Joseph Losey (1962)

I left my ticket at home so made a special return trip during the afternoon to collect it, then return to BFI.   The film was given an exemplary introduction by Clyde Jeavons, a film historian and archivist – audible, cogent, succinct.  Jeavons described how Losey’s producers, the Hakim brothers, had cut the piece to ribbons; and the restoration process which had made possible the print we were about to see.  Jeavons was evidently a passionate admirer of Eve (or Eva – in its original Italian title).  I thought he was likely to be pushing it when he claimed that Jeanne Moreau’s performance in the title role was her finest but his introduction made me look forward to the film and hope that my extra effort to get to see it would prove worthwhile.  From that point onwards, it was all downhill.  I thought several times about leaving and would have done if I’d set out with my ticket when I left for work that morning.   I’ve not thought much of Losey’s social message films that I’ve seen in recent weeks but this, his earliest ‘art’ film, is even worse

Eve tells of the relationship between Tyvian Jones, a Welsh novelist (his Welshness is an important part of his PR) and a mercenary, promiscuous French woman by whom he’s obsessed and who exploits him ruthlessly.  During the opening sequence, the camera moves around the various beauties of Venice.  It comes to rest on statues of Adam and Eve and a voice on the soundtrack is quoting from Genesis (‘They were naked and were not ashamed’).  This imagery recurs throughout the film.  Since Eve is meant to signify more than the individual in the story, what is being said about the relationship between men and women?   That woman is a callous temptress (this Eve seems to have been not so much beguiled as possessed by the serpent)?  Evidently not:  Francesca, the other woman in Tyvian’s life, is innocent, loyal and exploited by him as much as by Eve.  If that raises doubts as to whether any general statement is being made (other than that Joseph Losey is misanthropic), the consistently humourless and portentous style of the film allay them.  And it seems to be assumed by the authors of the screenplay (Hugo Butler and Evan Jones, who adapted a novel by James Hadley Chase) that the relationship between Eve and Tyvian is symbolic:  there can’t be any other excuse for their not writing properly detailed individuals.

In films such as Lift to the Scaffold, Moderato Cantabile, Jules et Jim and Bay of Angels, Jeanne Moreau creates characters which are utterly individual but, because of her expressive power, seem to be definitive and essential.   The reverse occurs here:  the conception may be obscurely archetypal but Eve, as an individual, is a blank. Although she’s still fascinating to watch, Moreau does things that come across as extraneous bits of business for the camera – as not really belonging to the woman she’s playing.  She runs her hands through her hair as she wakes, taps at her teeth and makes little moues to herself.  Some of her line readings, in English, sound as if she doesn’t quite get what she’s saying (especially her parting shot – ‘bloody Welshman’ – to Tyvian).  Stanley Baker seems like a bad actor throughout.  The fact that Tyvian is himself a bad actor doesn’t get Baker off the hook.  He makes this windbag sound as much a charlatan when Tyvian’s admitting he didn’t really work down the mines or write the book that’s made him internationally famous (his brother – who really was a miner – did) as when he’s pretending otherwise.  The bizarre implication seems to be that Tyvian couldn’t have written a best-selling book and been a fraud at the same time.  The book’s title – ‘L’étranger en enfer’ – certainly sounds like the work of a shameless fake.  Tyvian clearly has a verbal gift of some kind:  he talks in purple prose (describing his brother’s face as ‘Very white – like stone, the face of a carved angel’).  Most of the other people we see are members of one jet set or another (film people, casino habitués).   As Francesca (an actress), Virna Lisi is paradisally beautiful.  Giorgio Albertazzi is a jealous producer, James Villiers a camp screenwriter.

Giorgio Albertazzi was X in Last Year at Marienbad.  As in the Resnais film, but to a much greater extent here, the physical settings contain architecture and artefacts that are emblems of high European culture and there’s a similar reliance on the audience’s thinking that, because the director is presenting images that contain objects of aesthetic distinction, he’s thereby creating a work of art.  The settings in Eve don’t seem to be linked to the themes or the people, though.  Losey doesn’t use them metaphorically – the way that Venice is used in Death in Venice or Don’t Look Now.  The visual glories of the city and of Rome, which also features in Eve, merely counterpoint the despicable people whom Losey places in them.   (It’s a wonder that humankind, being so vile, managed to create the paintings and buildings and designs that we see.)  Whereas Resnais’s contempt was implicit and he remained inscrutably objective about the people in Marienbad, Losey’s relative crudeness means that he shows his hand.  It appears that he’s encouraged most of his cast to express dislike of the people they’re playing (this is particularly the case with James Villiers); but, since they’re hollow, you don’t feel any more about this lot than you do about the moneyed undead in Marienbad.  Music is used in Eve in an essentially similar way.  The Billie Holiday songs don’t particularly connect to or interpret the story but they’re culturally impeccable.  (The only time I laughed was when Eve snatches a Holiday record from the turntable and smashes it – by this point I had some sympathy with her vandalism.)  According to Clyde Jeavons, the soundtrack also features Miles Davis.  The jazzy score by Michel Legrand feels irrelevant:  it seems to belong to a less lugubrious, more exuberantly trashy film.

Losey evidently regards people as more depraved if they have money even though he does nothing to suggest that money has corrupted them.  His condemnation of the high-livers here is feebly uninteresting compared with La dolce vita, which develops from a satire of the lifestyle it describes (the attractions of which Fellini lets you feel) into a melancholy description of the elusiveness of happiness, even for people who are affluent (and intelligent).  On the basis of Eve, Losey doesn’t in any way stand comparison with Antonioni either.   Although the cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo (IMDB also mentions an uncredited Henri Decaë) is impressive, the visual scheme doesn’t seem core to Losey’s approach in the way it does in Antonioni:  as in Losey’s social message movies, there’s a load of dialogue.  The best thing that ever happened to him as a film-maker must have been his teaming up with Harold Pinter, whose sophistication did much to modulate Losey’s hectoring tendencies.

24 June 2009