We visit a French-Algerian political thriller from 1969. It also happens to be a bona fide classic that won a ton of awards, enjoyed great popularity, and even succeeded in markets where it was subtitled or dubbed. Neither of us has seen it before; both of us are glad our first encounter with it was on a cinema screen.
We discuss its relevance to society today – the reason the MAC is screening it, no doubt – the precision and economy of its editing and storytelling, its control of information, its title, its geographical setting, its surprising sense of humour, and indeed something we both found left rather a bad taste in the mouth. We also run down the eleven films from 1969 that outperformed it at the US box office, and Mike teaches me about The Stewardesses.
Recorded on 11th January 2018.
The podcast can be listened to in the player above or at this link
Michael Haneke’s precise, layered Happy End takes on – what else? – the bourgeoisie, and sees Eavesdropping welcome 2018 and iTunes availability at last! Opening with praise for the extraordinary image quality provided by the mac’s 4K projector, we consider the film’s surprising comic sensibility, its observation of different social strata, how our expectations shaped our experiences of what we saw (or didn’t see), Haneke’s surprising and subtle subversions of cinematic conventions, and his continued exploration of violence as a central theme and colonialism and race as something that would be invisible but for it constantly being on the edges and structuring.
The humour is dark but there’s lots of it: We never before knew that Haneke wanted us to have a good time.
Recorded on 7th January 2018.
The podcast can be listened to in the player above or at this link
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Schneider dazzle in Le Combat dans l’île, their first film together. It’s a political allegory played out through a melodramatic love story and visualised as a noir. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Clément, the son of a rich industrialist who’s involved with a crypto-fascist revolutionary group that plans to assassinate a left-wing politician. Schneider is Anne, his wife, a foreigner and formerly an actress, ignorant of her husband’s doings until the maid finds a package in the closet that turns out to be a bazooka.
Clement doesn’t like Anne talking to old pals, particularly when they’re black and in showbiz.
The film reminded me of Ascenseur pur l’échefaud/ Lift to the Scaffold (Louis Malle, France, 1958) in its spare compositions, low-angle shots on people, wonderings through Paris, acute evocation of mood; and also in the close-ups on faces, the use of silence, and even the way the score is used (though here its mostly Mozart instead of Miles Davis). Both films convey a loneliness, a desperation in love and a quest for meaning that can be characterized as existential; and both convey a textured intensity of feeling that nonetheless seems overhung with ennui. I wasn’t surprised to see Louis Malle listed as producer in the credits.
Romy Schneider is at her most beautiful and touching in Le Combat dans l’île; but then, I seem to feel that each time I see her. She’s exquisite here, still with a trace of baby fat but already seeming simultaneously transparent and mysterious; and capable of expressing a great range of emotion with delicacy and feeling. Le Combat dans l’île was her first film in France where she was to make her home and do her greatest work. Her Anne is extraordinary in that she’s able to convey the extrovert’s life one associates with an actress, her knowledge that her husband is shutting that life down, making it smaller, her love for her husband, and, when he beats her, her fear, hurt. and yes, arousal. Schneider not only succeeds in getting an audience to understand her Anne, but also, whilst invoking admiration for her beauty and skill as an actress, simultaneously incites a feeling of protectiveness towards her character. We understand and are with Schneider’s Anne.
Trintignant matches Schneider and is to me the revelation of Le Combat dans l’îsle . He looks very young here and very attractive. There are moments when he comes out of the darkness and into the frame where the lighting highlights long eye-lashes and a full lower lip. He’s short but wiry and gives the impression of being quietly coiled but primed for violence. His political fervor is rendered as an arousal brought on by a feeling of mastery that also helps to explain his relationship to his wife.
The first time we see Clement hitting Anne before sex
There’s a scene mid-way through the film, when Anne and Clément are in the woods, which beautifully illustrates this sudden burst into the unexpected: Like most scenes between Clément and Anne, it is characterized by a hint of violence that is also a hint of sex, and by a mutual affection that nonetheless victimizes her. It’s like they both find that danger sexy, and maybe for the same reason — the clarity of his dominance;. However, she’s also very much a bird with clipped wings and revolts at the same time as she sumbits.
In the woods, he tells her he’s going to kill the former colleague who’s since betrayed him, and she, aghast at the thought but also at what that might do to them, to her, tells him ‘I wanted to live and you’re killing me. You’re destroying me bit by bit. You’ll end up by killing me too.’ As she says this, he gives a kind of gleeful smile, not at the thought of doing so, but because he finds such power exciting; it makes him feel alive. Trintignant then chases after her nuzzling her neck affectionately without letting go of her hold on him, almost as if he loves her so much and is so insecure of his hold on her that he’s got to force it.
These are fascinating and original acting choices on the part of Trintignant and they’re thrilling to watch. I loved the moment where he stares at himself on a knife at breakfast or when he goes to kiss Anne in his final attempt to win her back and tenderly places a fist on either side of her neck before trying to kiss her. One can’t quite decide whether it’s adolescent confusion or underplayed psychosis that Trintignant is intending but these choices vividly convey why Anne continues to fancy him and why she stays whilst also showing how clearly he is capable of killing someone. It’s a great performance, one that makes of Clément a vivid contrasts to Paul (Henri Serre), the other man in what eventually turns into a triangle.
Clément and Paul are blood-brothers from childhood. The film uses them as structural opposites in the narrative; Clément is short, Paul tall; one lives in the city, the other in an old mill in the country; one is married, one is widowed; one is right-wing, the other at least a democrat. One loses Anne; the other wins her; one forbids her to act, the other provides the platform in which she can shine. It’s too bad that the bad guy is a much better actor. Henri Serre then on a career high due to playing Jim in François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, looks the part beautifully but diminishes his contributions to the film each time he opens his mouth. It’s very easy to understand why in spite of his initial celbritiy he never quite became a star.
The film gets its title from the final combat between Clément and Paul on the island. The battle is for Anne of course but it’s also for a politic, a way of life, and a particular kind of future. I’m not well versed enough in French history to know what the film is allegorizing though it doesn’t take too great a knowledge of history to note that it’s related to then recent Algerian war,. However, such knowledge is not necessary to appreciate this moody, beautiful film which seems to shape a whole way of life and a set of moral attitudes out of shadows and light; and the way that that light hits fog, fire and ice, in the country and in the city.
Le Combat dans l’îsle is a film of the nouvelle vague by one of its lesser lights (I’d never heard of Alain Cavalier before this). It references Godard and À bout de souffle/ Breathless directly when Clément goes to find his wife at the ‘hôtel de Suède’ room no. 12. It also references Truffaut through the casting of Serre. Pierre Lhomme, who’s work here is so great also worked with Jean-Pierre Melville on L’Armée de ombre/ Army of Shadows (which would have been such a great title for this film had it not already been taken). But these are peripheral reasons to see the film.
Le Combat dans l’îsle deserves to be seen for the beauty of its images, the intensity of the mood it creates, the economy with which the two assassinations are depicted (a lesson to any young filmmaker in how to do very powerful scenes on the cheap), the extraordinary performances of Schneider and Trintingant and the complex and exciting depiction of sexual attraction.
Aside from some of the voice-over narration, so typical of noir, my only complaint with Le Combat dans l’îsle is the knowledge that if Clément’s politics had been left instead of right, it would have been Trintignant rather than Serre, in the final clinch with Romy; and who wouldn’t have wanted that? Yet, if that is so, what does it say about the representation of politics in cinema?
A star vehicle for Romy Schneider, one of very greatest of European stars of the 1970’s. La Banquière tells the story of Emma Eckhart, a working-class woman, persecuted for her homosexuality, who becomes one of the great financial wizards of the twenties and thirties before an all-male establishment plots her demise and, failing to outwit her, resorts to murder. The film is a rise-and-fall narrative which combines elements from Baby Face (the uses of sex to facilitate the social and financial rise of an ambitious woman) and career-women films of the 1940s such as Mildred Pierce (the building of an empire almost single-handedly albeit greatly aided by a community of women) though it lacks the energy of the former and the artistry of the latter.
Romy, dressed to love women.
It’s not without its pleasures however: primarily a superb Romy Schneider in one of her most famous roles and greatest hits, Jean-Louis Trintignant as Horace Vannister, the aristocratic villain, and a very young Daniel Auteil as Duclaux, a rather perverse looking and (perhaps thus) amoral young villain-for-hire. The film also has a very interesting look, beginning with a 1970s idea of silent cinema: black and white, energetic tinkling on the piano, the narrative distinguished from the archival footage incorporated into it by showing the latter in the speeded up form typical of shots filmed at 18 frames per second but projected at 24; then, transitioning into a post-WWI world of muted colours and the restrained elegance big money can buy (the Charleston is relegated to speeded-up black-and-white representation) . The Art Deco furniture and bibelots on display are sublime and make one want to pause the film to stare at them (not a good thing really), the clothes are beautiful, and La Banquière is in everyway a sumptuous production. However, it is also one of those films that remind you that many beautiful things inside a shot do not a beautiful or expressive shot make; one sometimes questions if Girod does in fact know what he’s doing with a camera.
Romy, beginning to be undone by men
La Banquière should be of interest to anyone intrigued by Romy Schneider, the ‘woman’s film’, and/or representations of lesbianism in cinema. I can’t think of another big-budget, star-vehicle in a period setting where the woman at the centre, the woman who acts and is acted upon, is introduced as a lusty beautiful girl in love with girls, persecuted for that preference and encouraged by her father to lead her own life. We’re shown most of this in the first few minutes of the film: After having been caught in bed by the police with another woman and being brought home in a paddy wagon, her father tells her, ‘don’t be ashamed. They want you to feel ashamed so they can step on you. You’re beautiful, you’re intelligent, the world will smile on you!’. It’s, at least historically, quite an astonishing start.
Auteuil condenses a whole amalgamation of negative stereotypes — pursed-lipped, prissy, and deadly.
In La Banquière, all the girls fall in love with Emma, facilitate her rise and/or cushion her fall, and, as Emma is played by Romy Schneider, who can blame them? As the film progresses, she marries for money and status, several times, and has a child, all the while maintaining her primary relationships with women, before we’re shown her desires becoming more labile and expansive. The film is interesting too in that her downfall begins when she falls in love with a man (Daniel Mesguich), younger, selfish, worthless. It’s the type of representation sure to arouse debate in some circles, difficult to categorise and very much worth seeing because of that.
