MATCH POINT (Woody Allen, 2005)

The alleged decline in Woody Allen’s work allegedly helped occasion the stunning praise that his latest film, Match Point, garnered at Cannes in 2005; but, in truth, Allen’s prolific body of work has long been unpredictable as to quality, including in any given period films both good and bad. Pick your Woody-movie. While I delight in Sleeper (1973), Manhattan (1979), Radio Days (1987), Shadows and Fog (1991), Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and Celebrity (1998), I have little or no use for Love and Death (1975), Annie Hall (1977), Stardust Memories (1980), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and Sweet and Lowdown (1999). Better than the films in this last group are the mixed-result Woodies: What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Alice (1990), Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Hollywood Ending (2002). Allen’s films have often been stronger in script than in visual facility, and until Match Point his one great work was the astounding Zelig (1983), which I have described as “a humanistic piece of such wit and dazzling invention that it accumulates into a metaphor for creative possibilities.” Starting in the 1920s, its egoless protagonist, Zelig, pops up seemingly everywhere—at a ticker-tape parade of heroes, at a Scott Fitzgerald party, at a Nuremberg Hitler rally, etc.—and appears to take on the aspect of whomever or whatever group he happens to be with. Reflecting the uncertain sense of self at America’s core, this “chameleon man” becomes a freak celebrity and a subject for medical study; when, in fact, nothing really can be learned from him because he can scarcely be said to exist. Here, in gorgeous black and white (Gordon Willis cinematographed), Allen achieved the high satirical order of Mark Twain’s literary masterpieces. Zelig isn’t a perfect film (Mia Farrow’s limitations required that the later years of her pivotal character be played by another actress, and this splits the film into two pieces), but it is riotously funny, genuinely—not in a mannered way—bleak, and probing, both of human nature and of the American disposition. Zelig has now nearly met its match. (Or has, with no nearly required?) Match Point is the best directed of all Woody Allen pictures. If Zelig was after the author of Pudd’nhead Wilson, Match Point has set its sights on Dostoievski. It serves; it wins.

It’s all about luck. Allen had meant for his thirty-sixth movie to be filmed in the Hamptons; but when a British company came through with additional, necessary funds, he moved the script’s locale to London. Match Point’s witty, highly suspenseful exploration of class meldings and collisions thus found a perfect home. The Thames River, over which the fate of the protagonist both figuratively and literally hangs, becomes a principal player in the film. The “charter’d Thames” of Blake’s poem “London,” it is heavy with a sense of fate and of stiff embankment—and, one must add, of pollution. (One recalls here Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 Frenzy.) This pollution is correlative to the muddied moral waters swimming around in the mind of the film’s protagonist, Chris Wilton, brilliantly played by that most unlikeable of young actors, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. Here, Rhys-Meyers (who for some reason has dropped the hyphen) is so purposefully unlikeable I ended up liking him. (A lot!) Thanks to Rhys-Meyers, his Irish charm and, one supposes, Allen’s directorial guidance, I got caught up in all Wilton’s mental turbulence and egotistical shenanigans, which include two cold-blooded murders with a shotgun, one of them at nearly point-blank range. All of a sudden, after a long stretch of carping, I find myself a fan of the actor. In this film, he is a rock at showing his character’s fear and crumbling—like a male Joan Fontaine. (Think Ivy, Sam Wood, 1947.) He is also marvelously, bottomlessly ambiguous as he overcompensates for his near inability to reach a decision, make a choice. His is one of the great portrayals of moral weakness.

Unlucky Chris! He was born poor, and his adeptness at tennis on the professional circuit has become his means for entering another world, giving him a taste of la dolce vita. The extent of his talent for tennis has imposed a limit, so now he is selling lessons to the rich at an exclusive club and in this way is keeping his hand in the till. In this capacity he befriends rich boy Tom Hewett, and dates and weds Tom’s sister, Chloe—and has an affair with Tom’s fiancée, Nola, an actress. She is a struggling young American actress—as much of an outsider to the upper class and to Tom’s family as Chris, but more easily identifiable as someone on the make. In one of Allen’s most intriguing moments (what an eye this artist has!), Chris compliments Nola on her sensual—i.e., hungry—lips as the camera shows that Nola’s lips are the very image of Chris’s. Given the amoral way that young people today navigate and negotiate reality, we never do find out to what extent either Chris or Nola manipulates others to pursue his or her gain. These are decent folk, after a fashion, after all. They half-manipulate. Rather, it is clearer that Tom is slumming in his “affection” for Nola, whom he eventually dumps under duress from Mum’s disapproval, marrying instead someone of the same class. Of course, his befriending Chris, which the family accepts, is part and parcel of the same liberal impulse as his initial gravitation towards Nola. (Tellingly, the veddy English Tom addresses Chris as “Irish.”) But like Mums everywhere, Tom’s is less possessive about her sweet, modest daughter than about her handsome (and truly disgusting) boy. Not all emotions are governed by class. One must add that Nola is as beautiful as the actress who plays Nola, Scarlett Johannson. (Johansson is terrific.) In a perpetual alcoholic fog, Eleanor, Tom’s mother, very likely misses the incestuous implications of her own obsession with Tom, and these suppressed feelings of hers—because Eleanor wants Tom to marry a cousin, Nola remarks how “inbred” the family is—may have helped drive her into the bottle in the first place. Here is a person who would never think of applying a shotgun blast to anyone. Eleanor lacks the resourcefulness, the flair for self-help, upon which a boy like Chris, unluckily born, must rely in order to have a shot at the good life. Her “decency” exacts the price of moral blindness. Thus she fails to recognize the threat that Chris poses—and the threat that she herself in a way poses by her being relatively unconcerned with her daughter’s fate. Perhaps she doesn’t know better; perhaps her own parents once upon a time fixated on a brother of hers at her expense. We tend to repeat our parents even as we claim moral or behavioral superiority over them. Indeed, those who do behave better than their parents tend to be those who, while critical, embrace them or their memory without issuing condemnation.

Where class is concerned, one is either lucky or not. One doesn’t choose how high or low one’s birth is. It’s purely a matter of luck. The other instances of fortune in Allen’s film refer to class stratification or to what one can do to eliminate the handicap of lowly origins such as Chris exemplifies. For all his ambitions, Chris is drawn beyond his measure to resist to Nola, who is as lowly as he. (In bed, Chris is restrained and tender with Chloe; with Nola, full-bodied, flamboyant.) When she becomes pregnant with his child, jeopardizing his marriage to Chloe and the lifestyle and work opportunity that are attached to it (Chris has a responsible position in his father-in-law’s company), Nola must be gotten rid of. Obtusely, some have suggested as a result that Match Point is amoral. Instead, it is mesmerizing, crisp, emotionally rich, occasionally hilarious, and always highly satirical. It is a film about such ingenuity as compensates for one’s “bad luck”—Chris ends up committing a first murder in anticipation of covering up his second murder; in effect, Chris makes his own luck, as unlucky people are always counseled to do, condescendingly, by those who lack the capacity to confront the reality of how our basic circumstances largely reside out of our control, for better or worse. Match Point is also a study in guilt—about the cost to his conscience of all that Chris feels forced to do. (Chris is confronted by very material forms of the two persons he dispatched.) The writer-director of Zelig is still on the side of the angels.

The hybrid genre to which the film belongs is perhaps upsetting to some. Like Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), not to mention Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Allen’s own Shadows and Fog (a symbolical evocation of the Holocaust as characters simply disappear in shadows and fog), Match Point marries film noir and, under the circumstances, unexpected humor. A brash joke (to which Rhys-Meyers’ performance is attuned) radiates alarmingly, distressingly, wittily from the center of this comedy: that Chris must commit murders in order to save his marriage. As the joke plays out in the film, one is forced to question certain assumptions about the institution of marriage. For one, given the motives behind both Tom’s and Chris’s marriages, marriage is presented as a kind of abstraction rather than as a human union, in one case reinforcing other institutions such as class, and in the other contesting these. Moreover, Chris and Chloe’s “union” contests something else: the myth that two persons in some sense become one. The film leaves Chris and Chloe each in their own world even as they’re “together” as a couple while entertaining others. Because Chris has committed murders to retain his marriage, and because Chloe is ignorant of this fact (compare the couple in Victor Sjöström’s 1927 The Wind, who are bound together by the shared knowledge that Letty has killed the man who attacked her), they are forever apart; the need to stay married to Chloe has taken over Chris’s being married to her, and as she is being sociable with guests (her family) Chris withdraws into his own haunted head. In a sense, Chloe is married to her ignorance, Chris, to his guilt, and their “marriage” primarily exists to paper over their recurrent—I would not say perpetual—separateness. Marriage, then, may institutionalize whatever a couple already essentially are while, at least in certain instances, failing to lead the couple into greater unity, except perhaps in the eyes of others. I am reminded here of an even greater film about marriage than Allen’s—and a bleaker one: Claude Chabrol’s La femme infidèle (1968).

Match Point opens with a bravura flourish, establishing a complex tone that admits equal measures of mockery and flat-out seriousness; it introduces the exquisite, gracious poise of Allen’s film. (Well, with its air of anticipation, we may say that the film’s title is first to introduce this.) A tennis net runs in angled depth through the shot. We hear Chris’s voiceover: “The man who said ‘I’d rather be lucky than good’ saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win—or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.” Until these last two sentences we see a ball going back and forth, in slow motion, over the net. With the last two sentences we actually see the ball strike the top of the net and, in a freeze frame, stay suspended in air over the net. Allen never releases the freeze frame, dissolving instead to the narrative proper, in which Chris begins his job as a tennis instructor at a posh club. The poor lad’s whole life is one of suspense, his future without the guarantees that pupil Tom enjoys. Moreover, the suspended ball, not going down on one side or the other, symbolizes Chris’s moral state, (like ours) neither bad nor good, but capable of doing bad and suffering in guilt, afterwards, mightily for it. Later, the scene at the net is evoked when Chris tosses a ring he has stolen to cover up a murder, expecting it to be washed away in the Thames, and, instead, unbeknownst to him, it hits the top of the guard rail and falls down landside. Does this mean Chris will be caught? Or, unpunished, will he be haunted (intermittently, at least) by guilt? It has to be one or the other, except that Allen devises a resolution that cuts in half the difference between the two alternatives—the narrative translation of the opening freeze frame. What brilliant filmmaking!

One of the film’s themes is compensation: in his case, the ends to which Chris feels driven to offset the unluckiness of his humble origins. Allen finds a similar impulse motivating all kinds of behavior, including Tom’s attraction to Nola and Nola’s attraction to Tom. However, the sharpest, most slicing appearance of this motive again attaches itself to Chris or, more particularly, his unseen father, a Christian fanatic, about whom he contemptuously explains, “After he lost both his legs, he found Jesus.” Chris’s emotional life is therefore contextualized by family history as well as by class and social strata. He is fleeing from a father whose strictures and discipline threaten to trap him in a moral straightjacket, much as the history of poverty that his father also embodies for him threatens to trap Chris in a social straightjacket.

Chris loves opera—or claims to. We are never quite certain what is real about Chris and what is affected as he pursues, or half-pursues, better luck than he is used to. (We catch him reading Crime and Punishment perhaps only to impress Chloe’s father in conversation.) Of course, if he does love opera, we have here another of his “compensations.” In any case, the soundtrack is graced by five old recordings of Enrico Caruso, including one of Caruso singing, hauntingly, forlornly, “Mai Reggendo All’Aspro Assalto” from Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Such music is correlative to the boy’s soul; Chris tells Chloe that he loves opera because it expresses “everything that is tragic about life.” But Caruso imaginatively participates in the film in another way. We think of Caruso as the greatest tenor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the one who set the modern standard. But Caruso was not always so adulated. Early on, he was an object of critical derision because, despite his passion for singing, his wee, reedy voice would routinely crack on high notes. It is Guglielmo Vergine whose rigorous training transformed his most famous pupil, creating the magnificent singer whose voice we cherish. What luck for Caruso, since Vergine accepted in lieu of payment a quarter of Caruso’s earnings for—this was the contractual wording—“five years of actual singing.” What bad luck for Caruso, though, who interpreted this as meaning that his obligation to Vergine would end after five years. Vergine had a different meaning in mind: a quarter of all of Caruso’s earnings, aria by aria, until “five years of actual singing” had been exhausted, that is to say, five times 364 days times 24 hours of “actual singing.” Bad luck, then, turned to good luck, which turned to bad luck again—which turned again to good luck for Caruso when he sued Vergine to extricate himself from the contract and the courts ruled in his favor. All this provides a lovely metaphor for much of what Chris goes through mentally and emotionally throughout the film.

There is another striking detail that assumes the dimensions of a metaphor for Chris’s lot in life. One of his past jobs, he reveals, was to clean his employer’s expensive sports car, an Aston Martin, with a toothbrush—a task suggesting the sexual humiliation that attaches itself to poverty and social inferiority.

Allen’s Match Point variously recalls Crime and Punishment, Macbeth, Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley books, Alfred Hitchcock (for instance, his 1951 Strangers on a Train—and Highsmith again), Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), and Allen’s own films, especially Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen orchestrates these and other echoes handily and thrillingly. A packed work, Match Point nonetheless proceeds without any signs of strain. The degree to which it implicates us in Chris Wilton’s anxious predicament before, during and after his double murder: this may be Allen’s highest accomplishment. Allen has made many worthwhile films, but among them only his Match Point reaches the viewer’s soul and shakes it up.

HONEY FOR OSHUN (Humberto Solás, 2001)

A legendary filmmaker, Humberto Solás made Lucía (1968), arguably the most celebrated Cuban film of all time. Lucía depicts progressive changes in Cuba over more than half a century (beginning with the 1895 struggle to gain independence from Spain), where the formal design of the film—three episodes, each in its own visual style, showing the role of Cuban women at different times—implies quantum leaps in political consciousness. In each episode, the name of the female radical or revolutionary is Lucía. Solás centered the film on women, he has explained, because “women are traditionally the number one victims in all social confrontations. The woman’s role always lays bare the contradictions of a period and makes them explicit.” Solás also believes that all films are political, adding, “though I certainly don’t consider all films to be revolutionary . . . Cinema takes on a revolutionary character to the extent that it becomes a weapon of struggle.” Solás’s career has had its ups and downs, in part due to his homosexual orientation, but he is regarded today as the founding father of cinema in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Honey for Oshun (Miel para Oshún) is his first film in nearly a decade, and it has been, for the most part, either highly praised or panned in the U.S. It doesn’t seem to be a piece that invites a moderate response. (In Mexico, it won the Silver Ariel as the year’s best Latin-American film.) It is very much the work of a man approaching sixty, and it is imbued with Solás’s biting edge and distinct sensibility. Its central character is Roberto, a beautiful young man (Jorge Perugorría, who played Diego, the politically discontented gay man who falls for a straight communist, in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s 1994 Strawberry and Chocolate). Roberto is a professor of Spanish literature in a university in Miami, Florida. Now that his father has died, Roberto is in Cuba on a mission: to find his mother, Carmen, whom he believes abandoned him when he was a small boy. However, he will learn from a cousin, Pilar, that his embittered life has been built on a faulty premise; Carmen never abandoned Roberto. Rather, his father abducted him and illegally moved to the States. Pilar’s well-positioned family didn’t keep in touch with Carmen, whom they regarded as beneath them. Now Roberto, Pilar and a taxi cab driver, Antonio, will comb the island in what at many turns seems a futile search for Carmen, who went insane and was institutionalized for a spell, all those years ago, when her beloved son was taken away from her. The film is a borderline comedy, and it ends happily, with an emotional payoff of tidal force.

Co-scenarists Solás, Sergio Benvenuto and Elia Solás adapted Solás’s original story, and they have done an emphatic job. At one point Roberto, whose veneer of charm covers a certain arrogance (Perugorría is excellent), breaks down in public, declaring that he doesn’t know who he is, that he is neither Cuban nor U.S. American, and Antonio, whose son died in a road accident at twenty, is similarly given to arduous displays of self-pity. The script implies that Antonio somehow feels that a reunion between Roberto and his lost mother will spiritually translate into a reunion between himself and his lost son. To me, this is farfetched. Too, the long odyssey is too beset with jokes about faltering transportation, apparently a recurrent problem in Cuba. A nation that provides medical care and higher education to all its citizens is entitled to a bugaboo or two (there is also a power blackout), but that doesn’t make such problems of efficiency as funny as Solás seems to think they are. Moreover, so long as the film keeps to the road, keeps on the move, it is elegant and captivating, and lovely (the color cinematographers are Porfirio Enríquez and Tote Trenas), but its pit-stops in this village or that are only of interest when they survey the locals. Our threesome is not of unlimited interest. There are arid patches involving them, and a number of times the film’s action—the trip variously by bus, bike, truck, car, foot—feels as if it is being cranked up after a dead stop.

The journey itself is transporting. Cuba is a ravishingly pretty island, and the people, warm and caring for the most part, suit the filmmaker’s love of humanity. Even when Roberto’s bicycle is stolen, our instant recollection of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) impresses on our hearts that there may be a story here that we don’t know about. Only a hotel clerk who calls the police, resulting in the trio’s brief incarceration, appears villainous, and the police themselves seem paranoid, with the interrogating officer obsessed with the notion that the trio is making fun of him, which they are not doing. The delight of Carmen’s plentiful neighbors at her reunion with the son they have all heard her speak about for so many years (“Look at how handsome your son is!”) is nearly the high point that the reunion itself is. Playing Carmen is the same marvelous actress, Adela Legrá, who played the third-episode Lucía more than thirty years earlier.

One hopes at the end that Roberto, who has had his passport taken from him (by the bicycle thief) anyhow, will remain in Cuba. What is there in the U.S. to go back to, a nation that regards people as unimportant and disposable, and is fundamentally rootless even for those who haven’t been, like Roberto, ripped from their roots? Besides, Roberto and Pilar have become kissing cousins, and it may be time for the bachelor to settle down and settle in. It’s a comedy, after all, not a documentary about incarcerated journalists and other dissidents. One is entitled to dream of one happy ending after another.

MY FRIEND, IVAN LAPSHIN (Aleksei Gherman, 1983)

Aleksei Gherman’s legendary My Friend, Ivan Lapshin (Moj drug Ivan Lapshin) has been called by Andrei Tarkovsky and many Russian critics, both Soviet and post-Soviet, the greatest Soviet film ever made. Its complex, stormy vision of drab provincial life in Soviet Russia has the visual elan to drug, and the power to sweep away, the viewer. I am sorry to say that the film left me cold. There’s no question that the film is great. There is some question, though, whether anyone needs to see it. It doesn’t strike me as essential, as did, for instance, Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Autumn (1960), which I left the same sick bed to go see at the movies the night before. Dazzlingly brilliant, My Friend nonetheless afforded scarcely a moment of pleasure to justify my years of anticipation of one of cinema’s most heralded accomplishments.

The film is set in a fictional provincial town, Unchansk, in 1935, that is, shortly before the Stalinist purges. The titular and main character is police investigator Ivan Lapshin, who shares his communal flat with several others, including the boy who (as an adult voiceover) remembers and narrates, who lived there with his father, presumably Gherman’s own father, Yuri, upon whose stories of the time his son’s film is based. (In actuality, the filmmaker wasn’t born until 1938.) But the narrative plays with time, and in fact we see the film, alternately, both in the 1930s and the 1980s, between which times too little has changed. Most of the film is in black and white (and, I might add, different kinds, different exposures, of black and white), but the present—the 1980s—sometimes is signaled by gorgeous, dark, richly evocative color inserts in panoramic long shots. (The cinematographer is Valeri Fedosov.) For those who cherish keeping their moorings, a warning: the black-and-white material itself traverses the alternative points of temporal inquiry. If you start off with a fever, as I did, you end up certain it’s a brain tumor.

Gherman may be playing with time, but he isn’t playing games with his audience. The confusions are to the point since one of the film’s themes is the psychology of memory. In this instance, memory is hampered not only by the passage of time but also by the persistence of harsh socioeconomic conditions over time, thus eliminating, by implication, the points of normal reference that might better distinguish one time from another. Formally, it’s a sophisticated procedure that Gherman employs, and had I been a tad healthier I might have been fit to meet its challenges. As it is, at times the film’s parallel universes of different times made me hanker for the clarity of the parallel universes in the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999).

There are three principal aspects to the action, in all of which Lapshin is central. One, along the lines of a play by Chekhov, Gorky or O’Neill, is the social interaction of the inhabitants in Lapshin’s flat. The most trenchant character in this environment, who is magnificently played by an actor whose name I wish I could give you, is Khanin, Lapshin’s friend who is half out of his mind following the death of his wife from typhus. Khanin is to this film what Romanych Chebutykin is to The Three Sisters or Harry Hope is to The Iceman Cometh: a touchstone for the artist’s take on the human condition. Khanin is also involved in another aspect of the action. Natasha Adashova, a young member of the troupe that’s in town to play in the local theater, falls in love with Khanin; but Lapshin has fallen in love with Natasha, and his courting her lends the film some comedy. In this frame of reference, Lapshin is gentle and likeable, but he is also, recall, a member of Stalin’s police, and he is anything but gentle in the third principal aspect of action in the film: Lapshin at work. On the job, he is a cold, brutal man whose current assignment is to track down a gang of hoodlums that’s trading in human meat. When, wounded by Lapshin’s gunshot, one of the gang members finally gives himself up pleading “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Dirty Ivan shoots him dead. Lapshin could pull up a chair in the barroom that’s America.

Critics are divided as to what this all means about Ivan Lapshin. Is Gherman whitewashing the Soviet police by not showing them going after ordinary citizens, or is he demonstrating by metaphor state police brutality? But more is involved here than metaphor, for the gangsters are, on the one hand, driven to their viciousness by the dire nature of Soviet economic conditions and, on the other, hunted down and murdered by the police for their viciousness. It’s a losing state of affairs.

Still, Gherman hedges his bets formally. The climactic gunfight at the U.S.S.R. Corral includes extraordinary tracking shots; but their effectiveness would have been that much greater had Gherman earlier not overused his tracking camera, thus robbing the shots of their unique character when they finally arrive at a real purpose and point. Gherman, earlier, tracks simply because he can, and his showiness costs him points at the end. Nor am I as impressed as are others by all the times a tracking camera follows the characters just to reiterate a child’s point of view. There’s a lot of formal messiness in the film before Gherman “pulls it all together.”

Andrei Boltnev is sturdy as Ivan Lapshin. Now, someone tell me, please, who plays Khanin, for he’s the actor who steals the show by giving it a human heart.

CASQUE D’OR (Jacques Becker, 1952)

Jacques Becker himself said that he had the paintings of Pierre Auguste Renoir in mind when he made what is widely regarded as his masterpiece, Casque d’Or (Golden Helmet). The film’s vivid, bustling humanity, such as in scenes where working-class couples dance in close quarters at a riverside dance hall, recall, for instance, Renoir’s 1876 Bal du Moulin de la Galette, or even his 1883 La danse à Bougival, where only a single couple is shown dancing, but the extent to which the pair fill the tall, narrow canvas emphasizes the tightness of the space they are inhabiting. (The latter scene may be less than joyous, for the cramped quality might imply the woman’s feeling of being somewhat trapped—a suggestion that arises from the discrepancy between the man’s ardent posture as he faces her and his partner’s demure expression as she looks away.) Becker’s film also contains overpowering images of beauteous Nature, with which Renoir’s paintings are full. Indeed, the gorgeous opening shot of a recreational row across silken river water recalls Renoir’s 1873 Canotier d’Argenteuil, while the intoxicating lushness of trees recalls, for one, his 1874 Sentier dans les bois. But something struck me as I revisited Casque d’Or, which is set in both Paris and Joinville in the countryside in the summer of 1898. While Renoir’s paintings are bursting with children, there is only one child, in a walk-on, in Becker’s entire film. He is a boy delivering a note—a wan, surly boy a world apart from Renoir’s fresh, warm, vibrant girls. Becker is, I submit, still thinking of Renoir here, but in an ironical point-counterpoint way; for the absence of glowing very young life in Casque d’Or befits a film that ends bleakly with one half of a romantic couple watching, from a hotel window, as the other half is beheaded in the courtyard below for the crime he committed, in a sense, on her behalf.

Pierre Auguste isn’t the only Renoir with whom we associate Jacques Becker. In the thirties Becker was apprenticed to Jean Renoir, Pierre Auguste’s son, and was part of the cooperative, including Renoir, responsible for the brilliant film La vie est à nous (1936), an eclectic, Brechtian advertisement for the French Communist Party on the occasion of upcoming elections. That same year, Renoir made the beautiful Une partie de campagne, from Maupassant, which rivets with exquisite irony a doomed young couple’s one sexual moment together in the country. The film, virtually an hommage by Renoir fils to Renoir père, may also have lighted on Becker’s mind.

In Casque d’Or, the lovers aren’t quite so young as the pair in Une partie de campagne; the fellow has already done a stint in prison. Working as a carpenter, he is now trying hard to “go straight”; he is even engaged to marry the boss’s unattractive daughter. Can bourgeois calcification not be far ahead? Well, yes; for “Georges Manda” (a new identity for what he hoped would be a new, crime-free life) meets Marie and the two fall instantly in lust, in love, in mutual rapture. (Initially, her eyes beckon him when she is dancing with another man!) But the relationship is doomed from the start because of the mob intrigue in which it is embroiled. Marie is being kept (and abused) by Roland, who is a member of a criminal street gang led by Felix Léca, the even more brutal dandy who also covets her. Manda kills Roland is a knife fight. Léca, who has a policeman in his pocket, “informs” on Manda’s friend Raymond, also a gang member, in order to pry Manda away from Marie and into confessing. But before Manda goes to the guillotine, he kills Léca, who has tricked Marie into bed with him on the false promise that he will get Manda free.

The story, based on an actual (and famous) turn-of-the-century murder case, provides a plot whose most interesting matter is the degree of ambiguity that attaches itself to Léca’s motivation at every turn. Here he seems calculating; there, just lucky—until his luck runs out and, a quivering coward, he is cornered and shot down like a dog by Manda. The film implies a connection between Manda’s being able to do this and the loyalty of his mob that Léca sacrifices as a result of how he treats Raymond. Léca, obsessed with trumping Manda over Marie, has blown his own cover.

The protagonist is Marie, whose drive for independence collides with the role that society permits women at the time. As a result, her being a prostitute becomes a kind of metaphor. The agreeable way that Manda treats her, so different from the abusive way other men treat her, links their relationship to that of the John Wayne and Claire Trevor characters in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939); our hearts are broken by Manda’s execution precisely because Manda is the man whom Marie deserves. Moreover, this is the key to understanding Marie’s final gesture, her watching the execution. Manda’s gracious treatment of her requires this repayment of respect on her part. The final look of horror on Marie’s face tells us that Manda’s death doubles as her own.

Simone Signoret (with her “helmet” of golden tresses) is superb as Marie. It is, along with her work in Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1958), certainly her most celebrated role. Here is a quintessential portrait of a strong-willed, feisty, highly intelligent woman who, in order to survive, must capitulate to convention even as she resolutely chafes against it. Georges Sadoul refers to hers as a “complex and sensuous role” that finds Signoret, “in the full bloom of her beauty,” giving “the performance of her career.” Hear, hear.

Let me add a symbolical wrinkle to the text of this extraordinary film. I detect a submerged resonance. Becker’s mentor, Renoir, reappeared (from the U.S.) after the war not quite the same man that Becker remembered. Renoir’s politics had shifted to the more conservative side of the ledger, although his love of humanity, inconsistently, continued unabated. A number of things connect Becker’s film to Renoir. One is the use of the same actor, Gaston Modot, who played the gamekeeper in Renoir’s masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (1939); in Casque d’Or, interestingly, Modot plays the man to whom, as a carpenter, Manda is apprenticed—the man who is slated to become his father-in-law. Too, Marguerite Renoir edited Casque d’Or; Jean’s wife, Marguerite had also edited Une partie de campagne and Rules of the Game. But, above all, perhaps, is Simone Signoret’s Marie’s resemblance to subjects of Renoir’s father’s paintings. Isn’t it possible, whether consciously or otherwise, that Becker is chiding his former mentor with his political retreat? Isn’t it possible that Marie, at some level, represents Renoir’s original inspiration, which derived, at least in important part, from Renoir’s father’s apprehension of the world? Isn’t it possible that Manda’s execution and Marie’s attendant horror and grief all represent the world’s loss of the Jean Renoir of the 1930s, when Renoir lighted the path for a kid in his twenties, Becker, by which to pursue true cinema? “I am going your way,” Becker may be saying to Renoir, “but you are not, O my spiritual father, who have lost your way!”

The next time, view Becker’s film through the prism of these suggestions, no matter how many other times Casque d’Or already has broken your heart. You may find, as a result, all the Renoir references, père and fils, coming together to a point of greater poignancy than ever before they’ve come together for you.