la femme d’ à côté (d. françois truffaut, w suzanne schiffman, jean aurel)

Truffaut’s melodrama feels slightly misconceived. Depardieu and Ardant are former lovers. She just happens to move in right across the street from him. Both are slightly nuts but keep it under control with their respective sane partners. However, when they inevitably reconnect, it’s a tinder box. Both veer towards a shared madness, an amour fou. The charisma of the two leads almost pulls it off, but as the film veers more and more towards melodrama, it flirts with the ridiculous. At one point Ardant’s husband says that he’s not a jealous man, “I’m not a Spanish husband”, (something the subtitles struggled to translate), but Depardieu and Ardant both have a Lorca-esque streak to them (she actually comes from the south, her children’s book editor is informed). One wonders what someone like Almodovar might have made of this tale. The tension between a Gallic cool and a Mediterranean excess doesn’t quite come off, as it did in a film like L’Apartment, for example, or even Pierrot Le Fou. It’s an interesting study in how a remarkable director can slightly misfire, no matter how enticing the ingredients, actors and premise. 

à bout de souffle (d godard, w truffaut)

Who would have thought I had never actually seen Breathless in its entirety? Clips galore, a million posters or stills on bedroom walls, Belmondo and Seberg, as iconic as Bogart and Bergman, Godard’s vainglorious ambition realised. Perhaps even more so, as Bogart gradually fades into the cinematic palaeolithic age. Who has stepped into the breach to follow Seberg and Belmondo? Or has romantic cool been killed off, once and for all? Answers on a postcard.

My friend, Jason, had stills from À Bout de Souffle on his study wall. (We had individual studies where I went to school, that was how it was.) If Godard understood one thing that Anglo-Saxon filmmakers didn’t, until then, it was the seductive power of the image, cinema’s secret weapon, a weapon whose potency can still elevate cinema above and beyond the Dickensian nouvel vague of the boxset series. The irony being that once they cottoned on, every Anglo-Saxon film school, and film school student, began to follow in Godard’s footsteps, so that the image has now acquired, within the arcane corners of subsidised cinema, the breeding ground for the mainstream, an almost religious devotion. As a result delivering films which are a collection of moments, like misshaped pearls strung together on a string, each one struggling for transcendence, rarely coming together to form a collective whole.

Or perhaps Tarkovsky is to blame. Still, the experience of watching a film that one has imagined already watched, but one hasn’t actually seen, is disconcerting. Every moment a predictable surprise. What I didn’t expect, perhaps, was the amorality of Belmondo’s anti-hero. He’s an unreconstructed bastard and he’s proud of it. Populist existentialism. This is one aspect of Hazanavicius’ film, Redoubtable, which feels spot-on, as the commoners approach his Godard and ask when he’s going to start making entertaining movies again, like À Bout De Souffle. The film exudes a rip-it-up delight, which goes hand-in-hand with the slapstick violence sequences, as though cast and crew are giving two fingers to the values of their elders. (Not without justification, given what the French were up to in Algeria etc). This is proto-punk, guitar-smashing par excellence. Albeit carried off with a breathless Parisian charm.

le beau serge (chabrol) & les mistons (truffaut)

The NFT notes inform that Chabrol mostly financed the making of his first film himself, and that it did not get an immediate release. They don't say whether he felt this was a disaster or not, but note that he immediately got on with the making the next.

Chabrol's film showed at Cannes with Trauffaut's 20 minute short Les Mistons two years after they were both made. You can see why distributors and the like would have been wary. Le Beau Serge is psychologically hard hitting. The eponymous anti-hero is an alcoholic waster, treated with an even-handed sympathy. The narrative describes what happens when his childhood friend, Francois, returns to the village they grew up in. Francois is a well-dressed young man, who's been to university, whereas Serge is a scruffy drunk who never got close to realising his dream of becoming an architect. Francois' ostensible reason for returning to the village is to recuperate following a TB attack, but it becomes increasingly clear that he wants to save his old friend, something Serge, of course, resents.

In a sense, this is the kind of narrative that might have been groundbreaking at the time, but now has become commonplace, the stuff of TV mini-series set in rural backwaters. (In the UK McGovern's The Lakes comes to mind.) But it's not hard to grasp how, at the time, the superficially unsympathetic characterisation and harsh psychological realism would have seemed like a hard sell to distributors. Furthermore, there's no gloss on Chabrol's shire horse. In grimy black and white he captures the mud and rain and dourness of the rural environment. In the final sequence, as snow falls, he succeeds in convincing that this isn't pretty - it's cold and threatening. He pulls this off in part through the minimal, powerful lighting. The outdoor scenes where Francois goes searching for Serge are lit by nothing more than a flashlight, throwing stark, disorientating images onto the screen; conveying the genuine chaos of the night.

The comparison with Truffaut's twenty minute short is intriguing. Les Mistons is all bright Summer memories of youth, as a pack of brats pursue the beautiful Bernadette, who's awakened their adolescent curiosity and fear. This is a gentle, elegiac film, with a clear crowd-pleasing premise. On the surface it would be seem to be the complete opposite to Chabrol's harsh examination of rural life. What knits them together is something which could only be described as 'style'. Which is to say, the straightforward camerawork, the lack of any great emphasis on design, and the use of natural lighting as far as possible. Both films have a freshness to their approach, the sense of cobwebs being brushed away as a result of a wilful lack of artifice.

Cinema is always exploring the duality that exists between its desire to explore technological frontiers, and a corresponding desire to strip the technology back and let the stories speak for themselves. Hollywood, a cultural-technological adjunct of the world's most powerful economy, makes 'em bigger and brasher than anyone else, because technology has always driven cinematic expression. However, whenever a group of directors come together and step back from technology's tyranny, like the Neo-Realists or the Danish Dogmatics or the Nouvelle Vague, the audience feels as though it's learning to see what's in front of its eyes all over again. Like 19th century audiences who stared at the very first screenings of people walking through city streets, or horses running, we're reminded of the most simple cinematic miracle of all: the ability to capture life, once, and play it back again forever.