Copie Conforme

1947, France, directed by Jean Dréville

So often confined to small, if often indelible, roles, Louis Jouvet gets to dominate the screen here, playing two different characters -- and, into the bargain, three further incarnations essayed by one of those two characters, who is a con artist, a thief, and perhaps worse. Copie conforme wasn't the first occasion on which Jouvet played different roles, although previously it was the same character temporarily taking on a new persona, whereas here he plays two entirely different men.

The confrontation between the two men provides a fascinating opportunity to observe Jouvet's own development as a screen actor -- as much as he preserved many of his theatrical instincts, he learned ways to modulate them for the screen, and he draws careful distinction between the two characters without ever lapsing into obviousness. The requirements of the plot dictate that the two main characters gradually converge, which makes the onscreen action enjoyably confusing near the end -- both the other characters and the audience are constantly uncertain of who they are dealing with.

Jouvet's three smaller roles, little vignettes of criminal enterprise, are also very enjoyable, especially his turn as a jovial moving man wonderfully adept at dissipating all air of suspicion; it's a rare working class character for an actor more often associated with middle-class professions (or middle-class thievery). While Jouvet certainly does the heavy lifting throughout, there are a handful of notable supporting turns, too -- a very youthful Jean Carmet (above) has one of his first credited roles as  one of the criminal cohort, while Suzy Delair provides the love interest in the first of her two films with Jouvet that year.

Crimson Tide

1995, US, directed by Tony Scott

This was our small tribute to the late Tony Scott, one of the contemporary Hollywood directors whose work I most enjoyed -- without a trace of guilt. Visually, at least, Crimson Tide isn't representative of Scott's more recent work -- it's much more classical in its framing and construction, and the Scott's experimentation with the image is for the most part, confined to lens filters or cascading showers of sparks and water. The camera, though, is a good deal more mobile, even in the tight confines of a submarine, where the vast majority of the film takes place, and as such it's quite different to the more static style of films like Top Gun -- in motion in their overall action, but less so within the individual shot. Here, though, Scott's camera tracks up through the submarine and along the individual floors, sometimes moving back and forth to underline the central confrontation between sub captain Gene Hackman, playing a kind of distillation of the gruff Gene Hackman type, and younger buck Denzel Washington. In comparison with many of Scott's later films, the opening is relatively languid -- it takes some time, and a good deal of scene setting, to get us on board the sub, whereas later films often begin with us already within the action, or get us there awfully quickly. In this case, though, the set up works well, giving us reasons to invest in Washington's character in particular, which is critical to Scott's creation of tension later -- the people need to matter for us to buy into their confrontation, just as, a few years later, the back story is essential to our being caught up by Will Smith's sudden flight in Enemy of the State.

The Match King

1932, US, directed by William Keighley and Howard Bretherton

While Warren William had plenty of practice playing the cad, his role on this occasion is the concentrated essence of the type -- absolutely no-one is safe here, and the Ponzi schemes of the titular king are as much personal as financial, with everyone hoping for a return that can never possibly materialize. William plays a version of the real-life "match king" Ivar Krueger, and his business schemes are outlined with the characteristic Warner Brothers energy that infused everything from gangster bloodletting to social climbing with breakneck speed. Indeed, at times the film almost trips over itself in the early going, so much so that William repeats the same catchphrase four times in a few minutes, as though the filmmakers have forgotten he's just use the line. Things slow down a bit, not especially to the film's benefit, when William stumbles on the charms of the lovely Lili Damita -- as much as his rise to prominence convinces, blaming his downfall at least partly on the distractions of a beautiful woman fails to ring true given his utter ruthlessness on all other occasions.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

1978, Hong Kong, directed by Chia-Liang Liu

This was a bit of a shock after so many films from the 1930s -- it's been ages since I dipped a toe into Hong Kong action, particularly of the kung fu variety, and I'd forgotten just how busy the folio artists are kept, with every absurd swish and kick amped up to eleven. On this set, at least, the camera operator must have earned overtime for all the zoom work -- in the early sequences, the zoom seems to function as a kind of visual exclamation point to direct our attention to the key participants in a big fight scene.

The opening sequences are pretty standard quasi-historical-injustice stuff -- I'd forgotten just how generic these films can be in structural terms -- but the film really comes alive in the training sequences: indeed, where many kung fu films are essentially structured as a series of escalating battles, Liu throws the viewer off by adhering to the standard template only to set his story up, and then we're off to an imaginative and often very funny succession of training chambers, where our hero, Gordon Liu, hardens his abs and hones his skills in order to throw off the yoke of political subjugation. It's a template then re-worked many times over by subsequent filmmakers -- down to The Karate Kid, though where the Hong Kong film links kung fu training to a series of apparently abstract tasks, The Karate Kid turns that same exercise into a series of Tom-Sawyer-esque chores.

It was an absolute pleasure to see this on the big screen -- not the best print ever, with the colours a little off, but the vocal enthusiasm of the audience gave a little hint of what it must have been like to watch these films in crowded, bantering theatres on a Saturday night in the 1970s.

La Maison du maltais

1938, France, directed by Pierre Chenal (aka Sirocco)

Made the year after L'Alibi, this feels at times like the work of a completely different director: the opening section, set in an unnamed North African town, recalls Jacques Feyder's Le Grand jeu, not just because of the exotic location but for the wonderfully mobile camerawork, exploring the crowded streets of the casbah and the teeming life of brothels and nightclubs with equal zest. That vigorous movement is reflective of the state of mind of Marcel Dalio's lead character, a man bewitched by the sight of a beautiful woman and determined to do anything for her.

Later, when the plot transfers to Paris -- like so many of the colonial adventures of the 1930s -- the camera is a quieter presence, and Dalio, too, is tamped down by his bitter experiences, though Chenal can't fully hide his delight in exploring the new spaces offered to him by the change in setting -- a park, a thieves' lair, a lavish entryway. It's unusual to see Dalio squarely in the lead role, and his character is more unusual still: an exoticized but fundamentally sympathetic, hard-working Muslim character, hardly a regular occurrence at the time.

His support is top-notch, too: Raymond Aimos, one of the truly great character actors of the 1930s, is wonderful as Dalio's protective pal, while Viviane Romance, like Aimos a veteran of Duvivier's La Belle équipe, is entirely convincing as both prostitute and society dame, and the sequence where she revisits her past, in an attempt to purge it once and for all, is a terrific bit of acting, the actress perfectly moving between her different personae. Oh, and then there's a fellow by the name of Jouvet -- who excels in these smaller roles as oily lawyer/detective/factotum -- he's delicious here, turning on his clients as he spots the potential for much bigger paydays, though for once his part doesn't dazzle so much that it overshadows the remainder of the film.

The Guard

2011, Ireland, directed by John Michael McDonagh

The obvious point of reference for The Guard is In Bruges -- the same lead actor, the directors are brothers, the not-dissimilar mix of comedy and occasional action, and the occasionally absurdist bent to the dialogue in both films. Where In Bruges aimed for greater visual assurance, The Guard eschews some of the stylistic flourishes -- most of the film is shot pretty squarely, with characters bang in the middle of the frame -- in favour of a bit more character development. Indeed, while the film is marketed as a culture clash between Brendan Gleeson's cute hoor Galway guard and Don Cheadle's slick FBI agent, it's almost entirely Gleeson's film, and at times the film seems closer to the kind of personal study of Lenny Abrahamson's Garage (the latter film's star, Pat Shortt, has a lovely bit here as a peeved IRA man). He's a fascinating character -- a genuinely decent cop with a sense of community, a man absolutely comfortable in his own skin, with a hard-won dose of wisdom. Along the way, McDonagh also shows he's got a pretty decent handle on his ancestral homeland -- the opening sequence, featuring a bunch of youthful jackasses on a date with tragedy is all too reflective of the realities of Ireland's roads and deaths, and McDonagh handles it with brutal humour.

Mister Flow

1936, France, directed by Robert Siodmak

A bit of a genre mishmash, Siodmak's film, made during the French portion of his career, throws together crime, courtroom drama, romance, high society shenanigans, and a dash of humour. The shifts of direction occur with some crashing of gears, partly, I think, because Siodmak holds back from embracing the material's full potential for silliness -- unlike in, say, Cobra Woman a few years later and a very large ocean away, where he goes full throttle.

We're still in the early stages of Louis Jouvet's screen career here, and while Jouvet never abandoned his theatrical mannerisms -- something that was to our long-term benefit -- he gradually found ways to better integrate them with cinema style. At this point, though, his performances sometimes seem rather exaggerated -- certainly true when his character becomes a blubbering, hand-tic-infested mess. I'm sure the actor rather enjoyed concocting a character with two distinct personae, but it's not an especially subtle transformation, and it's instructive to compare this with his wonderful work a decade later in Copie conforme, where he plays, in essence, five roles, each crisply delineated without fuss, and each entirely convincing.

Jouvet's not the main attraction here, in any case: the leads are Edwige Feuillère, who sparkles throughout, and Fernand Gravey, who starts out as a down-on-his-luck lawyer who's rather easily convinced to begin a less straight-and-narrow existence, hardly helping the reputation of the legal profession in the process. Gravey sports a beard initially, an accoutrement that manages, paradoxically, to make him look even younger than he does when clean shaven, although the Harry Potter glasses don't help his cause either. The two actors seem to have great fun in each other's company -- a kind of Nick-and-Nora from the other side of the law, with roughly the same amount of alcohol consumed.

Impasse des Deux Anges

1948, France, directed by Maurice Tourneur

While Chabrol may, as I wrote recently, have grouped Impasse des Deux Anges with Panique and Macadam as examples of the cynicism and despair of post-war French film, the film reminded me more of Christian-Jaque's great 1946 movie Un Revenant -- both films have a gnawing sense of despair about the unrecoverable past, an idea with both general and very specific historical resonances in the France of 1948, while both also feature plotlines in which characters return to locations critical to their former lives. 

While Paul Meurisse plays, not for the first time, a fellow from the wrong side of the tracks -- and one who knows just what to do when a gun comes his way -- this is a different kind of criminal, with a sense of honour that goes well beyond the criminal code as he resolves the complications of his past affair with Simone Signoret, who has hit the marital big time in Meurisse's absence. Where Signoret is stunningly luminous -- she really was a great beauty, though she seems to have cared little for such accolades -- Meurisse hides his light under a bushel, underplaying to the point where it's almost aggressive. The sequence where he listens to Signoret exuberantly remembering their past together, barely nodding his head but clearly rapt, is a marvel.

Happy Accidents

2000, US, directed by Brad Anderson

The packaging is rather deceptive here, emphasizing the romantic qualities of the film when it's really a fairly self-aware bit of science-fiction, with tongue pretty firmly in cheek (there just happen to be characters who can easily debate the potential paradoxes of time travel, and there's a very amusing sequence in which Anthony Michael Hall pokes fun at himself -- the best thing of its kind until Domino came along). There's no real romantic heat between the main characters, though both Vincent D'Onofrio and Marisa Tomei are individually charming, and they come off as quirky roommates rather than romantic soulmates; that's not a paradox the film is interested in exploring, though.

Mademoiselle Docteur

1937, France, directed by G.W. Pabst (aka Salonique, nid d'espions)

Pabst's first slice of exotic wartime intrigue is rather more successful than the follow-up, Le Drame de Shanghai, not least, I suspect, because the setting is a couple of decades in the past and rather less bound to contemporary events; there are no asides on the geopolitical realities here. It's also a more carefully conceived bit of work -- it has some of the vivid set pieces that characterize the later film, particularly during an exuberant nightclub scene, but there's also a precision and care in the quieter sequences, the camera subtly moving from one character to another, or lingering on an apparently insignificant object while the action happens outside the frame.

Louis Jouvet appears here, too, as a spy whose cover story involves a vegetable shop; Jouvet's features and voice seem perfectly attuned to the kind of moral compromises that are inevitably part of the spy game, with a world-weariness apparent on his face before ever he opens his mouth. As so often during this phase of his screen career, Jouvet's part is brief but vividly drawn, though on this occasion the rest of the cast is also very strong: Pierre Blanchar's work as the oiliest of intermediaries is especially good, while Jean-Louis Barrault makes an indelible cameo appearance, while I'd never have guessed that Dita Parlo starred in L'Atalante -- she's entirely convincing as the self-possessed spy of the title, nothing like the barge-girl of the earlier film.

Twentieth Century

1934, US, directed by Howard Hawks

Hawks' film can't keep up the terrific momentum he establishes in the the opening sequences -- it's not quite Scarface in a comic register -- but he's blessed with the presence of a boundlessly energetic John Barrymore, who delivers one of the great comic performances, both self-aware and self-parodying as a Broadway director who never shies away from the exaggerated effect in his personal stylings. By contrast, Carole Lombard is lumbered with too much in the way of irritating histrionics; she's a much more subtle performer than Hawks allows, and there's a repetitiveness to her character that causes the centre of the film to sag. Hawks' work behind the camera is often more subtle than in some of his other films, with careful setups of the actors rather than more visible stylistic flourishes; he frames the crowded train sequences in ways that surely influenced A Night at the Opera a year later, though that film pushed the idea for even greater comic effect. A final thought: at what point did the drunken press man disappear as a Hollywood staple?

Macadam

1946, France, directed by Marcel Blistène (and Jacques Feyder)

Claude Chabrol, in a long interview in Cahiers du cinéma, grouped Macadam together with Duvivier's Panique and Impasse des Deux Anges as three extraordinarily bleak postwar films, made at a time in France's history when -- as he saw it -- one might have expected a rather more hopeful mood to prevail. I'm not sure that his thesis is all that carefully thought-through -- the US produced some pretty downbeat fare during the same period, after all, while France was coming to terms with a terrible national trauma, a theme to which Chabrol returned in several of his films, but he's certainly on the money that these are three films with a frequently grim take on human nature.

Macadam begins with an off-kilter shot that gives an early indication of its skewed world-view -- even an apparently innocuous bit of domestic business becomes imbued with a sense of unease as the camera cants to the side, and such angles proliferate as the film progresses and we're introduced to the residents of a Paris hotel that holds little of the bonhomie of the pre-war Hôtel du Nord.

Françoise Rosay was never averse to playing less than sympathetic characters, though her turn as the hotel proprietor here is as jaundiced as they come, a woman who uses all of her wiles to survive, and who blithely uses her own daughter as a servant (where Arletty might have made such a survivor sympathetic, Rosay makes no attempt to paper over the flaws). There's a scene where the younger woman unexpectedly expresses affection for her mother that carries a deep frisson, as though we're privy to the moment when the daughter's Stockholm syndrome reaches its apogee, and the finale scene suggests that the apple has indeed stayed pretty close to the tree.

Rosay's character has no monopoly on misbehaviour -- when Paul Meurisse shows up with a briefcase in hand and asks Rosay to keep an eye on it, it doesn't take a genius to deduce that he may be up to no good. Meurisse played some light-hearted parts during his career, but it's the men from the darker side that stick in the memory -- the casual killer from this film, the sadist from Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, or the melancholy safe-cracker in Impasse des Deux Anges.

L'Ainé des Ferchaux

1963, France, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

L'Ainé des Ferchaux seems to be the forgotten man amidst Melville's 1960s output  -- all of his other 1960s films, and then some, have received the Criterion treatment, while this film hasn't been released in the US at all (it was remade in 2001 for French TV with a much older Jean-Paul Belmondo playing the role taken here by Charles Vanel).

I wonder if there's a rights issue that's holding it a release, since the film's certainly not without merit or interest, not least as one of two films that Melville shot (partly) in the US. The "partly" is the more significant here in that he didn't bring his actors with him for the American shoot -- apparently in a fit of pique over Charles Vanel's desire to have the trip double as a honeymoon, something that Melville, with his exceptionally, and perhaps sometimes unreasonable, high standards found to be unforgivably unprofessional.

Whatever the rationale, the outcome allows Melville, as he acknowledged, to have plenty of fun stitching together American location footage with studio material and, here and there, exteriors shot in southern France but purporting to be in the US. The stitching doesn't quite work if you happen to have taken a similar road trip through the American east and south, with the locations occasionally shifting unexpectedly, but Melville's not really after strict verisimilitude, and his vignettes of early-1960s Americana remain diverting, while there's a genuine care to find continuities between the neon colours he finds in the American streets and the studio sets back in France. He seems to be thoroughly enjoying his first work in colour, although he switched back to black-and-white for his subsequent film.

Always an admirer of the US, Melville gets to indulge that love here, both in terms of the places he chooses to put on the screen and the films to which he pays homage -- starting off with The Set-Up in the opening scenes, to the western music that underlines much of the central road trip that Charles Vanel, a banker on the run, takes with his new assistant Jean-Paul Belmondo. Many a road movie mines the differences between the protagonists for comic effect, but Melville is much more interested in the cat and mouse dynamic between Vanel, an ailing older man, and his brash young bagman, who's clearly on the hunt for a score. Melville underscores the difference between the men by constantly placing them as far apart as possible in the frame, so that even when they are ostensibly crammed together in a car they're at odds; the effect is even more pronounced when they settle for a time on the fringes of New Orleans, with Belmondo, in the example below, barely inside the frame.

For the most part, Melville films the two men in long and medium shot, eschewing close-ups until two key moments in the narrative in which Vanel and Belmondo invade the frame, as if to intensify an already fraught scene. The shots also reinforce the claustrophobia of their New Orleans existence -- a near-tropical setting that recalls Vanel's past in the French colonies. The atmosphere of decadent decay surely influenced Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon (based on an American novel transposed to Africa) years later; Tavernier worked for Melville on Le Doulos.

More screengrabs:

Sherlock Jr.

1924, US, directed by Buster Keaton

I'm not even going to attempt to dissect Keaton's wonderful comedy, which provided easily the most laugh-filled evening I've enjoyed at the cinema this year, except to note that after only a few minutes I started thinking about how much I was looking forward to screening this for my son, still only 18 months old and thankfully as yet pretty uninterested in the television (except in so far as the remote control can be used as an improvised telephone). I loved Chaplin and Keaton when I was young, and Sherlock Jr reinforced my sense that it's been far, far too long since I spent time in their excellent company. I'm not sure if I'd ever seen this particular Keaton before, but the imaginativeness of the gags, both small-scale and death-defying, is often breathtaking; you're still recovering from the previous gag, or the previous portion of a multi-layered gag, when the next laugh is upon you.

Untel père et fils

1943, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

Duvivier's film, shot in 1940 but not released until much later, recounts 70 difficult years in France's history -- from the Franco-Prussian war to the coming of World War II -- through the experiences of one over-burdened French family, from the trenches to the home front. There's an extraordinary amount of narrative action packed into the film's brisk 80 minutes, but there is still room for some distinctive Duvivier touches, particularly his repeated use of traveling shots, most effective in the clever shot in which he focuses on a man running behind a plane, perhaps as a means to avoid special effects; that shot has a parallel later in the film when Robert Le Vigan's character anxiously watches warplanes over the Marne.

There's also a hint of Duvivier's earlier La Belle équipe in the set of an artist's rooftop studio, although the backdrops with Montmartre, the Arc de Triomphe and the colonies could have been taken from any Hollywood backlot. Despite the historical through-line, the film isn't entirely coherent: it's never really made clear why Louis Jouvet's character needs to depart France forever after a failed love affair, for instance, though the metaphor of Raimu's decline from youthful glory to shabby old age is pretty straightforward.

Volpone

1941, France, directed by Maurice Tourneur

I loved Ben Jonson's original play when I read it in college, but I'd never previously seen Volpone on stage or film, and somehow it never occurred to me that it might be quite so broad in performance. This version is at a couple of removes from Jonson -- it's a filmed version of a stage adaptation that came the pens of Jules Romains and Stefan Zweig, which altered Jonson's original ending -- and perhaps it plays up the farcical elements to an even greater degree. That's especially true of Harry Baur's performance in the title role: although Baur is capable of great subtly elsewhere, his work here hits the same note over and over, with only the briefest of more nuanced asides -- the performance is in keeping with his enormous fake nose, as seen above.

Louis Jouvet, as Volpone's sidekick Mosca, is rather more toned-down, at least within the context of the play, and there are some terrific supporting players, especially Charles Dullin, a great theatre actor who tutored Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau, among others; he plays the decrepit Corbaccio so convincingly that it's easy to forget the actor was only in his fifties. Maurice Tourneur, so good a director elsewhere, mostly settles for observing the actors at work, with only a handful of interesting shots (a conversation shot in silhouette, or the shadows of dancers late used as a striking backdrop); it sounds as though the film had a troubled production history in the early months of the Occupation, and perhaps in the end it's most valuable as a record of a work which had its greatest fame on the stage.

Drive

2011, US, directed by Nicholas Winding Refn

Something of a tightrope act, to be sure, Nicholas Winding Refn's film almost courts accusations of pretentiousness, with its unnamed central character, a Hawksian figure without the laconic dialogue, and the slow-burn pacing that eventually erupts into sustained and brutal violence. Ryan Gosling is terrific, remaining absolutely buttoned-down and conveying in the process a deeply wounded psyche with his own moral code, a kind of modern-day Los Angeles ronin with a rather old-fashioned sense of chivalry. Refn makes full use of his frame, his characters often situated at extremes of the screen, inviting the eye to explore the empty spaces and reinforcing the sense that these characters are too flawed to be able to bridge the gaps that separate them in any sustained fashion.

Mon Meilleur ami

2006, France, directed by Patrice Leconte

Leconte has a pretty uneven filmography, with a fairly strong run in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, bookmarked roughly by Tandem at one end and Ridicule at the other, with the occasional high point since. This is pretty standard issue fare, though: the concept, with an antique dealer forced to show he has an actual friend rather than just a series of business connections, is pure Hollywood, and you wouldn't be surprised to see, say, Steve Carell, in the Daniel Auteuil role while Boon, for his part, busily hones the affable persona deployed with such success in the subsequent Bienvenue chez les ch'tis. Leconte's films, even when fairly empty-headed, usually look fine, and there's a warmth to the lighting in several of the early sequences here that's quite beguiling, though the regular use of zooms is a distraction, if in keeping with the television aesthetic that dominates late on when Boon's character stars on the French version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?

Young Adult

2011, US, directed by Jason Reitman

It's refreshing to come across a mainstream American film that so resolutely refuses to conform to standard Hollywood psychology. Charlize Theron plays a genuinely dreadful person, utterly self-obsessed, but there's no attempt to provide her with a simplistic psychological back story -- indeed the film goes out of its way to demonstrate that psychological back stories in no way determine the subsequent ability to behave like a human being -- nor is there that familiar story arc wherein a character learns the error of her ways and grows as a person. That trope -- or tripe -- is so familiar that it's absence is weirdly bracing, particularly when the character at the heart of the film is such a piece of work.

Haywire

2011, US, directed by Steven Soderbergh

Crisp, quick and ultimately rather forgettable, Haywire is another of Soderbergh's films that functions rather better as a concept than a final film -- with the concept here presumably being to ask what it might be like to cast a person with genuine action skills, in the person of MMA champ Nina Carano, as an action hero, thus eliminating all that messy stand-in work. Carano's more than adequate as a performer -- the mainstream action films hardly make many demands of their stars anyway, and few enough of them have the balls-to-the-wall conviction of a Bruce Willis, who manages to invest everything with a little extra vim -- and the plot is brisk enough, if rather obviously a Bourne knockoff, with Ewan McGregor doing his best to exude menace. In the end I found myself more taken with Soderbergh's sojourn in Dublin, where he makes geographically accurate use of the capital to stage several fine sequences, than with the substance of his film; Soderbergh rather undercuts his central concept anyway by casting Michael Fassbender for one of the film's key fights, and I couldn't tell whether it was Fassbender himself, or his stand-in, doing the punching and grunting, but still enjoyed the sequence.

Offroad

2012, Germany, directed by Elmar Fischer

Further proof, if ever it were needed, that European film industries are perfectly capable of churning out low-grade, pre-fabricated films of their own; there's virtually nothing original or especially charming in Elmar Fischer's film, and certainly no reason to root for the heroine, played by Nora Tschirner. She's apparently one of Germany's more energetic young stars, but this is a poor showcase indeed.