Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour

Alain Resnais' Muriel ou Le temps du'un retour is a curiously unsettled, and unsettling, film, a continuation of the disjunctive, ambiguous dream logic of Resnais' previous feature, Last Year At Marienbad. Like the infamously unresolved Marienbad, Muriel revolves around missed connections, complicated pasts, lies and disguises, shifting identities, love affairs and betrayals. Also like its predecessor, it mocks conventional storytelling by shattering narrative into a patchwork series of disconnected events, using editing to thrust seemingly unconnected moments together. In the opening minutes of the film, Resnais' editing confounds a prosaic conversation by chopping up the scene into miniature details: bowls of fruit, a doorknob, a piece of furniture, a door, anything but the people actually speaking. This opening suggests the destabilization to come, but only partially. A few minutes later, a nighttime scene is interrupted by a series of shots of urban streets, shifting unpredictably back and forth from night to day. Resnais is mocking the convention of the establishing shot, mocking the whole idea of setting the scene through images of scenery: the only thing these shots establish is that time slips unpredictably, that location is unstable, that this is a film where the sense of reality can be disrupted at will, images thrown together without logic, randomly, so that an ordinary story becomes surreal and abstract.

And beneath it all, this is an ordinary story. As Hélène (Delphine Seyrig) says at one point, speaking of her own long-ago love affair with Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien), "It's a banal story. I find that reassuring." That's not quite right, though. For one thing, Resnais isn't telling a banal story: he's telling several, all of them blended together, their facts and details mixed up and prone to change at a moment's notice. For another thing, the way in which Resnais tells this story is anything but reassuring. It's the story of a woman trying to reconnect with the lover who left her many years before, when they split apart towards the end of World War II. Alphonse comes to see his old lover Hélène, at her invitation, bringing along a woman who he calls his niece, François (Nita Klein), but who is really (maybe?) another girlfriend, perhaps one of many for this deceitful man. Alphonse stays with Hélène, perhaps for many months, perhaps for just a few days — it's hard to tell, as Resnais chops up the story into disconnected moments that seem to mean nothing in isolation, the sense of time utterly obliterated by these fragmentary montages of snatches of dialogue, silent temps mort interludes, puzzling diversions.

In any event, the story seems to be locked into a never-ending stasis, trapped in cycles of repetition like the frustrated maybe-lovers of Marienbad. Alphonse is always threatening to leave, and so is François, but neither ever does despite many conversations that seem to end with the matter resolved, with one or the other ready to depart immediately. Hélène's stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée), newly returned from the war in Algeria and obviously mentally scarred by the experience, is similarly always in the process moving out, but never seems to finish. He periodically packs up his stuff and gets into arguments with Hélène, but then in the next scene he might be back, magically reappearing from one shot to the next as though nothing had happened. At one point, Hélène says that Bernard has been gone for eight months, but could that really be true? The film's manic disregard for time and space makes it impossible to tell.

It's as though these characters are trapped by this story, as trapped as the partying bourgeois of Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, made the year before. Buñuel trapped his characters in a physical space, but Resnais encircles these people only with the boundaries of narrative and cliché. They're hemmed in by the story, by the editing, by the illogic of a film where everything seems to be perpetually on the verge of happening without ever quite getting there. The characters keep expressing their emotions, telling and retelling their stories, exploring a past that seems to be evasive and contradictory, but they never progress beyond their state of stasis, repeating the same actions and the same arguments over and over again.


The key to all this confusion lies in the film's subtext, its hints of wartime trauma and atrocity. Bernard says he has a fiancée named Muriel, who no one has ever met, and he's always saying that he's going off to meet her. In fact, no such girl exists, even though Bernard does have a girlfriend (Martine Vatel), whose name turns out to be Marie-Dominique, not Muriel. The secret of Muriel is revealed during a sequence in which Bernard, an amateur filmmaker, provides voiceover narration over a reel of grainy, scratchy clips of soldiers. His story initially seems like a romance, like the story of how he met his girlfriend Muriel: he saw her from across an office, he went over to see her, there were typewriters, and then instead of an office it's a courtyard, and then it's a warehouse. Without warning the story has become a war story, a story of soldiers torturing and raping a prisoner named Muriel, stripping her naked, burning her with cigarettes, kicking her as she lays on the ground dying. It becomes clear that Bernard saw this during the war, that he even participated in the abuse, although perhaps not as enthusiastically as some of the others. This is the girl he's obsessed with, the girl who occupies his thoughts now, not a lover but a symbol for the horrors of the war, a symbol of the brutality inflicted by soldiers on those they oppress, a symbol for the French occupation of Algeria and the terrible effect of this war on both those fought it and those who suffered innocently under its toll. When Bernard says he's going to see Muriel, where does he goes? What does he mean? Is it that he sees her everywhere now?

The Algerian situation haunts the film, and so does World War II, the occupation of France, the Liberation. Boulogne, the town where all these memories and stories coexist, was bombed badly during the war, and was largely rebuilt. The characters speak of places that no longer exist, places that have been reconfigured: Hélène's apartment, she says, occupies the same physical place that once housed the attic of her friend Roland's (Claude Sainval) childhood home. This is why the characters, weighted down by the past and by geography, can't escape their cycles of disconnection and dishonesty, can't help but repeat the stories of the past.

For Resnais, this cyclical trap is rooted as much in things as in people. Hélène is an antique dealer, working out of her apartment, and as a result she lives, quite literally, amidst the clutter of the past — as Bernard says near the beginning of the film, one never knows what era one is in in a place like this, where the styles of the past clash against one another, multiple times coexisting in the same place. In much the same way, history — World War II, Algeria, bombings and atrocities — coexists with the present, never quite fading away. The records of photographs and audio recordings, like those that Bernard preserves, can be reminders, evidence, but they can also lie: Alphonse, who has never been to Algeria, pretends he has and presents photographs as proof. He's a tourist, like the soldiers of Godard's Les Carabiniers, insisting that snapshots can stand in for reality, that a photogenic image can paper over the real oppression of the Algerian people. Alphonse is also a bigot, a man who says he respects all races, "even the Arabs," a phrase in which the "even" tellingly reveals his real feelings, barely covered by his false civility.

Muriel is a remarkable film, a surreal subversion of bourgeois narrative, in which the unstably shifting tectonic plates of place and time create a very uneasy footing for these characters. Even the music — a spiky, dramatic score by Hans Werner Henze, with operatic vocals by Rita Streich — contributes to the instability, as the music appears sporadically and unpredictably as an accent, except that it doesn't seem to be accenting anything in particular. The music suggests suspense and action while the characters never do or say anything beyond banalities, beyond the rote repetition of their familiar cycles. The very form of Resnais' film mocks these bourgeois fakers, mocks their petty aspirations and desires, mocks the way they focus on the trivialities of their personal histories while ignoring the bigger picture. For Hélène and Alphonse, self-involved, wrapped up in their own dramas, World War II was a backdrop for their aborted love affair, but Resnais doesn't allow them to leave it at that, as complicated political contexts keep encroaching on their hermetic little melodramas.

Judex (1963)

Georges Franju's Judex is an arch, playful tribute to the serials of the influential silent filmmaker Louis Feuillade. Franju shuffles through the plot of Feuillade's lengthy serial of the same name, about an adventurer named Judex (Channing Pollock) whose revenge against the corrupt banker Favraux (Michel Vitold) unleashes a complicated series of schemes. The film is defined by its complex twists and turns, its melodramatic indulgences: a wronged father (René Génin) who's searching for his missing son; the fiendish femme fatale Marie Verdier (Francine Bergé) who faces off against Judex; the plots centering around Jacqueline (Edith Scob), the daughter of Favraux; the incompetent detective Cocantin (Max Montavon), who seems more comfortable as a babysitter than an investigator. The film opens with Favraux being blackmailed by Judex, who threatens to expose the banker's many crimes if he doesn't give his ill-gained fortune back to his victims.

Fittingly, Franju opens with an iris-out, and will close the film with an iris-in, only the most obvious of his nods to his inspiration. Franju sets his film primarily in the same kinds of gritty, realistic locales favored by Feuillade, who loved shooting on the streets and in scenic exteriors. The texture of the image here is grainy and dark, tending toward shadowy nighttime scenes where cloaked figures skulk through the abandoned streets, framed against the moon, heading out on mysterious errands. Franju is riffing on the magical, playful qualities of Feuillade's classic serials, and the imagery is lush. Judex's grand entrance in particular is stunning, set at a costume ball where he arrives in a massive bird mask, his outstretched, upturned palm holding a seemingly dead bird before him as he weaves through the revelers, with Franju's camera bobbing behind him. He then proceeds to perform a series of magic tricks for the assembled guests, pulling scarves from his sleeves and turning them into doves, which then flutter around the room. And, foreshadowing one of the film's central twists, he even brings the dead bird back to life with a gesture, allowing it too to fly off his palm into the audience. It's an amazing introduction, establishing the film's basic theme, its tribute to the magic and mystery of the cinema, the sleight of hand by which the filmmakers can divert the audience's attention and create startling effects.

This scene establishes the sense of low-key fun at the film's core, its predilection for toying with genre elements. This is especially true of the gleefully evil femme fatale Marie, the film's best character — and its best performance in Bergé, who really projects the slinky, haughty evil of her versatile seductress/criminal. Stalking through the night in her tight black jumpsuit and domino mask, she seems like a master criminal, which makes it easy to miss the fact that all of her schemes actually don't go so well. In one of the film's most delightful inventions, when she's breaking into Favraux's house, her henchman is snared by a handcuff trap that unexpectedly pops out of a desk, right at the spot where the crook had his arm resting to pick a lock. Marie is actually foiled at every turn, often by the unflappable Judex, who drifts around with his black cape flopping behind him and a black hat on his head.


Franju's approach to this story is inherently anti-logical, infusing Judex's adventures with a laidback, drowsy surrealism. The spectacle of the bird-headed hero performing magic tricks is absurd enough, but more subtle is the way the film utterly rejects the idea of death, allowing characters to pass fluidly between states. Characters are constantly being declared dead, sometimes even buried, only to suddenly come back to life, as though they had merely fainted and were able to recover: the convention becomes so familiar that when the villainess actually seems to remain dead after falling off a building at the denouement, it's startling. Franju's characters defy death, not because of any narrative logic — these resurrections are never explained — but simply because the magic of cinema and the strange anti-logic of this film allows it. Similarly, Franju creates complex shots where the camera starts from the distinctive Feuillade static camera angle, at a medium distance from the action, only to begin flowing into the scene, creating new compositions. This fluid camerawork suggests the technological limitations of Feuillade's cinema only to replace it with the more sophisticated possibilities available to Franju. At other times, he achieves striking effects with the editing, as when he cuts from Jacqueline walking up a staircase in her home to Marie walking up one as she schemes against the other woman.

The film's pacing is languid despite all this plotting, allowing plenty of time for Franju to explore the texture of the images, the vibrant characters, and the subtle jokes embedded in the mise en scène and performances. Perhaps the best sequence is the denouement, which keeps escalating as Judex and Cocantin engineer a showdown with Marie and her lover. It's a rich scene, though the action is less important than the whimsical touches, like the way the detective acquires a young sidekick who imitates his idol's every move, parroting his shuffling gait, the way he folds his arms behind his back, the way he nervously paces while waiting for Judex to save the day. At the scene's climax, a circus suddenly pulls up, owned by one of a Cocantin's friends, an acrobat (Sylva Koscina) who thrusts herself into the middle of the action by climbing up a sheer brick wall to the top of the building, where she rescues Judex from the clutches of the villains. Before she does, however, she pauses at the top, smiling and waving as she looks down at Judex's masked henchmen clustered below, looking up with the white eyeholes in their masks seeming to glow in the dark. She finally winds up stealing the show from the titular hero, even getting the final battle with Marie. The villain in her tight black jumpsuit and the acrobat in an equally form-fitting white outfit: light and dark, white hats and black hats, good and evil, all the movie conventions about heroes and villains inscribed in the clothes of these two women.

Franju's Judex is a compelling tribute to the silent cinema and the conventions of classic, pulpy genre storytelling. This film takes what might've been a straightforward story and infuses it with a moody visual sensibility and a subtly surrealist perspective that really locates the magic and mystery in these well-worn genre archetypes.

Films I Love #33: 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)

Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 transforms the director's preoccupation with his own creative difficulties and his tangled relationships with women into a wild film where fantasy and reality blend together seamlessly. Fellini's stand-in, the director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), is having problems making his next picture. He's out of ideas even though sets are being constructed and the characters are being cast, and his attempt to relax and focus on his work at a remote spa is sabotaged by the frenzied circus atmosphere that inevitably develops around him wherever he goes. He's surrounded by producers, writers, advisors, actors and actresses, as well as both his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée) and his lover Carla (Sandra Milo). Guido retreats into dreams, and increasingly hangs all his hopes on impossible fantasies regarding the actress Claudia (Claudia Cardinale), who he hopes will resolve his many problems once she finally arrives; he imagines her as a pure, calm, angelic presence who will be able to quiet his busy life.

In the meantime, Fellini packs the film with Guido's fantasies, dreams and nightmares, many of them loosely based on Fellini's own experiences, and all of it propelled by the jaunty music of Fellini's frequent composer Nino Rota. There's certainly no missing Fellini's own nostalgia in the film's most iconic sequence, the boyhood reminiscence of the grotesque Saraghina (Eddra Gale), a powerful mountain of a wild woman with legs like tree trunks. Outside her beachside hovel, she teases and dances for the young boys of the town. Fellini presents this memory with the force of a defining moment, an experience that contributed to the formation of the impressionable young Guido's sexual identity. Scenes like this — or Guido's surreal dream about his parents or his extended fantasy about a harem of women kept in line with a whip — are charged with Fellini's unique, hyper-real aesthetic, in which dreams and illusions have as much presence and physicality as Guido's reality.

The House Is Black

Forugh Farrokhzad's The House Is Black is a harrowing, horrifying, artfully made documentary, the only film made by the Iranian poet Farrokhzad. Her subject here is leprosy, and she looks directly, unflinchingly, at the devastation caused to the human body by this disease. She does not look away, not from the worst deformations this disease creates. Her purpose was to expose the cruel and unnecessary way that lepers continued to be treated in Iran, herded into isolated leper colonies where their disease went untreated, causing them to slowly and painfully disintegrate. Farrokhzad's film was intended to raise awareness about these conditions, and to stress that this situation need not be. A male narrator dispassionately lists facts about leprosy while Farrokhzad cuts quickly and abruptly between some of the most horrifying images of the disease's effect: limbs that seem to have been worn away, as though by erosion; noses caved in, creating crater-like gaps in the patients' faces; skin that flakes off, scraped away by a doctor's instrument. And yet the narrator says: "leprosy is not an incurable disease." He says it twice, once at the beginning and again at the end of this montage, repeating it to make sure that the meaning of his words is not lost. These people, suffering so greatly, could be cured. The unspoken implication is that their country, their government and their social structures and their medical system, have failed them. They could be cured, if only someone was willing to take the initiative to cure them, rather than herding them into isolation to prevent the spread of the disease and then forgetting about them.

There are two narrators in the film, the first the male narrator mentioned above, who appears sporadically to deliver straight facts in an objective tone. The second narrator is Farrokhzad herself, who delivers a lilting, poetic, religiously tinged voiceover. One of the most subversive undercurrents in the film is its subtle criticism of Islam, and religion in general, for failing to take a more compassionate and helpful interest in these forgotten and suffering people. Farrokhzad continually shows the lepers praying and giving thanks to God, and she purposefully contrasts their faith and devotion against the abjection of their condition. Again, her method is not to state her ideas directly, but to generate tension between a seemingly straightforward voiceover narration and the bracing power of the images she pairs with these texts.

In this way, she calls attention to the irony of the lepers' religious devotion, their continued praise of God even as they needlessly suffer and rot away. One man, leading the prayers, holds up his arms, which have been reduced to twisted and skeletal stumps, and prays to God with words that include "my two hands," hands he no longer has because of his disease. Other lepers unironically thank God for giving them both a father and a mother, even though most of them are here without families. There's a heartbreaking scene in a schoolhouse where a school teacher asks one of his pupils why they should thank God for giving them a father and a mother. "I don't know," the boy responds, "I have neither." There's something about this scene that makes it seem staged — it's too pat, too perfectly suited for the messages Farrokhzad wants to send — but it is a devastating critique of religion anyway. Why, Farrokhzad asks, do these people worship a God who has seemingly abandoned them? Why do they thank God for blessings that he has not bestowed on them? It is as though their religious fervor is abstracted from the actual conditions of their lives, as though they are hardly even thinking about the words they're saying.


Farrokhzad, though, is particularly attuned to the meanings of words. She was a poet, after all, and thus very sensitive to words and the disjunctions between language and reality. As a filmmaker, however, her skills are hardly just verbal. Her visual sensibility is relatively straightforward on the surface, and yet she creates rather complex effects with editing and the relationships between the soundtrack and the images. The House Is Black is entirely the product of her sole sensibility in a way that few films are: she not only wrote and directed the film but, crucially, edited it herself as well. Her editing is crisp and deliberate, and she frequently returns to images that have appeared already, inserting them into rapidly paced montages where their meaning is changed or intensified by the images around them or the content of the voiceover.

Two of the most poignant segments in the film are two sequences where Farrokhzad focuses on the ways in which life in the leper colony mirrors life in the outside world. The first is a montage of women prepping themselves, combing their hair or rubbing kohl around their eyes, making themselves "beautiful." It's a moving sequence, an indication of how these people, shut off from the rest of the world by their disease, attempt to retain some connection to their previous lives — and to the concepts of "beauty" and "ugliness" as defined by society. In another scene, Farrokhzad shows a group of children playing with a ball, all of them laughing and cheering, jockeying for position in the game they're playing, having fun, oblivious to the sores and deformities scarring their bodies. In their smiles and their body language, they look like any other children, cheerful and carefree as kids are supposed to be. But their distorted faces are hard to ignore, and Farrokhzad immediately cuts from this scene to images of older lepers, crippled and badly deformed, as though suggesting that these happy children will grow up into misery if their condition is not treated.

The House Is Black is a powerful, unforgettable film, a documentary whose forthright and unblinking look at life in a leper colony casts light on the suffering of people living in darkness, away from society's attention. Farrokhzad does not allow society to forget the lepers, does not allow her audience to look away or to take pity without also taking action. Her film does not merely wallow in suffering but calls for something to be done about it.

Films I Love #17: The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

The title of Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece The Silence has multiple meanings, resonances that cascade through this puzzling, richly symbolic allegory. Bergman considered calling the film God's Silence, and the absence of divinity and spirituality is certainly one of the title's implications. This is particularly true since the film is the capstone of the so-called "faith trilogy," which cumulatively represents a process of moving further and further away from God, arriving here at a place where the deity simply doesn't exist and is indeed never even invoked. In many ways, however, it is fortunate that Bergman settled on a more ambiguous title, because the film is about much more than the absence of faith: it is about the myriad ways in which communication can fail, the ways that speech and language can drive people apart rather than bringing them closer to mutual understanding. At the center of the film are two sisters, one sensual and earthy (Gunnel Lindblom), and the other sickly, intellectual, and introspective (Ingrid Thulin). They are traveling to a strange and unfamiliar country with Lindblom's son Johan (Jörgen Lindström), while the convalescent sister grows steadily sicker, obviously easing towards death.

The film centers on miscommunication on multiple levels. The trio arrives in a country where they do not speak the language, and where war and social disorder (signified by the presence of tanks in the streets) seem imminent. Everything is breaking down here. While Thulin turns to books, music, and mechanically passionless masturbation to distract herself from her impending mortality, Lindblom indulges in sex and sensual pleasures. She is obviously a woman who enjoys her own body, and Bergman lovingly photographs her radiant skin and the beaded sweat that seems to perpetually stand out from her arms and neck. She has sex with a stranger, a man she can't even speak with because of the language barrier — their communication is limited to physicality and breaks down as soon as the act is over.

Meanwhile, Johan is the only one who, with his child's curiosity and wide, probing eyes, manages to foster some moments of limited communication within the strange, empty hotel where they're staying. As Johan wanders the halls, amusing himself away from a mother who keeps going off by herself and an aunt who's slowly dying, he meets a midget theatrical troupe who welcome him in as one of them, joyfully entertaining him for a few minutes before their gruff manager puts a stop to it. The boy also forges a tentative bond with the hotel's odd but kindly waiter (Håkan Jahnberg), a gangly old man who cheerfully mutters in his incomprehensible language while offering Johan food and companionship. Johan is a hopeful presence in the film, a bridging force who overcomes barriers to reach other people, but he is an exception to Bergman's bleak assessment of the possibilities of communication. Bergman is presenting a powerful political fable here: just as the relationship between the sisters collapses under the strain of their inability to make themselves understood to each other, so too do the relationships between countries falter and lead to war as communication is hindered. This is one of Bergman's finest works, a masterwork of despair that obviously inspired filmmakers as diverse as David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, while retaining its own unsettling brilliance.

Irma la Douce

Irma la Douce has a delightfully farcical premise, a plotline that one would expect could only yield gold in the hands of a proven comic genius like Billy Wilder, whose One, Two, Three and The Apartment are among the greatest bittersweet gems of classic Hollywood comedy. Irma (Shirley MacLaine) is a Parisian prostitute who falls in with the naïve cop Nestor (Jack Lemmon) after he's kicked off the force. She takes him on as her "business manager," the film's coy term to avoid offending censors with the word "pimp," and the duo begins to fall in love. Unfortunately, Nestor is not cut out for the life of a pimp, and his jealousy leads him to create an alter-ego, a wealthy English lord who will be Irma's only customer, thereby keeping her off the streets and all to himself. This convoluted premise seems fraught with possibilities for delirious, absurdist comedy, Wilder's specialty, and yet the film itself is curiously flat, like a fine champagne with its bubbles dissipated, its potential to tickle and delight only showing through in periodic bursts.

It's hard to tell quite what went wrong, but the film is ill-conceived practically from the start, sabotaging itself at every turn. Even the language doesn't do it any favors, since having all the supposedly French characters speak perfect unaccented English is incredibly distracting. This is of course a common enough conceit for Hollywood films, but in a film where some characters are meant to be speaking French and others in English, the complete lack of foreign tongues or even accents drives home just how inauthentic and contrived the film is in every aspect. Lemmon's hilarious impression of Lord X — a pastiche of British malapropisms, with a rat-like mustache, bucked teeth, and an eyepatch with a proclivity for switching eyes between appearances — is one of the film's highlights, but its impact is dulled by the fact that everyone else in the film is speaking English too. The plot device's use of a false accent and language calls attention to the fact that Nestor is supposed to be a Frenchman impersonating an Englishman, even though he speaks like an American whenever he's not playing Lord X.

These contrivances extend to every aspect of the film, from its curiously closed-off scenery to its borderline-misogynist script to its entirely inconsistent characterization. The film opens with some gorgeous views of unpopulated Paris locations, capturing the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe at the hazy-blue early morning hours when the streets of Paris are empty except for the street-sweepers. There's a foggy, poetic quality to these shots, giving the film a real sense of place that is rarely returned to as the rest of the action occurs almost entirely on tightly constrained artificial sets. There are scenes at a market and a slaughterhouse that make some effort to capture the lives of working people, to give a sense of the drudgery and toil of "honest work," but these attempts are sabotaged by the blatantly plastic, forensically clean slabs of beef and perfectly molded cabbages being hauled around these carefully designed areas. There are many Hollywood films that have embraced this artificiality, crafted luminous entertainments from such lurid and obviously faked decoration, but Wilder falters by trying to mimic mundane reality from such ridiculous artifice.

Similarly, his script fails him by trying to have it both ways with regard to prostitution, touching on the exploitation of the women involved and yet never going far enough in questioning the assumptions behind the profession. Irma and the other girls experience a lot of violence and intimidation at the hands of their pimps, and Wilder doesn't flinch away, making Irma's first pimp Hippolyte (Bruce Yarnell) an oafish, nasty jerk who beats and threatens her constantly. This touch of reality only drives home how misogynist the script's treatment of Irma can be elsewhere. Although she's often portrayed as a tough, self-sufficient girl who views her prostitution as just a way to make money and take care of herself, she's sometimes characterized in more demeaning ways. In one nauseating scene, she weeps when Nestor says he's going to go out and get a job, tearfully protesting that she wants to take care of him and keep him in fine clothes and fancy jewelry. This is a strange inversion of reality, with the prostitute happily selling herself to provide for her pimp, rather than simply to survive. It makes Irma abject and pathetic, necessitating Nestor's attempts to rescue her; in the end, he rehabilitates her into a housewife and a mother, making her give up prostitution much as he gets her off cigarettes, as though paid sex was just another of the addictions she ought to give up. Wilder gave MacLaine dignity, depth, and complexity playing a similarly downtrodden girl in The Apartment. Here, she's given little to work with and few opportunities to get beyond the surface level of her character.


Even so, the film is not without its small joys and victories, one of which is Lemmon's portrayal of Lord X. Simply by donning a mustache, beard, and eyepatch and affecting an exaggeratedly pompous accent, Lemmon completely transforms himself, making it almost believable that his own lover wouldn't even recognize him. He's a kind of pop-culture British pastiche, spouting British place names and institutions with a randomness that borders on the unhinged. In the throes of conversation, he's likely to become excited and start just rambling off disconnected words — RAF, BBC, Yorkshire, Worcestershire, Dunkirk — or trailing off into an incomprehensible mumble. It's a brilliant comedic performance, and the film comes alive whenever Lord X and Irma get some screentime together, which isn't nearly often enough. Indeed, the film takes an unbearably dull hour to even get to the point where Lord X is first introduced, and once he does appear he's used very sparingly. The film's pacing and structure is haphazard, front-loaded with an hour of puffed-up background material before the film's "real" story even begins. The unlikely love triangle between Nestor, Lord X, and Irma is ripe material, giving Lemmon some room to stretch out and show off his comedic chops, maintaining a precarious balancing act to keep his mad scheme functioning somehow. Wilder doesn't seem to realize that this is the meat of his film, and that it's surrounded by fluff that only dilutes the best material he managed to get out of this mess.

Lemmon is great in stretches of the latter half of the film, racing around at his manic, mugging best, but there's not much he can do to improve Wilder's turgid staging of some of the slapstick scenes. Most of the film's attempts at physical comedy are strangely inert, lacking the propulsive brilliance that Wilder brought to James Cagney in One, Two, Three. It's true that Lemmon doesn't have Cagney's visceral energy, but he's obviously a fine comic actor in his own right, and Wilder simply leaves him adrift for long portions of the film, with no funny material or with such dead staging that the humor fizzles. In one early scene, Nestor gets in a fight with the pimp Hippolyte, a big thug who Nestor eventually manages to beat with sheer perseverance and ingenuity. It's a scene that should be irresistibly fast-paced, with the slapstick violence furiously accumulating towards the final takedown. Instead, it's unevenly staged, progressing in fits and starts, with curious lulls of dead time right in the middle of the action. It's hard to believe that this lumpen inaction was directed by the same man who filmed One, Two, Three with such intensity, such an acute sense of pacing and an eye for gut-busting details. In this film, Wilder's gift for comedy seems to come and go sporadically. There are scenes that work beautifully — like a cartoony set piece where Nestor, on the run from the law, hides from them by dressing as a cop and participating in the search for himself — but too many others that drag on, unfunny and forced, for what feels like hours. There are redeeming moments and scenes here and there, but too few, stretched out across a bloated two and a half hours, making Irma la Douce a surprising failure from a talented director mishandling a talented cast.

9/20: Les Carabiniers

From Godard's 1960s run of films stretching from Breathless to Week-end, possibly the least well-known is his 1963 fifth film, Les Carabiniers. There's possibly a good reason for that, though. I'm of the opinion that Godard didn't make a bad film in this period from 1959-1967, but Les Carabiniers is the least fully formed of these movies, more of a transitional work in which Godard could experiment with form. Taken on its own merits, outside of the canon of Godard's 60s filmography, it's a bit boring — especially the lengthy postcard-viewing scene which forms its climax — and its ideas work far better on paper than they do on the screen.

It's only as a part of Godard's 60s work that Les Carabiniers takes on greater significance. Many of the political ideas which would come to dominate his filmmaking as the decade wore on received their first, tentative airing here. The film follows two peasants who are enticed, by promises of wealth and power, into joining the King's army and going to war. The bulk of the film, after they enlist, shows their wartime exploits, with scenes of carnage and violence alternated with text screens showing the soldiers' letters to the women waiting for them back home. The letters flippantly and casually describe rape, pillaging, mass executions, and battles, then offhandedly add that "it was a nice summer nevertheless." The film's premise — that war is an exploitation of the poor for the goals of the rich — clearly originates in Marxist thought. This becomes especially apparent in a scene where the soldiers come across a young woman who berates them for not understanding the role they play in the class struggle. Of course, they execute her, though not without hesitation.

Les Carabiniers bogs down a bit in the prolonged symbolic scene where the two young soldiers, freshly returned from war, show the women the spoils of war: a suitcase full of postcards cataloguing the full contents of the world. The satirical point is obvious, but the scene drags on too long without much of Godard's characteristic wit and subtlety. There are flashes, though, even here, in references to Felix the Cat and Rin Tin Tin. But this scene mostly demonstrates the problems of this early film from Godard. Its ideas are continually interesting and indicative of the director's future areas of examination: war, capitalism and socialism, the proletarian classes, the strained relationships between the genders caused by social and political forces. These ideas, though, aren't realized with the precision and depth and visual brilliance that Godard would bring to bear on his later efforts. Les Carabiniers remains primarily interesting as a transitional work, a deconstruction of the war film genre just as his other films from this period deconstructed noirs, musicals, and spy thrillers.