Old Yorker

  • The Big Picture

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie

    Eric Lartigau (2010)

    Roman Duris is a very good actor with unusually strong audience rapport.   The longer The Big Picture goes on, the more the film turns into a test of these qualities.  Duris plays Paul Exben.  Married with two young children, Paul always liked the idea of being a professional photographer but he’s taken the financially safer option of a legal career and is now a partner in a successful Paris law firm.  His much older colleague Anne reveals to him that she’s terminally ill and offers Paul sole ownership of the practice.  He’s more concerned with events closer to home, increasingly suspicious that his wife Sarah is having an affair with a man they both know called Grégoire Kremer – who is a professional photographer, although not a greatly successful one.  When his suspicions are realised, Paul confronts Greg at the latter’s home, and, in the heat of the moment, lashes out and unintentionally kills his rival.

    Sarah had already decided she wanted a divorce and taken the children to her sister’s.  Paul now takes advantage of his solitude to hide Greg’s body in the deep freeze and assume the dead man’s identity.   He then drives to his boat in Brittany, throws Greg’s corpse overboard, and eventually fetches up in Montenegro.  There he meets an expatriate Frenchman called Bartholomé, who edits a local newspaper and, while staying overnight with Paul, sees his camerawork.  The paper’s picture editor Ivana offers Paul a job:  he soon becomes such a successful photographer – with a gallery exhibition and the prospect/threat of international exposure – that he has to abandon the identity of Greg Kremer too.  The film ends suddenly at the moment he’s succeeded in doing so.  Paul disappears from view, into a new anonymity.

    I don’t know if Douglas Kennedy’s 1997 novel The Big Picture is written as a first or third person narrative but Romain Duris is in nearly every frame of the film.  In some respects, Eric Lartigau and Laurent de Bartillat, who did the screenplay, are admirably disciplined.   They don’t rely on a voiceover telling us what was going on in Paul’s mind and he never confides in anyone.  Although this puts colossal pressure on Duris, he demonstrates to an even greater extent than before that he can carry a picture.  He suggests a super-speedy metabolism and not just because he’s skinny:  in the early scenes we see how fast Paul’s motor runs – and how he’s both great with his kids and childish himself, as well as smart, annoying and charming.  Over the course of the film, Paul retains, because he has to, his speed of thought and movement and decision-making – yet he still becomes subdued.  Duris is most impressive in how he conveys a man in hiding – not just from the law but from himself, guilty about the crime he’s committed and remorseful about leaving his kids.

    It’s refreshing that someone in Paul’s situation doesn’t (and this in spite of the film’s French title) succeed in ‘finding’ himself:  he succeeds rather in burying himself more deeply.  Duris’s shaggy, swarthy looks also make him believable as a stateless person, a refugee.  Even so, there’s only so much even the best actors can do when they’re limited to describing a character’s behaviour, as Duris is here.  Of course we can see what Paul is thinking too – when, for example, he’s negotiating terms for the exhibition with the gallery owner.  But the thoughts and feelings of his to which we’re privy, while the other people on screen are not, don’t do much more than illustrate, repeatedly, Paul’s predicament.

    It makes good pragmatic and psychological sense for Paul to become Greg.  There’s a dead man’s passport (and laptop) going spare and Paul knows the legal ropes.  His life is now in effect defined by Greg so why not as Greg too?  But there’s a problem with the film-makers’ decision to set this adaptation of Kennedy’s novel, published when the internet was still young, in the present day – especially since Paul, as we see in the opening part of The Big Picture, takes pride in the latest electronic toys that he can afford.   After he’s defected to Eastern Europe, he does an improbably sketchy Google search for ‘Grégoire Kremer’:  he doesn’t, for example, explore elaborations like ‘Grégoire Kremer missing’ (even though we assume Paul’s in Montenegro for much longer than the two- to three-month trip abroad which Paul indicates that Greg’s on, in an e-mail that he sends to Sarah from Greg’s laptop).  As Hannah McGill points out in Sight & Sound, it’s incredible there are no online images of the real Greg which would explode Paul’s identity as soon as Bartholomé looks Greg up on the internet.  There was another bit I didn’t understand.  When Paul, about to make his escape from Paris, tells Anne he won’t accept her offer of taking over the law firm, she says goodbye and good luck – is she expecting to die that night?  (Paul doesn’t tell her he’s leaving town.)

    Paul’s wife is played by Eric Lartigau’s wife, Marina Fois, who makes it clear from the start that Sarah has other things on her mind.   She summons Paul to a lunchtime meeting and he fears she’s going to say she’s seeing another man (this is before he suspects who that might be).  When Sarah announces in this scene ‘It’s over’, she’s referring, however, her attempts at a writing career, which she claims Paul has thwarted by turning her into a housewife.  The lovely but stony-faced Marina Fois exudes selfish resentment and it’s believable that this is why the marriage is in trouble – it’s less convincing that Sarah’s in love with the vacuously handsome Greg (Eric Ruf).   Duris gets better support from Catherine Deneuve as the doomed legal partner (businesslike in the face of death but you see the tiny flickerings of fear too); Branca Katic as Ivana (you believe the mutual attraction here – not least because the humorous Katic’s hair and eyes, though not the expression in them, recall Marina Fois); and, especially, Niels Arestrup (Duris’s father in The Beat That My Heart Skipped) as the droll, hard-drinking Bartholomé.  In the smaller parts, I really liked Stevan Radusinovic as the enthusiastically nerdy owner of a camera shop in Montenegro.  Paul’s older child is played by the easily expressive Enzo Caçote.  (The younger one, not yet even a toddler, is Luka Antic and, according to IMDB, several doubles!)  The unobtrusively excellent editing is by Juliette Welfling.

    22 July 2011

  • The Big Knife

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Aldrich (1955)

    Shown as part of the BFI’s ‘Birth of the Method:  the Revolution in American Acting’, The Big Knife made me wonder about the criteria for a film’s inclusion in the season.  The cast of this adaptation of Clifford Odets’ stage play (with a screenplay by James Poe) includes the likes of Rod Steiger and Shelley Winters but time spent at the Actors Studio surely doesn’t mean that an actor’s every subsequent role is a true expression of their Method training?  Robert Aldrich’s film contains little evidence of a radical approach to screen characterisation.  The restriction of the action, except for a couple of brief exterior sequences, to a single room; the mechanical exits and entrances; the sententious dialogue (the standout aphorism is ‘Half-idealism is peritonitis of the soul’):  these all suggest that The Big Knife belongs on Broadway, where it began life in 1949, even though the story is set in Hollywood.  The piece has some interest as an expression of the intensity of Clifford Odets’ hatred of the Dream Factory but the tone of his censure is sanctimonious and, with Aldrich at the helm, the whole film is continuously overwrought (with a score by Frank De Vol to match).

    In spite of The Big Knife‘s unremitting excoriation, this kind of exposé of lethally pernicious Hollywood must have seemed familiar by 1955 – after Sunset Boulevard and The Bad and the Beautiful, as well as the less explicitly satirical The Barefoot Contessa and A Star is Born, during the course of the previous five years.  At least the stage production of The Big Knife preceded all these.  The main character is Charlie Castle, a huge star who’s sold most of his soul but who retains just enough of it (a) to be mired in guilt and (b) to want to win back his estranged wife Marion, along with his self-respect.  Odets is represented most obviously here by the writer Hank Teagle, whose work is too sophisticated to have made it to the cinema screen and who’s on the point of heading back to New York – he hopes in company with Marion, to whom Hank has proposed marriage.

    Jack Palance works hard as Charlie but he never seems sufficiently vulnerable.  Ida Lupino offers a breathy, hyper-tense interpretation of the anxiously principled Marion, whose heart still belongs to her husband, even though her head tells her to go east with Hank – played with almost comical lack of charisma by Wesley Addy.  As the villainous studio boss Stanley Shriner Hoff, Rod Steiger gives the kind of ingeniously bad performance which is beyond all but the most talented actors.  It’s remarkable that the thirty-year-old Steiger is physically persuasive as a man presumably meant to be twice as old but his white-haired, shades-wearing, light-voiced (until he’s angry) Hoff is camp and thoroughly psychotic:  Steiger is quite unconvincing when, for example, Hoff is boasting pompously about rubbing shoulders with kings, presidents, American military heroes.  Wendell Corey’s quietness as Hoff’s sidekick Smiley Coy (sic) at least makes for a bit of impact when Coy eventually raises his voice.

    Jean Hagen did a famously fine job of playing another kind of Hollywood monstrosity in Singin’ in the Rain but she’s gruesomely one-note as Connie, the vampish wife of Charlie’s hopelessly loyal minder Buddy (Paul Langton), who, a few years back, took the rap for a hit-and-run accident caused by Charlie.  Much of the plot revolves around the studio’s continuing attempts to hush up what really happened that night and the threat posed by Dixie Evans, a struggling starlet who knows the truth, likes a drink, and gets more talkative when she’s had one:  Shelley Winters has only the one scene but her vivid, needy Dixie is the best thing in The Big Knife.  Patty Benedict, a Louella Parsons/Hedda Hopper-type columnist, threatens, when Charlie upsets her, to resume digging for dirt about the car accident but no more is seen or heard of her (not a great loss:  Ilka Chase is unvarying throughout the few minutes she is on screen).  Since Hoff and his cronies are already preoccupied with what Dixie Evans might reveal, Patty seems pretty superfluous.  With Everett Sloane, Nick Dennis and Michael Winkelman (as the Castles’ son).

    13 November 2014

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