Two French Masters

Those of us who follow from Australia the work of the French director Bertrand Tavernier are frustrated—with ourselves. After years of complaining that the great director’s work was not being seen theatrically in this country, when in 2014 his latest film, the political satire Quay d’Orsay, was released in “certain cinemas” we missed it—or at least I did. It’s now called The French Minister, and I was looking under the original title. I have since discovered that there were reviews in the Sydney Morning Herald and on SBS which also escaped me. Those “certain cinemas” don’t seem to have given The French Minister anything like a long run, even though the film was a hit in France, where it won two Césars. But back then I should have been urging you to view the film theatrically, where Tavernier’s commanding exploitation of the wide screen can be seen at its best. Still, it is now readily available on DVD and, if anything, its satire is even more relevant in 2016 than it was eighteen months ago. What is more, when The French Minister was screened in America some good critics managed to get Tavernier on record about the film and his working methods. So there are some advantages in coming late to a story.

Quay d’Orsay or The French Minister—Quay d’Orsay refers to the large quay where the French Foreign Ministry is located—is based on a graphic novel (comic book to my generation) co-written by Christophe Blain, who was in a way describing his own experiences working for Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister between 2002 and 2004. Many Australians remember de Villepin from the television coverage of the UN debates on the Iraq War, when his icy dignity and eloquence were in marked contrast to the condescending rudeness of Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, and the arrogance of the Americans. According to Blain it was very different behind the scenes.

The film’s minister (given in the script the spectacular name of Alexandre Taillard de Worms) and played with great panache by Thierry Lhermitte, moves through the gilded chambers and labyrinthine corridors of the Foreign Ministry in a whirlwind of papers and slamming doors proclaiming there are three principles of diplomacy—responsibility, unity, efficiency—only to announce later that the principles are legitimacy, unity, efficacy. Given this material Tavernier, as he puts it, “saw the possibility of comedy with serious undertones and at the same time a way of mixing crazy characters and events and in a way that everything was believable”. The film was shot on location at the ministry, with Taillard’s habit of bursting through doors and sending papers flying becoming one of the film’s best running gags. His arrival in most scenes is heralded by the sound of slamming doors. In one sequence we see a door being repaired in the background, and a final title states “no doors in the Quay d’Orsay were damaged in the making of this film”.

Tavernier uses these whirlwind movements of the minister—where we see him, again in Tavernier’s words, “multiplying himself as though he has several hands”—as one way of creating the frenetic pace of the film. A major influence was Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, one of the great 1930s Hollywood screwball comedies (even if it was released in January 1940) with some of the fastest pacing of the era. (Tavernier is a formidable film historian.) There were, however, no screenings of the American classic during the shoot. “I stop being a film buff when I’m making my own film,” he says.

While Tavernier may achieve the same kind of frenetic rhythm as Hawks, his methods are very different. Like most American directors of the 1930s, Hawks allows his viewers to forget the camera. Set-ups are mainly at eye level and there are only a few unobtrusive moving shots. Although Hawks created some memorable images, particularly when working with cinematographers like James Wong Howe, his films are calculated to make their audiences believe they are spectators watching the action unfold. The hectic pace of His Girl Friday is created through the superbly timed and delivered accelerated dialogue, which is so fast that when I screened the film for my students back in the 1970s many of them could not keep up with all the wisecracks.

Tavernier certainly uses accelerated dialogue; after all, that is the way the French usually speak—just watch their news programs—but he also employs a restless camera, fast cutting and at times a split screen. He is famous for covering scenes in single takes with the camera following the action either hand-held or from the dolly. (The word dolly refers to the legend that to get a moving shot an early director mounted a camera in a pram. It then became the name of the wheeled platform on which the camera would be set up. The special features on the DVD show Tavernier’s cinematographer, Jerome Almeras, employing a small mobile crane for some of the moving shots.) Tavernier has no reservations about drawing attention to the camera, or to his editing for that matter. For him they are just part of the narrative.

The mobile camera seems to pull the minister along as he storms through his domain proclaiming his opinions on American neocons, the need for instant reactions and the principles of modern diplomacy, all the while demanding rewrites of speeches he has barely read. But as with Hawks there are counterpoints. In His Girl Friday in the midst of the high-powered lunacy there is a quiet scene where Rosalind Russell’s reporter interviews a condemned man. Tavernier takes this sort of change of pace much further. Maupas, the minister’s chief of staff, is played by Niels Arestrup as softly-spoken, grey-haired and unassuming. He is also very funny. Whether it is quietly making phone calls to resolve a crisis while the minister harangues his staff about how they should provide him with highlighters that aren’t squishy, or deftly managing to get Taillard to see reason, the contrast between the characters is both comic and profoundly truthful.

Tavernier has said he has little time for dumb-and-dumber comedy where the characters are buffoons. The French Minister is effective because it is about intelligent people who are played straight. Like all the great comedies the film is fundamentally serious. Dominique de Villepin himself confirmed The French Minister’s accuracy, although he thought he was probably even more outrageous in real life than on the screen.

The film concludes with the writing of one final speech, only this time we see it delivered. It comes from the real speech the real French Foreign Minister gave to the United Nations opposing the invasion of Iraq, and Lhermitte is as impressive as de Villepin was at the time. It is the kind of resolution that virtually requires viewers to return to the film so they can appreciate fully its richness and complexity.

Technically The French Minister is extraordinarily accomplished, with twenty-first-century technology employed with skill and restraint. A new DVD release in the Eclipse Series 44 from Criterion, however, takes us to the beginnings of French sound film. It is Julien Duvivier in the Thirties and includes titles that have never been seen outside Europe, carefully subtitled, with excellent background notes.

Duvivier was best known in Australia for his American films—the wonderfully romantic The Great Waltz (1938), Tales of Manhattan (1942), a portmanteau film in which he worked with Charles Boyer, Edward G. Robinson and Charles Laughton; and later the two Don Camillo comedies that he made in Italy, The Little World of Don Camillo (1952) and The Return of Don Camillo (1953) shown on the arthouse circuit here at the time. Duvivier’s masterpiece, Pepe le Moko (1937), did not reach Australia until the late 1950s, when as I recall it was treated by our local critics with the respect it deserved. The film had been bought by Walter Wanger and remade as Algiers in 1938 with Charles Boyer in the role of the tragic Pepe, the part created by Jean Gabin. Wanger tried to destroy the prints of the Duvivier version he had virtually plagiarised. Fortunately he failed.

In the film community, as distinct from the academics, what caused us to take Duvivier really seriously was when film-maker and scholar Barrie Pattison returned from France proclaiming Duvivier as one of the great directors of the 1930s. In fairness to my academic colleagues I should note there is online a splendid essay by the late Sam Rohdie on Duvivier’s career that discusses Duvivier’s silent films that date back to just after the Great War. Australia was not totally ignorant of the great director’s earlier work; in 1935 La Bandera, starring Jean Gabin, about the Spanish Foreign Legion, was shown at the Savoy in Sydney, where it was greatly admired by the young Damien Parer. But until now there has been no real context.

The Eclipse DVD goes a little way towards remedying this deficiency. The first film of the set is David Golder (1930). It is perhaps not the best to start with if you are discovering Duvivier’s body of work for the first time. The film is slow-moving with darkly shadowed interiors contrasted with brightly lit location shots and is of course an early sound film. This is not the problem you might expect. As with the best of the early sound directors, Duvivier has recaptured the fluidity of silent film. We can see the beginnings of his characteristic moving camera, which he employed to comment on the action and to establish a setting. There are too the extreme close-ups and, at times, even the closely packed, tightly framed images characteristic of his darker works.

Based on the best-selling novel by Jewish writer Irene Nemirovsky, David Golder is the story of a banker who has risen from Polish refugee to become a power in the financial world. Unlike American films of the same period Golder is not a stereotypical hero or villain. He may ruthlessly reject a former partner’s plea for help but Golder is neither cruel when he turns on his avaricious wife, nor pathetic when he sacrifices his life to provide for a manipulative daughter who may not be his own.

This was the first of seven films Duvivier made with the great stage actor Harry Baur. Baur’s work has not been familiar to Australians, but he was a giant of French cinema of the 1930s and he appears in all of the films in this collection. A physically imposing and rather ugly man, he had a powerful screen presence and an extraordinary range. Although Baur had made a few silents he was primarily a stage actor when Duvivier persuaded him to appear in David Golder. He seems to have easily adjusted to the camera. There are a few theatrical moments but nothing like the unabashed overplaying of John Barrymore or Paul Muni in their early sound films. Baur’s is a rich multi-layered performance that even in the big moments is never sentimental.

Baur is equally fine as the indifferent father in Poil de Carotte (1932), the next film in the collection and perhaps the best starting point for anyone discovering Duvivier for the first time. Poil de Carotte, which translates as “carrot-top”, the rather demeaning nickname of the main character, was a favourite film of Duvivier’s. This was the second time he had filmed the story, based on an 1894 novella by Jules Renard. The silent version of 1925 is available and according some online postings is very good; I have not yet been able to secure a copy of the DVD.

The sound Poil de Carotte is a masterpiece. It was filmed in the summer of 1932 in Correze, in south-western France. There is a sunny lushness about the exteriors that anticipates Jean Renoir’s Partie de Campagne (although Renoir’s main influence seems to have been his father’s paintings). For all the beauty of the rural settings the film is a bitter portrayal of a family who in the words of the youngest son—the Carrot-Top of the title—“are a group of people forced to live together under one roof who cannot stand each other”.

Duvivier builds up his portrait of their lives detail by detail: the father ignoring his wife’s suggestions as to what he should wear on a hot day; her casual cruelty as she dismisses an old servant; the arrogant selfishness of the eldest son as his mother fawns on him; and the way the youngest boy is expected to do all the chores around the house and is given only a nickname. At first Carrot-Top seems well able to look after himself. There are delightful scenes where he plays with a young child and they have a mock wedding and bathe naked in the stream—the boy’s shivering seems only too real. But the indifference of his father, his mother’s systematic cruelty, mental and physical, and, above all, seeing other families who are happy drives him to attempt suicide. He is rescued at the last minute by his father. There follows the finest scene between father and son I have ever seen on the screen. Up to then Baur had splendidly embodied the man’s increasing sensitivity to his son’s needs. Now as he probes further, with the emotions beautifully understated, it becomes almost unbearably moving yet completely unsentimental. The great actor is matched by an extraordinary performance by the child performer Robert Lynen.

Both these superb actors were later murdered by the Nazis. Lynen fought in the Resistance and was imprisoned in Germany. After several attempts to escape he was executed. Baur was imprisoned by the Gestapo and tortured. He died of a heart attack three days after his release.

Duvivier was nothing if not versatile. His next film, shot in 1933 and also included in the collection, is an early Maigret, La Tête d’un Homme. The novel had been published in 1931 and the author, Georges Simenon, wanted to direct the film version, but this project fell through and Duvivier was brought in. Much to Simenon’s disgust Duvivier cast Harry Baur as Maigret. Simenon had wanted Pierre Renoir, who had played the detective in La Nuit du Carrefour, directed by his brother Jean Renoir the year before. But there had been a delay in the pre-production of Raymond Bernard’s Les Miserables and Baur was available. Duvivier also removed the mystery of the original, concentrating instead on the duel of wits between Maigret and Radek, the devious murderer played flamboyantly by Valery Inkijinoff.

Despite all these changes, paradoxically La Tête d’un Homme is painstakingly faithful to the atmosphere of the novel: the grubby lodging rooms, the sleazy, aimless hotel society; and, Simenon’s objections notwithstanding, the film gets the Maigret of the books just about right. Baur had the seeming detachment, the massive physical presence and the gruff authority Simenon described. Not in the book is the inspector’s breakdown when Radek kills one of his men, but the moment is truthful and effective.

The final work in the collection is Le Carnet de Bal (1937), the first of Duvivier’s portmanteau films. A wealthy widow, newly alone, visits the names on an old dance card—the carnet de bal of the title. Her journey lets us experience an array of stories enacted by some of the best actors in 1930s French cinema. Louis Jouvet is delightfully sleazy as a disbarred lawyer turned gangster, while Harry Baur nearly breaks your heart as an old priest who was once a concert pianist, but having lost his gift now directs the church choir. Sad as this may be, in a nice touch he is seen to be rather good at it. We also get a last glimpse of Robert Lynen as one of the choir. Raimu is at first amusingly pompous then pathetic as a provincial mayor with a parasitic son and Fernandel gives a delightful performance as a self-important hairdresser. Marie Bell as the widow, Christine, strikes just the right note of compassion and understanding as she uncovers these stories.

All four films in this collection have been carefully restored. Ideally they should be available theatrically, but as Bette Davis says in Now, Voyager, “We have the stars—why ask for the moon?”

My old friend David Brill recently directed a documentary, Dean Semler’s Road to Hollywood, an affectionate portrait of the distinguished cinematographer’s return to Australia last year to visit a class of primary children in his hometown of Renmark. Brill weaves in some reminiscences from Semler’s wife, friends and colleagues such as George Miller about the making of Mad Max II, not to mention Mel Gibson, Hugh Jackman and Angelina Jolie. Brill also gets some good anecdotes from Semler himself.

The film was shown on SBS at 5.35 p.m. on Saturday January 23 with no publicity whatsoever from SBS. Reportedly, publicising a documentary about an Oscar-winning Australian cinematographer “was not a priority”. I’m informed this idiocy has attracted some scathing letters of protest from distinguished broadcasters, so watch out for the repeat screening—perhaps this time in a prime-time slot.