France

Napoléon (1927)

André Crous

France
5*

Director:
Abel Gance
Screenwriter:
Abel Gance
Director of Photography:
Jules Kruger

Running time: 240 minutes

Napoléon, by French filmmaker Abel Gance, is an experimental epic that has achieved the status of legend, with good reason. The story of the young Napoleon Bonaparte (the film charts his development from school boy till the age of 27, when he successfully invaded Italy) is presented as a visual feast that keeps churning out scene after scene, the one as breathtaking as the next. The entire film is accompanied by a masterful orchestral score composed by Carmine Coppola that deftly integrates melodies from a few other works, including, among others, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise”, and Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique”. The 2000 restoration of the film has a score by Carl Davis, which has been performed at various public screenings of the film in the past few years, most notably at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

The film is a cinematic tour de force and contains a multitude of memorable scenes, from the snowball fight at Napoleon’s school and a scene with his pet eagle to the scene where crowds of people learn the new French national anthem, a double storm scene and the climactic tricolour triptych that makes visible Napoleon’s desires for himself and his country. At one point, during a chase on horseback across the Corsican countryside, Gance even fixes his camera to a saddle in order to give us Napoleon’s point of view.

These are all scenes that one can talk about extensively, for they demonstrate the skill of the director and the joy he found in telling the adventurous story of Napoleon’s rise to power. I was incredibly moved when the song’s composer, Roget de Lisle, sang “La Marseillaise”: The soundtrack had already been hinting at the gorgeous melody for a while since Danton, Marat and Robespierre had received word of the composer’s arrival, and when de Lisle finally performs his work, the effect is overwhelming exhilaration. The combination of the music itself, the passion on de Lisle’s face, the emotion on the listeners’ faces, in close-ups presented in rapid-fire succession, and the sunlight that pierces the stained glass windows behind them all signal this moment as a cohesive turning point for France and national unity. It is an absolute gem of a scene; if you thought the performance of “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca was wonderful, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

However, as much as this rendition of one of the country’s definitive trademarks elicits emotion in the viewer, there are even greater things to be said about the effect that a completely liberated camera can have on the viewer’s reception and interpretation of events on screen. In a well-known scene referred to as the “double storm”, Gance cuts between a physical and a metaphorical storm simultaneously brewing in different places. While Napoleon is stuck at sea on a small sailboat, the sirocco throwing him hither and thither like a wet rag doll in waters ready to swallow him at any second, people at the Paris Convention are growing more and more impatient with each other, and ultimately their event degenerates into complete chaos. At the convention, as blood begins to boil, the camera starts swinging from the ceiling, over the heads of the revolutionaries inside the enormous hall. The result is an awesome sequence of shots unlike any other I have ever seen in a film.

From the very beginning, it is clear that Napoleon Bonaparte is a testy little upstart, but rather than wanting to provoke, he acts out of pride and concern for his country. Born in Corsica in 1769, when France conquered the island, he sees himself as French, though his fellow schoolmates don’t quite agree. Napoleon has a born sense of strategy – as is made evident in a brilliantly staged fight against other boys, which he wins despite being hugely outnumbered and underestimated – and a genuine love for France. He is fearless, and his audacity leads to a moment one could compare to the scene in Birth of Nation when the Confederate flag is rescued from the front lines of the Union.

Later in the film, shortly before the sopping wet Battle of Toulon, Napoleon orders one of his officers to replace a cannon. When the officer tells him that it is impossible, Napoleon firmly asserts: “Impossible is not French!” Napoleon’s delicate features and slight frame hide a soldier with nerves of steel, eyes like a hawk, and military brawn like few others. “He is made of granite heated in a volcano”, declares one of his school teachers in Brienne.

There are many other great scenes to mention, including a pillow fight at his school that precedes Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct by more than five years and ends with a frame subdivided first into four, then nine, different angles of the same scene to reflect the different points of view of the schoolboys.

The film has rapturous energy, and while I didn’t much care for the scenes dealing with his courtship of Joséphine de Beauharnais, nor the scenes taking place shortly after their very unromantic wedding, in which he becomes a sentimental fool, writing her one letter after the other in which he proclaims his love for her and his frustration at being separated from her, the film is strong enough to cope with such whimsy.

Napoleon as a boy (Vladimir Roudenko) and as an adult (Albert Dieudonné) were both cast very well, and even at a young age, Roudenko’s eyes convey a striking maturity. Napoleon is an inspirational figure, who persuades his nation to do things they never allowed themselves to dream about, and in the process he becomes a messianic figure. A messianic figure with an instantly recognisable bicorne – something Gance teases us with when Napoleon first appears on-screen as a young boy.

The film deserves all the praise it has received. Not only did Gance make an epic film worthy of its subject, but he employed techniques unheard of at the time that served the story incredibly well and keeps the audience galloping along all the way as history unspools in front of our eyes. The film was meant to represent the first part (out of six) of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, but Gance spent his entire budget on this first instalment, and therefore Napoléon ends before the title character even gets to the throne. Nonetheless, this monumental film shows what the cinema is capable of and serves as a rousing reminder that representations of real events can be every bit as exciting as life itself.

Final note: This review refers to the 1981 edition of the film. Around the turn of the millennium, Kevin Brownlow added about half an hour’s worth of footage to restore the film to a version that approaches the original. The running time of 330 minutes on some websites refers to the film’s length when shown at 20 frames per second (fps), as opposed to the 240-minute version shown at 24fps.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

André Crous

France
3.5*

Director:
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Screenwriters: 
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Joseph Delteil
Director of Photography:
Rudolph Maté

Running time: 82 minutes

Original title: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is particularly true of silent films, where one often has only the images to rely on. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc has a remarkable following and is revered as one of the best silent films. Above all, reviewers focus on the force of the lead performance, by Renée Falconetti, whose face conveys anguish and passion with great clarity and admirable conviction.

However, for all the veneration it has inspired in viewers all over the world, and I grant that Dreyer’s film has much going for it, it has never provided me with the kind of transcendental experience that other viewers have written about.

Based on the trial records archived at the Bibliothèque de la Chambre des Députés, the film prides itself on being an exact reproduction of historical events. It focuses on the interrogation of Joan of Arc in court in 1431, her obstinate refusal to disavow her statement that she is the daughter of God and her eventual execution by burning.

The problem is the same one I had with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, incidentally also very faithful to previous texts, and my objection has nothing to do with the religious content of the two films. Rather, I question the approach of a filmmaker who seems to think that the viewer would be able to fill in the big gap left by the removal of the film’s build-up. In Gibson’s film, as in Dreyer’s film, if you had never heard of Jesus Christ, or of Joan of Arc, the film simply wouldn’t make much sense, since the reason for their suffering has been wholly omitted.

In the film, Joan of Arc is supposed to be about 19 years old. At the time of the shoot, Falconetti was almost twice her age: 35. This is not a fatal disparity, but since the main character states her age in the opening scene, I found it difficult, from the very beginning, to trust anything she had to say.

And then there is the face of the film, Falconetti’s face, with eyes, says Roger Ebert, “that will never leave you”. That much is true: when I think of the film, I think of Falconetti’s face and her unblinking eyes. But that is because Dreyer spends so much time showing us her face, and Falconetti spends so little time doing anything else than trying not to blink. Her pauses are frustrating, and she remains a very opaque figure at the centre of the drama, even though it is clear that the director intended for her to seem like she was drunk on divinity. Most of the time, whenever she is asked an important question, she stares blankly at her interrogator, her eyes as big as plates.

The film is evidently on her side, not only because an opening title card informs us that we are about to watch the story of “a young, pious woman confronted by a group of orthodox theologians and powerful judges” (théologiens aveuglés et juristes chevronnés: blind theologians and seasoned legal experts), but also because the judges themselves are not portrayed very flatteringly: In one of the opening shots, a judge scratches his ear and examines the piece of wax on his finger. The judges often snicker at Joan’s responses to their questions and victimise her even further.

Despite my objections about its plot and the central performance, The Passion of Joan of Arc is an audiovisual gem. I watched a version with Richard Einhorn’s glorious “Voices of Light” on the soundtrack, and the experience of listening to his choir music, often accompanied by strings, and watching the stark, clean images with pure white backgrounds, sometimes in very elegant tracking shots over slightly expressionist décor, was extraordinary.

The film is intense, and many sequences stand out for provoking powerful feelings in the viewer, but Dreyer’s choice to place his central character above all else (significantly, he fails to introduce all other characters by name) makes it a very prejudiced work of art. On the technical side of the production, however, The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the most beautiful films ever produced.

IP5 (1992)

André Crous

France
2.5*

Director: 
Jean-Jacques Beineix
Screenwriters:
Jacques Forgeas
Jean-Jacques Beineix
Director of Photography:
Jean-François Robin

Running time: 119 minutes

Original title: IP5: L’île aux pachydermes

Poor Jean-Jacques Beineix. Perhaps he thought that this would be his 8½, and that is why he indicated in the title that it would be his fifth film. Supposedly, the letters represent the initials of his girlfriend at the time, supporting the romantic element of the narrative. But ultimately such self-indulgence does little to enhance the experience of watching the film, except to make us shake our head. The film has three wonderfully entertaining central characters, but the director doesn’t quite know whose story he wants to tell, and he ends up failing us on all counts.

The three characters are Jockey, barely in his teens; Tony, in his mid-twenties; and the sage old Mr Marcel, who might just be a tree hugger who escaped from an insane asylum. Tony, played by Olivier Martinez looking like a young Elvis, is a professional “tagger”, a graffiti artist who is constantly on the run from the law but merely wishes to create his art on the walls of his city. Jockey, the son of an always drunken immigrant, lives in the same block of council flats as Tony and wants to have a good time, even if this involves a bit of petty theft now and then.

And then there is Mr Marcel, played by Yves Montand, who died shortly after the shoot. One night, Jockey and Tony steal a car only to discover in the backseat Mr Marcel, a man who very politely but insistently refuses to leave them alone. Mr Marcel is mysterious and presents signs of clairvoyance that might be construed as traces of something divine, but as the film proceeds, this initial hypothesis falls apart rather quickly; unfortunately, the film itself does not provide any useful information to explain his behaviour and especially his insight.

The full French title translates as “IP5: The Island of Pachyderms” and “pachyderm” is a term I know from Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play, Rhinocéros; it means “thick-skinned mammal”, but alas, we don’t get to see any of them. And it isn’t a certainty that we’ll get to see the island either. The film is about memory and desire, but such a statement makes Beineix’s film sound much more clearly defined than it actually is. While Mr Marcel and Tony are both on a journey to reclaim the loves they lost, their journeys are quite different, and so are the women, and the reasons they haven’t seen each other for 40 years (Mr Marcel and Monique), or, well, barely 40 hours (Tony and Gloria).

The film’s only relationship that we care about, though to a very limited degree, is the one between Mr Marcel and Monique, and once that part of the story has been resolved, we suddenly find ourselves remembering that the film started out being about Tony’s journey, from Paris to Toulouse, to find Gloria. At this point, at the end of the second act, the film starts to drag, because there is no real desire to see Tony’s “love”, based on two or three very brief encounters, when it was made very clear to Tony that Gloria couldn’t care less about his feelings towards her.

As is to be expected from the director of Diva and Betty Blue (37°2 le matin), the colour palette is strikingly beautiful, and there are particularly attractive shots scattered throughout the film, including a moment when Mr Marcel stands, preacher-like, in the middle of the forest during a rainstorm and lets the “lustral rain” purify him while he is lit up like a Christmas tree. This is, however, one time where his crew let him down and one can spot very odd changes in lighting on Montand’s face.

IP5 contains too many coincidences for the story development to be credible, and while Mr Marcel could have had a mysterious air about him that might make us believe in a supernatural force at work, the questions generated by the film are never answered but rather lead to a very banal conclusion that – considering the film’s energetic opening – is not at all satisfactory.

Death and the Maiden (1994)

André Crous

UK/France/USA
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Rafael Yglesias
Ariel Dorfman
Director of Photography:
Tonino Delli Colli

Running time: 102 minutes

Roman Polanski’s career as a filmmaker will always be best remembered for Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, but his underrated Death and the Maiden is a stunning film, in large part thanks to the work of Ariel Dorfman, on whose play it is based.

The film is set in an unnamed country in South America “after the fall of the dictatorship”. This could be any number of countries, and since Dorfman has Chilean origins one would expect the country to be Chile and the dictator to be Pinochet, but even if this were true, it has no real bearing on our interpretation of the film. Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) and her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) are living in near isolation, and she becomes tense every time a strange car pulls up to their house. On the radio, Paulina hears that Gerardo has been appointed the new head of the government’s tribunal that will look into human rights abuses during under the former military junta. However, she remains unconvinced that the guilty individuals will be made to pay sufficiently for what they did.

It is a stormy night, and the power goes out. So, too, do the phone lines. Gerardo is brought back home by a friendly stranger after his car had got a flat tyre. Later in the evening, the friendly stranger appears again: Gerardo had forgotten to take his spare tyre. The friendly stranger makes some very flattering comments about Gerardo and his role in the upcoming investigations, and Gerardo asks the man in to have a drink with him. Hearing the two of them, Paulina flees from the house. In the man’s car, she finds a cassette of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet and decides to push the car down a cliff into the rough seas.

All of this might sound rather odd, but the thrust of Paulina’s mental processes is soon revealed when she goes back to her and Gerardo’s house, ties up the stranger, who is called Dr Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley), and accuses him of having raped her several times, while the Schubert Quartet was playing in the background, during her time as a political prisoner. She was always blindfolded, but she claims to recognise Miranda’s voice, his smell, the expressions he uses, his quotations from Nietzsche and, most importantly, his love of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”.

These three characters – Paulina, Gerardo and Dr Miranda – are the only people we ever see in the film, except for a prologue and an epilogue in a concert hall, where the title piece is performed. The actors’ performances are all very strong and make the film a wholly dramatic experience.

Viewers will vacillate between trust and distrust in Paulina’s assessment of Miranda’s guilt. Is Paulina, who has clearly been emotionally and mentally affected by her ordeal more than a decade ago, someone whom we can trust? Or is she just out for revenge? Even in the film’s climactic scene (an amazing piece of acting: nearly three minutes in close-up), things are not as clear-cut as they seem to be, making this journey towards the truth so much darker, because we have to decide for ourselves whether we have not been deceived one last time.

The strength of Death and the Maiden lies in the screenwriters’ ability to keep us guessing throughout, while still maintaining absolute control over the credibility of the admittedly theatrical world we see before us. Almost the entire film is set in the Escobars’ house (clearly in a studio), but the camera work by Tonino Delli Colli and the editing by Hervé de Luze create the necessary tension in concert with the actors’ performances. One minor weakness is the house’s lighting: Although the power is supposed to be out, every inch of the house’s interior is lit, and when characters throw five shadows, you know things are a bit fake.