* The region 2 DVD of Grand Illusion from Warners is missing three scenes, approximately 4 minutes. The region 1 DVD from Criterion is therefore preferable.
MARIUS/FANNY/CÉSAR (THE MARSEILLES TRILOGY)
(Alexander Korda/Marc Allégret/ Marcel Pagnol, 1931/32/36, b/w, DVD amazon.fr, no English subtitles)
Marcel Pagnol is best known in this country as the author of Manon des Sources and Jean de Florette. In France, he is esteemed for the Marseilles trilogy, which he wrote, produced, and, in the case of César, directed. The story chronicles the lives of a seafarer, Marius (Pierre Fresnay), the girl he leaves behind, pregnant (Orane Demazis), and his rambunctious father, César (the splendid Raimu). Cinematically rudimentary, the trilogy is graced with rich, boisterous characters and warm, sympathetic performances.
THE WAGES OF FEAR (LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR)
(Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953, b/w, DVD)
Clouzot was known as the “French Hitchcock”, and a misanthrope, a reputation he earned for wringing every last ounce of tension out of thrillers such as The Raven (1943) and Diabolique (1955). The Wages of Fear is not a crime film, but it’s as nail-biting as they come. Yves Montand is one of four French mercenaries trucking nitroglycerine across treacherous Latin-American dirt roads. It’s what they call an explosive situation and, true to form, Clouzot spares no one.
PICKPOCKET
(Robert Bresson, 1959, b/w, DVD due April)
For Bresson, less is more. He is the most rigorous, spare, austere of film-makers. Using non-actors and stripping away the artifice of studio production, Bresson strives to represent the spiritual condition of his subjects. Here, Michel (Martin La Salle) is a seemingly respectable young man whose compulsion to steal evokes the existential crises of Dostoevsky and Camus. For Bresson, though, there is always the hope of salvation. Appropriately, perhaps, the American director Paul Schrader lifted the ending of Pickpocket for American Gigolo (1980).
ARMY IN THE SHADOWS (L’ARMÉE DES OMBRES)
(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969, DVD, amazon.fr, no English subtitles)
Jean-Pierre Melville, né Grumbach, took his name from his favourite author. During the Second World War, he fought with the Resistance, a period he recreated in this, his most personal film — a rare excursion from the gangster milieu he made his own. From its startling opening shot of German soldiers marching down the Champs-Elysées, the film combines a documentary-like authenticity with a compressed, hallucinatory quality; it takes place in a dangerous twilight world of half-truths and betrayals. Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse and Simone Signoret star.
VINCENT, FRANÇOIS, PAUL AND THE OTHERS (VINCENT, FRANÇOIS, PAUL ET LES AUTRES)
(Claude Sautet, 1974, NTSC VHS, or DVD amazon.fr, no English subtitles)
From Les Choses de la Vie (1970) to Un Coeur en Hiver (1992) and Nelly and Mr Arnaud (Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, 1995), Sautet’s cinema is a perennial midlife crisis. Here, for the three ageing friends of the title (Yves Montand, Michel Piccoli and Serge Reggiani) it exhibits itself in financial ruin, divorce, moral decadence and creative stagnation. While the film’s focus is squarely on males of a certain age (supplemented by the young Gérard Depardieu’s pugnacious heavyweight), it has the depth to indict a wider, manifestly corrupt materialism.
A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY (UN DIMANCHE À LA CAMPAGNE)
(Bertrand Tavernier, 1984, DVD amazon.fr, with English subtitles)
Tavernier was too young to belong to the Nouvelle Vague, and inclined to the older school of quality French cinema — exemplified by his writing collaborators Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche. Based on Bost’s novel, A Sunday in the Country is a lovely, graceful mood piece about an elderly painter (Louis Ducreux) welcoming his family home a few years before the First World War. Parallels between the artist and the director are inevitable.
AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS
(Louis Malle, 1987, currently out of print)
Malle’s autobiographical film is intensely moving. Set in a Catholic boarding school in occupied France, it seems to be about the pangs and pleasures of adolescence, offering only an oblique view of the Nazis and French collaborators. Yet in this typically delicate French comingof-age story, the hero Julien’s loss of innocence is not sexual, rather it’s the realisation of Evil in the world, and carries with it a great burden of guilt. How this masterpiece has been allowed to slip out of print is a mystery.
THE THREE COLOURS TRILOGY: RED, WHITE AND BLUE (TROIS COULEURS: ROUGE, BLANC, & BLEU)
(Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993/ 1994, DVD)
Named after the three colours of the French flag, inspired by the revolutionary ideals liberté, égalité, fraternité, and showcasing indelible performances from Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy and Irène Jacob, this sovereign triptych by the Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski is a requiem for second chances and a reverie for connections made and missed. One is reminded of a joke from Manhattan (1979), when Michael Murphy accuses Woody Allen of thinking he’s God. He replies: “Well, I’ve got to model myself on someone.”
LOOK AT ME (COMME UNE IMAGE)
(Agnès Jaoui, 2004, DVD, amazon.co.uk, with English subtitles)
The co-writer Jean-Pierre Bacri plays a writer whose overweight 20-year-old daughter Lolita (Marilou Berry) struggles to get anyone’s attention, until they find out who her dad is. An actress herself, here playing the wife of a struggling writer who latches on to Bacri’s luminary author, Jaoui is sharply attuned to how we’re flattered by proximity to beauty and success. She is also aware of the reverse: how we instinctively patronise those less beautiful, less successful. Even though this social Darwinism has its grim moments, you leave the cinema having sniggered at some of humanity’s most tragically laughable foibles.
STAR CHOICE
CHARLOTTE RAMPLING ON BREATHLESS
“The French films that impressed me were the films by Jean-Luc Godard starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, such as À Bout de Souffle (Breathless). In the early 1960s, Godard was making films that were really quite exciting.”
Charlotte Rampling’s films include Un Taxi Mauve (1977), Viva La Vie! (1984) and François Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2003)
