(contains spoilers) An amazing film as complex and multilayered as anything done by Martin Scorcese. In terms of plot it is fairly conventional but also rather surreal as the main character, a moped riding young Postman, Jules, gets in waaay over his head in a complex mix of organized crime, prostitution, police corruption, and classical opera. To begin with he makes a bootleg recording of an opera star soprano, the Diva, who for somewhat obscure reasons refuses to make any sound recordings of her voice. Two sinister Taiwanese characters happen to be sitting right behind him when he is making his clandestine recording and they set off in hot pursuit. Meanwhile in a police stakeout gone wrong, a woman carrying an incriminating recording shows up at a train station and drops the tape in his saddlebag just before she is killed by a knife thrown by two creepy and shadowy characters who have pursued her to her death. The tape is gone and no one knows where it went.
Meanwhile the postman strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young Asian adolescent girl, Alba, who apparently makes a career out of shoplifting. We first see her in a record shop where she is seen stealing an album (this is after all 1981) that she secretes into her portfolio. Even though the shopkeeper suspects something he is unable to find anything amiss. Instead we see a number of pictures of the girl naked in the portfolio. She befriends the postman to whom she later presents a gold Rolex watch, which she claims was her first theft. The postman invites her back to his pad which seems to be a kind of indoor junkyard-loft full of wrecked cars, machine tools, and his extensive recording equipment. It is decorated with a huge murals of automobiles and damsels in distress.
Shortly after this scene and while he is away romancing the Diva, the Taiwanese music pirates track him down to this remarkable pad and ransack the place so now it is wrecked even more. They don't get what they want and the postman wisely decides it is time to go into hiding. The postman has meanwhile lifted the Diva's gown and visits a prostitute whom he asks to wear it while they do whatever it is they do during such visits.
The two sinister characters track him down to an underground garage and wing him as he makes his escape. His Asian adolescent friend puts him in contact with an even weirder friend, Gorodish, who is apparently very well off, drives a white citroen and in the lotus position does crossword puzzles while smoking and listening to recordings of the basso profundo mumblings of Buddhist monks. He is the unlikely savior of the day.
He prepares onions for his cooking using snorkeling gear, and gives impromptu cooking demonstrations with a baguette, butter, and caviar for his young postman friend on the lam. He is, indeed, a kind of French superhero. When the postman needs to go into hiding and convalesce he takes him to a lighthouse, priapic in its grandeur there at the seaside.
Then he sets up a showdown with the corrupt police chief in the abandoned Citroen plant. In a neat coincidence that seems almost an afterthought, while the police chief plants a bomb in the white Citroen he has been directed to drive. After the exchange of tapes or whatever he thinks are the tapes, the police chief listens for the ignition sounds of the car, and triggers its explosion. This does not kill Gorodish, but the two Taiwanese gangsters who just happen to be stealing the car, still trying to get the tape of the Diva.
Gorodish then rolls up a garage door nearby and voila! there is another white Citroen in which he drives away. The man obviously has magical powers.
Finally Jules goes back to his junkyard apartment loft where the lower level and honest police woman is holding a stakeout. There is a shootout with the two henchmen of the corrupt Police Chief, and they fall down an elevator shaft. Then Gorodish arrives, turns out the lights, and causes the police chief to also meet his death in the elevator shaft.
Contrite Jules finally reveals to the Diva that it was he who had made the unauthorized recording of her, and destroys the tape. She forgives him, and you see them striding off the stage arm in arm as La Wally plays in the background.
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This was a very stylish and somewhat surreal action film, beautifully filmed, and memorably acted. There was nothing very original in the plot, which like so many movies shows a character who gets in over his head in something he knows nothing about, but who, through luck and his wits and a little divine intervention comes through a very dangerous time. How nice it would be if we had someone like Gorodish to magically save us when things get very much out of hand. In most action films the viewer is not given the luxury to think much about the plausibility of the story in its headlong rush to a conclusion. What is great about this film is that the characters are not as unidimensional as they often are in action films. Unlike many action adventure films where the characters are so secondary to the special effects and stunts that you find them annoying, this one gave them life, which was an achievement.
(contains spoilers) This 1970 film is a sequel to "The 400 Blows" about the character Antoine Doinel and played by the actor Jean Pierre Leaud who is by this time all grown up. In this episode, now shot in color, he is married to a music tutor played by Claude Jade. He started out as a florist's assistant and we see him in the courtyard of their apartment block dyeing carnations red and other things. It is a light-hearted look at French urban life, with characters such as the mysterious man whom everyone thought was a murderer until they manage to see him on TV. Then there is the old man who leans out the window and talks to his neighbors, etc. For some reason whenever Antoine and his wife go somewhere he tosses her coat down the stairwell and someone is always coming up the stairwell and helps his wife on with her coat.
Later they have a child and while his wife wants to name him something aristocratic, Antoine wins out with the apparently more pedestrian name "Alphonse".
Then he gets another, presumbly better job, is hired by an American who plans to build a harbor. You see them working together with a scale model of the harbor complete with wireless driven shipping going in and out. A delegation of Japanese on business visit them and Antoine is smitten by a young Japanese woman and she with him. They start seeing each other. He goes to her apartment. He makes excuses to his wife that he is working late, etc. At one point the Japanese lady sends him a bouquet of tulips in which she has enclosed little love messages.
He receives this at work, is embarrassed by this and ditches the flowers in the trash on his way home, but a little boy helpfully retrieves them and brings them upstairs, knocks on the door and his wife receives them and puts them in a vase. Meanwhile his wife notices that while she is interested in Rudolf Nureyev, her husband has an interest in all things Japanese.
Inevitably the flowers begin to wilt, dropping the messages. Thus his wife and he have a big argument.
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| pissed | |
He continues seeing the Japanese lady but clearly cultural differences are starting to grate on him. Finally he is out to dinner with her and more than once he calls his wife in the pay phone up the stairs and describes how annoying he finds the his new Japanese girlfriend. When the last of these phone calls ends, he returns to the dinner table to find his companion gone with the note in Japanese which is in effect the words "Drop Dead". So he reconciles with his wife and they get on with their lives.
And so what do I think? It is as I said, a light-hearted comedy of a film. The ease with which sexual liaisons are formed and broken seems rather French or should I say so like Truffaut.
Americans I think would not take infidelity so lightly, or at least they have not in the recent historic past. The current President of France is shacking up with a woman not his wife and the result? Certainly not political suicide or resignation on his part. Indeed he's done it twice, once before he was even elected President of France. Compare this to the fate of presidential candidates Gary Hart or John Edwards and any number of American politicians and you see the difference.
Anyway it is an entertaining sequel if not quite up to the power of the original. Sequels seldom are.
(Contains spoilers) I know, I know. I'm a little late with my review. The film came out in 1959 after all and the auteur director, Francois Truffaut has only been dead for 30 years. However I would still recommend the film. The life or non-life of the director, writer, etc should have nothing to do with our desire to see or to read an artist. The great thing about the advent of VHS and DVD's is the ease with which people nowadays can benefit from what was once ephemeral. Once the feature film had departed the local Orpheum, all you had was the mental picture of the motion picture. Now if you own or rent a copy of the film you can see it once, twice, a dozen times with or without screen commentary. And you can watch films not just in one popcorn fumed visit to the local cinema, but like a book, shutting it off and bookmarking it until you are good and ready to experience the rest of it.
And I visited Paris for the first (and quite possibly the last time) in April. In the afterglow of that grand but transient adventure in seeing first hand this city and this culture, I have renewed an interest in French culture and history.
The film opens in some dreary French school in Paris where a classroom of boys are made to recite their lessons under the supervision of an ill-tempered male instructor known as Sourpuss. The oppressive nature of this kind of education is clearly too much for the young hero of the story and he is driven to cut school and find inexpensive amusements on the streets with accomplices in petty crime.
The streets are the only places where he feels free, going to the movies, or to an amusement park, and this fact is underlined with the fleeting and joyous music heard during these scenes. At home he is similarly oppressed by his parents, who fight, and especially his mother who in time reveals herself as a manipulative sociopath of a woman.
On one of his extracurricular jaunts he sees her in the arms of another man, and the lies of having to "work late" are revealed. For a time this gives him a little bit of leverage with her, but only for a time.
As the film progresses, he resorts to increasingly desperate measures to escape school and to fund his jaunts outside. However as a juvenile delinquent he is singularly incompetent at everything he does or tries. Asked to write an essay on a personal experience, for example, he plagiarizes instead something he had read in Balzac, a writer whom he reveres and to whom he even created a small shrine in his bedroom. He even graces it with a candle, which sets his room on fire. The minor incident of fire in the bedroom was not the end of it however, as he submits as his own work the experience described in Balzac, blissfully unaware that his French teacher might be familiar with it. So he is given an F for plagiarism. Later he steals a typewriter and tries unsuccessfully to sell it, ending up being caught when trying to return it, when perhaps the more sensible thing would have been to ditch it somewhere. And so he gets caught, is arrested, and his parents, his stepfather and mother are through with him, and give him up to the authorities and the tender mercies of the reformatory.
The reformatory seems hardly much of a change, naturally from the confinement and regimentation he experiences at school. He finally informs on his mother's infidelity in a letter to his father and as result he finds himself completely cut off from any residual concern or care about him.
Meanwhile he explains to the psychologist on his intake interview his view of life at school and with his parents, which is unsentimental and damning. In the final scenes of the movie we see him escaping from the reformatory and running in an extended scene until he reaches a beach. One can guess what happens after that, and this is where Truffaut chooses to leave the story in a freeze frame of his blank expression there on the beach.
The film was one of the first salvos of the revolution in French cinema called New Wave, which was a movement away from elaborate artifice and towards a more personal and idiosyncratic kind of film-making.
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| Truffaut in 1965 |
The 400 Blows was confessional and autobiographical to an extent that you realize that Truffaut himself had a troubled childhood and adolescence not unlike the protagonist, and it was only when he stumbled onto film criticism and ultimately film making that his life turned around. This was when he met Andre Bazin, the film critic who, ironically, died shortly before Truffaut was to make the film that made him as a film-maker, the 400 Blows.
Truffaut of course went on to make many other films, the one that I remember best was "Fahrenheit 451"
which translated Ray Bradbury's dystopian story of a world where books were outlawed, and where firemen were tasked with seeking out these illegal books and readers and destroying them. It was his only English language film. He was a great admirer of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles among others. The only other film of Truffaut's I have seen, I am motivated to see more of them.
It is regrettable that at the age of 52, in 1983 he died from a brain tumor. With an artist such as Truffaut it is easy to reflect on what might have been, had he lived another 20 years.
