The reopening of Film Forum today, after several months of renovation and expansion (it has grown from three screens to four), is being launched auspiciously, with the first complete American retrospective of the French director Jacques Becker. Becker lived from 1906 to 1960; his directorial career spans not quite twenty years, from the middle of the Second World War—and the Occupation of France—to the dawn of the French New Wave. His films, many of which are very hard to find, are marked by the tensions of his times no less than by his own idiosyncratic passions; his personal vision converges with political and cinematic history in exemplary ways. By putting these rare films on view, Film Forum re-inaugurates itself with a display of its own centrality to current movie culture.
Under the Occupation, the French cinema—strangely and disturbingly—underwent a renewal. Though its greatest director, Jean Renoir, left France, as did many of France’s Jewish producers, directors, actors, and technicians, a new generation of young filmmakers was (perhaps therefore) launched—most notably, Becker and Robert Bresson. Becker, whose father was a wealthy industrialist and whose mother ran a fashion house, had been Renoir’s assistant throughout the nineteen-thirties. During France’s brief war with Germany, Becker, in military service, was held as a prisoner of war; he got out by feigning epileptic seizures. His directorial career, which had started haltingly with several short films and a feature that he didn’t finish, got going in 1942, with “Dernier Atout” (“Last Trump”), a gangster film set in a fictitious South American city and filled with North American criminals. That and his (far better) second feature, “Goupi Mains Rouges” (“It Happened at the Inn”), the story of greed, resentment, and depravity in a French farm family, seethe with corruption, bitterness, and ugliness. They’re classic examples of film noir, French style, and they subtly but surely fling the corruption and the fear of the Occupation back in the faces of French viewers. (“Goupi” even begins with the terror of denunciation, in a scene of one farmer spying on another.)
Becker’s third feature, “Falbalas” (“Frills”), made in 1944, his last under the Occupation, was also his first masterwork. The contours of its story (which is enriched with his firsthand observation of the high-fashion world) are surprisingly close to those of “Phantom Thread”: the suave, sardonic Raymond Rouleau (who also starred in “Dernier Atout”) plays Philippe Clarence, a successful, middle-aged Parisian designer (and a serial philanderer) whose mansion in the city is a hive of art and commerce. Clarence works closely with his business partner, Solange (Gabrielle Dorziat), an imperious middle-aged woman whom he calls “the only family I’ve got,” as he works feverishly to complete his new collection. But he’s unsatisfied, frustrated, uninspired; he dashes off to complain to his friend, a high-end-fabric manufacturer, about the quality of his silks. There, he meets his friend’s fiancée, Micheline (Micheline Presle), a nineteen-year-old orphan with whom he falls in love at first sight (a transformative moment that Becker films with an elegant, graceful, decisive rapidity). Overnight, inspired by Micheline, Clarence redoes his entire collection and sends his houseful of female cutters, seamstresses, administrators, and secretaries into a frenzy of activity.
This entire drama is a flashback from the point of Clarence’s death by suicide. “Falbalas” is a story of love unto madness—of the tangle of artistic inspiration, commercial responsibility, intimate betrayal, and romantic agony that leads to destruction. Becker himself was a self-described “maniac” about details, and he calibrates the film’s action exquisitely. The work in the fashion house—the comings and goings of employees, friends, and lovers—is choreographed with a turbulence that never dispels its air of refinement. The defining word of Becker’s career would be “elegance,” but he approaches it as a dynamic and ironic idea, one that conveys the rigid bearing of social convention, the deft performance of a social role. In his films, cultivated manners hide, contain, and reflect furious passions. Becker’s directorial vision catches both these refined deceptions and their underlying furies, nowhere more than in his incisively imaginative, piercingly expressive closeups. In “Falbalas,” for the first time, he proved himself—while Ingmar Bergman was still serving his apprenticeship—to be a master of the closeup, the burning stare into camera, the nearly unbearable intimacy with characters that the cinema grants directors—and viewers.
For his first postwar film, “Antoine and Antoinette,” Becker came up with his own version of Parisian neo-realism to rival the work of Italian filmmakers—a drama about a young working-class couple perpetually short on money and struggling to pay for food. Becker relied upon non-stars, Roger Pigaut and Claire Mafféi, for the main roles; he filmed on location in Paris and incorporated street life into the action; and he even anticipated Vittorio de Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” in the story. Antoine, who works in a book-printing factory, gets to work by bicycle; Antoinette, who works as a clerk in a five-and-ten, is the object of intense flirtation and urgent courtship by Monsieur Roland (Noël Roquevert), the aging goat who owns the nearest food market. When one of Roland’s trucks runs over a wheel of Antoine’s parked bicycle, Antoine rages and panics at his inability to get to work—but when Roland discovers that the bike belongs to Antoinette’s husband, he immediately grabs another bike from a female employee named Denise and lends it to him—then buys Antoine a new wheel and uses it as an excuse to visit Antoinette after Antoine has gone to work.
There’s a telling urban-fairy-tale-like quality to “Antoine and Antoinette” ’s main plot—it involves a lottery ticket and it suggests, with a bitter irony, the lack of social mobility and the vanity of ordinary dreams at a time of constrained inequality. Becker depicts the couple warmly and tenderly, and frankly displays their hearty and vigorous eroticism (not least, in closeups of a frank, tactile ardor). But Becker depicts with a special strain of bile Roland’s increasingly pressing, ultimately violent, sexual harassment of Antoinette (while also alluding to his sexual abuse of Denise). This French way of relentless sexual pursuit, of men’s endemic and unchallenged harassment of women, was one of Becker’s crucial subjects. At another moment early in “Antoine and Antoinette,” Antoinette, leaving work, has to jump a turnstile in the Métro and dash through a train’s closing doors, to get away from a male customer at the store who has followed her through the streets.
Becker soon made three more movies about young lovers in the present day. His 1949 comedic drama, “Rendezvous in July,” is a teeming generational portrait that reveals a new tone and mood among young Parisians coming of age after the end of the war—a tone of joyful revolt against their parents’ traditions and conventions, a tone that they brought to the arts. The action is set in the three worlds of the theatre, jazz, and, above all, the cinema. A playwright is about to get his play produced by a major young stage director, and several of the young women in his life will have roles in the play; a young jazz musician plays in a basement club in the Latin Quarter; and an ethnographic filmmaker (Daniel Gélin) is waiting for the chance to bring a crew to Africa and make an authentic and realistic documentary. At the same time, “Rendezvous in July” is a story of romance, of love won and lost, of crossing the line between work and pleasure. Its action depends upon the formation of a group that’s ready to make a vast personal commitment to independent filmmaking, but its action concludes with a frenzy of romantic gestures and an intimate tragedy.
“Édouard et Caroline,” from 1951, is a horror-romance-comedy. It has two main locations: the rumpled apartment where Édouard (Gélin), a young concert pianist from a poor family, and Caroline (Anne Vernon), who comes from a wealthy family and doesn’t work, live (and for which they struggle to pay); and the mansion belonging to Caroline’s uncle Claude (Jean Galland), where Édouard is going to give a private concert for high-society guests and thereby make his name. But the conflict is established in the first scene, where Caroline is scrubbing the bathtub while Édouard is practicing. She does it cheerfully, he does it unthinkingly, and the action is sparked by his domineering insensitivity to Caroline. Their playfully bantering and jousting domesticity conceals unexpressed vitriol that bursts out in a nearly comedic scene involving a dress; their dispute, started by Édouard with his ivory-tower ignorance and high-culture arrogance, devolves into a horrific physical fight between them that Becker sets to the sarcastic ticking of Édouard’s metronome.
“Rue de l’Estrapade,” from 1953, is also a story of high society meeting la bohème, an American-style screwball comedy on the French way of seduction. An haut-bourgeois race-car driver named Henri (Louis Jourdan) has structured his life around his extramarital romance. When his wife, Françoise (Vernon), gets wind of his philandering, she moves out, to a seedy roominghouse in the Latin Quarter, and there is pursued by a struggling young musician named Robert (Gélin). Much of the comedy comes from the absurdities of Henri’s deceptions and the increasing absurdities of his efforts to regain her love—as well as the silliness and frivolity of Robert’s own romantic exertions. Beneath its blithe humor, it, too, is a bleak vision of mismatched lives and misguided mores.
Becker’s second absolute masterwork, “Casque d’Or,” from 1952, marks a major turning point in his work. The film is set around the turn of the century, loosely based on a then widely reported story of Parisian gangland revenge. The setting and the milieu inspire Becker to out-Renoir Renoir, or, rather, to make a film that borrows more liberally from Renoir’s father, the painter, than Renoir himself could do. The movie begins in the kind of near-Paris outdoor dance-garden that the artist had so often celebrated—only here Becker plots it on a sociological grid of gangsters and prostitutes who are among the garden’s picturesque denizens. The title, “Golden Helmet,” refers to the high-piled blond hair of Marie (Simone Signoret), a prostitute who’s a gangster’s moll; at the dance, she links eyes with Jo, a.k.a. Georges, a.k.a. Manda (Serge Reggiani), a former gangster gone straight. He now works as a carpenter at a shop on the outskirts of Paris and is preparing to marry, lovelessly, his boss’s daughter. His instant, explosive romance with Marie puts him into conflict with the local big boss of the Montmartre underworld, Félix Leca (Claude Dauphin).
The danger-seethed, death-steeped maneuvers and manipulations of the criminal life lend a dark and rich romanticism to the passionate and tender love story. The gangland deceptions have an elegance of their own that belies the amoral power plays that they set into motion—and that’s matched by the tender considerations and intimate formalities of the love between Marie and Manda. The exquisite, lyrical stillness with which Becker imbues the performances is, in turn, matched by his fanatical physical reconstruction of the era, with costumes, styles, décor, and dialogue of a seemingly documentary specificity.
But there’s another pivot to the action in “Casque d’Or,” Manda’s friendship with another gangster (and fellow-convict), Raymond (Raymond Bussières), which Becker depicts as an absolute touchstone of character, and that subject would be at the center of Becker’s other gangster drama, “Touchez Pas au Grisbi” (Hands Off the Loot), from 1954, a contemporary story that is, so to speak, a post-heist film that’s also a story of friendship—and of aging. Jean Gabin plays Max, a fifty-ish gangster who, with his partner in crime and best friend of twenty years, Riton (René Dary), has stolen and stashed a huge load of gold ingots that will allow them to retire. But the gold is hot, they can’t cash out yet, and, while still wheeling and dealing, word gets out about their heist, and the two friends are suddenly at the center of a gang war. “Touchez Pas au Grisbi” is one of the great movies about male friendship; its central sequence is a domestic one that presents the earnest rituals of friendship—involving pâté and biscuits, pajamas and toothbrushes—as a setting for life-changing, identity-shattering confidences. Its final scene offers one of the greatest, most bitterly poignant touches of face-saving deception in the history of cinema.
Deception is at the center of another of Becker’s masterworks, and the rarest gem of the retrospective: “The Adventures of Arsène Lupin,” from 1957, a very loose adaptation of Maurice Leblanc’s fictional stories (written between 1905 and 1937) about a master thief and master of disguises. It’s his second color film (the other, “Ali Baba,” from 1954, is a purely commercial film, in which his touch is only rarely on view, as in a final sequence of an astounding, gleeful revolutionary uprising), and Becker revels in the sumptuous palettes of early-twentieth-century France. The story begins with a vast and lavish set piece in which the loftily ironic Lupin (Robert Lamoureux) infiltrates a grand ball filled with world-class potentates and is accepted as one of them. He commits his thievery with schemes of a long-range, meticulous intricacy, each in a different disguise, each with a different array of witting or unwitting collaborators, each with its own riotously fastidious specificities of costume, character, and performance. Lupin—whose efforts sustain his well-cushioned bourgeois life style—is a sort of Robin Hood who only targets the obscenely, decadently, unreflectively rich, and his very presence among his chosen victims is a sort of litmus test for, and mirror held up to, their indecent wealth.
Becker once again re-creates past times with a fantastic precision that filters precisely into the comedic drama; he depicts Lupin as a sublime artist, as a real-life actor of genius whose performances depend upon his own fanatical mastery of costume and settings. (One of the giddiest robberies in movie history is also a masterstroke of furnishings.) Lamoureux, a theatre actor (and songwriter, raconteur, and playwright), wasn’t one of the most celebrated French movie stars, but Becker extracts from his performance a physical grace—including deftly light-footed stunt work of a breathless effortlessness—that’s inseparable from Lupin’s own wily majesty. Lupin’s only rivals in guile and in craft are women, ones from diametrically opposite stations in life: a manicurist (Huguette Hue) and a baroness (Liselotte Pulver). An ironically romantic sequence pitting Lupin against Germany’s own Kaiser Wilhelm in the run-up to the First World War only adds to the movie’s extravagant, ironic resonance.
Becker’s 1958 bio-pic, “Montparnasse 19,” about the relationship of Modigliani (Gérard Philipe) with Jeanne Hébuterne (Anouk Aimée) and the deterioration of the artist’s life in the face of poverty, neglect, and critical contempt is an outpouring of passionate and flamboyant style, a furious cinematic revolt against restraint. The story of Modigliani’s agonies gives rise to Becker’s own cri de coeur regarding the practical and commercial perversities that are inflicted upon artists. His last film, “Le Trou,” from 1960, about a prison break, is a tour de force of practical planning, tight-lipped deception, and the bonds and betrayals of friendship. It’s nearly context-free, and has the feel of a work of pure virtuosity, in which the physical details that adorn Becker’s earlier films now become an end in themselves.
The critics who, at the time of Becker’s death, were recognized as the filmmakers of the French New Wave were among the very few writers of their time to recognize and exalt Becker’s artistry. (For that matter, he had hinted, in “Rendezvous in July,” at their future existence.) Their affinities were predicted even before. As early as 1944, Becker celebrated the artist of filmmaking as “the auteur (i.e., author) of films,” and, in a 1947 article titled “The Author of Films: A Complete Author?,” he went into detail on the subject of the director as “auteur,” saying that “The author of a talking film tells a story with images, words, and sounds,” and emphasizing the importance of directors working on their own screenplays and making their films “personal,” whether the subject was one of their own invention or one provided by another writer. Becker proved his ideas with his films, even before the future New Wave, following in his footsteps, did the same. His films don’t merely reflect and criticize the moods and mores of the times; they embody and foretell the artistic history of the era, the future history of the cinema.
Sourse: newyorker.com
