Tavernier Goes South

In 2007 veteran French director Bertrand Tavernier embarked on an economical forty-one-day shoot in New Iberia, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans. The film was In the Electric Mist, starring Tommy Lee Jones and John Goodman, based on the novel In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead by James Lee Burke. Although Tavernier has visited the USA many times, speaks fluent English, loves westerns and is the author of the books 50 Ans de Cinéma Américain and Amis Américains, a collection of interviews with American film-makers, this was only the second film he had made in the USA. By all accounts everyone enjoyed working with the genial Frenchman. As he did with Dirk Bogarde in Daddy Nostalgie, Tavernier let Tommy Lee Jones write some of his dialogue. “Only once did we quarrel,” says the director. “He came up with the idea of inventing new relationships between the characters and I threatened to quit the film if he pursued this. But in general we got along very well and his work greatly enriched the scenario.”

In post-production, however, there seems to have been a bitter dispute between Tavernier and the American producer, Michael Fitzgerald, and film editor, Roberto Silvi. This was not to be the all-too-familiar story of the studio butchering the director’s film, as Columbia did with Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, MGM with the same director’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, RKO with Orson Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons and Universal with Welles’s Touch of Evil. This time Tavernier was a partner and was determined not to be another victim of the Hollywood system. The dispute took nearly a year to resolve. Finally two versions were released—one edited by Silvi supervised by Fitzgerald, the other by Tavernier aided by Thierry Derocles. The former, running 101 minutes, was to be released in America only; Tavernier retained the rights for the rest of the world for his 117-minute director’s cut. This version premiered at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, later opening in Paris where it was well reviewed. It also won the Grand Prix at the first Festival de Film Policier de Cognac. The 101-minute producer’s cut was never screened theatrically in America and was released direct to DVD.

So where did this leave Australian admirers of Tavernier’s work? I ordered what turned out to be the producer’s cut from Amazon.com. It seemed to me, as Variety put it, to have “[plot] ends lying loose everywhere”. Then I discovered that Madman Video Australia had bought the rights to the director’s cut and released it on Blu-ray; this is the version I’ll be reviewing here.

The film opens with a slow pan across a lake to a crime scene on the shore as Tommy Lee Jones, playing the main protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, says in voice-over: 

In ancient times people put stones on the graves of their dead so their souls would not wander and afflict the living. I’d always thought this to be the practice of superstitious and primitive people but I was about to learn that the dead can hover on the edge of our vision with the density and luminosity of mist and their claim on the earth can be as legitimate and tenacious as our own. 

Although these lines are not in the original they are true to James Lee Burke’s vision. The film uses much of the novel’s dialogue, which plays very well, and the images are a faithful translation of the book’s lyrical descriptions. Tavernier has always seen the camera as a character in his films’ narratives. Here the visuals embody the detective Robicheaux’s experiences as he investigates first the sadistic murder of a “hapless fatally beautiful” young prostitute; then the lynching of a black man that he witnessed as a boy forty years ago. Interwoven with these cases is mafia boss Julie “Baby Feet” Balboni (John Goodman) who is backing a movie being shot in New Iberia: “I speak on the phone regularly with people you read about in Entertainment Weekly.” Goodman’s Baby Feet is not quite the character in the book, but the actor captures unerringly the repulsive panache described by Burke. Above all the portrayal reflects the author’s treatment of the Mafia. According to Tavernier, Burke 

has a very precise and very real vision of the Mafia. No glamour. The first time we encounter the principal Mafioso in the film it is by a motel swimming pool with plastic chairs … no big deluxe Florida hotel. So too his [Baby Feet’s] manner is horribly cheap and vulgar. Burke says all the Mafiosi he ever encountered had no taste and dressed disgustingly. They were enormously stupid people. 

There is also a moving portrayal of Robicheaux’s friendship with an alcoholic actor, Elrod T. Sykes (Peter Sarsgaard) and his partner Kelly Drummond (Kelly Macdonald). “He needs an AA friend or he’s not going to make it,” Robicheaux tells his wife Bootsie (Mary Steenburgen). This sub-plot adds yet another layer to the world-weary cop’s character and is skilfully incorporated into the ghost story. Like Robicheaux, Sykes sees the shade of Confederate General John Bell Hood and his men in the misty Louisiana Bayou. In both the novel and the film this was a startling innovation. Gritty films noir don’t usually involve the supernatural. But here it works. There really was a John Bell Hood who came from Louisiana. The general was at Gettysburg and commanded the Confederate troops in Georgia against Sherman. Hood was terribly wounded, losing the use of an arm and a leg, so it is historically accurate to have him using a crutch as he does in the film. It is also in character for him to urge the detective to keep his integrity and warn against “venal and evil men”. Tavernier draws the line at having the general’s crutch trip up the villain in the climax. It is a nice moment in the book but probably wouldn’t have worked with film viewers. The ghosts are employed by Burke and Tavernier as a symbol of the way the past—specifically the War Between the States—shapes the present. In a crucial scene the old-school businessman, Twinky LeMoyne (Ned Beatty), begs Dave Robicheaux to “let go of the past … we are different people now”. Dave replies, “We are the same people … the best way to let go of the past is by addressing it.”

Although the book was published in 1993, Tavernier believed the film should include some reference to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, after which Louisiana seemed to Tavernier like a Third World country, reminding him of Cambodia, where he had shot Holy Lola in 2004. There are some powerful travelling shots of lines of ruined houses, and Bootsie is raising money for the victims. Again this reflected the concerns of the author. When he was conferring with Tavernier, James Lee Burke was putting the finishing touches to The Tin Roof Blowdown, a Dave Robicheaux novel, set during the hurricane. 

In the Electric Mist is unlike most contemporary American films. The pace is leisurely, with the emphasis on character. Scenes are played out in full, enabling the viewer to appreciate every nuance of the finely etched performances. Care has gone into recreating the New Orleans accents. John Goodman, who comes from the South, told Tavernier In the Electric Mist was the most accurate film about the region he had seen.

Tavernier’s regular collaborator, cinematographer Bruno de Keyser, captures some haunting sequences of the Louisiana Bayou. There is also the rare pleasure of seeing an American subject treated with the kind of richly detailed mise-en-scène a John Ford or an Anthony Mann might have employed fifty years ago. Performances are uniformly excellent, with some delightful contributions by non-professionals such as singer Buddy Guy as Hogman and independent film-maker John Sayles playing the director of the film crew shooting in New Iberia with Baby Feet’s money. Tommy Lee Jones has played investigators of various kinds, but good as his work in films like The Fugitive has been, his performance here has a detailed richness he has not achieved before. His sensitive delivery of the voice-over narrations based on Burke’s eloquent prose deftly complements the film’s sumptuous visuals.

Even briefly comparing the director’s cut with the American version provides a disturbing insight into artistic mediocrity. To be sure, the shorter version moves at a faster pace and the editing is reasonably competent. But nearly every grace note illuminating character, together with the individual shots that heighten the drama and make the interactions between characters more powerful, have been eliminated. What is really disturbing is that the American producer must have thought this truncated version was better. Tavernier has to date refused to comment on this travesty of his work, saying only, “Look at the two versions and make up your own mind.” He has of course won the kind of victory that a Peckinpah or a Welles could only dream about. M. Tavernier is to be congratulated. 

Neil McDonald writes: The comments by Bertrand Tavernier come from “Seeing Double in the Electric Mist” by Chris Mosey in Cineaste online.