Old Yorker

  • Le jour se lève

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marcel Carné (1939)

    The prologue tells us what we’re going to see:

    ‘Un homme a tué … Enfermé, assiégé dans une chambre, il évoque les circonstances qui ont fait de lui un meurtrier.’

    We know almost immediately the identity of the man who’s been shot dead and, within a few frames, the identity of the man who killed him.  The latter’s name is François.  He doesn’t instantly strike you as the murdering kind; and we learn from the chatter of his neighbours in the building where he lives that he’s a good bloke.  So, as François wonders how the crime he’s committed came about, we wonder too.  And because he’s played by Jean Gabin we’re immediately well disposed towards him.  (This would also have been true of the first audiences for Le jour se lève, released in June 1939 – after La grande illusion, La bête humaine and so on).  The film is well under halfway through when we see the murdered man again.  His name is Valentin; he’s a music hall artist whose act includes performing dogs.  I hadn’t realised that the hero of The Artist may owe his name to this character but while George Valentin is a decent chap, his namesake here is a nasty piece of work.  He mistreats his onstage assistant Clara and, off stage, a younger woman called Françoise – in other words, both the women in François’s life.  (Valentin also mistreats the dogs in order to train them.)  François lives with Clara – he likes but doesn’t love her the way he loves Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent).  As their twin names imply, these two are soulmates; the relationship between François and Clara is amiable and, we assume, carnal.  Even though François, a foundry worker, isn’t predisposed towards violence, it comes as no surprise that someone wants to murder the vile Valentin – so we don’t remain baffled for long as to how on earth his death could have come about.  You might think from all this that Le jour se lève won’t have much ammunition left for its second half.  Yet the film is so relentless and concentrated that you don’t experience the lack of surprises as something disappointing – anything but.

    The film is structured as a series of flashback recollections in the mind of François, interleaved with shorter sequences in the present – the morning after the night which has ended with Valentin’s death.  These sequences describe the scene in the street outside, where a crowd has gathered, and François’s interactions with them.  The people in the street are sympathetic but avid for the details of what’s happened and what might happen next.  When at one point François yells at them the effect is startling because Gabin is normally such a vocally quiet actor.  The moment is also startling because he’s such an intensely believable one – he gets over to an exceptional degree the sense of a man’s horrified realisation of how he’s wrecked his life irretrievably.  Le jour se lève – written by Jacques Prévert and based on a story by Jacques Viot – is engrossing and engaging thanks principally to the wonderful actors and Marcel Carné’s direction of them.   As well as Gabin, there’s Arletty.  Clara is a smaller role than Garance in Les enfants du paradis but, as in that film, Arletty has the quality of a used sphinx – she is beautifully present but infinitely old.  There’s also Jules Berry, extraordinary as the sadomasochistic Valentin, who’s both strongly malignant and profoundly weak.  Berry’s Valentin seems always in motion.  This drives François mad in their climactic meeting – but it’s a movement without fluidity: it has a stiff, irrational, spasmodic quality – like a puppet no one is controlling.  (There were times when Valentin reminded me of the ventriloquist’s dummy Hugo in Dead of Night – in the moment in the nightmare sequence when Hugo starts to move independently.)  Valentin makes things up, he boasts of being a dreamer – this makes him more threateningly unpredictable.  The cast are able to make the characters they play both individual and definitive and the ominous, poetic visuals and music – the cinematography is by Philippe Agostini and the score by Maurice Jaubert – give the story a compelling weight.  The people in it, François especially, seem fated to a degree way beyond the fact that we know his fate from the start.

    16 May 2012

  • Le Havre

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aki Kaurismäki (2011)

    I don’t remember The Man Without a Past, Kaurismäki’s best-known film and the only one of his I’ve seen previously, except that I didn’t enjoy it much.  I enjoyed going to Curzon Richmond yesterday but one reason for that, a glass of Prosecco, is why I won’t recall much of Le Havre either:  I must have been asleep for a good quarter of an hour (it’s a short film anyway – 93 minutes).   I didn’t fight to stay awake.  This is the story of a sixty-something man in Le Havre whose beloved wife lies seriously ill in hospital and tells him not to come back and see her for a couple of weeks.  During that time, he forms an attachment to an adolescent African boy – an illegal immigrant who’s trying to make his way across the Channel to join his mother in London.   The elderly man is called Marcel and his wife’s name is Arletty.  Marcel’s surname is Marx.  The key figure among the team of local police and port officials is Monet.  There’s an agreeable dog called Laika (the name of the first dog in space).  Marcel makes a few bob as a shoeshine man.  Jean-Pierre Léaud, always to be remembered as another boy heading towards the sea, has a cameo in the film.   It’s hard for me to see what this assortment of references adds up to – in fact I don’t get Kaurismäki at all.  His absurdist deadpan humour is greatly admired but I find it monotonous.    Marcel’s first shoeshine customer moves off and gets himself killed.  ‘Poor devil’, says Marcel’s sidekick.  ‘Fortunately, he’d already paid’, replies Marcel.  The woman who runs the neighbourhood bakery tells Marcel he doesn’t deserve Arletty.  ‘No one does so it might as well be me’, is his answer.   The immigrant boy Idrissa is looking miserable and Marcel asks if he’s been crying.  Idrissa shakes his head.  Marcel is relieved to hear it:  ‘Just as well:  it won’t help’.  These one-liners are witty but once you’ve heard one you’ve heard them all.  (These three examples are all taken from the film’s trailer, for obvious reasons.)

    The contest in Le Havre – between eccentric, canny local underdogs and humourless, eventually incompetent authority – is reminiscent of some of the power struggles in Ealing comedy even if, in this case, the success of Marcel’s plan to get Idrissa safely on a boat to England depends on Monet changing sides too.  When Arletty insists that Marcel not visit her for a while, she expects to be dead by the time he goes to see her again; when he returns to her room in the hospital, he finds an empty bed and a nurse tells him he can pick up his wife’s belongings later.   It turns out, though, that she’s made an unexpected recovery.  The couple return home; the cherry tree is in bloom; Arletty says she’ll get on making their evening meal (which is what she was doing when she fell ill).  There’s no doubt this is a striking ending – it’s a happy one yet the outcome feels absurd as much as miraculous.  The cast includes André Wilms (Marcel), Kati Outinen (Arletty), Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Monet) and Blondin Miguel (Idrissa).   They’re a fine collection of faces – Kati Outinen is a particularly remarkable presence not just thanks to the strength of her acting but because she looks out of time (like a woman of the 1950s) and sounds out of place (with her Finnish French accent).  I can’t fault any of the actors yet nothing they do does anything for me.  The best thing in the film is the music played over the opening and closing titles – ‘Matelot’, a mid-1960s song by a British band called The Renegades, of whom I’d never heard.   Along with The Renegades and the Prosecco, another nice thing about this visit to the cinema was being given a card by the guy at the box office to watch a free film on Curzon on Demand.  Le Havre opened only yesterday but it’s available immediately to watch at home.  I suppose I could use the voucher to see the parts of the film I was unconscious for but I don’t think I will.

    6 April 2012

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