Alain Resnais (1974)
The ellipsis in the title may be an acknowledgement of the enduring notoriety of the Stavisky Affair in France: those three stops could suggest there’ll always be more to say on the subject. The Ukraine-born Serge Alexandre Stavisky was a financier and embezzler. His mysterious death in 1934 sparked a political scandal which, according to Wikipedia, ‘led to fatal riots in Paris, the resignation of two prime ministers and a change of government’. Last Year at Marienbad is scrupulously obscure and that leaves a strong impression: I always assume that when an Alain Resnais film is opaque this must be intentional. The structure of Stavisky …, written by Jorge Semprún, is superficially intricate: the movie has a fragmented narrative – with flash forwards, flashbacks, imaginings. While I was watching it, I wasn’t sure if this was an attempt by Resnais and Semprún to reflect the impenetrability, at this distance in time, of the protagonist’s character and death – or recognition of the need to present in a novel way the events of a story already well known to French audiences. I guess it must have been the former: perhaps the Stavisky Affair was still being written about decades after it happened but there’s no indication in the Wikipedia articles on the film and its subject of earlier screen dramatisations (or subsequent ones, for that matter). No expense was spared here: Jean-Paul Belmondo in the title role, music by Stephen Sondheim, gowns by Yves Saint-Laurent. There are handsome buildings – with stylish Art Deco interiors – and a parade of vintage cars. Our awareness that all this beauty, photographed by Sacha Vierny, isn’t going to last much longer gives the luxury an edge. Yet the whole of Stavisky … adds up to much less than the sum of its elaborately designed parts.
Belmondo’s personal popularity with audiences was surely an important factor in the picture’s box-office success in France and, as usual, there’s a lot more to him than surface glamour. Belmondo both epitomises and undermines the stylish swank of the production – he conveys the pessimism underlying Stavisky’s willed nonchalance. Visiting the house where his father committed suicide several years before, Stavisky sees a young German woman he’s met before: the moment when he watches her ride away on her bicycle is unaccountably touching. In his penultimate film, Charles Boyer gives a winning performance as Baron Raoul, a right-wing aristocrat who becomes one of Stavisky’s few loyal allies. Another of them, his doctor, is played by Michel Lonsdale with intense but finely controlled exasperation. The young Gérard Depardieu makes a vividly strong impact in his thirty-second appearance (as the inventor of a device for determining the sex of a child in the womb, in which Stavisky agrees instantaneously to invest).
Too many of the other actors, although physically well cast, are monotonous – a reflection of the one-dimensional, sarcastic conception of their characters. As Stavisky’s wife Arlette, Anny Duperey is remarkable not because she acts wells but because her beauty is so perfectly inert. It’s rather startling when, in a flash forward to her husband’s funeral, Arlette loses her footing on the icy ground – she’s momentarily human rather than a thirties fashion plate. More typical is a scene in which, wearing ermine, she tends to Stavisky’s bloodied hand: you care less about Arlette’s reaction than about her fur getting bloodstained. (Another image that’s stayed in my mind is of a cigar being stubbed in a snowy dessert – it’s not only striking but made me wonder if it had inspired the moment in Inglourious Basterds when the Christoph Waltz character puts his cigarette out in a dish of cream.)
The young German woman who cycles out of Stavisky’s life features too in scenes describing Trotsky’s time in France in the early 1930s, after he’d obtained political asylum there. Stavisky and Trotsky, both Jewish émigrés from (different) parts of the Soviet Union, are being watched by the same determined police chief (Claude Rich). On his arrival in France, Trotsky is warned by the authorities not to get involved in politics. Stavisky, pulling political strings among many others, does so at his peril. The government upheavals following the Stavisky Affair led to Trotsky’s being asked to leave France (for Mexico, where he was assassinated in 1940). But the connections between the two men don’t have a lot of resonance – or any dramatic substance. At the end of the film someone says explicitly that Stavisky’s death heralded the death of an era. Alain Resnais and Jorge Semprún have spent nearly two (long) hours obscuring this obvious point.
4 July 2011
