Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • Lift to the Scaffold

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ascenseur pour l’échafaud

    Louis Malle (1958)

    Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) and Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) are lovers.  They plan to murder her wealthy industrialist husband (Jean Wall), who is also Julien’s boss.  Julien will carry out the killing, with Florence’s connivance, and make it look like suicide.  The crime will be committed on a Saturday afternoon in Simon Carala’s office, on an upper floor of a tall building in the centre of Paris.  When Julien has done the deed, he’ll meet Florence at the Hotel Camée and they’ll start a new life together – a life financed by the money that Florence will inherit from her late husband.  Lift to the Scaffold begins with an impassioned phone conversation between the lovers and ends with the camera showing a collection of incriminating photographs of the pair together.  Yet because their plan goes wrong they never meet up.  Their relationship is the heart of the film but they’re never on screen together except in those photographs.

    The killing is carried out intrepidly but imperfectly.  After entering Simon Carala’s office, shooting him dead and putting the gun in the victim’s hand, Julien departs the scene of the crime.  He spots what is, in more ways than one, a loose end.  He re-enters the building to attend to it.  The place shuts down for the weekend just as he’s preparing to make his escape for a second time.  Julien is stuck in the building, in a lift which will be stationary until Monday morning.  His swish car is in the street – unlocked and with the keys in the ignition.   A small-time crook, Louis (Georges Poujouly), and his girlfriend Véronique (Yori Bertin), who works in a florist’s nearby, steal the car.  They check in at a motel as Mr and Mrs Julien Tavernier and get into conversation with an older German couple, Horst and Frieda Bencker (Ivan Petrovich and Elga Andersen).  The latter take photographs of their new acquaintances, using Julien’s camera, which Louis supplies for the purpose.   When the Benckers go to bed, Louis tries to steal their car, which is even swankier than Julien’s.   Louis is caught in the act by the Benckers, whom he shoots dead, using the gun that he found in the glove compartment of Julien’s car.

    Florence wanders round Paris throughout the night, dazed and distraught.  As she waited for Julien at the Hotel Camée, she glimpsed Véronique in the passenger seat of what Florence recognised as her lover’s car.  She assumes that she’s been forsaken for a younger woman.   Thanks to his resourceful persistence, Julien eventually manages to escape from the lift.   He gets out of the building and goes to a café, where he sees his name and photographs all over the morning papers:  wanted for the murder of Horst and Frieda Bencker.  Julien phones Florence to explain what happened to him.  She goes in search of Véronique and Louis – eventually following the latter to the motel, where he’s gone to retrieve the camera.  He’s too late, though:  the photographs on it have been developed, incriminating Louis.   The police, when Simon Carala’s body was first discovered, believed that he’d committed suicide but the detective in charge of the inquiry now sees the light.  The roll of film in the camera discovered at the motel also contains snaps of Florence and Julien together.  The guilty parties are all arrested.

    Louis Malle’s first feature – widely regarded as one of the seminal films of the nouvelle vague – is based on a novel by Noël Calef:  Malle, Calef and Roger Nimier all worked on the screenplay.   The plot, although amusingly intricate, has several weaknesses.   Julien, an ex-Foreign Legion man who’s seen action in Indochina and Algeria, is a clever and nerveless operator – he scales the building to get access to Simon Carala’s office – yet the story pivots on Julien’s making the dumb errors of leaving (a) a rope hanging from the office balcony and (b) his car available to steal.  It’s remarkably helpful of Louis to supply the German couple with Julien’s camera in order for the Benckers to take photographs of Louis and Véronique.  The Sunday papers are incredibly prompt in leading on a crime that took place in the early hours of the same day.  Florence manages to locate Véronique’s apartment very easily.  The young couple, fearing they’ll be arrested for the murder of the Benckers, have decided but failed to take their own lives, with a drug overdose.  As Florence arrives, they come to drowsily but Louis leaps into action, once he remembers he needs to get back to the motel for the camera.   It doesn’t pay to ask who took the photographs of Florence and Julien together.

    Lift to the Scaffold is nevertheless a richly entertaining film, one of my favourite thrillers.   (The tension of the story is magnified by the particular horror of getting stuck in a lift.)   You want Florence and Julien and, to a lesser extent, Louis, to get away with their crimes.  This is partly because the various victims are loathsome (Simon Carala made his money as an arms dealer; the bonhomous Horst Bencker is pompous and snakish at the same time) and partly because the actors playing the criminals, especially Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet, are so much the best people to watch.  The modernity of the leads’ acting is very striking more than half a century after Lift to the Scaffold was made.  It was this film – along with Malle’s second feature Les amants, which appeared later in 1958 – that launched Moreau’s career as a movie star.  She conveys both Florence’s obsession with Julien and her discontent with everything else in her life.  The tight, peevish tone of her face muscles and couldn’t-care-less walk are those of a woman who refuses to make herself attractive to a cafard-inducing world.  Her aureole of blonde hair seems to radiate dissatisfaction.  Moreau creates a brilliant portrait of a woman bored by affluence and who yearns to get her own way in a new way.  Some of Florence’s sick-unto-death interior monologues raise the familiar suspicion that French scriptwriters of the period got away with murder even when the characters in their story didn’t.  But Moreau justifies the desolate romantic excess of her lines.  Her joyless passion makes you believe that Florence has emptied her existence of all meaning except  Julien – that she’s able to feel nothing but longing for him.  The sullen mask predominates but there are occasional breaks in Jeanne Moreau’s cloud of ennui that express Florence Carala’s sense of the possibility of escape.

    Just before he’s shot, Simon Carala tells Julien Tavernier that, while he may have been a good soldier, he doesn’t have what it take to succeed in life outside warfare.  Maurice Ronet’s subtle characterisation of Julien sheds light on this disparagement of him.  Julien, in spite of the resilience he shows, exudes – as unmistakably as the sweat that pours off him as he tries to get out of the lift – a leaden, anxious self-reproach.  When he does eventually escape from the building into the street outside, Ronet’s movement is beautifully expressive of a man who’s defeated inside.  The effect is touching because Julien, anxious to make contact with Florence, doesn’t yet realise that he’s now a wanted man in the criminal sense as well as in an amatory one.  There’s a complementary, consummately relaxed cameo from Félix Marten as Julien’s drinking pal, Christian.  When the shrewd, imposing police detective (Lino Ventura) tells Florence that Julien is wanted for murder, Christian is falling asleep beside her:  it’s as if the drunken porter is rubbing shoulders with Lady Macbeth.  (The broad-featured Félix Marten is a cross between George Hamilton and Charlie Watts.)  But this gangling brasserie-crawler, although he’s amusing, also reflects a twilit, transient world – one in which the lovers spend much of their time.  This reinforces our view of Julien and Florence as rootless, as snatching at pleasure when and where they can.

    Once they’re on the run, the vulnerable delinquents Louis and Véronique come into their own.  Yori Bertin is a vivacious feather-head; Georges Poujouly suggests Louis’s social inchoation in a strikingly physical way.  In a horribly funny scene, in the bedroom of Véronique’s tiny apartment, the pair rapidly run the gamut of the thoughts and feelings they’re capable of.  Within a couple of minutes, they rationalise the crimes they’ve committed, look on the bright side, lament their fate and attempt suicide, consoled by the prospect of immortality in the press.  Their shallowness makes a good contrast to the older lovers’ sense of oppression but the youngsters have their own mystique.   The playing of some of the other smaller parts, although enjoyable enough, is conventional – Ivan Petrovich’s Horst Bencker is the most obvious example.  But Lift to the Scaffold is carefully cast throughout and actors in very small roles make an impression:  the security guard who shuts down the lift, with his corpulent equanimity and inquisitive snout; the bird-like office secretary with beady and accusatory eyes, who sits sharpening pencils with smug application.  Also striking is the ex-schoolmaster police commissioner, who complains about the ‘insatiable’ newshounds but then treats them to a flamboyant interview, posing for photographs and making a show-off reference to the classical unities of French theatre when he predicts the crime will be solved within twenty-four hours (as it is).  In his brief appearance as Simon Carala, Jean Wall imparts an obdurate, derisive complacency that helps us understand the different kinds of suffocating effect he’s had on his wife and on Julien Tavernier.

    Louis Malle’s location filming in the streets of Paris has a great rhythm – he and Henri Decaë record images which are now of historical interest too.   Decaë’s black-and-white photography includes some marvellous chiaroscuro lighting.  The predominating night-time scenes are illumined by the gleaming contours of parked cars, then by a spark of urgency in Jeanne Moreau’s eyes that gives a sexual charge to the imagery.  The lift/noose motif is visualised very entertainingly:  not only in the virtuoso sequences describing Julien’s difficulties in the aftermath of the murder but also in marginal details like the contraption of ropes (presumably some kind of dumbwaiter) in the house Véronique lives in.  The justly famous jazz score, which includes a trumpet solo by Miles Davis, is used by Malle sparingly and effectively.   The film, which runs only ninety minutes, is wonderfully compact. The English translation of its title, although literally correct, is stilted and relatively weak.  (The same goes for the American equivalent – Elevator to the Gallows.)  The two French nouns, because they have the same number of syllables, suggest a grisly droll equation.

    14 February 2010

  • Evening

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lajos Koltai (2007)

    In Evening, the elderly, dying Ann Grant recalls how, fifty years ago, she and a young man she was in love with caused the death of another young man, for whom Ann had a different kind of affection.  Ann was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Lila Wittenborn, her best friend from college.  At the Wittenborns’ huge, beautiful house and estate on Newport, Rhode Island, Ann finds herself increasingly drawn to a young doctor called Harris Arden and the feeling is mutual.  Harris, the son of the Wittenborns’ former housekeeper, is a friend-since-childhood of Lila and her brother Buddy, who behaves more and more erratically during the course of the marriage celebrations.  As night falls at the end of the wedding day, he continues to up the ante.  Ann and Harris both feel a sense of responsibility for Buddy.  They’ve only just recovered from the shock of fearing he’d drowned when they go off together into a secluded shack in the woods, leaving the drunken Buddy to wander into the path of an oncoming car.  He’s badly injured but still breathing when he’s found by some other wedding guests.  They call for Harris’s help but he’s making love with Ann in the sylvan hideaway.  The pair returns to the Wittenborn house next morning to learn of Buddy’s death.

    An experience like that is certainly enough to prey on your conscience half a century later.   In a short story or novel about a character nearing the end of life and racked by the memory of a misdeed in the distant past, a good writer can make the guilt feelings powerful by showing how strongly they affect the person thinking back – without the ‘things ill done or done to others’ harm’ needing to be major crimes or misdemeanours.   In theory, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be possible for film-makers to do the same; in practice, they rarely do.  On screen, it seems that buried, nagging feelings of remorse need to be based on wrongdoings that are somehow spectacular.  That may render them more ‘cinematic’ but it also tends to make the psyche of the guilty party less interesting or extraordinary – it seems only right for them to feel they did something terrible because it was terrible, unequivocally so.  Evening is in fact based on a novel, by Susan Minot.  I don’t suggest that the past events have been gussied up in the process of screen adaptation.  I do think it’s unlikely that a film would have been made of the book if the grounds for Ann Grant’s septuagenarian guilt had been less floridly melodramatic.

    Although The Hours (2002) is a very much better film, the resonances between it and Evening are several, especially in terms of personnel.  Michael Cunningham, who wrote the book The Hours, shares the screenplay credit for Evening with Susan Minot (and also executive produced).    Four of the cast – Eileen Atkins, Toni Collette, Claire Danes and Meryl Streep – also appeared in The Hours, in which the Clarissa Vaughan character is inspired by, and Virginia Woolf is in the throes of writing, Mrs Dalloway.   The Marleen Gorris film of the Woolf novel (in 1997) starred Vanessa Redgrave, who plays the elderly Ann Grant in Evening.   The Hours and Evening were published in the same year (1998) so Susan Minot can hardly be accused of plagiarising Cunningham but Evening recalls The Hours in the preponderance of its female characters, the atmosphere of regret and cultural ambitions (Ann wants to be a singer, Buddy a novelist), the bisexual flavouring, the spliced time structure.   But whereas each of the three stories in The Hours is absorbing in itself, as well as fortified by its relation to the other two, the halves of Evening feel insubstantial, individually and in combination.   Because Vanessa Redgrave is the dominant presence, the old woman seems the primary consciousness of the story but ‘the present’ of the film is thin.  As she drifts in and out of sleep, dreams and memories, Ann Grant has fragments of conversation with her nurse and with her two daughters, Constance and Nina, who keep telling each other home truths at greater length.  That’s about it in the present.  Much more time is devoted to the events of Ann’s youth – but the 1950s story is insufficient too, perhaps because it’s designed less as a drama with a life of its own than as a means of answering questions that the older Ann has put in our minds.

    The direction by Lajos Koltai (who previously made Being Julia) is no great shakes.  The repeatedly windblown curtains at the windows behind Ann’s deathbed and a dream sequence in which Ann wanders out of bed to follow a butterfly (although Vanessa Redgrave in her white nightdress is a remarkable figure) are ‘poetical’ clichés.  There are some key moments that don’t work at all.   When Ann sings (‘Time After Time’) at Lila’s wedding reception, Koltai has Harris Arden get up from his seat and join her to dance on the podium:  you can’t believe in his impulsiveness and, when the music ends and the couple take a sheepish bow, you feel embarrassed for the actors more than the characters.  The morning-after scene, in which Ann and Harris return to the Wittenborn mansion, is very badly staged.   Lila has returned too, still in her honeymoon journey costume, yet her mother is hysterical with grief as if she’s just heard the news.  (How come Lila and her husband have made it back by this point?)  No one asks Ann and Harris where on earth they’ve been.

    There’s another difference from The Hours, in which the cast appeared remarkably unaware of their combined talents.  Some of the actors in Evening seem to be feeling the weight of collective prestige, the sense of contributing to an important dramatic enterprise.   This is partly because of constraining family relations, both real and fictional.   Of course there’s a fascination in the casting of Mamie Gummer (Lila) as the young woman who will grow into the old lady played by Meryl Streep, and Natasha Richardson (Constance), as one of Ann’s daughters.  But the younger generation is up against it.  Mamie Gummer is a skilful, intelligent actress but she’s so much less vivid than Meryl Streep that, especially when Lila is dressed in a rather frumpish, dusty pink going away outfit, she somehow seems an older, faded version of her mother.  (Gummer may do better in more eccentric roles – she was good in Taking Woodstock.)   It’s affecting, because it’s so sad, to watch Natasha Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave together but, to be honest, Richardson’s playing is too careful:  she seems anxious to keep herself in the background.  Imagining that Claire Danes, who plays the young Ann, would grow into Redgrave requires some suspension of disbelief:  they may share a potential for recklessness but Redgrave’s imposing eccentricity is miles away from Danes’s core of cheerful sanity.  Danes sings charmingly and her acting is very good, particularly in her scenes with Mamie Gummer and Patrick Wilson (Harris), but she always seems vaguely uncomfortable – as if she doesn’t believe she could become Vanessa Redgrave either.

    Toni Collette, sensational in her small, crucial role in The Hours, should be freer than the other younger actresses but the role of Nina, Ann’s ‘difficult’ daughter, is poorly conceived – there’s a crude contrast between her and the content, compliant Constance.  Although she registers strongly, some of the brittleness in her portrait of Nina feels like anxiety on Collette’s part.   As Mrs Brown, the night nurse, Eileen Atkins deserves sympathy for having to play some scenes dressed as the fairy godmother the confused mind of Ann imagines her to be – but no sympathy for the way she’s decided to do the part:  stage Irish, with a fey spark, and a look in her eyes that seems to want to tell you she may be playing a superficially humorous role but she’s a serious actress who understands there’s more to her character  than meets the eye (except that there isn’t).   Glenn Close, not for the first time, is a compelling but too obvious presence:  she’s an expressionist study of the soul of Lila and Buddy’s proudly controlling mother.   When she breaks down at the news of Buddy’s death, Close isn’t good at concealing that she’s been waiting the whole picture to do this bit.

    Lila and Buddy’s father (Barry Bostwick) barely gets to speak.  It’s no surprise that Lila isn’t sure she wants to go through with marriage to a man called Clyde (who is such a cipher that the actor who plays him doesn’t appear even to get a credit on IMDB).  After the traumatic events of the wedding, Ann decides to marry a man called Ralph Haverford (David Furr) as an antidote to excitement.  Nina’s boyfriend Luc (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is no more than pleasant.   The only two sizeable male roles are Harris and Buddy and both seem just about unplayable because they’re literary hand-me-downs rather than characters.   The messed-up, dipso Buddy – the boy who can’t grow up or get to, let alone beyond, the first line of the novel he’s going to write – is a terrible idea and Hugh Dancy’s performance is a disaster.  Overeager from the start and overdoing febrile self-destructiveness very soon, he leaves himself nowhere else to go long before Buddy does.   ‘We all loved Harris,’ says the seventy-year-old Lila drily.  The ‘all’ seems to mean herself and Buddy and Ann, who also describes Harris, with succinct regret, as ‘my first mistake’.  The unreachable golden boy is a tired idea:  it’s greatly to Patrick Wilson’s credit that he makes a success of the role.  The reserve that Wilson gives to Harris is nuanced – he suggests guardedness and egotism, shyness and an almost scientific curiosity to see how others react.     When Ann and Harris, both now married to other people, meet by chance in a rainy New York street some years after their encounter at the wedding, you fear the worst – it seems such an obligatory scene for this kind of story.   There isn’t anything much in the writing to rescue the situation but Claire Danes and Patrick Wilson certainly do.  Wilson especially, and with the minimum of histrionics, shows you a man who’s going to be disappointed for the rest of his life and who finds the fact puzzling but unchallengeable.

    In its closing stages Evening is an odd, unsatisfactory mixture of nihilism and facile uplift, concentrated in a conversation between Nina and the elderly Lila, who explains that, as you grow older, you get to realise how much doesn’t matter much.   It matters, though, and remains to Lila an unassailably good thing, that Ann sang at Lila’s wedding reception (even though when Harris joined her on stage it gave Lila a painful reminder that it was he, not the man she’d just married, whom she loved).   This disclosure seems to be enough for Nina to develop, on the spot, a positive outlook on life and towards the prospect of motherhood (she’s two months pregnant with Luc’s child).   The arrival of Meryl Streep as Lila senior gives the film, dying on its feet by this point, impressive artificial respiration.  Streep is such a conscientious impersonator that, as soon as Lila gets out of the taxi that’s brought her to Ann’s house, Sally said, ‘She’s doing an impression of her daughter’.  Sally had capitulated, though, by the time Lila was inside the house and meeting Constance and Nina, thanks to Streep’s amusing sizing up of the daughters.

    The following sequence, in Ann’s bedroom, is much the best bit of Evening.  I’m not sure if Streep and Redgrave shared scenes in The House of the Spirits but I’d not seen them on screen together before so this encounter was bound to be an event – and it’s a happy event.  The scene isn’t that well conceived or directed.  It seems odd that, decades after they last met, Lila would curl up on Ann’s bed within two minutes of their reunion.  (This arrangement is designed to repeat the image of the two girls in bed on the morning of Lila’s wedding.)  But Meryl Streep’s acting is so good that it transforms the conception; and Vanessa Redgrave’s innate, passionate expansiveness is all the more impressive for being subdued here.  Streep takes Redgrave’s hand stiffly and, as she keeps holding on it, you sense the tension in Lila between resistance to, and loyal affection for, her old friend.  Mamie Gummer convinces you that the young bride is someone who can make the best of a bad job; her mother brilliantly conveys how deep-seated that propensity has become, and how tough it’s made the older Lila with the passage of time.

    1 June 2010

     

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