THE ILLUSIONIST - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2010.

 

 

If there is such a thing as a match made in heaven, the animated movie The Illusionist just may be the most convincing evidence of it we'll find here on Earth. This delightful movie is the latest effort by Sylvain Chomet, the gifted director responsible for The Triplets of Belleville. For this new feature, Chomet is adapting an unproduced screenplay by master French filmmaker Jacques Tati. Tati was a comic figure in the mold of Charlie Chaplin, playing the befuddled Monsieur Hulot in a series of films he wrote and directed, including Mon Oncle and what I consider to be his masterpiece, Playtime [review].




The central character of The Illusionist is a magician who looks and acts very much like Hulot; which is to say, Chomet has modeled the stage performer Jacques Tatischeff on Tati--tall, thin, a bit of a hound-dog face. The Illusionist is as Chomet imagined the author would have made it, rejigged slightly for the cartoon format, but otherwise very much in the spirit of the tale's originator.




 

 

The Illusionist is set in the late-1950s (the movie's most concrete reference to a specific time is a newspaper with a headline about the chilly relationship between Nixon and Khrushchev, which would have been during Eisenhower's Presidency). An aging stage magician, finding himself out of work in France, hits the road in search of a new gig. In London, he is upstaged by an hilariously effete rock band before being reduced to playing an outdoor party. There, a drunken Scotsman invites him out to his village, where the magician sets up in the local pub. His act goes down a storm. His tricks have a particular effect on the poverty-stricken, teenaged barmaid Alice, who isn't aware that the objects the man makes appear out of thin air aren't actually coming out of thin air. She believes magic is real and that the conjurer can make anything he wants.




Enchanted as she is by Tatischeff, Alice follows him when he leaves for Edinburgh, and touched by her devotion, the magician takes her under his care. Her appetite for new things is too hard for him to keep up with, however, particularly in light of his profession's flagging popularity. New technology and new sounds are pushing out the old music hall routines--Alice and the magician live in an apartment building with acrobats, ventriloquists, and clowns, all of whom are having trouble keeping their acts alive. Eventually, Tatischeff has to start moonlighting doing other jobs just to make ends meet.




Describing the basic plot of The Illusionist does it little justice. Tati emulated silent comedy, and he was more interested in humorous scenarios, quiet slapstick, and elaborate scenic concoctions than he was in traditional narrative. His movies rarely had dialogue--and indeed, there are only a handful of complete sentences spoken here, and most of those are either in French or Gaelic (I believe). In the same way Chaplin resisted talkies because they restricted which borders a movie could cross, so too did Tati strive for the universal by favoring behavior over banter. Laughter knows no language, and he communicated more with a gesture than most do with whole paragraphs.




 

 

It is to Chomet's supreme victory, then, that he so perfectly conjures his own illusion: the essence of Tati. The magician is an exact replica of Hulot, and yet doesn't exist as some mere carbon copy. This isn't another soulless digital manipulation made for a cola commercial; rather, this is more like an animated séance, of bringing the legend back from beyond the grave, and by using traditional hand-drawn animation (with just a smattering of digital effects), Chomet creates a supernatural dreamscape for Tati to once again perform his pratfalls, huff his harrumphs, and fill new audiences with laughter. The Illusionist is beautifully rendered. The backgrounds teem with a warm nostalgia while the portrayals of everyone from a sad-eyed French chanteuse to a greedy booking agent meld Tati's perception of human nature with the incisive wit of caricature. Chomet also takes liberties with the animals that occupy his world, giving them their own personalities far beyond what Tati could have achieved with the real thing. (Though, I must say, I would have loved to see the flesh-and-blood actor messing around with an honest-to-goodness rabbit.)




As traditional hand-drawn animation continues to become just that, "tradition," it's hard not to greet every movie that bucks the trend as the last of a dying breed. Fittingly, Tati's screenplay already had plenty to say about changing tastes and the obsolescence of old-style entertainment. This gives The Illusionist a surprisingly bittersweet tone in its final act. As his peers drift into other things or have their souls crushed, so too does Alice find other distractions, losing her need for the old man. For Tati, who was as fascinated and amused by technology as he was concerned about its effect on society, the ending is surprisingly concrete. Perhaps this contributed to why he never made The Illusionist himself, it would have required his saying good-bye to an art form he wasn't ready to let go of. Instead, Chomet has made that farewell for him, and done so as tribute. The Illusionist is its own long-distance wave goodbye to a one-of-a-kind performer, a wonderful ode to all that could have been.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review as originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2008.

Happy-Go-Lucky is one of th more lauded filmes from British director Mike Leigh, who is known for telling stories of the working class that chronicle their fancies and their doldrums in a modern style that resembles the Kitchen Sink cinema from the 1960s. In this latest offering, Leigh could have easily adopted Charlie Chaplin's "Smile" as the movie's theme song, as it seems to be what he's encouraging his audience to do: smile, even when it's not that easy to do.

Sally Hawkins, last seen as Colin Farrell's girlfriend in Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream [review], stars as Poppy, a kindergarten teacher with a relentlessly upbeat outlook on life. Practically a child herself, she's equally at home in the classroom or on the dancefloor. Like any single young woman at age 30, she still likes to go out drinking with her girlfriends, but she's also slightly adventurous, booking weekly trampoline sessions and joining a co-worker for flamenco lessons because it sounds like fun. At the beginning of the movie, Poppy's bike is stolen, and instead of lamenting over it, she decides to learn to drive instead.

Poppy's driving instructor is one of the first of several challenges to Poppy's worldview. Scott (Eddie Marsan, Hancock [review]) is an angry little man with a lot of pent-up issues. He takes his job way too seriously, and he is easily provoked. Thus, he and Poppy get on like paper and a match, since she seemingly can't take anything seriously. In fact, she's often exhausting to watch, so I can't imagine what it must be like to be around her. Poppy can't let any comment pass without tossing out a silly joke, and she rarely answers a serious question with a serious answer. Honestly, I found her to be extremely annoying at first, and I was dreading spending two hours in her company.

Then came the first flamenco lesson. My whole attitude changed watching her interact with the class. Regardless of how stern the lead dancer's demeanor, Poppy always maintains her smile and her gung-ho attitude. She doesn't necessarily follow instruction, instead looking around the room at the other students and trying to elicit a reaction from them. Watching her pantomime amongst the group, a silly grin on her face and a knowing look in her eyes, it occurred to me that Poppy was like other clowns in motion picture history, characters like Chaplin's Tramp or Tati's Hulot. Though she is clearly more vocal than these mostly silent characters, she is like them in that she realizes that the rest of the world is too uptight and is doing her level best to keep from letting it grind her down.

Happy-Go-Lucky is Mike Leigh's study of this kind of figure. The movie is the writer/director's way of deconstructing the clown in order to see what makes her function. Throughout the film, he continually disarms Poppy, tossing her challenges she can't get out of by cracking wise. Her driving instructor, an abused student in her class, the recriminations of her middle sister (Caroline Martin), the prodding of her long-suffering roommate (Alexis Zegerman)--all of these people pick at the clown's mask and question if her brave face is real. It's to Poppy's credit that she is able to dial it down and prove that she can handle the bad as well as the good. Like all people who make us laugh, she is a caregiver, intent on alleviating the sadness of others even if it means harboring her own. She can be fierce, such as when she witnesses a boyfriend yelling at her youngest sister (Kate O'Flynn), but she can also be extremely empathetic. When she randomly encounters a homeless man (Stanley Townsend) in the middle of a psychotic episode, she sits with him rather than running away, answering all of his half-finished utterances with affirmative responses. It's a beautiful acting moment, centering on a look that Hawkins and Townsend exchange at the end of the scene, the masks clearing away for both of them for one truly honest moment.

Sally Hawkins is actually superb throughout. I don't think I would have wanted to strangle her as much as I sometimes did were she not. She makes Poppy a complete character, not just a collection of catchphrases and nervous ticks. She never once breaks character or appears to be an actress performing a role, every moment is authentic. During much of the joking, there is obviously more going on behind it. The outward expression may be physical, but the true weight of the performance is all mental. Thus, when it's revealed how much strength is really backing up the buffoonery, we can believe it.

Mike Leigh's shooting style is often stark, letting the setting and the actors dictate where he takes his camera. Once or twice, he indulges in a larger shot, pulling back to show us the landscape, but it's not just decoration, it's purposeful. The world these characters live in is just as important to their state of being as anything else. Over the course of the various conflicts, he slowly moves in closer, until in the final confrontation between Poppy and Scott, their heads take up the entire frame, and he rapidly cuts back and forth between them. (Though, such is the gravitational pull of the Poppy character, in all of the conversations, Leigh has no choice but to quickly cut back to Hawkins to catch her rejoinders.) There's a psychology to how Leigh sets up Happy-Go-Lucky, but it's not forceful or overbearing. The characters, their environment, and the greater narrative are all perfectly entwined. The final scene of the film is a little on-the-nose in comparison to the rest, but better to drift out of a story like this than superimpose a false dramatic arc over the top.

I doubt Happy-Go-Lucky is going to make Mike Leigh a household name. If anything, he's like Woody Allen in that he puts out a consistent stream of product that tends to cover a lot of the same ground, and when either of them hits the mark, they hit it quite well. Happy-Go-Lucky is a good movie propped up by excellent actors, and as seems to be its intention, is sure to leave you smiling.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD - #1007

I couldn’t have picked a more fitting movie to watch at the close of 2019, nor could I have timed it better. It was an accident that U2 and the movie’s credits kicked in around 11:57 p.m. Had I not watched “The Song,” Uli M. Schueppel’s documentary on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ contribution to the Until the End of the World soundtrack, before jumping from disc 1 to disc 2 or taken various other pauses, the timing would have been different. The song and the credits would not have concluded just as midnight ticked over to a new decade. Wim Wenders’ characters celebrate the move from 1999 to 2000; I move from 2019 to 2020.

And it’s not a real stretch to suggest we have as much existential angst now as Wenders imagined we would at the turn of the millennium. Released in 1991, Wenders took a gamble basing his artsy sci-fi road picture only eight years in the future. He was potentially building an expiration date into his own move. Yet, looking back, he accurately predicted the way technology would change and what would concern us, even if the look of his future was just a little more clunky than what turned out. Internet privacy, personal communicators, high definition, GPS, VR, digital preservatio, and digital escapism--all these things are at the fingertips and the forefront of the mind in Until the End of the World. To Wenders, technology was getting better, but also taking over in unforeseen ways.

It’s worth watching the director’s introduction to the movie to hear how long it took to get Until the End of the World onto the screen, how much longer it took to get to this version--final cut nearly twice the length as what initial audiences witnessed in theaters and on home video--and how the virtual world he shows then represented the cutting edge of technology. Amusingly, the filmmaker’s final product horrified the people who had loaned him their high-definition capabilities, as he used their inventions not to enhance and increase the clarity of images, but to tear them apart. But what better metaphor for technology’s propensity to overtake our humanity? It breaks everything down into pixels and data, abstracting the original, and the more removed it becomes from that initial experience, the more we seemingly want it.

Until the End of the World is a movie that has always fascinated me. I had listened to its now classic soundtrack album hundreds of times before I ever got to watch the movie itself. Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Julee Cruise, R.E.M., Neneh Cherry, Depeche Mode--Wenders was in my zone. (Recently reissued on double-vinyl, I’m listening to it now, and the compilation still delights.) Eventually I caught the movie on VHS and was enthralled by its unwieldy, ambitious narrative. Even then, there were rumors of longer versions. The United States had a 158-minute version, but Europe got 20 minutes more, and Japan somehow got nearly an extra 100. Wenders’ original cut was anywhere between 12 hours and 20 depending on what you read, but his preferred version, as seen here, is 287 minutes--or nearly five hours. This longer version, or some semblance of it, has been promised on DVD since the early 2000s. Remember when Anchor Bay supposedly was going to release it? (Remember Anchor Bay?!)

That sounds like a lot of math, but it’s a classic cinema tragedy. From von Stroheim to Welles to Tati, there are persistent tales of directors whose mad visions were undercut by business concerns. These “lost” cuts become fabled, and it’s always a gamble of whether or not what was intended ends up being what was best. You could have Ridley Scott finally getting to finish Blade Runner properly or the rediscovery of Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, or you could get Francis Ford Coppola’s endless tinkering of Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone’s exhaustive mining of Alexander [review].

Wim Wenders is somewhere in the middle. Until the End of the World is not a masterpiece, but it’s an impressive look at a celluloid Icarus almost making it to the sun. It is at times almost too playful with tonality, while later maybe becoming too ponderous, too in love with its own ideas. Not everything works, and the narrative structure is perhaps more befitting a novel than a film. Criterion smartly splits Until the End of the World across two discs to go with what is a very natural intermission. Part 1 is the international chase and long-term courtship of Sam Farber (William Hurt, Broadcast News [review]) and Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin, Wings of Desire [review]), a con man/scientist and a morally questionable party girl, respectively. It treks across Europe, Asia, and the U.S. before sending the characters toward their final destination, breaking for Part 2 just as they leave San Francisco for Australia.

Part 2 is more serious and heavy, trading the madcap physical chase in for a more intellectual pursuit. Sam has been on the run from the law. He is wanted for industrial espionage and the stolen technology he is carrying. When Claire finds him, he is traveling around the world recording messages from family members using special glasses that will record not just the video and audio, but the experience of seeing the event, the waves that connect the eye and the brain. The intent is to capture something that can be re-created in the brains of blind people, to let them “see” again. Sam’s father, Henry (Max Von Sydow, The Seventh Seal [review]), started the experiment, and had to go into hiding rather than let government or corporate interests take over. He’s built a lab in the Australian outback, and his number-one test subject is to be his wife and Sam’s mother, Edith (Jeanne Moreau, The Lovers [review]).

The Australian half is all about trying to make the tech work and to understand the consequences and implications. It’s a struggle of fathers and sons, but also men and women, and ultimately played out against the backdrop of total annihilation. This whole time, an Indian nuclear satellite has been falling from the sky, and there is a full expectation that it will signal the end of the planet. In this pocket of waiting, a community forms; yet, as they wait, there is a bigger question of what will happen if the prediction is false.

That’s a pretty simplistic breakdown of Until the End of the World. As suggested above, it’s kind of all over the place. Wenders’ approach changes almost with every locale switch, as the cast expands and he touches on different genres. Is this a caper picture? Is it romance? Is it a literary character study? Science fiction? Family drama? Political?

Of course, Until the End of the World is all of the above. Some of it clicks, some is hokey. The acting can be all over the place. Dommartin is an alluring cipher, defined more by the vision of her presented in the authorial narration than anything she does on screen. Sam Neill (My Brilliant Career) plays a writer who, as her former lover, is writing a book about Claire and, ostensibly, this movie, and he spends much of the running time waxing poetic about Claire’s elusive sensuality. Wenders’ supporting cast is like a tour of the Criterion Collection--from Ozu-stalwart Chishu Ryu to David Gulpilil from Walkabout [review]--but dotted along the globe, embracing different legendary personages wherever his crew lands and integrating them into the outline. The effect, though, can often be of miscommunication, as some of the performances feel lost in translation. Rudiger Volger’s private detective or Chick Ortega’s French hoodlum never seem comfortable working in English and often go too broad and cartoony for the rest of the movie. Would that more of the actors just spoke their own language and subtitles did the rest.

Weirdly, this mish-mash serves William Hurt well. His character arc involves a lot of strange turns as he adapts his personality to fit the moment. As an actor, Hurt is perfectly suited for this. His quirky persona is appropriately malleable, but it’s ultimately that quirk that maintains a thread through every scenario. As an actor, William Hurt was already as weird as the movie was intended to be.

That Until the End of the World takes on so much with such audacity leads me to believe that its detractors will forgive it as much as they dismiss it. You have to appreciate that Wim Wenders went for it as boldly as he did, and as an independent production no less. It’s full of hubris, and thus folly. For those like me that take it on and accept it, however, Until the End of the World can be as addictive and dreamy as Max Von Sydow’s futuristic machine, leading us through the dread of a changing world toward the hope of a better tomorrow. It’s colorful and crazy and deeply satisfying, and pretty much unlike anything else out there. And for that, to borrow from its own poetry: I will love it until the end of the world.

CLAUDE AUTANT-LARA/FOUR ROMANTIC ESCAPES FROM OCCUPIED FRANCE: SYLVIE ET LE FANTOME - ECLIPSE SERIES 45

There are many interesting cinema stories from Occupied France, the period of WW2 when the Germans controlled the country and everything in it, including the film industry. There were fictional films made under Nazi supervision, some of them sneaky parables of the times (Clouzot’s Le corbeau), or later dramatizations. of those who resisted (Melville’s Army of Shadows [review]). Then there were the real stories, the nonfiction travails of those who labored under the watching German eye--touched on in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [review] and examined in detail but without much insight in the documentary Sold Out!: Cinema Under Occupation (previously available on Filmstruck).

One of the more intriguing aspects touched on by Sold Out! is the popularity of light fantasies as distraction, serving a dual purpose of alleviating everyday woes while also pleasing the occupiers by not fomenting dissent. One of the more popular--though it actually went into production just after the liberation--was Sylvie et le fantôme (Sylvia and the Ghost), based on a stageplay by Alfred Adam and directed by Claude Autant-Lara, a filmmaker whose career blossomed during the Occupation. This period of the director’s oeuvre is the subject of the Eclipse boxed set Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France, of which Sylvie is the last.

An enjoyable romantic lark, the film features Autant-Lara’s regular star Odette Joyeux as the titular Sylvie, a sixteen-year-old girl fixated on the story of how her grandmother’s lover died in a duel with a man meant to be her husband via arranged marriage. The dead man, known as “the White Hunter,” was memorialized in a painting hanging in the family home. When Sylvie’s father (Pierre Larquey, Diabolique [review]) sells the painting the day before the girl’s birthday, he attempts to make up for the sadness it causes her by hiring an actor to play the ghost of the White Hunter to deliver her a birthday message and keep the magic the art inspired alive. Little does he know that he’ll get more ghosts than he bargained for--including the real Hunter, played by none other than Jacques Tati, M. Hulot himself, in his film debut.

Dear ol’ dad does get the real actor he hired to don the white sheets, an old man of the stage (Louis Salou, Children of Paradise), but his arrival is mixed up with two potential suitors for Sylvie--the art dealer’s son, Frederick (Jean Desally, Le doulos [review]), and a burglar he interrupts, a fellow called Branch (Francois Périer, Gervaise [review])--causing one fake ghost to become three. Never mind that Frederick was sneaking into Sylvie’s bedroom in the middle of the night when he catches Branch; or maybe do mind, since it’s this fact that prevents Frederick from admitting neither he nor the burglar are supposed to be there. Both boys meet Sylvie by chance--Frederick the day before, Branch the night of--and neither told her his name. Thus, when they are haunting their would-be paramour and compel her to admit she loves a man amongst the living, they can’t be sure which of them she is referring to.

Sylvie et le fantôme definitely has elements of farce and screwball comedy, but its tone and presentation lean more toward light costume drama than Hollywood slapstick. Even Tati is pretty subdued here, wandering the scenes as a transparent apparition, never engaging with anyone but the family canine, who barks at the Hunter’s own ghost dog. To Autant-Lara’s credit, he pulls off some pretty impressive practical effects, using double exposure to place Tati in the scene and have him manipulate “real world” props. The quality of the illusion helps sell the absurdity of the characters in the film not only believing what are obviously men in bedsheets to be specters, but also being frightened to see them. The best recurring gag is actually when Tati keeps trying on the costume himself, only to have it fall off when he walks through walls.

Outside of that, there are few laughs in Sylvie et le fantôme. And it’s not altogether romantic, either. The potential lovers don’t spend much time together and so never develop much chemistry. On the contrary, the relationship that gets the most screentime is Frederick and Branch’s. Even so, Autant-Lara’s light touch and likable cast means that Sylvie et le fantôme is charming regardless of its insubstantial script. It makes for a pleasant afternoon’s viewing, and should appeal to fans of other ghostly fair like Topper or The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Which makes it easy to understand why it would have been popular with French moviegoers in 1946. Ghost stories are often about yearning for something lost, and in this case, about simpler times, when it was easy to believe in something fantastic and forget everything else--even if just for 98 minutes.

THE PARTY - FILMSTRUCK/CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com.

Peter Sellers reteams with his Pink Panther [review] co-conspirator Blake Edwards to cut loose and indulge their love of silent film comedies. The concept for The Party is something Chaplin or Keaton could have done wonders with, and though the movie does have quite a few verbal jokes, the majority of the more elaborate gags could run without sound and still inspire a huge round of guffaws.

Sellers plays Hrundi V. Bakshi, a recent transplant from India to Hollywood trying to make his way as an actor. After a particularly disastrous day on the set, where Bakshi's clumsiness brings the production crashing down, a mix-up causes him to be invited to the studio head's glitzy soiree rather than be fired. From there, comedy ensues, as the good-natured Bakshi just tries to fit in. He loses his shoe, runs afoul of parrots and dogs, tries to communicate with starlets, and even learns to play pool from a cowboy actor (Denny Miller), who is the only person in the movie that has an accent more extreme than Sellers.

The Party is a fantastic showcase for Peter Sellers' true talents. Not only does he completely lose himself in the role, but his physical agility as he traverses the many architectural oddities in the thoroughly modern home (inspired, perhaps, by Tati's Mon Oncle?) lets the actor show just how marvelous of a comedic athlete he is. The Party is one of those films I can watch a million times, and it never fails to make me laugh. I can even put it on while doing other things and check back in and out as the task demands, and every time I check in, I know it will make me smile. It's no hyperbole to call it a masterpiece.

I think a big reason for that is it's all just so good-natured. While there is definitely a sense of making fun, the only people really being made fun of are the stuck-up fatcats whose old-world mentality and opulence are becoming passé. Note the exchange that Bakshi has with the impossibly tall daughter of the hosts (Kathe Green) about the painted elephant, and how quick she is not to offend. It's 1968, and Edwards and Sellers are definitely "with it," seeing a more colorblind world on their horizon (those incorruptible optimists!) and adjusting accordingly. Though a Brit playing Indian would be a little harder to pull off today, Sellers' caricature is less about racial stereotyping and more about capturing the genuine anxiety of a well-meaning outsider. The scenes where he wanders the room alone, on the outskirts of the crowd, have a surprising pathos, identifiable by anyone who has ever ended up at a shindig where they don't know anybody. I would guess that's why they chose Claudine Longet to play the love interest. She is also an immigrant, though one assumes she would have an easier time since she's a cute French girl (read: pretty and white). Still, theirs is a sweet courtship. Plus, we get the singer's performance of the super sugary Henry Mancini-penned pop song "Nothing to Lose." (Not to mention the awesomely cool-daddio title number.)

I should note, though The Party is very funny, it's not a gutbuster. The largely improvised comedy is of a kind that is observed and absorbed more than it is convulsively reacted to. As noted, it's more Chaplin and Tati than it is Jerry Lewis. Its slapstick is designed around character and as a send-up of the unnecessary conceits of the modern age rather than just silliness for the sake of being silly, and one could argue that The Party has likely aged better than most just for that reason.

PARADE - #731

Following last week’s review of Charles Chaplin’sLimelight, I considered how Jacques Tati’s final film, the 1974 television feature Parade, might make a good follow-up. The French comedian was an acolyte of Chaplin’s, with his own M. Hulot being a tight-lipped descendent of the earlier director’s Little Tramp. Parade makes for an interesting companion to Limelight, even if it’s not entirely successful or nearly as fulfilling as the Chaplin picture.

Actually, the closest relative to Parade might be Federico Fellini’s 1970 documentary I clowns [review]. Fellini was another director with a passion for live performance, and I clowns captured several renowned circus clowns at work. Tati uses his own stageshow as a blueprint, but he showcases the event in a circus environment. His set-up is notable for two things: it’s inclusion of the audience, including planting performers in the crowd (if, indeed, the entire audience isn’t just people cast by Tati for the event); and a split between the old and the new, with the younger clowns being set apart not just by their fashion, but relegated to the side of the stage where they have a kind of workshop, often mimicking the main action in the center ring, sometimes joining it.

I should note here, when I say clowns, I do not mean of the greasepaint and red nose variety, but in the broader comedic sense. They are silent performers, engaging in physical slapstick and sleight of hand. Tati himself has several skits where he pantomimes different kinds of athletes. There is also an elder magician who engages in card tricks and the like, and who enters into a competition with one of the scruffy youngsters. While the older men are dapper and composed, the new generation are hippies and flower children. Yet, Tati isn’t looking to separate, he’s seeking to find what is similar in the shared comedy and bring it all together.

In addition to these clowns, there is a donkey act, an orchestra, and a tumbling troupe. They all perform with varying results. Some bits land, some fall flat. There is a quiet tone to Parade that seems both generational and cultural. The clowning has a certain reserve, and there aren’t many guffaws to be had. Still, it’s pleasant entertainment, and Parade really only goes off the rails in the second act, when Tati embraces modernity too tightly. An extended psychedelic rock performance looks like it would have been out of step even back then, and now just seems laughable. This isn’t exactly your grandfather’s rock-and-roll, more like what his grandfather might think is rock-and-roll.

Which maybe is the problem overall with Parade. With Limelight, Chaplin saw vaudeville as an art vital enough to build a story around, and so it came off as more than just a nostalgic trip through a comedian’s greatest hits. Tati, it seems, is trying to show that his old routines can compete in the then-current marketplace, but never really reignites the spark that probably inspired his career path to begin with. A mild exit for an otherwise gifted artist.

JOUR DE FETE - #730

The journey to bring Jour de fête, Jacques Tati’s 1949 full-length directorial debut, to screen was not one I had been familiar with. When making the comedy feature, Tati shot simultaneously with two different cameras. One used a then-untested color process, and the other recorded the performances in standard black-and-white, a precaution just in case the color process didn’t work. This concurrent fascination with and distrust in technology is amusing, given how this would be a regular theme in Tati’s later M. Hulot films. It seems art did imitate life in this case.

It also turned out to be a smart move. The color labs behind the film shut down before ever processing a reel, and so Tati released the black-and-white version to cinemas. In the 1960s, he would revisit Jour de fête and hand-color certain elements, as well as putting in some new footage, but it wasn’t until 1995 that a full version was finally made from his original color negatives. All three options are given here, in Criterion’s lead disc of their The Complete JacquesTati collection. I opted for the 1995 release, which looked pretty good, even if the color is not as vibrant as a 1940s Technicolor picture from Hollywood.

In Jour de fête, Tati stars as Francois, a bicycle-riding postman for a small village. On the “big day” referred to by the title, Francois’ village is preparing to host a traveling street fair. The run of the movie shows the carnies getting ready, the town’s participation in the festivities, and the hangover the morning after, focusing mostly on how Francois gets through his day. The mustachioed public servant is the object of regular ridicule from his customers and neighbors, and even the visiting carnival workers get in on the act. They can read this rube from a mile away. He’s eager to please and none too bright.

Francois’ main problem is combining defensiveness with hubris, and so most of his misfortune occurs by his trying to prove he is a big man. He’ll go from nearly being beaned by a falling pole to instructing the men on how to put it in the ground. Seeing a film that claims American postal workers are using helicopters and airplanes to deliver letters faster and farther makes Francois work on his speed techniques--with a little help from the roustabouts who run the merry-go-round.

It’s one of Jour de fête’s best gags, the gangly bicyclist riding his bike in a stationary position while the carnival ride spins round and round. It’s a whole lot of effort just to end up in the same place. Francois is too self-assured to see his own ridiculousness. That’s perhaps why we laugh along with those teasing him rather than feeling sorry for him: he kind of deserves it. Late in the film, when he discovers one prank has left a ring of ink around his eye, Francois fails to laugh at himself. Instead, he deflects and lays into criticizing his coworkers for being slower than he is--making it all the more hysterical when, shortly thereafter, Francois’ bicycle takes off on its own, and he must run after it in a lengthy chase sequence. Instant karma.

The trouble the bike gets into and the distance it goes shows the kind of inventiveness that would be Tati’s calling card. It’s a little bit Buster Keaton, a little bit Charlie Chaplin. Having honed his skills in a series of comedy shorts, Tati appears confident in his humor here. His gags are mostly physical and largely pantomime, they are never really dialogue-based, borrowing more from the silent titans than contemporary movie comedians. Francois probably talks in Jour de fête more than Hulot in any of the other films combined, his repeated exasperated declaration “That takes the cake” getting more silly each time it’s uttered.

An example of the look of the color film.

Yet, Tati also takes full advantage of the soundtrack. Audio effects are important throughout, such as the aforementioned scene in the post office, where every time Francois steps out of the room, we hear an even more outrageous sound cue, only for his coworkers to barely react. A scene early in the film, when the actions of a carny and a local girl sync up with an English-language western being shown in the fair’s cinema tent, is vintage Tati, combining human emotion with a modern device in a way that allows one to supersede the other--a glimmer of the sort of commentary that would eventually make Playtime [review] such a vital masterpiece. So, despite being less vivacious and funny than Tati’s next several films, Jour de fête is still a worthy precursor.

PIERRE ETAIX: AS LONG AS YOU'RE HEALTHY/FEELING GOOD - #655

Pierre Étaix's 1966 (and 1971) film As Long as You're Healthy (also known as As Long as You've Got Your Health) is an anthology picture, featuring a quartet of lengthy skits showcasing the clown's penchant for visual gags and physical slapstick. On its original release in the mid-60s, the stories were threaded together by a unifying character--essentially, Pierre Étaix. In 1971, the director regained control of the movie, and he re-edited the feature to fit his original vision. One segment was cut, and another, his previously unfinished short subject "Insomnia," was added in its place.

As Long as You're Healthy is presented as pure entertainment, framed only by the conceit that we, as the audience, are watching it in our own theater--not unlike what Jean Renoir would do with his "petite cinema." The tales have no connectors except for cutting back to the theatrical façade. Each section is distinct, with only stylistic overflows. "Insomnia" leads and is the most different, not leastwise because it's in color while the other 3/4 of Healthy is black-and-white. It shows Étaix in bed, reading a vampire book to fall asleep. The movie goes in and out of his brain, showing the words he reads on the page coming to life as actual events, and features several excellent bits connecting Étaix's behavior in the real world to what is going on in his imagination.

The second piece is titled "The Cinema," and it stars Étaix as a moviegoer trying to find good seats in a crowded theater before the action leaps from the auditorium and onto the screen for an extended stream-of-conscious riff on advertising. The way Étaix moves through the showroom and how the camera roams the audience, zooming in on other comic characters and showing how they interact with their fellow moviegoers and the movie itself, brought to mind old Looney Tunes that used a similar set-up. Only here the observational humor is more grounded, playing on the common irritations that cinephiles endure in a multiplex when catching a film with folks who are less invested than they are. Truth be told, the laughs I got watching "The Cinema" were kind of cathartic.

From a possible cartoon influence to a more credible contemporary parallel, the title track, "As Long as You're Healthy," has shades of Tati's Playtime [review]. Étaix careens through Paris on an average day, making comedic hay out of many modern problems, like traffic jams, quack doctors, and overcrowded restaurants. The best sketch comes at the beginning, however. A punishing jackhammer rocks a neighborhood, disrupting lives with its noise and vibrations, all the way up to Étaix's apartment, where the helpless comedian is trying to keep all of his stuff from falling over and breaking. It's a wonderfully choreographed sequence. Every time Étaix moves one precious object, another crashes down in its place.

Finally, As Long as You're Healthy ends with "We're No Longer in the Woods," a triptych of wilderness travelers crossing paths and tripping over one another. Étaix plays a hunter out for the day. The other participants are a farmer building his fence and a city couple looking to picnic. Through a series of elaborate incidents, as each tries to go about his or her business, each action sets off a chain reaction that affects the others. How the affected parties react to the intrusion sets off another chain, etc.

As Long as You're Healthy is a perfect showcase for Étaix's humor. He and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière are at their best when exploiting the tunnel vision of the average man. There is nothing mean-spirited in how they cause their characters to bump into one another, and yet all the jokes arise out of individual foibles, from folks too caught up in their own pursuits to consider that they share the planet with others just like them. It's surprising, then, that the most impressive skit is the the closing piece of "The Cinema," when Étaix leaves everyday occurrences behind and goes into the invented world of advertising, parodying the all-in-one, all-purpose products that must have been gaining popularity in 1966. The orchestration of these routines is marvelous, with each gag butting into the next, exploding and imploding in tandem. Étaix ends up the hapless victim of his own campaign, always doing something wrong, putting the product to use in ways that exposes its flaws, and then having to cover lest he also expose the gullibility of his friends.

Presented alongside As Long as You're Healthy is the short film Feeling Good. This is actually the original portion of the main feature that Étaix cut when he reassembled the picture. Judging by the content, my guess is that it somehow connected the city stories of "Healthy" and "Cinema" by moving the star outdoors for "Woods." Feeling Good begins with a Buster Keaton-like morning routine where the camping Étaix stumbles and bumbles his way through making breakfast, before taking us to a nearby campground full of oddballs and nutcases. Étaix links each tent together by having his character walk through the camp and observing his fellow campers in action, before he finally finds his way out through the other side, tunneling like Bugs Bunny on his way to destinations unknown.

As Long as You're Healthy plays today, April 14, at 5pm, as part of the NW Film Center's Pierre Étaix retrospective. View the full schedule here.

PIERRE ETAIX: LE GRAND AMOUR/HAPPY ANNIVERSARY - #655

If you're unfamiliar with the name Pierre Étaix, don't worry, you're not alone. Up until recently, the celebrated French comedian's films have been largely unavailable due to a legal tangle with the distribution rights. I don't know the particulars of what finally caused those rights to be untangled, but soon all film fans will have a chance to get to know Étaix's artistry, thanks to a touring retrospective of his work and an upcoming Criterion boxed set.

The writer/director/star only made a handful of feature films and shorts through the 1960s, following stints as an assistant and gag writer for the likes of Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Nagisa Oshima. Étaix left film to return to his first career as a clown, but not before leaving an indelible mark on the cinematic landscape. In reviewing his final comedy feature, Le Grand Amour, released in 1969 and leading the dual weekend of Pierre Étaix films playing the NW Film Center [full schedule here], it's easy to see why. His playful flights of fancy, careening out of conventional narrative and into the realms of imagination, are delightful and intoxicating. One can't help but imagine that movies like Le Grand Amour were an early influence on Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose Amélie would not be out of place as one of the many girlfriends Pierre fantasizes about throughout this rumination on love and marriage. (Etaix actually had a small role in Jeunet's film Micmacs [review].)

Le Grand Amour begins with a wedding, as befitting any such movie. Étaix is at the altar, waiting to tie the knot with Florence (Annie Fratellini), and remembering his past loves and imagining a few paths not taken. The ceremony ends, and the film jumps ahead a decade. Pierre and Florence have settled into their married life, with all the ups and downs that entails. They are mostly happy, despite the gossip that's being passed around about them. In one ingenious sequence, Étaix shows the evolution of a rumor, as a chance greeting is soon inflated into a full-grown affair, the moment replaying and escalating with each added whisper. Pierre takes some lumps for this false story, before falling into a similar trap for real. He becomes quite smitten with his new secretary (Nicole Calfan), despite her being 20 years his junior.

The rest of Le Grand Amour shows Pierre trying to concoct a way to have the young girl and be free of his wife. He lives out the illicit, though amusingly tame, relationship in dreams, both of the sleeping and waking variety, debating the pros and cons. One amusing scene shows him obsessing over a strand of hair left on his desk, going back and forth between it and a portrait of his bride. It's one of the more straightforward segments of the film; other bits break the bounds of reality. When Pierre consults with a friend, that man becomes a part of the daydream, often to have his own speculations backfire (pie to the face!) because he doesn't understand Florence the way her husband does.  In Le Grand Amour's most memorable stretch, Pierre's bed leaves his room and goes out onto the open road, joining the traffic of other slumbering dreamers as he searches for the object of his affection. The beds, in their way, have become cars, and Étaix ups the ante by having their drivers suffer from engine trouble, crash into one another, and other mundane experiences normally reserved for regular metal automobiles.

Étaix is a charming presence. His approach, at least here, is quieter than the likes of Tati or Rowan Atkinson, who bears a slight resemblance to the French comic. Le Grand Amour has some slapstick, but it's mostly situational. Étaix prefers mix-ups to pratfalls. His pacing is more languid, as befitting a dreamer. The laughs are subtle and unforced. Some jokes sneak up on you, such as when Étaix leaves his apartment to go downstairs and hang up on his mother-in-law in person. In that same scene, the strains of violin that have been playing under the action are revealed to be coming from a live player, Pierre's henpecked father-in-law. The comedian otherwise doesn't use music to emphasize his punch lines, that would be too obvious. Étaix lets the humor happen, he doesn't telegraph.

This allows for a cleverly ironic ending, one that maybe I should have seen coming, but that is funny enough to transcend cliché. Suffice to say, Pierre learns to appreciate what he has, only to find himself becoming jealous via the same kind of speculation that already bit him on the butt once.

It should probably be noted here that the majority of Étaix's films were co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière, a prolific screenwriter who also worked with Luis Buñuel on most of his movies through the 1960s and 1970s and who also worked on the script for Schlöndorff's adaptation of The Tin Drum. The Étaix/Carrière collaboration dates all the way back to the clown's earliest film efforts, including his second short, Happy Anniversary (1962), which makes for a nice thematic pairing with Le Grand Amour (probably why the NW Film Center is showing them together). In this black-and-white comedy, Pierre Étaix plays a husband trying to get home for his anniversary dinner, only to end up stuck in traffic and himself causing further disruptions for his fellow drivers as he tools about running errands. Some of the on-the-road humor, as we ping from car to car, traveler to traveler, is reminiscent of Tati's Trafic [review], which was still over a decade away.

BED AND BOARD - (THE ADVENTURES OF ANTOINE DOINEL) - #187

It's in the third Antoine Doinel film, 1970's Bed and Board, that Francois Truffaut's series of films becomes a series proper. Now there is a set style and tone, the happenings vacillating between romantic drama and whimsical comedy, the loose narrative only reflecting traditional plot structure in an overarching sense. In relating the life of Antoine Doinel, small moments are equal to the big changes any individual encounters in his or her worldly progress.

Since Stolen Kisses [review], Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his girlfriend Christine (Claude Jade) have gotten married. They live in an apartment in an active building full of colorful characters--the opera singer and his Italian wife, the shut-in, the alleged strangler. There is a bar in the bottom story, and Antoine works in the courtyard, dying flowers for the shop around the corner. While he changes white carnations to red, Christine gives violin lessons upstairs. They are happy, existing is easy to do.

Truffaut and co-writers Bernard Rivon and Claude de Givray could have easily built Bed and Board into a multi-level comedy based out of this one building. The initial banter between the residents is light and airy, and the personalities are distinct enough to make each person interesting unto his or herself. As the movie progresses, however, these folks turn out to be merely colorful window dressing, the kind of distractions that provide a backdrop for newlywed life, but that soon get supplanted by more serious concerns. Growing up is about letting go of the frivolity and embracing serious responsibility.

In this case, when Antoine's ambition exceeds the limits of the flower stand, he gets a new job working for an American company specializing in hydraulics. His duty is to run the remote control boats that demonstrate the product. (I initially thought the scene of him at the miniature harbor looked like something out of the modern home demonstration in Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle; amusingly, a Tati lookalike shows up mid-movie for an all-too-brief Monsieur Hulot-esque cameo.) Not long after, Christine gets pregnant, and nine months later, the couple has a son. It's around this time that Antoine also takes a mistress, a Japanese woman he meets at work. Kyoto (Mademoiselle Hiroko) represents the new and the different, the kind of romantic adventure that Antoine would have pursued as a kid. When he is caught by Christine, his defense is that Kyoko is not another woman, she is “another world.” Indeed, the portrayal of this woman is rather shallow, she is like a cartoon of what Westerners imagined Japanese women to be. It's a surprisingly faulty facet of Bed and Board. Ironically, Truffaut appears as naïve about Kyoko's culture as his hero, and it bites both of them on the ass.

There is a randomness to Bed and Board that makes it come off as a less serious effort than its predecessors. The Doinel movies seem to be growing increasingly fanciful, almost as if Truffaut was taking on Jean-Luc Godard's penchant for jokey digressions right at the time his former colleague was abandoning “non-serious” cinema. How else does one explain the appearance by Hulot, or the animated flowers that spit out Kyoko's written messages when they bloom? Or Christine's geisha outfit? There's even a little self-reflexive humor. The faux strangler (Claude Véga) turns out to be a comedian, and the whole building sees him on TV doing an impression of Delphine Seyrig, quoting not just Last Year at Marienbad [review], but much to Antoine's horror, the bedroom talk from Stolen Kisses. Previous indiscretions are coming home to roost.

It's hard to say what someone just happening on Bed and Board randomly would make of it. While The 400 Blows [review] and Stolen Kisses can stand on their own independently of the other Doinel films, Bed and Board is nowhere near existing in a vacuum. There is an assumption that you know who Antoine is, and though Truffaut could have easily made a stand-alone film that relates the newly married experience in much the same way Stolen Kisses conveyed the travails of dating and early adulthood, he does less to establish Antoine and Christine as characters separate from what came before. This is a chapter for the initiated only, and is without a doubt lesser for it.

Nevertheless, the film's greatest success really is in how it portrays the ups and downs of being newlyweds. Antoine's growing pains are easy to identify with, though his screw-ups are all the more frustrating for seeing how loving he and Christine are, and how happy they are together, prior to having their son. It's not that Antoine is losing anything, it's just that he's having a hard time letting go, of shutting himself off to past freedoms in order to embrace all that lays before him.

Taking that into consideration, the way Truffaut straddles the fence between the serious relationship drama and the more reckless comedy makes more sense. Bed and Board represents the same transition. It's as if the whole series is maturing before our eyes, and the material is just getting real as we come to our conclusion. (Fittingly, Kyoko  is also finally getting real, or at least getting the last word, expressing a farewell sentiment that isn't an Asian cliché.) Thus, the absence of plot makes room for a true character arc, as Antoine Doinel stops acting like an irresponsible college kid and starts to be a man.

Though, with one more movie to go, it remains to be seen if he can actually hold it together.