Old Yorker

  • Love in the Afternoon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’amour l’après-midi [1]

    Eric Rohmer (1972)

    The last of Rohmer’s ‘six moral tales’ and the protagonist, Frédéric (Bernard Verley), is virtually a continuation of his counterpart, Jérôme, in the fifth tale, Claire’s Knee.  Jérôme, engaged to be married, claimed that he no longer desired other women; Frédéric, married to Hélène (Françoise Verley) and the father of a young daughter, explains in voiceover that, when he makes love to his wife, he makes love to all women.  This is a remarkably ambiguous form of words but one that Frédéric more or less reverses when, a little later, he describes his fantasies of ‘possessing’ other women:  he sees them, he says, as extensions of Hélène’s beauty – they affirm the rightness of his choice of wife.  Frédéric is at pains to make clear that the itch to possess doesn’t entail an ulterior motive of sex; as a married man, he does, however, miss the thrill of the chase.  Frédéric and Hélène, whose second child is born during the course of the film, live in the suburbs of Paris and work in the city centre.  While it’s clear that Hélène is a school teacher, I missed hearing that Frédéric is a successful lawyer, as the various plot synopses that I’ve now read confirm him to be.  He seems rather to have one of those ill-defined office jobs familiar to filmgoers:  there are bosses with secretaries, Frédéric tells an acquaintance the business is expanding, he gets described as a bureaucrat – but the work being done is unspecific and there’s not much of it anyway.  Frédéric has plenty of opportunity to indulge his habit of watching the beautiful women who pass transitorily through his life in the streets and stores of Paris:  he spends a good deal of screen time in cafes and even more shopping.  (Although he takes the purchase of clothes for himself very seriously, some of his choices hardly show him to advantage – especially a pale roll-neck jumper that’s about the same colour as his rather fleshy face.)

    Frédéric is pedantically definite about the details of his routine:  he prefers a book to a newspaper on his commuter train; the length of journey is just right for the amount of reading he wants to do before he’s home in the evening.  Eric Rohmer, of course, devises a situation that jeopardises Frédéric’s complacency.  One day, a young woman called Chloé (Zouzou), the former mistress of an old friend of Frédéric, turns up at his office.  With an uncompromising wardrobe, hairdo and jawline, Chloé looks like trouble from the start.  A bohemian drifter, she’s currently working part-time as a waitress; Frédéric, who’s been finding himself increasingly uneasy in the afternoon of his seemingly short working day, starts seeing her then.  Chloé seems to want some stability in her life and he manages to get her a job working in a dress shop.  Their conversations are personal from an early stage and they exchange embraces and kisses that are more than friendly but Frédéric evidently doesn’t think he’s being unfaithful to his wife. Chloé, however, announces that she wants to have a child and for Frédéric to be the father.  Moments after preparing to have sex with her, he walks out on Chloé and returns swiftly and wholeheartedly (at least for the time being) to Hélène.  As husband and wife embrace and she weeps, the film ends.

    One of the startling features of the contes moraux, viewed at this distance in time, is the writer-director’s chauvinism – which, because Rohmer was an intellectual film-maker, is more shockingly dated than the chauvinism of stupid movies of the time.  This is reflected both in what we see and in the writing of the characters.  As in Claire’s Knee, the male protagonist of Love in the Afternoon doesn’t undress.  Jérôme’s frequent changes of outfit and the continuing sunny weather made this noticeable in the previous film.  In Love in the Afternoon, Frédéric is about to remove his top when he sees his face in the mirror and thinks again.  (This is an effective moment:  in an earlier scene at home, Frédéric also pulled his jumper halfway over his head, balaclava-like, to pretend to frighten his young daughter; his reflection takes the viewer, as well, as Frédéric, back to this.)  Jérôme and Frédéric don’t, by keeping their clothes on, retain their dignity:  although their modesty isn’t an explicit personality trait, it’s an expression of both men’s lack of self-release and underlines their ridiculous quality – especially in the case of Frédéric, who, in hotfooting it out of Chloé’s room, is viewed as a figure of fun.   Nevertheless, the sexual discrimination in Rohmer’s exposure of flesh is striking in Love in the Afternoon:  each of Hélène, her and Frédéric’s English au pair and Chloé appears naked.  (In Claire’s Knee the teenage males were topless even if the camera, assuming Jérôme’s point of view, studied the bikini-clad girls with more interest.)

    Rohmer’s chauvinism goes deeper in that the women in both these films are no more than a means of testing and exposing the extent of the leading man’s smug self-deception and sexual betrayal of his fiancée or wife.  The impact of this different treatment of the male and female characters is reinforced by the fact that the actor in the main role in both Claire’s Knee and Love in the Afternoon is more skilful and creates a more substantial personality than his female co-stars.  In an excerpt from an interview with Rohmer which the BFI used as the programme note for Claire’s Knee, the director noted ‘the advantages of using actors who have not been spoiled by professionalism’ – a description which clearly didn’t apply to Jean-Claude Brialy or Bernard Verley but did apply to Aurora Cornu, Laurence O’Monaghan and Beatrice Romand in Claire’s Knee and to Françoise Verley and Zouzou in Love in the Afternoon.  At the time, Zouzou was a well-known model:  as Chloé, she looks and stands like one; she may read her lines like a non-actress but she reads them unvaryingly.  You’re reminded by a fantasy sequence in Love in the Afternoon that these casting tendencies persisted throughout the moral tales sequence:  Frédéric daydreams about propositioning six women on the street, all but one of whom immediately capitulates.  These cameo roles feature Haydée Politoff (La Collectioneuse), Françoise Fabian and Marie-Christine Barrault (My Night with Maud) and Cornu, O’Monaghan and Romand.  I’m not suggesting that all these women are poor actresses:  Fabian in Maud holds her own against the best male actor in any of the six tales, Jean-Louis Trintignant, but only she, Barrault and Romand sustained any sort of screen career.   To be fair to Françoise Verley, Hélène’s shaking sobs at the end of Love in the Afternoon ­­do register strongly – not least because you’re unsure if she suspects her husband of infidelity or if, as Chloé has suggested to Frédéric at one stage, Hélène has been seeing someone else too.

    21 January 2015

    [1]  The film was released in the US as Chloe in the Afternoon, presumably to avoid confusion with Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957).

  • They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sydney Pollack (1969)

    Working from a screenplay by James Poe and Robert E Thompson (adapted from Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel about a dance marathon contest taking place on the fringes of Hollywood during the Depression), Sydney Pollack is brutally overemphatic from the word go.  A semi-prologue cross-cuts between the protagonist Robert Syverton preparing to enter the dance hall in Santa Monica and recollecting the incident in his childhood that gives the film its title and its primary metaphorical image.  Each of the fragments of memory – featuring a fine black horse, galloping free until it falls and sustains mortal injuries – ends with a startling loud noise that merges with a noise from Robert’s adult situation.  These noises culminate, of course, in the gunshot that ends the horse’s life.   The equine sequence is remarkably badly done:  the animal’s progress is tracked by a man and a boy – the man holds his shotgun in a way that suggests he’s primed for lethal action well before the horse needs to be put out of its agony.

    They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is gruelling – but this less because of its subject matter or our intense involvement with the dance contestants or because the film is relentless and claustrophobic, than because it’s monotonous.  (The first hour seems to last for ever.)  And since it’s clear from an early stage that the marathon is going to be a metaphor for the human condition – the dance hall master of ceremonies’ spiel is increasingly explicit about this – you soon realise the style of the piece isn’t going to change and its themes won’t enlarge or deepen.   The siren that calls the competitors back from their short breaks to resume the contest certainly works on your nerves but it’s chiefly Pollack’s approach to the material that locks you in – and growing resentment of this produces some odd effects.  I grew anxious for any kind of change so that – like the audience in the dance hall who, as the competition organisers realise, need the occasional highlight – I was practically grateful for the two ‘derbies’ in which the dance couples are required to take part.  (They do endless circuits of the hall, the band playing faster and faster, until the MC calls time and the couples at the back of the pack when the music stops are eliminated.)

    We learn eventually that the contest is rigged so that no one wins – the victorious couple will have the management’s running costs docked from their $1,500 prize money.  You could argue that, in allegorical terms, this implies the universe isn’t absurd and meaningless but rather that a controlling agency is making things worse than they have to be.  But we’re no doubt meant to think simply that this heartless exploitation is clinching evidence that life is crap – a view expressed repeatedly by the story’s heroine, Gloria Beatty.    Except for one elderly woman who supports the Gloria-Robert partnership, the dance hall audience – who follow and place bets on the contest – is presented as a voyeuristic monolith, avid to watch other people suffering in public.  The effect is bluntly misanthropic.  Of course we understand that the masses’ desire for this kind of entertainment is sharpened by their own impoverished situation, and the need to see other people confirmed as worse off than they are themselves – but we’re not encouraged to feel any sympathy for the audience members.

    I’ve read the McCoy novel and I’d seen the film once before – I guess in the mid- to late 1970s.  I remembered how the story ended but not the structure of the film.  Watching it again, I took to be flashbacks what turn out to be flash forwards – to Robert in custody after he’s carried out Gloria’s final plea that he shoot her.  (The intensely blue-toned inserts look so unrealistic that in fact you wonder if they might be the young man’s imaginings rather than his memories.)  These bits don’t work at all:  because the film fails to make Robert interesting, let alone the central consciousness of the story, they don’t build up any curiosity.  (They function in effect as the film audience’s own rest breaks.)  Michael Sarrazin is a serious weakness.  We gather that Robert has unfulfilled aspirations to becoming a film director but Sarrazin is so meekly benign and inexpressive that he doesn’t suggest much of a character at all – except, perhaps, a half-wit.  That appears to be the only explanation (hardly a satisfying one) of why he accedes without much difficulty to Gloria’s extraordinary request.

    There are three characters each of whom strikes you, from their very first appearance, as designed to deliver a melodramatic resolution to their individual fate.  It’s somewhat to the film’s credit that in one case this doesn’t happen.  The veteran sailor Harry Kline (Red Buttons), who does a spirited tap dance before the contest proper gets underway, has a fatal heart attack during the second of the derby races.  (This is very well staged.)  An actress-on-the-skids called Alice LeBlanc – feyly melancholy, in a staring world of her own – duly goes over the edge (Susannah York is too quickly bonkers but her climactic scene in a shower is impressive).    A heavily pregnant young wife (Bonnie Bedelia) doesn’t, however, either give birth or lose the child she’s expecting or expire (not during the film anyway – the contest is still continuing, after more than forty days, as the final shot fades out).  Instead, to earn a few extra bucks, she sings ‘The Best Things in Life Are Free’ – affectingly, if surprisingly strongly, given her condition and exertions.  As her husband, Bruce Dern is hard to ignore but (from this distance in time, anyway) unsurprising.

    Jane Fonda plays Gloria with formidable intensity and consistency:  as Pauline Kael says (in her magnificent review – a treat after the dismal, largely disappointing film), she has the skill and magnetism to draw us in, even though the character of Gloria often makes us recoil.  Fonda’s relentless bitterness can seem too much – I think this is not because she overdoes it but because she’s such a dominant presence; even so, the strength of Gloria’s convinced defeatism pre-empts what happens in the contest and this reinforces the film’s monotony.   In her final scene, Jane Fonda is great:  asking Robert to shoot her, Gloria’s unhappy eyes light up – the imminent prospect of death gives her, for the first time in the film, hope.   The best scenes in They Shoot Horses are the laconic, backroom exchanges between Gloria and the MC Rocky (and the striking scene in which Rocky talks with Alice, when she’s gone crazy and is standing, in her dress, in the shower).  Gig Young as Rocky has an advantage over the rest of the cast in having the opportunity of showing different sides on and off stage – and takes it.   (He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance.)  You get the sense that the MC’s ringmaster energy is sourced from the same jadedness and almost frightened self-disgust which, when he’s not performing, weigh him down and show in his face.   (We catch the occasional glint of panic in his eyes on stage as well, too momentary for anyone in the dance hall to notice.)  Because we come to see there’s more to this man than his public persona, it makes the ironic moral-of-the-story lines the screenwriters supply him with (somewhat) less hard to take.  The glitterball in the dance hall ceiling has certainly stayed with me:  I realised watching the film again that, whenever I see one of these, on Strictly or anywhere else, it brings They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? to mind.

    22 February 2011

     

     

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