Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • L’Atalante

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean Vigo (1934)

    Michel Simon is a fine and highly individual actor who gets on my nerves in a way that few others do.  His best-known part is probably the title role in Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning:  Simon plays the tramp who exposes to ridicule the decent but condescending intentions of the bourgeois trying to turn Boudu into something socially respectable.  Actors carry their past roles with them and, because Boudu was my first experience of Simon, whenever I see him on screen I seem to sniff him too.  Reviewers will sometimes praise the complete realisation of a place and atmosphere by saying ‘you can almost smell the …’   I’ll have to be honest about L’Atalante:  it was partly because I could almost smell the fug of the eponymous canal barge’s cramped cabins – especially the one occupied by Père Jules, the richly eccentric bosun played by Simon – that I found the film hard to sit through.   It’s a mark of how strongly I felt that I didn’t even enjoy the colony of cats who live on the barge.  Although this was partly because I doubt that no-animals-were-hurt-in-the-making-of this-film, the cats also became part of the stinky mise en scène.  The shot of them arranged on and around the barge’s gramophone, which featured in the BFI’s trailer for L’Atalante, was by far the best feline moment in the whole thing.  As well as these prim considerations of cleanliness, I couldn’t stand the supposedly irresistible subversive humour of Père Jules.  When he briefly disappears from the scene, he’s replaced by a loveably crazy peddler (Gilles Margaritis), who’s even worse.  This camelot does magic tricks and doubles up as a one-man band.  He flirts with the heroine Juliette (Dita Parlo) and her new husband, the barge captain Jean (Jean Dasté), gets mad – jusr as he got mad when he found Juliette alone with Père Jules in his hovel.   It seems we’re meant to see Jean as a humourless, possessive spoilsport – he needs to be taught a lesson, and is when Juliette leaves him – which is probably why I sympathised with him.   It’s exasperating when you feel remote from the spirit of a film but trapped in it.  Elements like Maurice Jaubert’s evidently fit-for-purpose score made matters worse.

    L’Atalante regularly does well in Sight and Sound’s decennial poll and the BFI blurb for this newly-  restored version quotes the recently deceased Gilbert Adair, who thought it arguably the greatest film ever made.  (Even before I saw it, I couldn’t help thinking about Nick James’s S&S obituary of Adair, which mentioned his pride in never having seen the Godfather films.)  It’s the only full-length feature Jean Vigo made:  he died, aged twenty-nine, just a few weeks after the first screening of L’Atalante.  The three main actors are remarkable in their very different ways.  All in all, it isn’t easy to walk out of something as revered as this and I’m glad I stayed the course (around an hour and a half) – although part of what kept me going was the anticipation of reading someone else’s enthusiasm for the picture once it was over.  (The BFI programme note by David Baldwin didn’t disappoint in this respect.)  The film has a fine opening – the wedding of Juliette and Jean and their progress from the church, away from their guests and towards the barge.   The doubts set in for me as soon as Père Jules and the cabin boy (Louis Lefebvre) get into the comedy of losing in the canal the bouquet they were going to present to the bride and constructing a makeshift replacement out of weeds to hand.   In the closing stages, when the humour starts to recede, I began to like L’Atalante much more, including the famous sequence in which the bereft Jean has jumped overboard and has a vision of the figure of Juliette appear before him as he moves underwater;  and an even better one, which cross-cuts between the lovers, each alone in bed and longing for the other.  My liking for the character of the husband was confirmed by his reaction to the cabin boy’s news that Père Jules will find Juliette and bring her back to the barge:  Jean is the cleanest-looking man in the film anyway but he decides to have a good wash in preparation for his wife’s return.

    26 January 2012

  • Wolf

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Nichols (1994)

    A man gets bitten by a wolf and starts turning into one.  He bites another man.   The second, younger man, who has recently usurped the first man in a publishing firm, is also having an affair with his wife.  The first man has developed a lupine keenness of smell – it draws him to the second man’s apartment where he discovers his wife en deshabille.  This sounds like the premise of a comedy of manners; with Mike Nichols at the helm and Jack Nicholson as the lycanthropic cuckold, your anticipation of a jaunty social satire is increased.  The high-powered cast – which also includes Michelle Pfeiffer, James Spader, Christopher Plummer, Kate Nelligan, David Hyde Pierce, Richard Jenkins, Eileen Atkins, Om Puri and Prunella Scales – evinces a faintly self-satisfied air of participating in something deeply witty but, for a good part of its two hours, Wolf is just an unimaginative and uninvolving horror movie.  You don’t associate Mike Nichols with that genre.  He may have wanted to confound expectations by focusing more on this aspect of the screenplay (by Jim Harrison, Wesley Strick and an uncredited Elaine May) than on its comedic side.  But Nichols’s heart isn’t in the horror and, by soft-pedalling the comedy, he succeeds only in making what is, in my experience, his worst movie.

    The only thing that’s vaguely funny about Wolf is having Jack Nicholson exhibit – through special effects – a wolf’s speed and athleticism.   Nicholson has often used his wall-eyed look and trademark leer to suggest animality but he gives a lazy, underpowered performance.   When, near the end of the film, he tells Michelle Pfeiffer – as the daughter of the tycoon (Plummer) who owns the publishing house – how much he loves her and that when he looks at her ‘I know what God intended’ – it seems we’re meant to think he’s being sincere but Nicholson’s tone is merely, mildly sarcastic.  More crucially, you don’t get a strong sense of what his character was like before the wolf bit him so the transformation (which, not unexpectedly, comes and goes as the plot requires) hasn’t much impact.  James Spader, as his rival at work and in bed, is considerably worse.  Bitten by Nicholson, he too turns into a wolf:  Spader is so laboriously creepy from the start that he needs every bit of the hairy-face-and-yellow-eyes make-up for us to notice any change.  It’s striking that one of the few scenes in which the werewolf theme is more or less ignored is just about the best in the film – a tetchy exchange between Nicholson and Pfeiffer, as they drink milk and crunch toast.   Pfeiffer is mostly wasted, though – as is Richard Jenkins, even if he does manage to bring a bit of eccentric individuality to the role of a police detective.   The music is by Ennio Morricone and the cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno, two more talents who were wasting their time on this picture.

    16 March 2012

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