LE BEAU MARIAGE (Eric Rohmer, 1981)

The second of Eric Rohmer’s six “Comedies and Proverbs,” Le beau mariage is the most brilliant comedy of the 1980s.
     Fed up with his wife and children phoning him, art student Sabine dumps Simon. “I’m getting married,” she announces to Clarisse; “It’s an idea!” Clarisse has an unmarried cousin, Edmond. Introducing them, Clarisse announces, “You make a great couple.” Clarisse indeed convinces Sabine that Edmond is interested in her, and Sabine pursues the busy lawyer. Sabine wants Edmond to desire her, to suffer. “Is that necessary?” her mother, who works in a bank, asks. After she meets this potential son-in-law at her daughter’s birthday party, she pronounces him “too grand,” warning Sabine, “Don’t get too worked up over him.” However, she can see that Sabine already is. Meanwhile, Edmond is also being tactful by declining to declare his lack of romantic interest in Sabine. Cornered, he finally tells her, “I’m not available, even as a friend,” but does he know his own mind? Why when dumping her does he tell her, “I’m attracted to your type of woman. That’s why I must defend myself against you”?! A lot of male egotism tumbles out when he adds that he should have been permitted to think of marriage first—or “at least at the same time”! “He’s not my type,” Sabine announces to Clarisse; her romance with marriage is over. On a train one day she sits opposite a boy, and each steals looks at the other. At the beginning of the film, on the train, the same boy noticed her with interest, but, en route to Simon, Sabine didn’t notice him.
     “Can any of us refrain from building castles in Spain?” (La Fontaine). Perhaps not; but we may finally settle for something closer to home.

UNDER THE ROOFS OF PARIS (René Clair, 1930)

“[A] redoubtable monster, an unnatural creation, thanks to which the screen will become poor theater.” Thus René Clair described sound as it applies to cinema. Clair was right, of course, but he was also adaptable; “[sound] . . . released his imagination,” film historian Eric Rhode has written. Clair’s first sound film, Sous les toits de Paris, a musical of sorts, charms with its populism and tenderness.
     Actually, Roofs co-mingles sound and silence; the technical difficulties sound imposed helped generate a more captivating result. Correlative to its double nature, if you will, is its location of working-class Parisians under the roofs of their tenements and in the streets. People require more space than modest apartments can provide; but sometimes the intimacy of a public place’s doorway suits romance better than the crowded bar and dance floor inside.
     Albert, a street singer, works partly in the street, singing his songs, drawing crowds, and coins for his sheet music; but he composes these tunes indoors. The tune that gives the film its title unites crowd members but also those who listen from their windows; weaving in and out of the film, sung by this soul or another, it comes to embody the spirit of working-class Paris, its romance, dreams and implicit relief from reality.
     That title, consisting of one prepositional phrase modifying another, is correlative to the film’s distancing strategy, its tendency to generalize on the basis of individual instances of humanity. We hear the tunes, but often we glimpse dwellers indoors as the camera ascends or descends the outside of tenement walls. Albert is both inside and outside his own life, losing his Romanian beloved, Pola, to a friend when he is wrongly imprisoned.
     The comedy of life elicits a shrug and reconciliation.

KING LEAR (Peter Brook, 1971)

Shakespeare’s two greatest plays are Hamlet and King Lear. The latter overflows with humanity that is contextualized by a void, a stormy, rudderless universe. Born in Poland, literary critic Jan Kott proffered a daringly modern interpretation of the play in his 1964 book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. Reading the seventeenth-century play through Samuel Beckett, Kott dispenses with the overflowing humanity and concentrates on the bleak universe; the title of the relevant chapter is “King Lear or Endgame.” This cold, nihilistic look at Lear, intended to clarify aspects of the play at the expense of others, inspired Peter Brook, who had already directed a Brechtian stage version, to make this minimalist film, in black and white, in Denmark.
     It’s an impressive piece of work, but a hollow, ultra-violent one; rather than portraying the cruelty of Lear’s daughters, and sons-in-law, to their father, and the cruelty of others, Brook’s film is cruel itself, such as when it shows close-up the punitive plucking out of an eye, and this after teasing the audience into thinking it won’t have to see this—a shot corresponding to what would be for a theatrical audience a considerably more distanced view. Brook’s Lear has its defenders, most of whom prize cleverness over genuine expressiveness in art.
     Paul Scofield, with his thin, whiny and impeccably modulated voice, is a joke as Lear. In this inapt performance there is none of the messy, suffering, even childish humanity that is the role’s hallmark. Irene Worth is frighteningly vicious as Goneril, which is okay by me, and her suicide—she breaks open her head on a rock—stuns. Alan Webb is a good Gloucester, and Jack MacGowran a sublime Fool. It unhappily follows that a Lear without the King is also one lacking a recognizable Cordelia.
     Pity.