THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA (Christian-Jacque, 1948)

Christian-Jacque’s The Charterhouse of Parma (La chartreuse de Parme), from Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), is the sort of film I should intensely dislike. Narrative by virtue of the novel on which it is based, it proceeds by scenes rather than by shots. It is long because it needs to tell its story; its nearly three-hour length isn’t made necessary by any thematic development. The film, moreover, represents that “Tradition of Quality” in French cinema that the nouvelle vague would blow out of the culture-vulture skies, transforming world cinema. Yet I do like the film, if only as a romantic entertainment rather than as a work of art. It’s absorbing, at times (such as during the hero’s daring escape from prison) thrilling, and, especially towards the end, very touching. It isn’t one long snooze, which is how I find Claude Autant-Lara’s The Red and the Black (Rouge et Noir, 1954), also from Stendhal.

It’s a far better film than Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming et al., 1939), with which it has things in common: narrative contrivance; doomed romance against a vast historical backdrop. It is better, even, than Mervyn LeRoy’s Anthony Adverse (1936), from Hervey Allen’s pseudo-Stendhalian novel, with which it has more in common, including the Napoleonic times, and the theme of tormented love and renunciation. It is certainly worth noting in passing that Stendhal’s novel is the literary achievement that Margaret Mitchell’s and Allen’s novels are decidedly not. (By dint of its style virtually unreadable, Gone with the Wind is trash, not to mention racist trash.) Both Balzac and Henry James considered La chartreuse de Parme a masterpiece, and André Gide adjudged it the greatest French novel ever written. However, be forewarned: the historical and political complexities to which the 1839 novel owes its exalted reputation aren’t in evidence in the film. Romance and Italian intrigue are pretty much all we get. Indeed, Fabrice’s (that is, Fabrizio’s) monastic days and death after he and his beloved separate for good are also dropped from the film.

What do I like then about the film? For one thing, it isn’t sentimental or moralistic—a hard thing not to be when its centerpiece of love, between Marquis Fabrice (that is, Fabrizio) del Dongo and Clelia Conti, is utterly doomed by the conventions of the day, not really by the oath that Clelia makes to the Virgin Mary to give up this great love of her life if only she will grant her wish for him to escape his cell. If the film had railed against these conventions, the result would have been sentimental; if the film had self-righteously supported these conventions, the result would have been moralistic. Either approach would have made the film intolerable for me. But Christian-Jacque instead takes in the time observantly and thoughtfully so that we can consider the fact of these conventions without indulging our own feelings about them one way or the other. Given the potential here for rank manipulation, I’m glad that the filmmaker pursued his unhappy plot with such calm and tact.

This is more than the absence of a negative. Christian-Jacque has made a reasonable as well as a dashing film. However, even more decisive to my enjoyment of it are the performances by Gérard Philipe and Renée Faure as Fabrice and Clelia. Philipe, here at the height of his sensitive boyish beauty, is the soul of romance as the young aristocrat who enlists in Napoleon’s army in time for the horrors of the Battle of Waterloo. To be sure, more brilliant performances by this wonderful artist were yet to come (Modigliani, in Jacques Becker’s 1957 Montparnasse 19; Valmont, in Roger Vadim’s Les liaisons dangereuses 1960), but already Philipe is an actor of great charm and perception—and such passion. The moment when Fabrice learns that Clelia hasn’t stopped loving him is tremendously moving. (Were it not for Olivier’s Hamlet, I would name Philipe 1948’s best actor for his Fabrice/Fabrizio del Dongo.) Who is this Renée Faure who is so perfect as the pure, spunky Clelia, whose father, General Conti, marries her off to a much older man, who is rich, and arranges for Fabrice’s recapture and (he hopes) death? If I’ve seen her before, I can’t recall, but she is heavenly here, her close-set eyes perpetual testimony to the steadfastness of her Catholic faith and the one thing that trumps this: her love for her Fabrizio.

I must say, in passing, that María Casares is disappointingly undefined as Gina Petranera, the Duchess of Sanseverina, who is in love with her nephew, Fabrice. Betwixt Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945) and Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1949), Casares is weak throughout.

Christian-Jacque, though, realizes a host of memorable scenes, including one in a church, with Schubert’s “Ave Maria” on the soundtrack (and as heartbreakingly beautiful as ever), where Clelia, as lovers sometimes do, senses her Fabrizio’s silent presence behind her. In this scene, and in nearly every other one as well, Christian-Jacque benefits from the contribution made by his black-and-white cinematographers, among them, Anchise Brizzi, Aldo Graziati (G. R. Aldo) and Nicolas Hayer. La chartreuse de Palme is in fact the most gorgeously photographed film I have ever seen, with its sumptuous shadows, and soft light that in church truly seems to come from God. No wonder the film took the prize for cinematography at the Locarno International Film Festival.

Lovely lighting, however, is no substitute for rigorous, meaningful mise-en-scène. Christian-Jacque has come up with good scenes, not good shots, and what striking shots there are, such as a traveling shot through trees overflowing with blossoms, are clichés. The film of Stendhal’s novel is a thing of feelings, not ideas—moods and impressions. One should watch it, therefore, expecting it to be what it is, despite the title. It’s a sad, simple story well told.

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LES DIABOLIQUES (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1954)

We change in many ways over time, and sometimes a film with which we are familiar strikes us very differently than it once did. I recall a time when I didn’t much like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s celebrated thriller Les diaboliques (Diabolique, in the U.S.; more accurately, Fiends in Great Britain). Eventually, I gave it a grudging respect but found the film cold, manipulative, tricky. It scared the heck out of me—the film still does—but it seemed to be wanting of some humanity. The older I get, the more this impression fades. A profound meditation on the impact of mortal awareness on the human condition, Les diaboliques now moves me more than it chills me. It’s a trenchant, haunting film.

Clouzot’s history prior to making the film—he was in his late forties at the time—is troubled. Plagued by poor health since childhood, Clouzot was unable to pursue the naval career he wanted. Instead, he studied law and politics as preparation for entering the diplomatic service. His first job, as secretary to a politician, disappointed, motivating another career change; now he would be a scenarist. His scriptwriting, however, was interrupted by a tubercular condition that forced him into a sanatorium for four years, during which time he read voraciously. In 1938, he resumed his career, and he made his first feature film—he had made short films even before his confinement—in 1941. At this time the French film industry was officially in the hands of the Nazis, who were occupying much of France. Finding the provincial suspiciousness and other elements in his second film, the classic poison-pen melodrama Le corbeau (1943), demoralizing, the Nazis halted his career; the French themselves had their own misgivings, suspecting Clouzot of having collaborated with the Germans. Thus the interruption of his work continued even after the Liberation. In 1947, officially exonerated but under a lingering cloud of political suspicion, he returned to filmmaking. Soon after, respect and acclaim finally arrived: the best director prize at Venice for Quai des Orfèvres (1947), the top prize at Venice for Manon (1948), his adaptation of L’Abbé Antoine-François Prévost’s novel L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, and the top prize at Cannes for his masterpiece, Le salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear, 1953), a viscerally exciting, existential and fatalistic adventure addressing the dire human consequences of an American oil business’s exploitative intrusion into a South American town. A principal member of the cast would take on an even larger role in Les diaboliques: Clouzot’s Brazilian-born wife, Véra Clouzot.

Clouzot’s most famous film internationally, Les diaboliques is one of a handful of works—others are The Wages of Fear, Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954), Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956) and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959)—that generated the “art-house” crowd of U.S. movie patrons during the Eisenhower years.

Written by Clouzot and his Wages collaborator, Jérôme Géronimi, the script is based on the novel La femme qui n’était pas by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who would also write the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock based his Vertigo (1958). Yet, because of its reputation as a shudder-fest with suggestions of Grand Guignol theater, the Hitchcock film that Les diaboliques is more often identified as anticipating is Psycho (1960). Actually, I do not recall a single drop of blood in Clouzot’s film, but psychological human torture abounds. (Petit Guignol then?) Clouzot’s realization of his and Géronimi’s script, however, achieves a far more humane and poetic result than all this suggests.

The setting is a provincial boarding school for boys. The owner is a former Brazilian heiress; running the school is Christina’s husband, Michel Delasalle. Michel has apparently only recently ended an extramarital affair with one of the teachers, Nicole; matter-of-factly Christina and Nicole discuss how they both despise Michel, who openly abuses Christina both verbally and at times physically. Christina, devout, will not divorce Michel, nor will her pride allow her to abandon the school that her money largely keeps afloat. Nicole convinces her that they should murder Michel, during school vacation, in a complicated plan that will conceal their guilt. They drug Michel, drown him in a tub of water, and dispose of the corpse. Back at school, a student explains that the headmaster has ordered his punishment; other signs point to Michel’s having returned from the dead, being impossibly alive and taunting the homicidal co-conspirators. Garbicz and Klinowski have written (humorously, one hopes), “the person who reveals the totally unexpected final twist to someone who has not seen the film deserves a fate worse than murder,” and indeed the film itself closes by entreating the audience not to disclose the now-famous resolution. (The ads for Psycho would revive this kind of plea.) Regrettably, one can’t seriously discuss a film while withholding so significant a plot detail. It turns out that Michel and Nicole, lovers still, have concocted the whole scheme of feigning Michel’s murder in order to frighten to death Christina, who has a heart condition; that way they may stay together and take over the school. Their plan succeeds—up to a point; Christina has a fatal heart attack when Michel’s corpse rises from Christina’s bathtub and removes his pupil-less eyeballs. Inspector Fichet, who has been investigating Michel’s disappearance, arrives not quite in the nick of time and arrests the pair of culprits.

The briskness of Fichet’s appearance at the end, at night, and his failure to prevent Christina’s death have led some, including Roger Ebert, to find fault here. Christina dies only to generate a horrific scene, because in reality Fichet should have interceded sooner in order to prevent this crime. Nonsense. Fichet’s a-little-late intercession proves him an (unwitting) executor of justice. Christina, after all, was perfectly willing to kill her spouse; whether she actually did so, she certainly believed she had helped commit the murder, as her pathetic attempts to pass all blame onto Nicole expose. Nicole professes atheism; it is the devout Catholic Christina, who believes in Hell, who violates her religious principles in order to kill. Thus she reveals the vileness of her breeding and wealthy station; the public act of divorce would lead to her being excommunicated from her Church, but, on the other hand, if she can get away with secret murder . . . . The scene of Christina’s heart attack, gruesome and enormously painful to watch, represents the “just desserts” of a criminal’s mental guilt. The ending’s moral correctness has been somewhat obscured, though, by the fate of the actress playing her: Véra Clouzot herself died of a heart attack shortly after, in 1960.

One might accuse Clouzot of extreme callousness were it not for the fact that, at least on one level, Christina’s miserable health is a projection of his own. Clouzot even more than she may have felt guilty for “crimes” he, like her, did not commit but considered, during the war, in order to prevail in his chosen umpteenth profession. In his case, the guilt initially assigned to him by his countrymen, because tied up with issues of his decency and patriotism, may have induced a moroseness that his poor health exacerbated. Certainly no sensitive commentator has missed the degree to which seediness and decay describe the boarding school in Les diaboliques, both in terms of its atmosphere and objective reality. One suspects Michel of badly mismanaging the school’s finances, if not of outright embezzlement, since the input of his wife’s money seems to do little to help the school, which is somewhat in disrepair, and where fish no longer fresh is served at dinner. All this contributes to a portrait of the teaching staff as professional misfits, people who would prefer happier lives doing something else elsewhere, and their fear of and contempt for Michel are evident. They are indeed marginal individuals, poorly paid and in no way extended esteem or often, even, courtesy; Michel publicly begrudges a faculty member a second glass of wine at dinner! Finally, the teachers’ acute sense of their disadvantaged socioeconomic status is exacerbated by the wealthy background of many of their students. For the adults, the school is a repository of their failure, weakness, disgrace; this is even true for Christina, who, despite her financial resources and elitist background, is treated like dirt by her spouse—and all the more so now that he is setting up his plot against her with Nicole.

Indeed, much of the film’s elastic poignancy derives from the contrast and collision between the spirited, rambunctious and, in some cases, ripely pubescent boys and their worn, somewhat dissipated school masters, those on the verge of life’s possibilities and those rather past such possibilities. It was Truffaut who said that one shouldn’t make a film about children without loving them and without using the camera to express that love. Children are cherished in Les diaboliques—at least boys are—to the same extent that they are not, are in fact schematized, in René Clément’s Jeux Inderdits (Forbidden Games, 1952); their behavioral richness, glimpsed and gleaned by an almost documentary camera, in the midst of such a frankly contrived murder plot involving some of their elders contributes to a heartrending metaphor for this contrast, if you will, between the purely living and, in effect, the living dead. It is against this human backdrop of time waiting and time having passed that the visible rejuvenation that Michel and Nicole briefly experience when they embrace and kiss just after Christina’s horrible death discharges its emotional power. This is a film about those whose “second chance” at love and life is measured against all the activity, vibrancy and potential of the young. In a way, this “second chance” is like a “second wind” whose labored quality discloses the mortal awareness freighting it.

Another contributor to this pervasive sense in the film of mature humanity’s mortal self-awareness is the poetry of evanescence that Clouzot seamlessly weaves into an otherwise sturdily presented film. A motor vehicle’s tire disturbing while passing through a puddle; the reflection of passing trees on the windshield of another vehicle; the sheer playful energy of boys as they make their way down a hall; Michel’s ambiguous photographic image—is it there or not?—in an upstairs window overlooking the school grounds: these and like touches accumulate almost into a reverie of life implicitly projected by those who only dimly recall life. Assisting Clouzot in this and all other aspects of his vision is his superb black-and-white cinematographer, Armand Thirard, whose poetic airiness in the country in Julien Duvivier’s Poil de Carôtte (1932) resonates beautifully in filmgoing memory.

Finally, the boy who insists he has seen Michel after the latter is presumably absent and then as ardently insists he has seen, alive, Christina after we know she has died of a heart attack is not, as I once thought, a coy, crude and clever trick. The boy is not lying at all; rather, he is bodying forth a degree of possibility, even supernatural possibility, that existence at the dead-end of life is no longer privy to. In this and other contexts, one must note at least in passing the symbolic weight of Christina’s name; sacrificial and redemptive for Michel and Nicole, Christina stores a bit of magic for the schoolboy whose vision of her “risen” is a deeply touching chord on which to close the film. Goodness knows, the emotional depth of this film is something that eluded me for decades.

The acting is superb. The children are wonderful, wonderful. Paul Meurisse and Simone Signoret, as Michel and Nicole, rightly take precedence over Véra Clouzot’s Christina, but not once do any of the three strike a false note—a considerable achievement given the trickiness of the plot. Signoret in particular shines, and at no time more so than when Nicole, seated, still tenuously connected to the possibility of younger days, using her shoes and feet and not her hands, takes off her shoes and flexes her stocking feet, the camera startlingly dipping to catch this instance of fleeting relief from the world’s weariness. The tactful way that Nicole manipulates Christina’s unconscious sexual attraction to her constitutes another front on which Signoret’s acting delights. Finally, Charles Vanel—Javert to Harry Baur’s Jean Valjean in Raymond Bernard’s Les misérables (1934), and Jo, the fish out of water, the mobster panic-stricken in an alien milieu, in The Wages of Fear—is sly, wry and just a bit wicked as Inspector Fitchet, the character that inspired Peter Falk’s Columbo on U.S. TV.

Les diaboliques won the Prix Louis Delluc as 1954’s best film in France and, in the U.S., the New York Film Critics Circle award as 1955’s best foreign-language film—the latter a judgment that surely wouldn’t hold today in light of the fact that The Wages of Fear was released earlier in New York City that same year.

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BLAISE PASCAL (Roberto Rossellini, 1971)

“[Pascal] was a very boring man, who never made love in his life.” — Roberto Rossellini
     One of the most beautiful of Roberto Rossellini’s unsentimental, highly analytic, deeply moving present-tense histories, Blaise Pascal examines seventeenth-century Europe from the perspective of a scientist, philosopher and mathematician who helped change the world by advancing the cause of reason. Among his many accomplishments, Pascal invented the mechanical adding machine.
     The film begins matter-of-factly, in the middle of a conversation in the street, and ends on the threshold of eternity. Pascal’s painfully difficult life ended before he was forty.
     The first movement is extraordinary. Pascal is a young man under the wing of his father, a Parisian official. Pascal’s father is dedicated to reason. He is one of the judges at the trial of a maidservant who has been accused of witchcraft. Stubborn, she would not confess to her pact with Satan until her legs were broken; she is in court on a stretcher. Badgered, she declares, “I’ll confess to everything,” meaning, whatever charge is leveled against her. Her wish now is to be burned so that she might reclaim her soul. Rossellini’s method enables us—in my case, for the first time—to penetrate a facet of the establishment mindset from the inside, as well as be objective; we get to see irrationality as it is most rationally pursued—by men, that is, who cannot imagine their own irrationality. Pascal, who is sitting in, remarks to his father afterwards he is bewildered by what he saw in the courtroom.
     Pascal’s life is consumed by his struggle to know God. But how? “To penetrate infinity,” he tells Descartes, “we need a multitude of methods.” Subtly, mystically lit, Pascal’s death scene intimates Rossellini’s, if not God’s, mercy across time—a sober, stunning, luminous passage.

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HUKKLE (György Pálfi, 2002)

I am underwhelmed by György Pálfi’s Hungarian 2002 Hukkle. The experimental nature of some of the film’s elements does not redeem the whole.

I love a good bucolic. (If Albee in Virginia Woolf? can use the word bucolic as a noun, so can I.) And I’m fascinated by films composed of instances of people and animals engaged in different kinds of work. There are moments of the film that indeed win me over. One such consists of a mountain-climbing explorer, a ladybug, patiently making its way up and down a girl’s fingers. There are also moments that disgust me. I hope never again to see a closeup of dangling testicles as its owner here, a pig, is prodded along by a farmer.

But the thing that threw me out of the movie and forced me to question all those who have lent their voices to the chorus of praise, not to mention the festival prizes, that have attended this allegedly brilliant work of art, is the corpse in the stream. In the film’s thematic context, the implication is that it, too, is doing its job, its work, which apparently is to pose a puzzle for us and the patient, ladybug-like investigation by the police detective. To me, this is sophomoric cleverness, inhuman, cold, ugly. What avails a film such gorgeous color cinematography when there is this degree of heartlessness at its core?

INNOCENCE UNPROTECTED (Dušan Makavejev, 1968)

Dušan Makavejev had already made one of the most brilliant political films of the 1960s and a particular favorite of mine, Man Is Not a Bird (Covek nije tica, 1965), when he created perhaps his strangest film, Innocence Unprotected (Nevinost bez zaštite, 1968), a collage of various materials, most of them either contemporary or hailing from a quarter-century earlier, during the Nazi occupation of Belgrade, Makavejev’s birth city. These materials are both fictional and documentary. However, the distancing and editing techniques Makavejev employs transform everything into a nonfictional element as each piece sounds out those juxtaposed to it, and these juxtaposed elements sound out the pieces flanking it, with the originally fictional pieces becoming something else in the process: a documentary consideration of what wasn’t in the first instance documentary. Although (like many Makavejev films) at times gross, Innocence Unprotected is one of the most purely cerebral cinematic exercises I have encountered. It’s a legitimate puzzle, not a manipulative, condescending trick-film like Memento or The Sixth Sense.

One of its materials, cut, rearranged and noncontinuously presented, is a whole other film: Nevinost bez zaštite—a 1942 film of the same title as Makavejev’s by and starring Dragoljub Aleksic, a famous Serbian athlete and celebrity. (Some of the shots of him flexing and popping his muscles, especially in the present, and in closeup, require a strong stomach to take, as do other shots of him testing the strength of his teeth, such as when he bites a chain in half.) Historically, this is alleged to be the first Yugoslavian film, but it has eluded official recognition for having been made during the German occupation. At his postwar trial, though, Aleksic insisted that he made the film without German knowledge, much less support, and indeed the Germans themselves had banned the film as deleterious. Aleksic was exonerated. The film itself is trite and melodramatic (and clumsily framed and shot) but isn’t the last word on itself. Makavejev supplies this, subtitling his film A New Version of a Very Good Old Film. Serbian himself, Makavejev isn’t functioning here merely as a nationalistic archivist, however; his own film unexpectedly contextualizes Aleksic’s, as we shall see.

Although it ends with the romantic clinch that presumably also ended Aleksic’s film, Makavejev’s film begins in the present by introducing members of the film’s cast, crew and production staff, including Aleksic. This material is shot in color, while the Aleksic film is in black and white. However, Makavejev applies color tinting to frames of the Aleksic film, at least at one point alternating between black and white and tinted series of frames, creating the effect of a flashing traffic light. He also applies tinting to some instances of other of the film’s materials—materials that interrupt the continuity of Makavejev’s presentation of Aleksic’s 1942 material. Other materials that the film employs include ones contemporaneous with the Aleksic film: newsreel snippets; German propaganda film snippets; newspaper headlines. Elements of different materials are sometimes edited to create the illusion of brief continuity between disparate materials. Throughout, disparate elements either fuse or collide with one another, establishing coordinates of implied unity and explicit disunity, the latter correlative to bombardment—military warfare, including against civilians. (Newsreel shots of a bombed-out Belgrade are trenchant.) Aleksic’s film is escapist, apolitical, but Makavejev, whose cinema is never so, pursues the political context of Aleksic’s film that Aleksic himself avoided or ignored. Film critics David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson—in a joint educational project for McGraw-Hill available on the Internet—identify this as Aleksic’s own innocence in failing to appreciate the danger from Nazis that he courted by his personal filmmaking, an issue made clear by other Makavejev materials stressing Nazi atrocities. This irony of the political grip in which political innocence or apathy sometimes obliviously unfolds would become the unifying theme of Bob Fosse’s 1972 film Cabaret.

But Aleksic himself is a dangerous man, at least a dangerous example, Makavejev’s film implies. One of the other materials Makavejev employs is snippets from Grigori Aleksandrov’s Circus (1936), a haunting anti-racist Soviet musical, here rendered in sepia. (This was my paternal grandmother’s favorite film.) Makavejev relates the human cannonball in this film (played by Aleksandrov’s wife, Lyubov Orlova) with certain of performer Aleksic’s own stunts, and the circus atmosphere of the Stalinist film merges with the atmosphere surrounding the many clips, past and present, of Aleksic performing various feats of strength and death-defying acrobatics. This is the point: inspired by the Aleksandrov film, Aleksic invented a cannon for expelling performers, one of whom was killed in the act of performing the stunt. Makavejev informs us that Aleksic was blamed for this death. The associative satire here interrelates Soviet influence and disaster, becoming an implicit contemporary (circa 1968) commentary. Yugoslavia, under Tito, did much more to resist Soviet influence than did other East European Soviet satellites, and Makavejev implies—again, I must say, associatively, by the collision of elements he presents—that “innocence” of politics, whether Nazi, Communist or any other politics, comes at a price. Aleksic is a sort of hero in Makavejev’s film, but he is not the hero of the film. Rather, the “hero” is we, who, taking Makavejev’s point to head and heart, reject Aleksic’s example and pursue a more politically aware course.

Formally, the success of this film primarily resides in the fact that the collage Makavejev has wrought transforms everything in it, including pieces from two fictional films, Aleksandrov’s and Aleksic’s, into documentary materials. The implication is obvious: within an analytical context, anything can become “documentary.” It goes without saying that all the film’s distancing techniques—among them, the shifts in kinds of materials, the disparate length of elements (some, quick inserts, like bullets ripping the continuity), the shift between color and black and white and, within black and white, the shift to color tinting—direct us as audience to examine the analytical nature of Makavejev’s film as a whole. Innocence Unprotected thus emerges as something else besides: a veritable “textbook” on how to “read” a film. This may be why Bordwell and Thompson chose it as one of the films to analyze (which they do with greater specificity than I do here) for young people learning about film.

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