Screen Picks

Beyond the Nouvelle Vague, Part Deux (Thu.-Sun., May 8-11, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) I-House's tribute to the unsung heroes of the French New Wave heads into its action-packed second weekend with little-seen films by Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras, Alain Resnais and Georges Franju, as well as less familiar names like Luc Moullet and André Cayatte.

According to critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who will introduce Friday night's screening of Luc Moullet's The Smugglers (1967) at 8 p.m., "the New Wave" was "never more than a journalistic definition to begin with. It can be a very large list of films or a very small one, depending on which definition you choose." The small list -- Breathless, The 400 Blows, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, etc. -- is well-known enough, and it's possible such films deserve their place in the pantheon. But only a prig would want to exclude a movie as wickedly joyous as The Smugglers, which is something like Godard's Les Carabiniers with a side order of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Evidently filmed on a shoestring budget -- although Moullet once said it would have been twice as good had it been made for 20 percent less -- The Smugglers is an anarchic narrative whose plot (so to speak) involves a pair of (frequently scantily clad) women smuggling packages and people between two warring nations. More playfully than Godard did in Band of Outsiders, Moullet introduces radical disjunctures between the narration and image: When one of the women lights a pitifully small brush fire to block her pursuers, the narrator describes it as "a wall of flame." When, fleeing pursuit again, the women stumble across a rocky terrain, their voices fill the soundtrack muttering Dadaist nonsense, which, brilliantly, scrolls backwards when they retrace their steps. The movie couldn't take itself less seriously, and yet its utter disregard for the very idea of national boundaries is corrosive and contagious.

"At the time he made the film, Moullet was not a person who had much technique; he was almost defiantly amateurish," says Rosenbaum, whose writing appears weekly in the Chicago Reader, and whose most recent book, co-authored with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, is Abbas Kiarostami. "But he became a real comic master. He really has a technique where there's a kind of liberation that can come from saying, "Screw production values, screw technique, that's what's keeping us away from all kinds of possibilities.'" Indeed, though Smugglers' camera work may be no more than serviceable, Moullet's timing can be exquisite; the shot where one of the smugglers, laying low in an office job, is knocked off her seat by a typewriter carriage wouldn't be out of place in a Harold Lloyd comedy.

On the other end of the spectrum is Jacques Rivette's L'Amour Fou (1968), another favorite of Rosenbaum's, which screens Sunday at 7 p.m. Though its four-hour running time might scare some off, Rivette's tale of a deteriorating marriage between a theater director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his actress wife (Bulle Ogier) doesn't start to show its length until its last quarter, when the two hole up in their apartment for one last lunatic binge and the movie's intricate structure dissolves. Rivette blends the couple's struggles with scenes from his rehearsals for a production of Racine's Andromache and 16mm documentary footage of the rehearsals ostensibly shot by a TV crew. (Both the theatrical production and the documentary were approached as bona fide endeavors, and most of the dialogue was improvised.) Just as the director, who plays drums in his spare time, discovers the key to Racine's language in allowing its Alexandrine rhythms to speak for themselves, so Rivette interweaves his elements to hypnotic effect. The question isn't really whether four hours is too much, but whether you ever wish there was less. The answer is a resounding no.

The Adventures of Antoine Doinel ($99.95 DVD)/Day for Night ($19.98 DVD) François Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle is a unique achievement in the history of cinema -- five films, spanning 20 years, all with the same semi-autobiographical protagonist. Criterion's divine set, which collects The 400 Blows (1959), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979) together with Antoine and Colette (1962), Truffaut's contribution to the anthology film Love at Twenty, comes in a box fashioned to look like a battered old valise, and indeed watching these movies is like going on a long voyage -- one with its share of wrong turns and dead ends, but one you're definitely the richer for having taken.

The 400 Blows, whose title comes from French slang for youthful indiscretions, has to rank as one of the most full-blown, startling debuts in the history of cinema. Truffaut had made a pair of short films previously (one of which, Les Mistons, is included on an extra disc), but there's nothing in them to prefigure the tender toughness of Truffaut's first feature, which in addition to instantly establishing Truffaut's career and bringing the burgeoning New Wave to a boil, introduced 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, who would become the New Wave's most emblematic actor. Both raw and lyrical, urgent and poetic, The 400 Blows created a new kind of cinematic literacy, one that fused personal experience with classic storytelling. The idea of the caméra-stylo (camera as pen) had already been introduced, but was never so fully realized. Drawing heavily on his own turbulent childhood -- though Truffaut always maintained that Antoine was a fusion of Léaud and himself -- Truffaut created an unflinching work that nevertheless finds humor in the darkest situations. If the film's impact has been at all dulled by the intervening years, you can only imagine what a profound impact it must have had at the time.

Antoine and Colette, the missing chapter in the Doinel saga, is almost as good, a wrenching portrait of first love. Truffaut shows us Antoine on the verge of adulthood, straining for the next step and falling short. The way he carries out his over-eager courtship of the cool, callous Colette (Celine and Julie Go Boating's Marie-France Pisier), you know he's going to get his heart broken, that he must, but Truffaut never makes the inevitable feel like a foregone conclusion.

Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board are lackluster sequels, episodic and offhand, without the grains of truth that formed The 400 Blows' pearls. As documented by Kisses' supplementary materials, Truffaut became embroiled during shooting in what became known as l'affaire Langlois, the mass public protesting of the removal of the beloved head of the Cinémathèque Français, Henri Langlois. The demonstrations against Langlois' ouster, in which Truffaut played a major role, were in many ways the ember that would ignite the student revolts of May 1968, but the film Truffaut made while spending nights railing against the establishment is an almost forcibly light trifle that finds Antoine, returned from military service, engaged as a private detective. Bed and Board finds the peripatetic Antoine forced to settle down by the birth of his first child, but again Truffaut's trying to make cakes without any flour. In a documentary included on the disc, Truffaut and co-writer Bernard Revon discuss "un gag" where Antoine and his wife, in the near-poverty of the first-time parent, are forced to eat baby food because they can't afford to buy any for themselves. By the time shooting began, the scene had had its teeth yanked out; now Antoine merely forgets to buy groceries, and he and the wife smile beatifically as they spoon the baby food into their mouths.

The much-maligned Love on the Run is actually a rebound of sorts. Though Antoine's tendency to flash back to scenes from previous films calls up unfortunate resonances with sitcom clip shows, Truffaut pulls off a conceptual coup by giving the women in Antoine's life, several of whom make repeat appearances, flashbacks of their own, each of which suggests that, in an alternate universe, they might be the stars of their own five-film cycle, one in which Antoine Doinel plays only a small role. Closing out Truffaut's human comedy, it's a vivid testament to the power of movies as memory, both his and ours.

Truffaut arguably never cut as deep as he did in The 400 Blows; the sentimentality that softens the movie's uncomfortable truths drowns films with less soul-searching agendas. Truffaut famously demanded that films "proclaim the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema"; the trouble with Day for Night is too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Also starring Léaud, though not as Antoine Doinel, Truffaut's behind-the-scenes farce is a sloppy kiss on the face of filmmaking, a painless tickle in the ribs. It's a mistake to take a lack of cynicism for a lack of depth, but considering that Day for Night was Truffaut's most autobiographical subject since The 400 Blows, the difference between the two films is almost staggering.

Underground Film Festival (Sat., May 10, 8 p.m. and Sun., May 11, 2 p.m., $9, Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215-446-3033) Part of the Gershman Y's Pop Art exhibition, this re-creation of a bygone experimental film bill pairs old works with new, from directors like Stan Brakhage, Harry Smith and Peter Kubelka (Sat.), as well as Jonas Mekas, George Kuchar and Kenneth Anger (Sun., including the latter's Scorpio Rising).

Join the
City Paper
Mailing List




	search citypaper.net