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France belongs to us
The HFA digs up neglected New Wave treasures


Over the next month the Harvard Film Archive will be screening "Undercurrents: Neglected Works from the French New Wave," with films by Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and many more directors whose lesser-known efforts aren’t necessarily less fine. Here’s a look at 10 films from the series.

PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT

Jacques Rivette’s first feature film, released in 1960, took two years to complete because he kept running out of money. This state of affairs is evident in the film, whose plot traces hypothetical continuities across real stretches of time and space. The result is a fabulous and enigmatic work imbued with an occult sense of urban danger.

The narrative involves a group of actors who, while rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles, become affected by an obscure, quasi-political, apocalyptic conspiracy. Tracking down hints and warnings, the heroine (Betty Schneider) is led through a labyrinth of rooms and passages, all of them filmed in a gray half-light that suggests transience; faces seem both familiar and strange; scenes seem waiting for something to ignite them. Her quest involves her in dualities that become increasingly tricky to negotiate, both for her and for us: theater versus reality, destiny versus chance, the phenomenal world versus the world as idea, murder versus suicide, "Paris belongs to us" versus "Paris belongs to no one." Screens May 31 at 7 p.m. and June 3 at 9:15 p.m.

BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

LE BEAU SERGE

Claude Chabrol won the Prix Jean Vigo with this remarkably confident 1958 debut film. The subjects are provincial torpor and disillusionment. François (Jean-Claude Brialy) is a young intellectual who returns to his native village to rest after a bout with tuberculosis nearly kills him; there he finds Serge (Gérard Blain), his childhood best friend, who threw his life away by settling down with the woman (Michèle Mèritz) he’d got pregnant. Serge has become a hopeless drunk like his father-in-law (Edmond Beauchamp), and his pal’s return makes him more miserable than ever, forcing him to confront his dead-ended existence.

Chabrol directs with the kind of empathy for his characters that he would lose by the time — a decade later — he turned into an internationally celebrated chronicler of the hollow, bejeweled lives of the French bourgeoisie; this film, which was shot on location in his own childhood home, Sardent, clearly meant a great deal to him. But its critique of French provincial life was already tired territory by the late ’50s, since French novelists from Flaubert to Mauriac had done a pretty thorough job of dissecting it. You can respond to the movie’s detail and conviction, and to the performances of the two actors, without working up much enthusiasm for the quality of its observations. Bernadette Lafont co-stars as Serge’s sister-in-law, who, already wasted at 17, takes up with François. Screens June 1 at 7 p.m. and June 7 at 9:15 p.m.

BY STEVE VINEBERG

LES COUSINS

Claude Chabrol’s 1959 film reworks themes from his first, Le beau Serge, but is far superior. It’s unquestionably — and irresistibly — a young man’s movie, yet stunningly accomplished. Charles (Gérard Blain) is a stolid young romantic from the provinces who comes to Paris to live with his gifted, sophisticated cousin, Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), while both attend law school. Charles’s initiation into his cousin’s glittering circle of high-living intellectuals is a fiasco that winds up destroying both of them when Charles falls for a glamorous blonde, Florence (Juliette Mayniel), who trades in his distant appeal (she is drawn to the idea of being in love with him but isn’t stirred by him) for the sensual reality of Paul. The highlight of the picture is a party Paul throws where his guests talk smart, drink too much, and grow amorous and belligerent, and where Paul performs for them, wandering through the room with a candelabra and reciting to the strains of Wagner on the record player. It’s a magical moment: as he speaks of love, the candles illuminate Charles and Florence in a kiss; then they fade into shadow as Paul looks at them sadly, sensing all the reasons that they’re wrong for each other. Screens June 1 at 9 p.m. and June 3 at 7 p.m.

BY STEVE VINEBERG

LE PETIT SOLDAT

Whereas Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film, À bout de souffle ("Breathless"), became the stuff of New Wave and jump-cut legend, his second is practically unknown. In part that’s because the French government, which in 1960 was entangled in the Algerian War, censored this tale of French and Arab factions in Geneva. But even more than À bout de souffle, Le petit soldat is the seedbed of Godard’s future. There’s the war that makes no sense (Les carabiniers, Made in USA), the voiceover from our hero (Alphaville, Made in USA), the woman caught between two men (Une femme est une femme, Le mépris, Bande À part). And the woman is, of course, Anna Karina, making the first of her seven appearances in Godard films.

French News Agency reporter Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), though he professes no ideals, has been drawn into a group that’s fighting Algerian terrorists. He’s ordered to kill a Geneva radio broadcaster who’s criticizing the war, but he can’t handle the job (in a humorous allusion to Das Testament von Dr. Mabuse, Godard suggests that shooting a man in another car isn’t as easy as Fritz Lang made it look). Eventually Bruno is nabbed by the other side, and Godard gets bogged down in the experience of torture. But before that Bruno falls for Copenhagen-born (but really Russian?) Véronica Dreyer (Karina). This is a surreal, old-fashioned-looking movie that, with its menacing piano score and intertitle-like voiceovers, could almost be a silent. And Karina steals it by modeling and being as opposed to acting. When Bruno voices Godard’s famous assertion that "photography is truth; cinema is truth 24 times a second," Karina makes it seem all too true. Screens June 11 at 7 p.m.

BY JEFFREY GANTZ

LE SIGNE DU LION

In his 1959 feature debut, Eric Rohmer tells the story of an idler (Jess Hahn) who, deprived of his inheritance, becomes a tramp. Rohmer’s tone wavers between the tolerance of Jean Renoir and the austerity and anger of Fritz Lang. Accordingly, we fluctuate between enjoying and despising the characters. Most of the film’s strengths are concentrated in its long middle section, which follows the hero’s wanderings through Paris with great inventiveness (in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Marcel Hanoun’s Une simple histoire). Recurring images of sun, stone, and water evoke a late-summer mood. There’s a moving irony in the plight of the hero: formerly a social lion, he’s reduced to bitterly watching the activities of young people in St. Germain-des-Prés, in a haunted atmosphere echoing with missed opportunities that’s reminiscent of the section of It’s a Wonderful Life in which James Stewart sees what his town would be like if he had never been born. Rohmer’s drifting narrative leads to a brilliant final sequence with the fierce intelligence of his best later work. Among the future luminaries who can be glimpsed in small parts are Jean-Luc Godard and Stéphane Audran. Screens June 14 at 7 p.m. and June 19 at 7 p.m.

BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

L’HOMME QUI MENT

"The Man Who Lied" — or is it "The Man Who Died"? Alain Robbe-Grillet’s luminous 1968 mindboggler opens with a partisan (Jean-Louis Trintignant) being gunned down by German soldiers. Then he rises from the dead and begins to tell his tale, or tales. Is he Jean Robin, legendary resistance fighter, whose return the town awaits with dwindling hope? Or Robin’s comrade Boris, "The Ukrainian"? Was Robin a traitor, or was Boris, or both, or neither? Meanwhile, three women play blind man’s bluff in a decaying château, enthralled by mirrors, broken statuary, the phantoms of memory, and their own beauty.

The dead man’s tale, with its variations and deconstructions, spin out in a cubist labyrinth worthy of the co-creator (with Alain Resnais) of L’année dernière À Marienbad and the inventor of the New Novel. To what point? The pristine beauty of Robbe-Grillet’s imagery, which recalls the precision and absurdity of a dream? The playful anarchy and irony of its kaleidoscopic narrative? Or maybe the timely reminder that history is the lie told by the most powerful. A New Wave unto his own, Robbe-Grillet is neglected at the risk of missing much delight and rueful wisdom. Screens June 17 at 8:45 p.m. and June 24 at 9 p.m.

BY PETER KEOUGH

UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE

Marcel Hanoun’s unpopular, neglected 1959 film keeps a close, bleak eye on the adventures of a homeless woman in Paris. We see her dragging her young daughter on fruitless job hunts, sleeping in uncongenial hotels, obsessively counting her dwindling resources. Although the film runs only about an hour, it seems to last twice as long because of an alienating, matter-of-fact voiceover narration, spoken by the woman, that describes what’s happening or being said even as we see or hear it. For example, in addition to seeing the concierge nod her head, we’re told that she nodded her head. The intense concentration of Hanoun’s gaze, which discards more than it shows, letting the world imply itself by its absence, recalls Bresson. What Myron Meisel said of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour applies more precisely to Une simple histoire: "It compulsively grasps at the intolerable, only to find it readily within its reach." Screens June 18 at 7 p.m. and June 26 at 9 p.m.

BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

LES CARABINIERS

Jean-Luc Godard’s affable, ramshackle film is like a Brechtian vaudeville crossed with the theater of the absurd, though much lighter in spirit than that combination might suggest. Two brothers, goofy Michelangelo (Albert Juross) and scruffily handsome Ulysses (Marino Masé), are conscripted and sent off to fight for their king, in a lengthy war that seems meant to stand in for all wars. (They send postcards back from Egypt in one scene; in another, we hear that Santa Cruz has been captured.) The scenes are blackout sketches; most are charming, though one extended episode where a woman in military drag recites a Mayakovsky poem while being executed by a rifle squad may make you want to tear your hair out. The movie culminates in an extraordinary sequence where the men return to their wives bearing "the world’s treasures," which turn out to be a suitcase full of postcards depicting everything from modes of transport and types of animals to women of all nationalities and styles. This endlessly surprising scene not only eclipses everything that’s come before, it takes over the movie. It defines Godard’s ethic and his mission in these glorious early days of his career: to draw on the power of the image to capture the whole world. Jean Gruault and Roberto Rossellini worked with Godard on the script, which is based on a play by Benjamino Joppolo. Screens June 21 at 9 p.m. and June 23 at 7:30 p.m.

BY STEVE VINEBERG

ZAZIE DANS LE MÉTRO

Fans of Amélie might be especially charmed by this flawed 1960 curio from Louis Malle, an adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s jabberwockian bestseller of the same title. Ten-year-old Zazie (Catherine Demongeot) is a pint-sized prototype of Audrey Tautou’s irrepressible pixie, with her black bangs and her world of absurdities and serendipities verging on the dreamlike. But Malle’s film has a much rougher edge than Jeunet’s, and his style is a madcap mix of Dziga Vertov, Buster Keaton, Chuck Jones, and just about any other filmmaker with a penchant for camera tricks, slapstick or party colors.

Zazie is in Paris spending the day with her Uncle Gabriel (Philippe Noiret), a hulking melancholic who dances nights in a tutu at a cabaret and is otherwise content with his beautiful wife, Albertine (Carla Marlier), and the host of oddities who are his neighbors. But foul-mouthed and frisky Zazie insists on riding the Métro, which is on strike, and she finds herself menaced by a mustachio’d mystery man (Vittorio Caprioli) with a thing for disguises and females of all ages. Queneau’s Joycean wordplay defies translation, into English or cinema, and Malle compensates with hyperkinetic stylistics, heavy-handed humor, and pinball plotting that all grow tiring. Centering the storm is Noiret’s performance: his half-cracked soliloquies about mortality and dreams within dreams underscore the tawdry artifice that engulfs him. Screens June 22 at 7 p.m. and June 26 at 7 p.m.

BY PETER KEOUGH

LA PEAU DOUCE

At first it seems more like shoe leather than soft skin that spurs on celebrity (this was a long time ago) literary critic Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly) in this sleek, offputting 1964 melodrama by François Truffaut, his curious follow-up to the success of Jules et Jim. On his flight to Lisbon for a talk on "Balzac and Money," Pierre watches stewardess Nicole (Françoise Dorléac) put on a pair of high heels; later, as he walks down a hotel corridor lined with footwear put out to be polished, he resolves to make the fatal phone call to Nicole’s room. Such details, both intimate and alienating, make The Soft Skin coldly convincing in its depiction of the desultory, peripatetic affair between the hamsterish Pierre (he can’t dance, but he sure can go on about Balzac and Gide) and the doll-like Nicole (she hasn’t read Pierre’s books, but she’s seen him on TV). Only Pierre’s wronged wife Franca (Nelly Benedetti) shows some spirit, but by that time Truffaut has strayed from his detached study of anomie and bad faith to a shocking, Chabrol-esque soaper somewhere between Mildred Pierce and Female Trouble. Screens June 28 at 9 p.m. and June 29 at 7 p.m.

BY PETER KEOUGH

Issue Date: May 30 - June 6, 2002
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