The Artist
Michel Hazanavicius (2011)
This is a special film: that’s largely because, as Sally said, it’s a one-off. One of the charms of The Artist is not so much that they don’t make them like this anymore (and aren’t going to resume). It’s rather that they never did. The references in Michel Hazanavicius’s script to other Hollywood pictures are various in genre and chronological range. The story evokes, in different ways, A Star is Born and Singin’ in the Rain: George Valentin, a silent film idol, falls on hard times once talkies take over but is adored by a younger woman, Peppy Miller, who becomes a superstar when audiences can hear as well as see her. Valentin (Jean Dujardin) has made his name in Douglas Fairbanks-like swashbucklers. There’s a montage of breakfast table scenes of Valentin and his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) that’s taken from Citizen Kane (although they don’t tell the story of a marriage to anything like the same extent) – some of the shots outside and inside Valentin’s increasingly forsaken LA home also bring Xanadu to mind. They probably allude to other silver screen mansions too – I’m sure there were many visual references that I missed. Ludovic Bource’s music is either a mixture of pastiche and themes from other movies – or pastiche throughout: if it’s the latter, it’s intriguingly sophisticated. In his interview with James Bell in the January 2012 Sight and Sound, Hazanavicius was likeably candid that he wasn’t going be purist about his frame of reference – as well as in admitting that one of The Artist‘s most admired sequences, when Peppy (Bérénice Bejo) goes into an embrace with the tuxedo hanging in Valentin’s dressing room, is borrowed from Seventh Heaven, and that Frank Borzage therefore deserves the credit.
There’s a squareness in the verbal jokes that ranges from the triumphantly apt (in the opening sequence we see the on-screen Valentin being tortured but refusing to give in to his captors’ commands to ‘Talk! Talk!’); to the shrewdly cheesy (‘If only they could talk!’ says a woman about Valentin’s dog); to the simply crude (an intertitle announces ‘I want to be alone’ as if this had to be done at some stage). The recklessness of his quotation makes Hazanavicius’s passion for old Hollywood feel all the richer. The Artist communicates a love of bygone forms of cinema in a way that Hugo fails to do: Hazanavicius’s love is almost certainly more superficial than Scorsese’s but it’s transmitted more strongly and directly to the audience.
Hazanavicius worked successfully in French television for some years before his first feature film Mes amis (1997), which starred his brother Serge (one of the few good things in I’ve Loved You So Long). Michel is best known in France as the director of two spy thriller spoofs, both of them box office hits – OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) and OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009). These two films starred Jean Dujardin and the leading lady in the earlier one was Bérénice Bejo, who is now Michel Hazanavicius’s wife. Dujardin and Bejo are reunited in The Artist and it is a glorious pairing. Both are perfectly physically cast as the film archetypes they’re incarnating; both are equally able to express themselves to a modern audience. There’s a particular fascination in being able to see the private face of people embodying screen icons of a kind whose performing face is the only one you would expect to be in evidence. The two actors are actually closer together in age than you’d guess – he’s thirty-nine, she’s thirty-five – but Dujardin’s Valentin, with his burly good looks (including gleaming white teeth and a pencil moustache), appears to be verging on middle age even when he’s at the peak of his screen success. Bejo is slender and incredibly pretty – easily convincing in twenties outfits and as a thirties star. They have great chemistry throughout: their closing tap dance number is elating because it supplies a happy ending and because they’re such a good partnership – and so amusingly different from each other.
Dujardin is a big bloke: you see the effort that goes into his being light on his feet but that makes his achievement all the more winning. Bejo is relatively weightless but her dancing throughout is vividly energetic. Dujardin has incredible charm and warmth and Bejo a delightful vitality. What’s so wonderful about their performances and Hazanavicius’s capturing of them is that these qualities radiate from the screen – in a way that seems to connect you to the audiences of getting on for a hundred years ago, who bathed in the glow of effulgent screen stars. There is a third standout member of the cast – a nine-year-old Jack Russell called Uggie, who plays Valentin’s (unnamed) dog. Uggie initially brings to mind Asta, the wire-haired terrier best known for his roles in The Thin Man films, but he’s a very different kind of performer. Asta was beautifully urbane; Uggie’s enthusiastic, extrovert performance almost epitomises the appeal of The Artist and makes him very well suited to the role of Dujardin-Valentin’s best friend on and off screen. James Cromwell, as Valentin’s scarcely less loyal valet-chauffeur, and John Goodman, as an anxiously mercenary studio boss, give good support to the leads. Malcolm McDowell appears briefly in the early stages as the man next to Peppy in a queue of auditionees for bit parts.
The Artist works through a combination of dynamism, clever, self-aware shallowness, and the emotional truth of the performers; the film’s main weakness is that Valentin’s decline and depression are too protracted. There isn’t enough complication or inventiveness in the plotting to prevent a loss of momentum at this stage. (Indeed, the film seems almost to be making fun of the simplicity – to put it kindly – of the storyline: everyone’s problems are solved when Peppy remembers, at the eleventh hour, that Valentin can dance.) Uggie saves the day in more ways than one when Valentin starts a fire at his house by burning (nearly) all the reels of film that he keeps there: the dog sprints off to get a policeman and proves his owner’s salvation, just as he used to do in Valentin’s pictures. Most of the time, though, The Artist is greatly entertaining and Hazanavicius’s playing with sound and silence especially ingenious. The relatively few sequences without music have a real weight to them; the two interruptions of sound work perfectly – in a nightmare (in which only Valentin can’t speak) and the final tap-dance-until-you’re-out-of-breath sequence. This culminates in the only two words we hear from Jean Dujardin (‘Wiz pleasure’). Hazanavicius and his cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman construct many fine images but the finest must be when Valentin and Peppy meet and talk on a staircase and, once they’ve parted, the camera pulls back to reveal not just him descending and her ascending but other figures moving up and down the snakes and ladders of Hollywood fame.
A very secondary pleasure to be had from The Artist is that Sight and Sound seems unsure how to react to it. In his editorial, Nick James described it as a ‘satire’ of silent pictures; the introduction to the main piece by James Bell calls it a ‘loving tribute’ to the genre. That it genuinely is both these things doesn’t alter the sense you get from the S&S pages that the film’s hybrid nature – at various levels – is a little unsettling to their writers. It’s about cinema history so, in principle, they can’t fail to be in its favour; yet it’s a crowd-pleaser – not so good. An accompanying piece by Bryony Dixon about the myths of silent screen stars who failed to make the transition to talkies seems to be as vexed by Singin’ in the Rain as by The Artist – and misses the point that there almost certainly were real-life Lina Lamonts and, even if there weren’t, the possibility of there having been is a fine comic idea. (Dixon’s contribution also seems to miss the point that in The Artist George Valentin is brought low not by a lousy voice but by his arrogant assumption that talking pictures will be a flash in the pan.) The actual review of the film in S&S is by Tony Rayns, the East Asian cinema expert. Judging from this review, Rayns has as much difficulty reading French actors as I do Japanese ones (except in Still Walking). He ends his piece by comparing The Artist with ‘Ernie – the Fastest Milkman in the West’ the novelty chart-topper of exactly 40 years ago. This damning indictment doesn’t really work for fans of the Benny Hill song like me (and, according to Desert Island Discs, David Cameron).
7 January 2012