Monthly Archives: July 2019

  • La Cérémonie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Claude Chabrol (1995)

    An adaptation of the 1977 novel A Judgement in Stone, La Cérémonie appears to be the first piece of cinema based on a Ruth Rendell work to be made by a continental European director.  (Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh followed a couple of years later.)  Alongside George Baker’s characterisation of Inspector Wexford in the long-running television series, Claude Chabrol’s film is also one of the few screen interpretations of her work that Rendell publicly commended.  The screenplay, by Chabrol and Caroline Eliacheff, relocates the story in rural Brittany.  It also adjusts the relative size of the main roles.

    In Rendell’s novel, the illiterate maid Eunice murders her employers with the help of an accomplice who, as a social misfit, is also a kindred spirit.  In La Cérémonie, the Eunice character and the accomplice character – Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) respectively – are more of a double act.  Chabrol’s equalising of the roles and description of the pair’s behaviour behind closed doors combine to give La Cérémonie a faint whiff of Jean Genet’s The Maids.  Jeanne is not, however, a domestic servant but the local postmistress and Isabelle Huppert is significantly older than Sandrine Bonnaire – factors that turn Jeanne, rather than Sophie, into the prime mover in their relationship and actions.

    The acting is strong and the story told with verve but the film has a flippancy that’s most unlike Ruth Rendell and which makes her admiration for La Cérémonie something of a mystery in itself.  Chabrol skewers the entitled complacency of Sophie’s employers, the Lelièvres, but the climactic killing of all four family members doesn’t amount to subversion of the social order.  The businessman paterfamilias Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) is such a prat that he wears an evening suit and bow tie in his living room to watch a TV transmission of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with his wife Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) and their late-teenage children Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Valentin Merlet).  (In fact, Gilles is Catherine’s son and Melinda Georges’s daughter from previous marriages.)  The opera music drowns out the noise that Jeanne and Sophie are making in the kitchen.  Their intention seems to be to trash a few of the Lelièvres’ possessions rather than the people themselves:  when they start mucking around with Georges’s guns in the kitchen, they’re not intending to use them.  The first of the homicides – the killing of Georges – is spur-of-the-moment.  The remaining three are a matter of consequential action.

    According to Wikipedia, Chabrol ‘jokingly called [La Cérémonie] the last Marxist film’ and jokingly is all too right.  What comes across more than a political message is the arbitrary nature of key events in the plot.  In the first scene, Catherine, who runs an art gallery, meets Sophie in a café to interview her for the maid position.  Sophie’s stiff, laconic answers to questions are so disquieting that I was never clear why she got the job.  It seemed Catherine must be desperate to get a live-in maid without delay but that didn’t fit with the later revelation that the family hadn’t had one before (and aren’t sure even what to call Sophie).  A moderately amusing subplot revolves around Jeanne’s involvement in the local church, and attitude towards the pompous priest (Jean-François Perrier) and his acolyte Mme Lantier (Dominique Frot), whom Jeanne especially reviles.  After killing the Lelièvres, Jeanne leaves the family’s mansion ahead of Sophie and is killed by the priest’s car, in which Mme Lantier is a passenger.  The driver solemnly informs the police ‘it was fate’.  It’s hard to see that this amounts to more than an ironic flourish.

    At this distance in time, Isabelle Huppert’s theatricality seems uncharacteristic but her trademark speed and impatience are in evidence and repeatedly deliver.  With large, soulful eyes in a gaunt, pale face, Sandrine Bonnaire is a compelling camera subject.  She makes Sophie largely affectless – almost android – except in registering shame at her illiteracy.  The two leads are strongly complementary.  Sophie and Jeanne are given matching pasts.  Each was suspected of responsibility for a death – Jeanne her child’s, Sophie her disabled father’s – but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict either.  Their backstory naturally sets up expectations but the narrative, entertaining as it is, isn’t going anywhere exciting until the shocking finale.

    At one point, Catherine and Gilles watch a film on television – ‘a good one’, she assures him.  Someone in the NFT3 audience laughed emphatically when the TV screen images appeared – to tell the rest of us he could identify the movie and that it was one of Chabrol’s.  I didn’t recognise the film but I could see Michel Piccoli was in it and knew he’d worked with Chabrol – so that the one-upmanship laughter was confirmatory rather than excluding.  I’m not sure whether Chabrol meant this in-joke as a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that his work is part of the same self-satisfied haute bourgeoisie culture as Don Giovanni or whether he was being more thoughtlessly ‘playful’.   Whichever, I think the inclusion of the clip (from Red Wedding (1973)) epitomises what I dislike about La Cérémonie.

    28 June 2019

  • The Lusty Men

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nicholas Ray (1952)

    The title is puzzling, even more so after you’ve watched the film.  You know who the lusty men are but the phrase suggests a different kind of movie – something either square and hearty or camp.  It would be a struggle to accuse Nicholas Ray’s contemporary Western of any of those things.  The source material is a 1946 Life magazine feature by Claude Stanush entitled ‘King of the Cowboys’.  That sounds more commercially appealing and usefully carries a hint of potential irony.

    According to an informative essay on The Lusty Men by Jonah Horwitz[1], Stanush’s piece was a profile of Bob Crosby – ‘”Wild Horse Bob”, a 26-year veteran and the greatest champion of the North American rodeo circuit’.  The Crosby-inspired figure in the film is Texan Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum), who decides to end his lengthy rodeo career when a bull throws and injures him.  He hitchhikes to his childhood home, now dilapidated and owned by an elderly man called Jeremiah (Burt Mustin).  Jeff’s arrival there and his immediately following conversation with Jeremiah are a highlight of the whole film.  The script hasn’t informed us where Jeff was heading but his approach to the ranch is accompanied by music that unequivocally announces Western homecoming (and turns out to be the main theme of Roy Webb’s score).  Robert Mitchum’s lack of sentimentality is invaluable here, deflating as it does the music’s nostalgic swell.  Entering the place, Jeff looks for a boyhood cache in the crawl space under the ranch house.  Ray’s camera (Lee Garmes was the cinematographer) follows him there imaginatively.

    The exchange between Jeff and Jeremiah, two differently solitary men, is ended by the appearance outside the house of a married couple.  In Jeremiah’s words:

    ‘That cowhand from the jackhammer ranch, him and his wife … Do it regular every Sunday… Come prowling around with calf eyes, saying how much they’d like to buy the place … Where’s a ranch hand going to get $5,000?’

    Jeff was about to resume his road journey – ‘to Abilene by sundown’ – but his plans change on meeting Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy) and, especially, his wife Louise (Susan Hayward).  Their triangle of relationships is a major element of what follows.  The answer to Jeremiah’s question about the $5,000 is that Wes is secretly ambitious for a lucrative rodeo career and hopes that Jeff can help him towards it.

    The protracted reworking of the material detailed by Jonah Horwitz helps explain the five names on the screenplay credit, including Horace McCoy, author of the novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?   (The others are David Dortort, Alfred Hayes, Andrew Solt and the film’s co-producer, Jerry Wald.)   Watching The Lusty Men today brings the title of McCoy’s best-known work worryingly to mind.  One hopes none of the horses – or bulls – involved in the numerous rodeo sequences was seriously hurt but the arena thrills and spills (edited by triple Oscar-winner Ralph Dawson) are sometimes hair-raising, and the movie long pre-dates Hollywood’s no-animals-were-harmed assurances

    The dialogue is strong but, even if you take out the rodeo stuff, The Lusty Men is long (113 minutes all told), given what the story comprises.  Mitchum is convincingly part of the rodeo world and his laconic reserve repeatedly pays dividends, though this viewer (as usual) didn’t get a lot from him once the main dramatic focus was on Jeff’s relationship with Louise.  Susan Hayward is credibly hard-bitten and good in her character’s terse, sarcastic moments.  Hayward’s eagerness to do more and lack of nuance combine to ensure that Louise’s longer speeches work less well.

    It’s Arthur Kennedy’s Wes who’s consistently impressive.  Wes is far from young (Kennedy, in his late thirties at the time, was actually three years older than Mitchum) and doesn’t look physically cut out for action-man competition.  It’s not easy to suspend disbelief in Wes’s meteoric rise to the top of the rodeo game, as he wins contests across several states, but Kennedy conveys the man’s determination – and his own surprise at succeeding – strongly enough to sell it.  Wes is so keen to ingratiate himself with a big rodeo name that he’s blind for some time to the growing mutual attraction between Jeff and Louise; or perhaps (more interestingly) he’s so preoccupied with furthering his ambition that he’s unconsciously willing to take the risk of losing his wife to another.

    In the climax to The Lusty Men, in Pendleton, Oregon, Jeff makes an ill-fated rodeo comeback.  When he dies from his injuries, Wes, who’d been ready to abandon Louise and the purchase of Jeremiah’s ranch for the sake of more success and money in rodeo, comes to his senses.  The tension between Louise’s professed loyalty to her husband and her feelings for Jeff breaks effectively when the latter has what proves to be his fatal accident, and she rushes to his bedside.  Yet the prominence of Louise’s reaction to Jeff’s death makes for an ending that’s not only abrupt but rather bewildering.

    As Wes decides to quit rodeo and buy the ranch, Jeff’s old pal Booker Davis (Arthur Hunnicutt) – once a rodeo champion himself, now past it and poor – asks Wes if there’s any chance of a job at the ranch for him and his daughter Rusty (Carol Nugent).  Wes says yes.  ‘Rusty, me and you is going back to Texas’, Booker delightedly tells his daughter.  Wes and Louise leave the rodeo venue reunited; over the public address comes the announcement of the next competitor to enter the arena.  Nicholas Ray thus undercuts Booker’s heartwarming homecoming moment – rather as Robert Mitchum’s presence did Jeff’s earlier one.  In doing this, though, Ray in effect forgets about Louise – so that she seems to have got over Jeff’s death instantly.  In light of her grief a couple of screen minutes earlier, this is bizarre.  It upstages the dangerous-macho-show-must-go-on message that Ray seems to have intended as his film’s last word and parting shot.

    25 June 2019

    [1] At http://cinema.wisc.edu/blog/2015/10/29/lusty-men-never-cowboy-couldnt-be-throwed.  Although Wikipedia reckons the Stanush piece was called ‘The King of the Cowpokes’, Horwitz says otherwise.  He also traces the several name changes that the project went through.

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