On Screen

...at best, Inserts is a poorly filmed stage play...

...This is followed by a brief shot of the two of them sitting together in a restaurant—and the movie should have ended...

...Their movies are accessible only to those who possess the key to their arcane allusions and references—which in Beverly Hills amounts to a university education...

...What we need, quite clearly, are more competent directors and fewer phony auteurs...

...The whole of Salut l'Artiste is thus less than the sum of its parts...

...The structure is simply too shaky to sustain either its length or its feeble gestures at significance...

...Byrum spends so much time wallowing in the phony mythology of Hollywood that one is embarrassingly forced to conclude he really believes in it...

...This weakness is again most obvious at the close of the movie...

...The ludicrous plot and the painfully obvious symbolism—the phallic image of the title, the joint metaphors of the condemned mansion and the Hollywood Freeway, the link between sexual and artistic potency—make it tempting to interpret Inserts as a comedy...

...What sinks Inserts to the lowest depths, though, is its underlying motivation...

...In one scene, Clement (Jean Rochefort), Nicolas' partner in the nightclub act, worries at length about whether the gloves he wore in a cigarette commercial were appropriate for the role...

...Furthermore, although his episodic style successfully conveys and matches the often funny, usually frenetic activities of Nicolas and Clement, it fails to adequately penetrate deeper...

...Boy Wonder films only her body, not her face, in closeups that will be "inserts'' for the already completed footage...

...Today's filmmakers are increasingly becoming an incestuous lot...

...Nicolas had been told by Elisabeth that she is expecting a child by another man, in December...

...Yet to assume that a bad movie about the making of a bad movie is somehow good by virtue of its badness is to be guilty of a kind of mimetic fallacy...

...About 20 minutes before the conclusion of Salut l'Artiste, there is a beautifully executed scene of Nicolas and Peggy walking together...

...Moreover, the acting ranks with the worst I have ever seen, and bad actors portraying bad actors simply magnify whatever is wrong to begin with...

...Inserts fails even at this level of filmmaking because of its obviousness, but it is a good example of a bad tendency: the overly self-conscious obeisance of contemporary directors to the films of the past, until their own works become fake and vulgarized museum pieces...

...The character of Boy Wonder is probably intended to suggest a real-life boy wonder like Irving Thalberg, or possibly Orson Welles...

...To earn a living, he is forced to turn out stag movies—a personal as well as professional degradation, since he is sexually as well as cinematically impotent...

...Regrettably, though, Robert does not seem to have sufficient confidence in the subtleties his style achieves...

...One realizes their failure to rise above bit-player status has resulted less from a lack of talent than from relishing the excitement of variety...

...At that moment Nicolas enters...

...dressed as a waiter, and serves the couple...

...On Screen PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST BY ROBERT ASAHINA In Salut l'Artiste, a 1973 film directed by Yves Robert that only recently opened in New York, middle-aged Marcello Mastroianni plays a middle-aged actor, Nicolas Montei...

...And Mastroianni, who has matured as an actor as he has gracefully grown older, nearly ceases the artless and distracting mugging (the curse of the Italian male star) that characterized many of his earlier performances...

...he will attempt a reconciliation with Peggy...

...In another scene, Nicolas, who once tasted success playing Chekhov at Strasbourg, humbles himself before a young director after causing a delay in shooting...

...Nicolas will attempt a reconciliation with Elisabeth...

...Witness the success of Kenneth Anger's current history of celluloid scandal, Hollywood Babylon...

...The film capital has always robbed itself blind, of course, feeding on its own myths and regurgitating them for a seemingly ever-hungry audience...

...While Rex the Wonder Dog (Stephen Davies), the male lead, and Big Mac (Bob Hoskins), the financial backer, are out burying Harlene's body, Cathy Cake (Jessica Harper), Big Mac's girlfriend, substitutes for the late star...

...Through a series of short episodes too loosely held together by the plot, Robert manages to capture the feeling of life along those fringes—where invariably an actor is not hired because he is "wrong for the part," never because of his inadequacies...

...at one point as Montei walks by, but he is a bit player, worthy of salutation more for his diligence than for his artistry...

...In the case of Inserts, everything is wrong...

...He is playing one more bit part in one more movie...

...he will continue to find work...

...The story covers one afternoon in the life of Boy Wonder (Richard Drey-fuss), a director who once took the Hollywood of silent films by storm, only to be rushed into oblivion by the advent of talkies...

...For the title is ironic: A stagehand shouts "Salut I'artiste...

...Yet he is merely on the fringes of the show business world he has always dreamed of...

...Still, if Robert cannot be credited for conception or execution, he cannot be faulted for the direction of his players...

...In Salut l'Artiste, Yves Robert demonstrated that a competent director can rise above the weaknesses of his technique and the limitations of his material by drawing strong performances from his cast...

...A New York University Film School graduate, Byrum nevertheless appears to have learned little about moviemaking...

...All perform exceptionally well...

...Instead, Robert continues with a series of episodes that spell out what we already know, or could have guessed: Nicolas and Peggy will separate...

...He manages his career well enough to help maintain his estranged wife, Elisabeth (Carla Gravina), two children and a mistress, Peggy (Francoise Fabian...

...Now (sometime around 1930) he is a recluse in his decaying mansion, soon to be a victim of the Hollywood Freeway...

...Looking straight ahead and not at her, he asks rather flatly whether she still loves him, and she wordlessly shakes her head No...

...winning becomes secondary...

...Robert simply lacked the courage to stop...

...But Robert also shows that this tenuous existence has its rewards...

...In Inserts, however, the director's overwhelming ineptness is rivaled by the incompetence of the performers...

...Like compulsive gamblers, they are obsessed with playing the game...

...As Cathey Cake's writhing body is restoring Boy Wonder's sexual and cinematic powers—he is supposedly pioneering in the use of the handheld camera—Big Mac abruptly returns and calls a halt to the proceedings...

...Ultimately, this is the most distressing aspect of Inserts, and not its glaring incompetence...

...During the filming of a porno flick in his living room, Harlene (Veronica Cartwright), the leading lady, dies from an overdose of heroin...

...An Italian living and working in France, professionally handicapped by his foreign accent, Montei entertains at banquets, performs a magic/ comedy routine between striptease numbers at a nightclub, dubs voices for animal cartoons, does commercials, and occasionally even lands small parts in legitimate plays or movies...

...Indeed, the uniformly inspired acting manages to overcome the failures of the movie and powerfully evoke its major theme—the joy of role-playing...

...The staging is nonexistent: Byrum doesn't even see the interesting and potentially claustrophobic effects of the forced intimacy of his five characters...

...The script is utterly devoid of dramatic tension: Most of the plot developments are telegraphed in an opening flashforward showing the completed blue movie being screened before an unappreciative stag audience...

...Since the plot is extremely thin, few internal imperatives govern the generation of the film's individual segments...

...In the final scene, an unknown couple are talking in a restaurant and the girl tells the boy that she is expecting a child by another man, in December...

...But Robert's attempt to comment on the tangled relationship between Nicolas' art and his life is pretentious, heavy-handed—and a terrible way to end the film...

...In fact, what emerges from the skillfully edited sequences of scrambling for jobs and money is that Nicolas and Clement thrive on the precariousness of their situation, that their very sense of living depends on the multiplicity of the roles they are called upon to play...

...Inserts, written and directed by John Byrum, is also concerned with show business people...

...Hardly remarkable, except that Mastroianni succeeds here in developing a character wholly unlike himself...

...His humiliation and resentment express the indignity of having to market one's talents and self in order to make a living...

...Inserts is similarly studded with casual remarks about Lillian Gish, D. W. Griffith, Josef von Sternberg, Wallace Reid, and Clark Gable ("that new kid over at Pathe...

...The pathetic vulnerability of his self-importance embodies the illusions and aspirations of all those second-raters who never made, and will never make, the "big time...

...This surfaces when Boy Wonder pompously intones, "What passes for genius is the ability to steal from yourself...

...You'll never reach your peak until you learn to rob yourself blind.' Inserts will never be mistaken for a work of genius, and Byrum has had too little experience to steal from himself, but he has not hesitated to criminally larcenize the dubious lore of Hollywood...