Old Yorker

  • Classe tous risques

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Claude Sautet (1960)

    In its early stages, Classe tous risques promises to be a fast-paced, character-driven crime thriller. It delivers on that promise but the effect is oddly unsatisfying.  My reaction may reflect a lack of sympathy with thieves’ honour stories, in which a professional criminal’s adherence to a code of behaviour seems meant to illustrate a dogged, doomed gallantry – in spite of his (it is nearly always a man, of course) disregard for other people’s lives and property along the way.  I knew nothing about the movie other than who the director was and from the trailer shown at BFI, which made me want to see it.  Now that I’ve found out a little more, I wonder if viewers aware of its real-life background read this onto Classe tous risques – in a way that enlarges and deepens the film beyond what it actually is.  The protagonist Abel Davos is based on a real criminal (of the same name, except for one letter – ‘Danos’ instead of ‘Davos’).   The author of the source novel Classe tous risques was José Giovanni (he co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Claude Sautet and Pascal Jardin).   Giovanni was himself a former criminal, at one time a next-door-neighbour of Abel Danos in jail.  His first novel, Le trou, an autobiographical account of an attempted prison break, was published partly thanks to the support of Albert Camus.

    At one point in Classe tous risques, Abel (Lino Ventura) warns a copain that if you compromise (I think the word he uses is ‘slide’), you’re nothing.  By the end of the film Abel’s cussed commitment to resisting capture and to settling scores with disloyal members of his circle has resulted in the loss, in different ways, of all those who matter most to him.  A shoot-out with customs officers on a Menton beach has brought about the death of his loving wife, Thérèse (Simone France), and his long-time partner in crime, Raymond (Stan Krol).  (It’s Raymond’s corpse that Abel goes to and holds in his arms first – perhaps this is significant or perhaps Abel didn’t see Thérèse go down.)  An old flame, the wife (Michèle Méritz) of another associate, dies from a melodramatically timed heart attack.  For their own sake as well as his own, Abel is separated from his two young sons, Pierrot (Robert Desnoux) and Daniel (Thierry Lavoye), and from Eric Stark (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a younger voleur who helps Abel keep hidden from the law, and with whom he develops a friendship.  Eric is shot in the leg by the police when, in search of Abel, they arrive at his apartment.  Eric is last seen, with his adoring girl Liliane (Sandra Milo), recovering in a prison hospital.  A voiceover narrator informs us, as Abel disappears from view on a busy Paris street, that a few days later he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death and executed. (This sequence also features a small, elderly woman, who walks badly. I don’t know if she’s a brilliantly cast extra or an accidental passer-by but she magnetises the camera.)  The consequences of Abel’s way of life are sometimes passed over by Claude Sautet – for example, the shocking trauma for his two boys of not just losing their mother but seeing her shot dead.  And the effect on the protagonist’s frame of mind of his actions is delayed until the very end – there’s little sense of accumulating doubt and a draining away of self-belief.  What is Abel trying to achieve?  Is he a man determined to assert and stay true to his own identity even if this quest is bound to end in failure?  The answers to these questions are not clear in the film itself.  It’s the Camus connection, via José Giovanni, that lends the proceedings, in retrospect, a bit of existential substance.

    Lino Ventura, rock-hard but melancholy, gives a fine performance in the lead.  The physical contrasts between Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo as Eric, and what these signify, are the best thing in Classe tous risques.  While Ventura’s face is gravely immobile, Belmondo’s will break into, and be transformed by, his big grin.   The two actors’ physiques and the quality of their movement express how Abel’s options are closed off whereas there are possibilities for Eric.  Belmondo does amazing things:  driving in a car, he’s silent and apparently expressionless but he communicates Eric’s feelings of respect for and protectiveness towards Abel.  Belmondo’s amiable dynamism also gives his character a real unpredictability.  While fully loyal to Abel, Eric in his hospital bed assures Liliane he’ll be back on his feet in a few weeks and won’t get that long a sentence for harbouring a fugitive.  This cheerful crook is both hopeful and disturbing.  (Eric also seems more real than Abel, in that he’s not expected to mean something in the way that Abel is.)   The film is generally well acted.  The cast includes Marcel Dalio as a seedy fence, Evelyne Ker as his bolshy stepdaughter, Michel Ardan and Claude Cerval as fairweather criminal friends, and France Asselin as the former’s wife.  Particularly striking are Robert Desnoux as the permanently stunned-looking elder son; Charles Blavette (Renoir’s Toni in the 1930s) as a man who gives Abel a roof over his head before Eric does; the vivid Sandra Milo as Liliane; and Betty Schneider as a young woman in Eric’s block who takes a tentative shine to Abel.

    From the very start Georges Delerue’s score has an edgy wit and melody which lifts the story.  And the changing tempo of the film is a real strength – the nervous stasis of the opening sequences in Milan station give way to Abel’s and Raymond’s escape from the scene of their crime there, and their sense of exhilaration at being on the run.  Later on, the pressure of the cramped interiors in which Abel increasingly finds himself is no less expressive.  Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet, Classe tous risques is impressive in many ways but less than the sum of its parts.  In his Sight and Sound piece, which the BFI used as the programme note, Nick James argues that Sautet’s ‘magnificent’ film got overlooked in 1960 because of the ‘fuss’ about the New Wave but it can’t hold a candle, either as a Hollywood-inspired crime story or as an existential character study, to Breathless.  (It arrived in Paris cinemas in the same month as Godard’s film.)  The presence of Belmondo, marvellous as he is in this movie too, is a persistent reminder of that.

    19 September 2013

  • Sunshine on Leith

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dexter Fletcher (2013)

    Some people don’t like musicals simply because they can’t deal with characters breaking into song and dance in the middle of a conversation.  I’ve never found this a problem but the movie musical’s decline in popularity has turned the experience of seeing a new one into a relative rarity.  Sunshine on Leith made me realise that most of the musicals I know are, thanks to their setting in time and place, somewhat divorced from reality even before the conventions of the genre take over.  Sunshine on Leith is different.  It’s set in the present (or at least it was when first staged in the theatre in 2007) and it’s set in Edinburgh.  In the early stages, I felt awkward watching people performing numbers by the Proclaimers in streets that I know well.  And because the storyline isn’t intrinsically silly, you can’t ignore it the way you do in, say, Mamma Mia!  The prologue to Dexter Fletcher’s film, including the opening song, features British soldiers in Afghanistan, in a truck heading towards a roadside bomb.  It takes a little time to adjust to Sunshine on Leith.  But the numbers are well sung and performed – and much more skilfully built and choreographed than the repeated chaos of the staging in Mamma Mia!   Fletcher is particularly good at giving life and rhythm to routines that involve movement rather than dance, and regardless of the number of people on screen:  sequences involving a couple of characters work as well as those that take place in a busy pub or at a big silver wedding party.  Once I’d got used to Sunshine on Leith, it was easy to accept outbursts of singing and dancing as an expression of the characters’ heightened feeling.

    My lack of familiarity with the Proclaimers – I knew only three of the numbers – cuts both ways.  In Mamma Mia! the Abba songs were so familiar and numerous that you could always look forward to the next one – and how the star cast would cope with it – and you never had to wait long.   Without that assurance, you expect more of the parts between numbers in Sunshine on Leith but the newness of the songs also makes the experience fresher.  In fact, the two songs I knew well – ‘Letter From America’ and ‘500 Miles’ – made for relatively less satisfying sequences.   I had tears in my eyes during ‘Letter From America’ but this was less because of what the song meant in the context of the film than because of the associations of the Proclaimers’ original (and because I took in the words more clearly than I had before).   The theme of this great song is too big to work, as it has to here, as a description of relationships within a single Scottish family.  (Given the strength of their daughter’s wanderlust, Florida seems a disappointingly conventional destination but the lyric requires it of course.)   ‘500 Miles’ is the climactic number – a crowd scene staged in the Princes Street Gardens next to the National Galleries.  It’s jolly but mechanical, and too focused on only one of the three main couples in the story.

    The script by Stephen Greenhorn, who also wrote the stage show, is workaday.  The awareness of that is something of a drag on the movie’s effectiveness – you often think the cast are doing well considering.  Yet they win you over.  The paterfamilias Rab finds out that he’s also the father of an adult daughter (Sara Vickers) he knew nothing about.  In spite of the marital crisis this sparks, it’s a relief to see Peter Mullan with fewer demons than usual.  Even better, he doesn’t seem to be soft-pedalling:  he gives a quietly commanding performance of great warmth and humour.  Mullan transcends feebly conceived scenes:  Rab goes to a book signing by a Nigella-ish celebrity chef (Daniela Nardini), treating her as an agony aunt who can help him mend the rift in his marriage.  The sequence and the one that follows – Rab climbs the stairs with supermarket shopping for the conciliating supper and has a heart attack – are thoroughly unconvincing but Mullan’s intonation of the question ‘Veal?’ redeems them.  As Rab’s wife Jean, Jane Horrocks is, compared with Mullan, doing-a-character but her movement and gestures are particularly well absorbed and she has a fretful sweetness of nature that’s touching.

    Although Freya Mavor, the Miami-bound nurse Liz, is hemmed in by the obvious plotting, she sings nicely and her divided feelings and allegiances are persuasive.  George MacKay (her brother) and Kevin Guthrie (the brother’s best mate and the sister’s boyfriend) are well paired as the physically contrasting ex-soldiers, Davy and Ally.  MacKay has a lovely voice and is particularly good at making the transition from speaking to singing – his movement in the numbers is excellent too.  Guthrie has a distinctive screen presence and is very likeable.  Paul Brannigan from The Angels’ Share appears only briefly (in a non-singing role) as a soldier who got out of Afghanistan with his life but not his legs:  he makes a strong impression.  Antonia Thomas as an English girl, Yvonne – Liz’s nursing colleague, who becomes Davy’s girlfriend – is OK although not as natural as the other youngsters.  I liked Jason Flemyng as Harry, who works with Jean as an attendant in the National Galleries, especially in his coming to emotional life in his one musical number.  I gather that the Proclaimers make a cameo appearance but I missed them.

    14 October 2013

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