France
3.5*
Director:
René Clair
Screenwriter:
René Clair
Director of Photography:
Georges Périnal
Running time: 83 minutes (see review below for details)
René Clair’s À nous la liberté (“Freedom is ours”) is a heartfelt film about friendship in the face of capitalist greed. Its one lead is a die-hard romantic and the other is a guy full of ambition who, once given his chance, quickly establishes himself as the businessman of the decade. But the film has become more well-known for the controversy it caused years after its release than for its plot or its technique.
The film was released in 1931. Five years later, in 1936, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times showed a remarkable similarity to Clair’s film, and the French producers decided to take the Americans to court in a case that was only settled after World War II. On careful viewing, it is clear that Chaplin had not stolen from Clair: The characters and the storyline are both very different, and even the one scene at the root of all the trouble is so enjoyable it would be hard to imagine either film without it.
The scene in question takes place around an assembly line at a factory. It’s one of the first sequences of Chaplin’s film, taking place during the opening minutes, and it shows the Tramp hard at work tightening the screws on some nameless implement the company is producing. He continues to be distracted and as a result comes up against the next person in line, creating a domino effect of chaos.
More or less the same thing happens in À nous la liberté, in that occupational chaos ensues when the aforementioned romantic is distracted at work in the factory. But Clair does not give the mechanical nature of the work environment the same priority as Chaplin; instead, his story looks at the friendship of two former prison inmates. Their work behind bars very obviously resembles the work in the factory — both take place around a conveyor belt, and in both spaces they are watched over by powerful individuals (guards or supervisors) who ensure they don’t steal anything, but Clair doesn’t belabour this point.
The two former prison inmates are called Louis and Émile — when they both attempt to escape at the beginning of the film, only Louis succeeds. He goes on to sell records on the street and in a very quick succession of shots that anticipates the editing of the famous decline of the marriage sequence in Citizen Kane, we witness his meteoric rise to becoming a very wealthy producer of gramophone players.
Émile is not so lucky and remains in prison a while longer. Upon his release, he is found in a field by two police officers and in resisting them he gets locked up again, albeit briefly.
The film’s subsequent handling of the reunion of these two men is smooth though never very profound, as they both seem to instantly revert to their earlier selves, without any real complications. There is a very firm sense that Émile could make Louis’ life difficult as he could tarnish his reputation as an upstanding member of society when he has in fact broken out of jail. But this line is never thoroughly exploited.
Instead, Clair has a very soft storyline that sees Émile fall in love with a girl who shows a little interest towards him at the factory — and whom he literally broke out of jail for to be with. This is where the film’s re-releases become an interesting point of discussion. While the film was initially released with a running time of more than 100 minutes, the current version has had two scenes cut, both available on video sharing sites.
The first scene develops the musical theme of much of the first part of the film by having flowers sing to Émile. The film didn’t really need this scene. The second scene, however, serves to provide some detail on Émile’s appreciation of the girl he has fallen in love with and certainly would have provided a firmer background to Émile’s apparent laissez-faire attitude when it is revealed she will remain with her boyfriend rather than hook up with Émile.
Besides one scene that, in retrospect, seems an eerily accurate commentary on the evil of the workplace (a teacher tells his students, “Work is freedom,” echoing the infamous words of the Auschwitz death camp), À nous la liberté has a humanist slant and is by no means that scathing indictment that Chaplin insinuated with Modern Times. That being said, Chaplin has a much more enjoyable film, and he offers more gimmicks than Clair that, in the end, make for a memorable production. That is not to say Clair’s film lacks importance or interest — the opening tracking shot in the prison is a particularly strong evocation of man’s potential loss of human characteristics in the prison (or work) environment, and in a very well-scripted speech towards the end of the film, someone makes the point that while machines can replace the hand of man, they cannot replace his brain.
Whether that is true remains to be seen, but as far as we can tell from this film, Clair’s heart, head and hand were in the right place at the right time.