Film review

  • Jules and Jim

    Old YorkerFilm review

    François Truffaut (1962)

    When I was eighteen I saw a book in W H Smith, in Coney Street, York that, as soon as I looked at the jacket and checked the contents page, I wanted.  The Great Movies, newly published at the time, is the work of an American author, William Bayer (son of the screenwriter Eleanor Perry, to whom the book is dedicated).  The front cover announced, above the block-capitals title, that ‘In cinema history, 60 films deserve to be called …’  I wanted the book because the sixty included my then favourite film, Cabaret (1972), and the introductory words on the cover seemed an appealingly authoritative confirmation of greatness.  Bayer, who has subsequently had a successful career writing mainly crime fiction, isn’t himself a great writer about film.  His methodology – he defines twelve genres (some of them overlapping) and selects five movies to represent each one – is a dubious means of constructing a canon.  His short essays stand up well enough, though, and I’ve always been grateful for his book.  It introduced me to films I’d not yet seen, have since come to love, and which would be at least contenders for a personal top-sixty list – All About Eve, Bonnie and Clyde, Dr Strangelove …, La dolce vita, 8½, Les enfants du paradis, The 400 Blows, From Here to Eternity, M, The Manchurian Candidate, On the Waterfront, Persona, Psycho (along with Cabaret).  The downside of the book’s canonical flavour, in 1974, was that it intimidated me.  I was nervous of voicing negative thoughts about any of the sixty classics – just as I was at the time, and later, about disparaging films I didn’t like that more articulate friends did.  One plus of getting old is that I’m easier speaking my mind (at least on these web pages).  A few years ago, I walked out of one of William Bayer’s selections – Only Angels Have Wings.  I now don’t mind admitting that I’d pay good money to avoid watching another of them, The Wild Bunch, again.  And there are plenty of films on Bayer’s list I rate somewhere between the two extremes – worth seeing, even repeatedly, but falling a little short of greatness.  They include Jules and Jim.

    Truffaut’s third feature (following The 400 Hundred Blows (1959) and Shoot the Pianist (1960)), Jules and Jim celebrates bohemian life in the years before and after the First World War, and dramatises, through a love triangle, the relative claims and weight of male friendship and heterosexual passion.  The protagonists are two contrasting young men, both writers, and one extraordinary young woman.  Jules (Oskar Werner) is a shy Austrian, Jim (Henri Serre) a more self-confident Frenchman.  The capricious, enigmatic Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) – she demands and practises the sexual freedoms enjoyed by men but can also be a clinging vine – fascinate them both.  In the summer of 1914, Jules marries Catherine.  This doesn’t weaken the bond between him and Jim – nor, in the event, does the imminent conflict in which they fight on opposite sides.  Once the War is over, Jim comes to stay with Jules and Catherine and their little daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin) at their home in the Black Forest.  Jules confides in his friend about his wife’s inconstancy – Catherine has had numerous affairs and spends periods of time away from her family.  She now tries to seduce Jim who, although he has a fiancée, Gilberte (Vanna Urbino), back in Paris, is still attracted to Catherine.  Jules encourages the liaison:  that way, he tells Jim, ‘she’ll still be ours’.  They live as a ménage à trois until tensions between Jim and Catherine, resulting chiefly from their failure to have a child of their own, break up the relationship.  Jim returns to France.  A reunion is on the cards when Catherine becomes pregnant; it doesn’t happen, thanks to Jules writing to tell Jim of her miscarriage.  When Catherine and Jules move to France, a chance meeting with Jim rekindles old passions and discords:  after Jim announces his intention to marry Gilberte, Catherine pulls a gun on him, though he manages to escape.  Sometime later, another chance meeting, in a cinema, leads to the trio going on a drive together.  During a stop at a café, Catherine persuades Jim (you feel he’s asking for trouble) to get into the car with her:  she has something important to tell him.  As Jules watches, Catherine drives the car off a nearby bridge into the river.  Jules is left to arrange the funerals of his wife and friend, and the burial of their ashes in Père-Lachaise.

    I think this was the third time I’d seen Jules and Jim (over a period of some forty years) and I’ve been less impressed each time I’ve returned to it.  The source material is a semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché.  The screenplay, by Truffaut and Jean Gruault, includes large chunks of voiceover narration.  I don’t know if these are lifted straight from the novel but, in a film as visually alive as this one is, the narration gets to feel superfluous, despite Michel Subor’s brisk, elegant delivery.  There’s so much philosophy of love (and woman-as-the-other) stuff to listen to that Jules and Jim can feel like French cinema parody.  At this distance in time, it’s hard not to think the film’s original impact had more to do with the freshness of the camerawork (Raoul Coutard was the cinematographer) and the fast cutting (Claudine Bouché edited) than with the themes of the story that Truffaut tells.  This is grudging, though, when there are so many good things in the film.  All three principals are excellent.  Jeanne Moreau, with her uncanny knack for seeming volatile and no nonsense at the same time, is perfectly cast as Catherine.  Her singing of ‘Le tourbillon’, a song composed for the film by Serge Rezvani aka Boris Bassiak (who also appears in Jules and Jim as one of Catherine’s ex-lovers) is justly famous.  The narrative spans more than twenty years – from 1910, when Jules and Jim first meet, to footage of Nazi book-burning in the mid-1930s.  A particularly strong aspect of Oskar Werner’s and Henri Serre’s portraits is that Jim, subtly but definitely, appears to get older whereas Jules continues to look the same – this seems to chime with the different scope of the two men’s personalities to adapt to new circumstances.  Truffaut’s choice of a wide range of locations, in France and Germany, is highly convincing (the production designer, Fred Capel, also did the clothes).  Georges Delerue’s music has great emotive fluency – it’s romantic yet amusing.  Truffaut makes judicious, telling use of archive film inserts.  The Parisian street scenes, remarkably, are no less striking than the footage of the Great War.

    10 November 2021

  • The French Dispatch

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wes Anderson (2021)

    Set in a fictional French town, the outpost of a fictional American magazine, Wes Anderson’s latest is an anthology piece, dramatising supposed articles from the magazine.  The sequences framing the narrative are based in the offices of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, which publishes the cultural supplement that gives Anderson’s film its title.  The French Dispatch is summarised on IMDb as a ‘love letter to journalists’ and dedicated, ahead of the closing credits, to a long list of contributors, over the decades, to The New Yorker.  As expected, plenty of press reviewers, suffering from all-publicity-is-good-publicity syndrome, love the film in return.  The fans include both New Yorker film critics (a relief, if not a surprise, that Anthony Lane’s measured praise makes more sense than Richard Brody’s highfalutin hyperbole).  Inert from the start, The French Dispatch soon becomes infuriating.  With nearly every new scene featuring yet another well-known actor wasting their time, it amounts cumulatively to an obscene squandering of talents, including the writer-director’s own.  The project must have required a good deal of research; the result, as usual with Anderson, is a display of fanatically detailed and ingenious design.  Yet his treatment of the human components in that design is neither satirical nor admiring – the tone is mildly nostalgic, tamely joshing and tiresomely jocose.  The film lacks the emotional energy to be a love letter worthy of the name.

    Like The New Yorker, Anderson’s magazine began life in 1925.  To ensure that The French Dispatch is thoroughly and safely reminiscent, he doesn’t allow his magazine the longevity of its inspiration.  The death of its founding and only editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray), in 1975, is announced at the start of the film (although that’s not the last we see of Howitzer):  his will decrees that, when he ceases to exist, so shall his brainchild.  The dramatised articles number four.  The first is a relatively short travelogue in which a cycling reporter (Owen Wilson) sets the French provincial scene.  The next, enclosed within a lecture by an art historian and critic (Tilda Swinton), tells the story of an artist-murderer (Benicio del Toro) who paints in prison, where his uniformed guard (Léa Seydoux) doubles as his nude model.  The third chapter centres on French student politics in 1968, as represented by a soi-disant revolutionary (Timothée Chalamet) and covered by a sharp-tongued foreign correspondent (Frances McDormand).  In the last section, a distinguished Black author (Jeffrey Wright), who emigrated to France and wrote about its food, recalls the career of a chef of police cuisine (Stephen Park) and how he solved a kidnapping.  Here too the events described are retrospectively contained, in a TV talk show conversation between the writer and an interviewer (Liev Schreiber).   In addition to these framing devices and the sequences in Howitzer’s office, there’s an intermittent voiceover narration (by Anjelica Huston), which doesn’t belong to a character and comes from nowhere in particular.

    The French town is called Ennui-sur-Blasé.  In the gastronomic crime caper, the sleuth chef is Lieutenant Nescaffier.  Those names give a fair idea of how self-congratulatory The French Dispatch is, pleased even with the feebleness of its jokes.  (It’s apt enough, though perhaps not in the way he intends, that Anderson calls a café in the town ‘Le sans blague’.)  An inbuilt advantage of the portmanteau film is that, when it drags, you can rest assured that the next part will be along soon and hope it’ll be better. In The French Dispatch soon is never soon enough and things don’t look up.  Perhaps the three elements that make up most of its running time (103 minutes) are conceived as a tribute to The New Yorker’s celebrated feature-length articles (the student politics episode is clearly indebted to Mavis Gallant’s two-part piece on the May 1968 riots).  But Anderson does a disservice as much as homage to the magazine of Harold Ross and William Shawn, and to some of those who wrote for them.  Anderson’s gay African American in French exile is obviously based on James Baldwin.  It’s insulting to the memory of a fine novelist and passionate commentator on race issues to turn him into a food columnist.  This seems designed as a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone jape, referencing Baldwin at the same time as teasing The New Yorker’s gourmet tendencies – a quality that ties in, of course, with the magazine’s smart metropolitan flavour.  I could make no sense of the film’s premise that a small-town American newspaper would spawn a New Yorker-like offspring in continental Europe (Ennui-sur-Blasé, for the most part, might as well be Paris).  Anderson doesn’t even try to get comic mileage out of the mismatch.

    The actors’ names in brackets above are the tip of an iceberg of famous names.  The cast also features – among many others – Bob Balaban, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Alex Lawther, Elisabeth Moss, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Lois Smith and Christoph Waltz.  As well as Léa Seydoux, the relatively small contingent of French (or Belgian) actors includes Mathieu Amalric, Damien Bonnard, Cécile De France and Denis Ménochet.  Since Anderson has several of his non-French actors pretending to be French, the real thing might seem surplus to requirements.  In the event, it doesn’t make much difference because everything French in the film is actually ‘French’ – that is, an educated American’s whimsical view of France and French culture.  Not that the Americans in evidence are any less artificial.  The characters are sketches at best; those playing them have next to nothing with which to work.  The resulting performances aren’t just effortless but weightless.  When, rarely, someone suggests a person you’d be interested to know more about – Frances McDormand, Saoirse Ronan (as a chanteuse kidnapper), Liev Schreiber – it’s a momentary shot in the arm to the film but also a little jarring.  Giving someone more than one dimension feels like an aberration.

    Weightless is also the word for the violence in The French Dispatch.  This merits a BBFC warning and it’s true the body count is quite high but the mayhem isn’t offensive.  Like everything else, it’s too hollow to matter.  There are a couple of animated sequences.  You’re almost grateful for the second one:  by the time it comes along, the film has become so listless that any kind of dynamism on the screen is welcome.  It makes you wonder why Anderson didn’t go the whole hog and make another animated feature; then you remember Isle of Dogs (2018) and think again.  In The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), the title location, in its heyday, has the look of a fancy, multi-layered gateau; the produce of a de luxe patisserie plays a significant part in the plot.  Even so, the characters just about hold their own against Anderson’s various non-human confections.  In The French Dispatch the balance of power has shifted decisively.  The people and ideas matter far less than the decoration.  It says a lot that a performer as naturally witty as Tilda Swinton is upstaged by the false teeth she wears here.  Wes Anderson has become a sort of auteur-patissier, so preoccupied with fancy piping that he’s neglecting to bake a decent cake.     

    1 November 2021

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