Regarde les hommes tomber

Jacques Audiard (1994)

Perhaps it was the presence of the sad-eyed Jean Yanne, who played the title character in Le Boucher, or just the reference to ‘the French thriller’ in the title of BFI’s Jacques Audiard season that brought Claude Chabrol to mind as I was watching See How They Fall.  Its tone and trajectory could hardly be more different from the studied intellectual approach of Chabrol; Audiard is ultimately much more persuasive too.   This was his first feature (A Prophet, more than fifteen years on, is only his fifth) but he had a very strong cast – Yanne, Mathieu Kassovitz, Bulle Ogier and, best of all, Jean-Louis Trintignant.  Simon Hirsch (Yanne) is a fiftyish salesman, who realises he’s aging and wonders what to do with the rest of his life.  When Mickey (Yvon Back), a policeman friend, is shot and killed, Simon devotes himself to finding who killed him.   I may not have understood the timeframe properly (although I was struggling to stay awake, a warm BFI theatre on a cold night had the usual effect) but it seems that Audiard then goes back in time two years to tell the story of an elderly card sharp Marx (Trintignant) and a dim-witted youngster (Kassovitz) who teams up with him.  (The youngster changes his name from Frederic to Johnny to please Marx.)  The development of their criminal partnership, as a means of clearing Marx’s gambling debts, is intercut with scenes from Simon’s life during the same two-year period.

One of the things I liked so much about Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped was the quick tempo that helped bring out the farcical aspects of the story – the black comedy of a son trying to live his life in ways designed to satisfy the diametrically opposed, irreconcilable expectations of his mother and his father.   For much of the time, See How They Fall moves along smartly too; the succession of short scenes and Audiard’s cool presentation of the characters, supported by Alexandre Desplat’s sprightly score, combine to give the film a kind of bracing grimness.  Audiard both draws you in and, because there’s no intellectually good reason for being amused by the grubbily violent lives described but you’re amused nonetheless, keeps you uncertain.  The homosexual theme in the story emerges both suddenly (in Simon’s encounter with a gay man (Yves Verhoeven) – Simon wants to know from him what it’s like to live in a gay relationship) and stealthily (in Marx and Johnny’s realisation of what they mean to each other).   Plenty has been written about the sexual substrate of films about gangsters and other lawbreakers – the gun as a phallic symbol, the ambiguousness of male criminal partnerships and so on.  The BFI note on See How They Fall, which included a good Sight and Sound piece by Chris Darke (and a subsequent interview between Darke and John Hillcoat, also from S&S) confirms that Audiard’s treatment of the gay potential of the genre is manna from heaven to serious students of cinema.   But Audiard and the actors make it dramatically powerful and psychologically truthful, ensuring that it doesn’t feel like an academic enterprise.

Jean Yanne gives a fine performance as a man who keeps thinking he’s at the end of his tether then keeps having to think again.   There are a couple of sequences where Audiard presents Johnny’s lack of intelligence a bit too broadly but Mathieu Kassovitz is always inventive and entertaining in the part, and he’s marvellous in the scene in which Johnny gets things right in order to shoot a man dead:  the fusion of shock and relief is perfect.  Trintignant is outstanding as Marx:  he’s utterly convincing in the physical details – always conveying a sense of Marx’s gradual dilapidation (as John Hillcoat says in the interview with Chris Darke, ‘you can smell and taste’ the character), waking suddenly in the night and coughing his guts out.  What’s also masterly about Trintignant is that, once the homosexual dimension of the partnership of Marx and Johnny is expressed, you realise it’s been implied throughout, but very subtly, in his  characterisation.  Women don’t feature very much in See How They Fall – Ogier (as Simon’s wife) and Christine Pascal (his daughter) have cameos – although it’s striking that the few bits of narrative are read by a female voice.  Audiard wrote the screenplay with Alain Le Henry; it’s adapted from a novel called Triangle by Teri White – who, from the few references to it brought up by a quick Google search, I assume to be American and female.  The cinematographer is Gérard Stérin and the editor is Juliette Welfling (who has cut all of Audiard’s films, as well as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

8 January 2010