Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
Louis Malle (1958)
Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) and Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) are lovers. They plan to murder her wealthy industrialist husband (Jean Wall), who is also Julien’s boss. Julien will carry out the killing, with Florence’s connivance, and make it look like suicide. The crime will be committed on a Saturday afternoon in Simon Carala’s office, on an upper floor of a tall building in the centre of Paris. When Julien has done the deed, he’ll meet Florence at the Hotel Camée and they’ll start a new life together – a life financed by the money that Florence will inherit from her late husband. Lift to the Scaffold begins with an impassioned phone conversation between the lovers and ends with the camera showing a collection of incriminating photographs of the pair together. Yet because their plan goes wrong they never meet up. Their relationship is the heart of the film but they’re never on screen together except in those photographs.
The killing is carried out intrepidly but imperfectly. After entering Simon Carala’s office, shooting him dead and putting the gun in the victim’s hand, Julien departs the scene of the crime. He spots what is, in more ways than one, a loose end. He re-enters the building to attend to it. The place shuts down for the weekend just as he’s preparing to make his escape for a second time. Julien is stuck in the building, in a lift which will be stationary until Monday morning. His swish car is in the street – unlocked and with the keys in the ignition. A small-time crook, Louis (Georges Poujouly), and his girlfriend Véronique (Yori Bertin), who works in a florist’s nearby, steal the car. They check in at a motel as Mr and Mrs Julien Tavernier and get into conversation with an older German couple, Horst and Frieda Bencker (Ivan Petrovich and Elga Andersen). The latter take photographs of their new acquaintances, using Julien’s camera, which Louis supplies for the purpose. When the Benckers go to bed, Louis tries to steal their car, which is even swankier than Julien’s. Louis is caught in the act by the Benckers, whom he shoots dead, using the gun that he found in the glove compartment of Julien’s car.
Florence wanders round Paris throughout the night, dazed and distraught. As she waited for Julien at the Hotel Camée, she glimpsed Véronique in the passenger seat of what Florence recognised as her lover’s car. She assumes that she’s been forsaken for a younger woman. Thanks to his resourceful persistence, Julien eventually manages to escape from the lift. He gets out of the building and goes to a café, where he sees his name and photographs all over the morning papers: wanted for the murder of Horst and Frieda Bencker. Julien phones Florence to explain what happened to him. She goes in search of Véronique and Louis – eventually following the latter to the motel, where he’s gone to retrieve the camera. He’s too late, though: the photographs on it have been developed, incriminating Louis. The police, when Simon Carala’s body was first discovered, believed that he’d committed suicide but the detective in charge of the inquiry now sees the light. The roll of film in the camera discovered at the motel also contains snaps of Florence and Julien together. The guilty parties are all arrested.
Louis Malle’s first feature – widely regarded as one of the seminal films of the nouvelle vague – is based on a novel by Noël Calef: Malle, Calef and Roger Nimier all worked on the screenplay. The plot, although amusingly intricate, has several weaknesses. Julien, an ex-Foreign Legion man who’s seen action in Indochina and Algeria, is a clever and nerveless operator – he scales the building to get access to Simon Carala’s office – yet the story pivots on Julien’s making the dumb errors of leaving (a) a rope hanging from the office balcony and (b) his car available to steal. It’s remarkably helpful of Louis to supply the German couple with Julien’s camera in order for the Benckers to take photographs of Louis and Véronique. The Sunday papers are incredibly prompt in leading on a crime that took place in the early hours of the same day. Florence manages to locate Véronique’s apartment very easily. The young couple, fearing they’ll be arrested for the murder of the Benckers, have decided but failed to take their own lives, with a drug overdose. As Florence arrives, they come to drowsily but Louis leaps into action, once he remembers he needs to get back to the motel for the camera. It doesn’t pay to ask who took the photographs of Florence and Julien together.
Lift to the Scaffold is nevertheless a richly entertaining film, one of my favourite thrillers. (The tension of the story is magnified by the particular horror of getting stuck in a lift.) You want Florence and Julien and, to a lesser extent, Louis, to get away with their crimes. This is partly because the various victims are loathsome (Simon Carala made his money as an arms dealer; the bonhomous Horst Bencker is pompous and snakish at the same time) and partly because the actors playing the criminals, especially Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet, are so much the best people to watch. The modernity of the leads’ acting is very striking more than half a century after Lift to the Scaffold was made. It was this film – along with Malle’s second feature Les amants, which appeared later in 1958 – that launched Moreau’s career as a movie star. She conveys both Florence’s obsession with Julien and her discontent with everything else in her life. The tight, peevish tone of her face muscles and couldn’t-care-less walk are those of a woman who refuses to make herself attractive to a cafard-inducing world. Her aureole of blonde hair seems to radiate dissatisfaction. Moreau creates a brilliant portrait of a woman bored by affluence and who yearns to get her own way in a new way. Some of Florence’s sick-unto-death interior monologues raise the familiar suspicion that French scriptwriters of the period got away with murder even when the characters in their story didn’t. But Moreau justifies the desolate romantic excess of her lines. Her joyless passion makes you believe that Florence has emptied her existence of all meaning except Julien – that she’s able to feel nothing but longing for him. The sullen mask predominates but there are occasional breaks in Jeanne Moreau’s cloud of ennui that express Florence Carala’s sense of the possibility of escape.
Just before he’s shot, Simon Carala tells Julien Tavernier that, while he may have been a good soldier, he doesn’t have what it take to succeed in life outside warfare. Maurice Ronet’s subtle characterisation of Julien sheds light on this disparagement of him. Julien, in spite of the resilience he shows, exudes – as unmistakably as the sweat that pours off him as he tries to get out of the lift – a leaden, anxious self-reproach. When he does eventually escape from the building into the street outside, Ronet’s movement is beautifully expressive of a man who’s defeated inside. The effect is touching because Julien, anxious to make contact with Florence, doesn’t yet realise that he’s now a wanted man in the criminal sense as well as in an amatory one. There’s a complementary, consummately relaxed cameo from Félix Marten as Julien’s drinking pal, Christian. When the shrewd, imposing police detective (Lino Ventura) tells Florence that Julien is wanted for murder, Christian is falling asleep beside her: it’s as if the drunken porter is rubbing shoulders with Lady Macbeth. (The broad-featured Félix Marten is a cross between George Hamilton and Charlie Watts.) But this gangling brasserie-crawler, although he’s amusing, also reflects a twilit, transient world – one in which the lovers spend much of their time. This reinforces our view of Julien and Florence as rootless, as snatching at pleasure when and where they can.
Once they’re on the run, the vulnerable delinquents Louis and Véronique come into their own. Yori Bertin is a vivacious feather-head; Georges Poujouly suggests Louis’s social inchoation in a strikingly physical way. In a horribly funny scene, in the bedroom of Véronique’s tiny apartment, the pair rapidly run the gamut of the thoughts and feelings they’re capable of. Within a couple of minutes, they rationalise the crimes they’ve committed, look on the bright side, lament their fate and attempt suicide, consoled by the prospect of immortality in the press. Their shallowness makes a good contrast to the older lovers’ sense of oppression but the youngsters have their own mystique. The playing of some of the other smaller parts, although enjoyable enough, is conventional – Ivan Petrovich’s Horst Bencker is the most obvious example. But Lift to the Scaffold is carefully cast throughout and actors in very small roles make an impression: the security guard who shuts down the lift, with his corpulent equanimity and inquisitive snout; the bird-like office secretary with beady and accusatory eyes, who sits sharpening pencils with smug application. Also striking is the ex-schoolmaster police commissioner, who complains about the ‘insatiable’ newshounds but then treats them to a flamboyant interview, posing for photographs and making a show-off reference to the classical unities of French theatre when he predicts the crime will be solved within twenty-four hours (as it is). In his brief appearance as Simon Carala, Jean Wall imparts an obdurate, derisive complacency that helps us understand the different kinds of suffocating effect he’s had on his wife and on Julien Tavernier.
Louis Malle’s location filming in the streets of Paris has a great rhythm – he and Henri Decaë record images which are now of historical interest too. Decaë’s black-and-white photography includes some marvellous chiaroscuro lighting. The predominating night-time scenes are illumined by the gleaming contours of parked cars, then by a spark of urgency in Jeanne Moreau’s eyes that gives a sexual charge to the imagery. The lift/noose motif is visualised very entertainingly: not only in the virtuoso sequences describing Julien’s difficulties in the aftermath of the murder but also in marginal details like the contraption of ropes (presumably some kind of dumbwaiter) in the house Véronique lives in. The justly famous jazz score, which includes a trumpet solo by Miles Davis, is used by Malle sparingly and effectively. The film, which runs only ninety minutes, is wonderfully compact. The English translation of its title, although literally correct, is stilted and relatively weak. (The same goes for the American equivalent – Elevator to the Gallows.) The two French nouns, because they have the same number of syllables, suggest a grisly droll equation.
14 February 2010
