Voyage à travers le cinéma français 

Bertrand Tavernier with Thierry Frémaux (2016)

As noted before, if I fail to see a film out the reason is less likely to be outright loathing of what I’m watching than how much longer the movie is set to go on.  That’s certainly why I walked out of Bertrand Tavernier’s My Journey through French Cinema.  If the total running time had been two hours I’d have managed it comfortably.  There was still two hours to go when I abandoned the journey, after some eighty minutes.  I’m a bit ashamed of this failure and sure that, had I stayed, I’d have enjoyed plenty more of the film clips that Tavernier and Thierry Frémaux, who gets a share of the directing credit, have assembled.  Yet I wasn’t getting enough from this documentary to make staying the course worthwhile.

The opening suggests, as does the (English) title of the piece, a personal odyssey.  Tavernier recalls witnessing, as a three-year-old boy, the liberation of his native city of Lyon in 1944; his early visits to the cinema; the expanding sense of hope and light that both experiences evoked.   He remembers childhood time spent in a sanatorium and the especially strong impression made on him there by a film he identified many years later as Jacques Becker’s Dernier atout (1942).  From there, Tavernier moves into admiring commentary on Becker’s cinema more generally, with plenty of illustrative clips.  So far, so pleasantly discursive and informative:  then Tavernier embarks on a fresh commentary, on Jean Renoir, followed by Jean Gabin, followed by Marcel Carné.  By now, the opening has given way to a less distinctive, insiderish narrative.   The movie excerpts are complemented not only by snatches of black-and-white archive film interviews with the likes of Jean Gabin but also by Tavernier’s recollections of what Gabin (and others) said to him in conversation.  These disclosures are a kind of superior gossip rather than illuminating.   There’s no indication of how these other famous names influenced Tavernier in his film-making career.

Watching My Journey, I had an increasing sense that, in order to appreciate it, I needed to know either much more or much less than I do about French cinema – or perhaps more about the Tavernier oeuvre.  (He’s directed more than twenty features, beginning with The Clockmaker of St Paul, in the course of the last forty years.  I’m afraid I’ve seen none of them.)   For example, if you’re familiar with all the Jacques Becker films included in Tavernier’s selection, you can perhaps perceive connections between them that eluded me.  If you understand the technical terminology of movie-making, you’ll be able to follow easily what Tavernier says about the technique of Becker and Renoir.  On the other hand, if you’re such a newcomer to classic French cinema that you’ve never seen Jean Gabin before, you’ll very likely be impressed enough from Tavernier’s clips to want to see Gabin’s full performances in Pépé le Moko, La grande illusion, Le jour se lève and so on.  The clips whetted my appetite to see these films again and to seek out more of Gabin; the same reaction followed brief samples of the work of Pierre Brasseur, Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo.  But this served as a reminder of what I already knew I should be doing.  It wasn’t a revelation.

28 September 2017