of them...
...We are presented with the conflicting forces that cause so much of Descombes' anguish—the pressure of the sensation-seeking media, the lurid curiosity of strangers, the attempted exploitation of the killing as a political act by militant Leftists...
...The clockmaker of the title is Michel Descombes (Philippe Noiret), a minor craftsman with a small shop in Lyons...
...Nevertheless, the response was manipulated by some rather shabby mechanisms...
...Both encourage us to sacrifice the substance of drama for the pleasures of style...
...Noiret's Descombes reacts to him with a powerful ambivalence that makes their interplay and exchanges the second most powerful attraction of The Clockmaker...
...The ludicrousness of this situation perfectly expresses the fanciful nature of Cousin, Cousine...
...One morning as he is opening for business, the police unexpectedly pay him a visit and begin to ask puzzling questions...
...A family portrait...
...The small spasms of feeling that Noiret permits his character impress us all the more because of the stolid exterior he generally maintains...
...While no work of art can be easily categorized, The Clockmaker's generic ambiguity makes it very difficult to locate the film's terms, much less know how to react to its characters and situations...
...It would be wrong to call it brilliant, for it is quiet, subtle and restrained—the very opposite of brilliant—but it would be impossible to praise it too much...
...Rochefort's precise characterization neatly captures this tension between professional and personal concerns...
...Is it a murder mystery...
...Sadly, however, Noiret's virtuosity is in the service of a drama that is muddled from the start...
...In the middle of the conversation, he suddenly bursts out, "My God?0 years...
...Inevitably, they consummate their affair, deciding they have nothing to lose...
...One wonders, indeed, whether they correspond to anything in French life...
...But its "realism" is wrought by plot contrivances and caricatures that appear fresh to us merely because they are foreign...
...I suspect that most of the appeal of Cousin, Cousine lies in its attractive picture of Marthe and Ludovic's blossoming nonsexual involvement...
...What prompts these observations is the reception accorded two recent imports: Cousin, Cousine, written and directed by Jean-Charles Tacchella, and The Clockmaker, directed by Bertrand Tavernier from a novel by Georges Simenon...
...He is helped somewhat by Guibod (Jean Rochefort), the police inspector assigned to the case, whose motives are mixed: Although he is anxious to track down the fugitives, his interest is that of a father as well...
...This is most apparent at the end...
...Why aren't they like their spouses—and why did they marry them in the first place...
...The universe of the petite bourgeoisie in Cousin, Cousine revolves around family weddings, funerals and parties that generate ever larger and more complex networks of involvements...
...As Marthe and Ludovic become more platonically involved with each other, their family becomes more convinced they are sexually involved...
...As much as we are misled by the dramatic and structural difficulties, we can be certain of his virtuosity and delight in his skill...
...In this respect, The Clockmaker seduces us in the same way as Cousin, Cousine...
...These stick figures spring from a mythology peculiar to the French cinema...
...and their spouses also grudgingly accede to it...
...To cite just one example, the petty preoccupations of the middle class in the French cinema do not seem to correspond to anything in American life...
...But Marthe and Ludovic, at first merely thrown together by the circumstances of betrayal, gradually enter into a warm friendship...
...American audiences have delighted in this emphasis on seemingly mature sensuality instead of brute sexuality...
...The feeling is underscored by the fact that their cultural concerns are frequently all but inaccessible to American viewers...
...The first is Noiret's performance itself...
...And, true to French cinema, they really haven't: The affair is kept all in the family...
...His Guibod is a humane cop who can never quite shake the constraints of his job...
...Let's keep it platonic," they tell each other, "and just enjoy being together...
...But we never find out exactly why the bourgeois, respectable clockmaker ultimately decides to affirm "complete solidarity" with his son at the trial, a decision so out of character that it virtually cries out for an explanation...
...And we indulge the failings of Tavernier's film for the same reason that we are charmed by the falseness of Tacchella's—merely because they are French...
...American movies suffer from a peculiar kind of sexual reductionism whereby explicitness is confused with reality...
...The result has been an utterly unreal, unnatural emphasis on the role of sex in love...
...And the sequence, although visually exciting, is dramatically unsound, for it reveals too much (albeit in a deliberately puzzling fashion) of what should later come as a complete surprise to the audience as well as Descombes...
...They must gain something in translation, for they tend to be less winsome than merely foreign...
...A more serious difficulty with The Clockmaker is that its conclusion appears either esthetically arbitrary or psychologically wrong...
...and then he looks up and continues talking as before...
...he chokes and his voice breaks...
...Admittedly, the film avoids American sexual reductionism and its equally artificial flip side, shallow sentimentalism...
...Even if Tacchella had actually captured the genuine emotions of growing personal involvement, we would still be left with a fundamental dramatic inconsistency: How did Marthe and Ludovic manage to remain wonderfully sympathetic people in this gross environment...
...After Bernard is finally caught and then tried, after the ordeal of both father and son is largely over, Descombes is discussing the sentencing with a friend...
...Finally, the context of the film is unclear...
...The movie begins with a child looking out of a train window at night...
...their parents and children accept it as perfectly normal...
...He eventually learns that his son, Bernard (Sylvain Rougerie), along with a girlfriend who the elder Descombes did not even know existed, has killed an industrial policeman named Razon, burned his car and fled to the countryside...
...During the wedding reception, their respective spouses, Pascal (Guy Marchand) and Karine (Marie-France Pisier), engage in a hasty coupling behind some bushes—an affair that is forgotten as quickly as it was consummated...
...As Andrew Saris has suggested, it is easy to mistake complexity for profundity...
...The Clockmaker is the story of Descombes' agonizing quest to reacquaint himself with a son whom he thought he once knew and understood, and to find the inner resources to cope with the shattering of his placid existence...
...In the case of The Clockmaker, there is also the prior temptation to mistake confusion for complexity...
...The result is that Noiret's performance takes on an exaggerated significance in our response to the movie...
...We see a burning automobile, first from her point of view, then at much closer range...
...A psychological drama...
...For French films, usually praised for their realistic treatment of human relationships, arc in their way as formula-ridden as American Westerns...
...that they can so successfully provoke the derision of Americans and flatter the protagonists by contrast is cause for wonder...
...Similar problems plague Tavernier's movie...
...In Cousin, Cousine Marthe and Ludovic indulge in all the small pleasures that distinguish a genuine love affair from a mere affair: They sing, laugh, feast, and talk together, enjoying themselves so much that sex becomes a relatively minor aspect of their relationship...
...Ludovic and Marthe appear so virtuous and sympathetic only because Pascal and Karine are such exaggerated caricatures of grubby acquisitiveness...
...The skillful acting, the clever direction, the impeccable cinematography—these are not enough to overcome a basic falseness...
...he covers his face very briefly with his hand...
...But the introduction of the child's viewpoint is irrevelant at best, and confusing at worst...
...The popular and critical acclaim both have received strike me as somewhat in excess of their very real virtues...
...Pascal is a compulsive wencher who collects extramarital affairs as a testament to his virility, while Karine is a hopeless, helpless neurotic, preoccupied with the size of other peoples' apartments (which she duly records in a notebook...
...Eventually, of course, we learn the significance of the fire...
...Marthe (Marie-Christine Barrault) and Ludovic (Victor Lanoux) meet when her mother marries his uncle...
...The only way to make sense of Cousin, Cousine is to deny that its portrayal of the lovers is at all "realistic," and to speculate that audiences are responding to cinematic conventions that finally differ little from those of American genre films...
...The title and film coyly suggest that adult men and women who instantly become "cousins" when their families are joined by marriage can succumb to the temptations of "incest" without suffering any of its unhealthy consequences...
...One scene stands out among many...
...He confesses, "If you don't understand your own children, you try other people's...
Vol. 59 • September 1976 • No. 19
