Leaping into the Void: Jacques Becker (part 2 of two)

“Subjects don’t interest me in and of themselves. The storyline (the anecdote, the plot) matters to me a little bit more but I am not passionate about it… Only the characters in my stories (who become my characters) truly obsess me, to the point that I think of them all the time.” [Jean Becker, Becker on Becker, p. 19; translation mine]

“The passion that I put in my marionettes is perhaps all that is of interest in my films.” [Becker in Arts, April 1953, quoted in Queval]

I finished writing this piece two weeks ago, but in the interim three more books about Becker arrived in the mail. The first, Becker par Becker by Jean Becker (Editions PC, 2004), offers an interesting package of cut-and-paste quotations. The second, Jacques Becker: etudes, textes et scenarios inedites... edited by Claude Beylie and Freddy Buache (1991), contains invaluable documents by and about Becker — his articles, unproduced scripts, interviews with colleagues, essays about his work, and a critical roundup of contemporary comments on his films.

The third book, Jacques Becker by Claude Naumann (BiFi/Durante, 2001), is a more “written” book that has only one author and includes a full, nearly 100-page biography of Becker before the “documents,” which overlap with the Beylie/Buache book but also include new, unique interviews and other uncollected articles by Becker.

These books have given me additional perspective on Becker, and so I open this second and last part of my appreciation with more information about the man and his art. One of the most valuable pieces in the Beylie-Bauch book is by the master filmmaker Alain Resnais, who speaks about the fact that Becker was a classical filmmaker and an innovator at the same time.

Resnais proclaims his love for the “minor” Beckers (Falabas, Eduouard and Caroline, Rue de l’Estrapade), which he said plunged the viewer into “a state of happiness that isn’t often found in cinema.”

He then offers a concrete example of the way that Becker influenced his own work. After having praised him as a filmmaker of “suppleness” and “fluidity,” he mentions that Antoine and Antoinette (see the last part of this piece) had something like 1,200 edits in it. “It doesn’t feel that way because the cuts are almost always linked to movement….”

Resnais then discusses an editorial decision he made for his 1965 film Muriel ou le temps d'un retour: “When I made Muriel, I said to myself: I’m going to do the opposite of Becker here, meaning that I’m going to cut the shots a little earlier or a little later than he would’ve done, in order to release a sort of madness... concerning an ordinary subject and characters, like his, as he would search for a calming, gentle effect….” [p. 230-31]

Another document found in the Beylie-Buache and Naumann books is Becker’s article “L’auteur de film?... Un auteur complet.” (The author of a film?... A complete author; there are no English translations of Becker’s articles, except the short excerpts found in the Casas/Iriarte book, so all translations from this point on are mine.)

First things first: Becker wrote this piece in November 1947 when the “politique des auteurs” had not been fully formulated (Truffaut did that with certainty in 1954) as a guiding principle of film criticism and study in France. The phrase “auteur” was used in late-Forties French criticism, though — the pre-Cahiers magazine La Revue de Cinema found various writers discussing the “auteurs” of certain films, and in March 1948 an article appeared by Alexandre Astruc in L’Ecran Francaise in which he discussed the “camera-stylo” (camera-pen), saying the director was the author of the film. (That article can be found here.)

Also, for sheer perversity’s sake, I will note that Becker’s title is an eerie foreshadowing of Jerry Lewis’s “Total Filmmaker” label, which in itself was a slangy, American way of expressing the auteur concept.

In any case, Becker extols the virtues of personal cinema in this short article, which ran only one page in L’Ecran Francaise (the original can be found here). He states outright that “One cannot tell a good story on screen unless it is a story about one’s self.”

He declares that “All the great filmmakers… who have made this such a marvelous art, have always prepared their stories personally and from the ground up, before shooting starts.” He has harsh words for filmmakers who merely directed their pictures without working on the screenplays, claiming that is an “abdication of paternity” (!) for the film.” As for those who merely direct: “I don’t despise them, but I feel sorry for them, because they went to the studio while leaving their heart at home.”

He closes out by underscoring a notion that I mentioned in the first part of this piece – that he considered himself a uniquely French filmmaker (his famous fans, like Godard, felt the same way about him). He maintains that the strength of French cinema is that it “seems authentic…. The auteurs of French film must underscore their personal connection to their films. By doing this they reinforce the position of our cinema in the world… and our pleasure.” [Beylie-Buache, p. 139]

Another moving article by Becker that appears in the Beylie-Buache and Naumann books is “Le cinema a besoin d’amants” (The cinema needs lovers, which appeared in Arts in Nov. 1959; found in Beylie-Buache and Naumann). The piece is a rebuttal to criticisms that the “nouvelle vague” filmmakers were too young to be making features.

He starts off bemoaning the “New Wave” label and declares that age has little to do with artistic talent. He notes that he was an assistant of Renoir for eight years, and while he valued the lessons he learned at the side of the master, he wished he had started his own filmmaking career earlier.

Becker notes that if he were a producer, he would hire younger filmmakers instead of those who have “not gotten too old but have become too wise. Nothing is more boring than knowing ahead of time what is going to come out of a machine. It’s true that in the cinema we know nothing in advance…. I repeat: painters, musicians, or writers, none of them wait until they are 40 to begin their work.” [Beylie-Buache, pp. 143-44]

He goes on to state outright that “one can only learn this metier by doing it.” His final words are without doubt the kind of thing that made him much beloved by his younger fans: “I therefore think that it’s more important to not become a filmmaker before having fallen in love, and that one must take a little time to watch others live their lives.” [pp. 143-44]

Perhaps the tersest summation of Becker on a personal level is supplied by scripter-director Marc Maurette in an interview. When asked at the end of the chat to describe Becker, he merely says “L’élégance.” [Beylie-Buache, p. 111]
*****

Back to the filmography, interrupted at the end of part one of this piece:
Becker returned to familiar ground with the utterly charming Rue de l’estrapade (1953). As noted above, the film is basically a fourth entry in what critics called Becker’s “youth trilogy.” It is, like the preceding films, a blissful blend of romantic longing and out-and-out comedy, as well as a beautifully constructed sketch of a community.

The plot sees a young wife (Anne Vernon) leaving her cheating husband (Louis Jourdan) to live in a small apartment. While her husband breaks up with his mistress and tries to make amends with his wife, the wife is seduced by both a bisexual fashion designer (his boyfriend’s reappearance during the seduction being a fascinating moment in a Fifties movie romance) and a bohemian musician (Daniel Gelin, again!).

Becker once more delivers a detailed sketch of a community — in this case the inhabitants of the apartment house Vernon’s character moves into. One of the film’s best moments, however, occurs early on: Jourdan dons Vernon’s scarf for a moment and she takes the opportunity to act like a man and sexually harass him while he is overwhelmed by her overtures. It’s a surprising and endearingly odd scene, which indicates Vernon’s character is more multifaceted than her husband gives her credit for.

Becker’s next film, Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), made him a legend in noir cinema. The film is radically different because the “big caper” has occurred before the film begins. We are witness to the scramble for loot (“grisbi”) and, again, see the code of honor among the more noble crooks.

The noblest of all the crooks depicted here is Max (Jean Gabin), a meticulous and dapper criminal who wants to fade out of the “milieu.” He is dragged back when his sidekick and best friend (Rene Dary) is kidnapped by a rival gang leader (the terrific Lino Ventura, in his big-screen debut). Max has to decide whether to give up the loot for the life of his friend, and we are certain from the first what his response will be.

The two most jarring, ultimately welcome aspects of Grisbi are its mellow pace, which serves to introduce the characters and their environment in detail (including Max’s extraordinary hideout — a secure, fully stocked luxury apartment) and the fact that these gangsters deal in matters that American movie gangsters never mentioned before the late Sixties, namely prostitution and drug dealing. Max’s sidekick in fact admits that if he were younger that he’d be pimping off his girlfriend, played by a young and very beautiful Jeanne Moreau.

The film’s theme of sacrifice for a friend links it to Casque d’or and the indelible work of Becker admirer Jean-Pierre Melville. Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1956) was unfavorably compared with Grisbi, but they are in fact complementary, in that they both discuss the theme of aging in the criminal world and do not show the big caper that drives their plots.

In his review of the film, Truffaut emphasized Becker’s focus on the commonplace in his characters’ lives: “It is not so much his choice of subject that distinguishes Becker as it is his treatment, and the scenes he selects to illustrate it. He keeps only what is essential in the dialogue, even the essential part of the superfluous (he sometimes keeps even onomatopoeias). He will skimp what another director would treat most seriously in order to linger over the characters eating breakfast, buttering a roll, brushing their teeth… In Casque d'Or he shows us Reggiani and Simone Signoret in nightgowns, and in Grisbi we see Gabin in pajamas.” [Francois Truffaut, The Movies in My Life, 1975, translation in 1978 edition, Simon and Schuster, p. 179]

The next two films in Becker’s filmography were works for hire. They are both entertaining, but it would be quite a stretch to connect them with Becker’s more personal work — although that was done by Francois Truffaut, who justified Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves (1954) as an auteurist work. The Truffaut biography by de Baecque and Toubiana [University of California Press, 1999]. includes this information about Truffaut championing the film:

“The movie was ignored by the critics upon its release and Truffaut himself was embarrassed by its failings. Again, he used the art of paradox to extricate himself from a difficult position, subscribing to Becker's body of work, ‘with no exception,’ in the name of coherence in taste. ‘Even if Ali Baba were a failure, I would still defend it by virtue of the auteur theory to which I and my fellow critics subscribe.

‘This theory, based on Giraudoux's statement, “There are no works, there are only authors,” consists in denying the axiom dear to our elders, which maintains that films are like mayonnaise, you either succeed in making them or fail.’ ["Ali Baba et la 'politique des auteurs,"Cahiers du Cinema, February 1955] What Truffaut is plainly suggesting, in a way, is a theory of taste as intransigent as the one he had used to attack ‘quality French cinema’ a year earlier in ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.’” [p. 99]

Truffaut was being both kind and doctrinaire in this article. Ali-Baba is a light, frothy vehicle for the big-toothed comedian Fernandel. It has a gigantic budget for a Becker film — with large, detailed sets and hundreds of extras — and is pleasant and amusing. The plot is a trifle about a servant who falls in love with a dancing girl owned by his sultan boss.

The most interesting aspect of the production is that Becker hired black actors to play the Arabic characters and an Egyptian actress to play the lead female role, something that would never have been done in the U.S. in the mid-Fifties.

Becker’s second work-for-hire is his only other color feature, The Adventures of Arsene Lupin (1957). Like Ali-Baba, the film has very little that is “Beckerian” about it. Any talented French director could’ve made the film in the same manner. Also, like Ali-Baba, the film has a much bigger budget than Becker was used to working with.

Robert Lamoureux (looking like the later thin and aged Johnny Hallyday) plays the title role, a seasoned thief who was featured in a series of best-selling French novels. Lupin is a master of disguise who steals, in the film’s lively first half, valuable paintings during a high society party and jewels from a pair of unwitting jewelers. The film slows down to a crawl with the third caper, in which Lupin robs a fortune from the Kaiser. 

Lupin does indeed test the auteur theory, but Becker certainly did his best with the material. While watching the third caper unfold oh, so slowly, one is amazed that the man who made this film had previously made the tight, concise Casque d’or and Grisbi.

The next film, Montparnasse 19 (aka The Lovers of Montparnasse, 1958), is an “anti-biopic” that provoked extreme reactions from Becker’s fan base, especially critics. It was loved or hated, and it is, without question, one of the most downbeat of his films.

Some critics put it alongside Ali-Baba and Arsene Lupin as a work-for hire, because Becker took it on at the request of Max Ophuls, who died while he was preparing it. It certainly doesn’t belong in the category of its two predecessors, though. Becker made its storyline — the final weeks in the life of painter Modigliani (Gerard Philipe) — into a highly personal and very “Beckerian” film.

As was common in Becker’s work, the film telescopes the time period in which the real events occurred. He concludes the plot with Modigliani’s death, leaving out the suicide of his wife Jeanne (played in the film by Anouk Aimee), which occurred shortly thereafter. These decisions caused a major rift between Becker and scripter Henri Jeanson, but Modigliani’s daughter Jeanne presumably approved it, as she remained the technical consultant on the film. 

Montparnasse 19 is indeed loaded with cliches from the “tortured artist” handbook, and yet Becker’s portrait of the talented but self-destructive and severely alcoholic Modigliani is infused with a great deal of sincerity and a particularly pointed message about the artist’s need to sell out to make a living (perhaps Becker’s reflection on his two preceding films?). Andre Bazin gave it the highest of compliments by saying it was “the most ‘Bressonian’” of all of Becker’s films.

Certain decisions made by Becker go against what would presumably have been Ophuls’ take on the material. Firstly, Becker chose to make the film in b&w, forsaking the visual beauty of the painter’s work that could’ve been conveyed in color (as it stands, we see very little of Modigliani’s art head-on). He also used editing to convey emotion rather than using tracking shots, which were Ophuls’ specialty and his primary method of involving the viewer in the action.

The last aspect of Montparnasse 19 that received much attention was the casting. Matinee idol Gerard Philipe is good in the lead role, but often the purpose of him seems to have been seeing a “pretty” A-list star as a dissipated drunk. (Philipe winds up looking like the glamorously dissipated mid-Seventies David Bowie at a few points.)

Lili Palmer is quite good as a South African journalist whose relationship with “Modi” includes regular beatings (which, it is indicated, she not only tolerates but enjoys). Anouk Aimee has the thankless (but tragically glamorous) role of Modi’s wife.

Outshining them all is the great Lino Ventura, whom Becker transformed into an actor in Grisbi (he had formerly been a pro wrestler!). Lino was best known for playing crooks and cops, but here Becker wisely cast him as an art dealer who is following Modi around, waiting for his impending demise — and the resulting rise in value of his thus far worthless art. Lino is incredible in the film’s final scene, when his vulture-liked character finally gets his wish. At this moment Montparnasse 19 transcends all of its poetic sadness to proclaim its real message: Those who rule the art world are those who hold the purse strings.

Where most critics were trashing Becker’s “anti-biopic,” one critic raved about the film’s blatant negativism. Godard wrote: “The sole greatness of Montparnasse 19 is that it is not only a film in reverse but the reverse of cinema…. [The film]… is probably the first film to be fundamentally, entirely negative….

“The fact remains. [It] will not prove to you that Modi loved Jeanne or that Beatrice loved Modi; nor that Paris is a wonderful city, that women are beautiful and men are weak; nor that love is pleasant, that painting is amusing or that painting is tedious; nor that art is more important than anything else or anything is more important than art. No, Montparnasse 19 will not prove that 2 + 2 = 4. Its purpose lies elsewhere. Its purpose is the absence of purpose. Its truth, the absence of truth. Montparnasse 19 will prove to you only that 2 – 2 = 0….

“After all, if a modern novel is fear of the blank page, a modern painting fear of the empty canvas, and modern sculpture fear of the stone, a modern film has the right to be fear of the camera, fear of the actors, fear of the dialogue, fear of the montage. I would give the whole of the post-war French cinema for that one shot, badly acted, badly composed, but sublime, in which Modigliani asks five francs for his drawings on the terrace of the Coupole.

“Then, but only then, everything pleases in this displeasing film. Everything rings true in this totally false film. Everything is illuminated in this obscure film. For he who leaps into the void owes no explanation to those who watch.” [Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne, The Viking Press, 1972, pp. 74-75]

Becker’s final film, released after his premature death at 53, is considered his legacy. And what a legacy it is — Le Trou (The Hole, 1960) is one of the best prison escape movies ever made and got no less than Jean-Pierre Melville raving about the film in Cahiers du Cinema “How many pages would it take to enumerate the wonders of this masterpiece, of this film that I consider — and I weigh my words carefully — the best French film of all time?” [No. 107, Mai 1960, quoted in Jean Becker, Becker Par Becker, p. 82; translation mine] More on the Melville-Becker connection below; suffice to it to say Melville still felt the same about the film in 1971 when he was quoted as saying in the legendary book-length interview with Rui Noguiera that Le Trou was “one of the greatest [films] in the world.”

Based on a real event, the plot is as straightforward as possible: An inmate (Marc Michel) is moved to a new cell and is let in on an escape plan that the four men in the cell have been developing. The quintet work diligently to dig a hole, explore the tunnels under the prison, and exit via the sewers.

Becker was stunningly meticulous in his approach (cue the opening quote of the first part of this piece), and his attention to detail is nothing short of dazzling (albeit a low-key brand of dazzling). The storyline begins in media res, the characters are quickly sketched and the time it takes them to dig the hole and journey through the tunnels and sewers is brilliantly telescoped, so that the proceedings are tense and yet incredibly quiet (no music appears on the soundtrack until the end credits).

Granted, there was one major precedent for the film — Bresson’s immaculate A Man Escaped (1956). The similarities and differences between the films are instructive. Both are exceedingly quiet, rigorous studies of a carefully mapped out prison break. Bresson, however, created a hypnotic, spiritual work focused on one inmate’s efforts (he eventually joins up with one other inmate), while Becker made a quiet yet carefully emotional film about a group’s efforts, with the emphasis placed on friendship and community.

Both directors used non-professional actors in the lead roles (with the exception in Becker’s film being the newcomer to the plan, played by Marc Michel). Bresson exclusively used non-professionals because he didn’t want the viewer to be distracted by acting flourishes. Becker, on the other hand, cast non-actors who could “feel” their way through the situations — his most impressive coup was to cast Jean Keraudy, a participant in the real prison break, to play himself in Le Trou.

The most miraculous thing about Le Trou is how Becker evokes tension with such an understated and sober-minded approach — none of the action and tension that characterizes Hollywood prison-break pictures can be found here. It is a lean piece of filmmaking that, while containing numerous changes made by Becker and co-scripter Jean Aurel to the original novel by Jose Giovanni (who also took part in the real prison break in 1947), remains true to the atmosphere of whispers, secrets, and jerry-rigged solutions that drive the action.

A final note on something that is mentioned *nowhere* in any of the Becker biographies, but found in Rui Noguiera’s timeless and wonderful interview book Melville on Melville (Secker and Warbug, 1971). Melville notes there that “Not content with the draft every film has to be, Jacques Becker entirely reshot Le Trou… in my Rue Jenner studios. He did twenty, twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty, thirty three takes of every scene, invariably using the first, second, third, or at the most, sixth. It was perfection in reverse… It was incredible!” [p. 77]

It’s very peculiar that this fact occurs in the Melville books (thanks to the original interview with Noguiera), but not in any of the Becker books — either to be proven or disproven. The fact that Becker in effect re-made the film in his friend’s studio is quite something, even if he only reshot certain takes in Melville’s studio and not the entire film, as Melville maintained (harkening back to Becker’s "not meticulous… but maniacal!” side).

And an interesting interview with Jean Keraudy, shot from a weirdly oblique angle:

*****

Like Bresson and Melville, Becker’s output was small but it changed French cinema forever. Thanks to Truffaut and Godard proudly citing him as an influence (and utilizing some of the hallmarks of his approach in their early films), Becker’s influence is still felt today.

The legendary Andre Bazin came closest to the mark when he said that the viewer “comes to ‘love the characters independently’ of their place in the infrastructure of the drama or the film’s given genre.” [Bazin quote from “The Cinema of Jacques Becker: Four Original Reviews,” Film Literature Quarterly, Vol. 34, no. 4; quoted in Casas and Iriarte, Jacques Becker, p. 156].

A quote from the man himself: “What is an auteur of film? It’s a man who, like a baby, loves to tell stories to himself, and then translate these stories into images.” [Beylie-Buache, p. 145]

One of the most unique things about Becker’s work is that he did indeed craft characters that you could fall in love with. Whether he was making a film about a young couple experiencing a lightly comic crisis or a bunch of hardened crooks realizing that age was their single worst enemy, the strength of Becker’s cinema lies in the likability and sheer charm of its characters.

Sources: 
– Jean Becker, Becker par Becker, Editions PC, 2004 [Jacques’ son put together this book about his father and himself, splitting the tome in half and presenting a mostly cut-and-paste portrait of his father, using his own insights, quotes from interviews with Jacques B., and contemporary articles and reviews.]

– Claude Beylie and Freddy Buache (eds.), Jacques Becker: etudes, textes et scenarios inedites, entretiens, temoignages, florilege critique et filmographie Edition due Festival International du Film de Locarno, 1991

– Quim Casas and Ana Cristiana Iriarte (eds.), Jacques Becker, Donostia Zinemaldia-Festival de San Sebastian/Filmoteca Espanola, 2016, Bilingual edition – in Spanish and English (the only English-language book on Becker!)

– Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne, The Viking Press, 1972

– Claude Naumann, Jacques Becker, BiFi/Durante, 2001

– Rui Nogueira, Melville on Melville, Secker and Warburg, 1971

– Jean Quevel, Jacques Becker, Cinema d’aujour’hui series, Editions Seghers, 1962

– Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life, 1975; English translation: Simon and Schuster, 1978

Web link:

– Four vintage articles by Becker and one interview with him. [in French] La Belle Equipe website. 

Thanks to superior cineaste Paul Gallagher for helping me find articles and copies of the “minor” Becker titles on disc (none of the minor ones are really minor; the two color works-for-hire are indeed works-for-hire, though); to Librarie Antoine (39 bis rue Molitor in Paris) for their incredibly speedy and economical sale of the very-hard-to-find Beylie-Buache book; and to Bruce Goldstein and the Film Forum for doing a comprehensive Becker tribute for the first time in NYC in… well, forever.

Noir and romance, comedy and drama: the ‘tone changes’ of Jacques Becker (part 1 of two)

“I’m not meticulous, I am maniacal!” – Jacques Becker (Arts, Dec. 1954)

Bingeing — it’s what TV fans do, right? They make a big deal of it, discuss it with their friends, write about it online, to the point where it has become an all-too-familiar phrase referring to watching every episode of a series in a row, over a short span of time (most always through a streaming platform, because Americans is the laziest peoples…). Here’s a super-secret: Culture and entertainment fans have been doing this since... well, forever.

Fiction readers have “binged” their favorite writers, music junkies have listened to their favorite artists for weeks/months at a time, and cinephiles have gone to film retros of their favorites for eons now. And all these long-established methods of bingeing involved (gasp) leaving the house, to gather and/or experience the work!

One of the utter joys of living in NYC is being able to see all of a filmmaker’s work in a short span of time in a theater. Thus, an occasion like the Film Forum’s comprehensive Jacques Becker festival, which ran from Aug. 1 to Aug. 16, was a festival not to be missed. It allowed me to see all of his rarest films in one short span of time — since then, I’ve rewatched two of the films and read two books about Becker (see references at the bottom).

Becker is an unusual case for American film fans. Three of his films, undisputed classics (Casque d’or, Touchez pas au grisbi, Le Trou), have pretty much always been in circulation in the U.S. — all available on DVD at the current time. But, aside from a VHS release of two others (Antoine and Antoinette and Rendezvous in July) in 1998, his other films have been out of circulation over here.

Becker died prematurely but accomplished much in his last two decades. He went from being an assistant director to Jean Renoir in the 1930s to making films of his own during the Occupation, following his release from a German prison camp. He forged a recognizable style, distinguished by his meticulous visuals and attention to detail, and even more recognizable subject matter, in the Forties and Fifties, and died at the age of 53 in 1960 of hemochromatosis (a build-up of iron in the bloodstream).

The Film Forum retro featured all 13 of his features and the films on which he assisted Renoir. While I didn’t see the films in chronological order, it was more than apparent that Becker got better and better as a filmmaker from ’42 to ’60. He blended the humanist concerns that he surely drew from Renoir with a vital visual style that only got “showy” when he was intent on probing a character’s dilemma — and then a super-tight close-up was used.

Becker directs Montparnasse 19.

It’s easy to see how his work influenced the French New Wave, who wrote favorably about his films when they were critics. His use of real locations in romances like Antoine and Antoinette influenced Truffaut and Godard, but his focus on common characters — both in the forefront and as marginal “color” — is reflected in the early work of the New Wave directors.

He never made a film directly based on his own experiences, but his life crept into his narratives. “You can only tell a personal story well on screen,” he maintained. “You can borrow from someone else but you must love it so much that, by thinking and working on it, you end up forgetting that it belongs to someone else.” [“L’auteur du film? Un auteur complet,” L’Ecran Francais 1947]

Becker with young
Jeanne Moreau.

Coincidentally, Becker completed 13 features, as did his countrymen and colleagues Jean-Pierre Melville (an admirer of Becker’s work, who died at 55) and Robert Bresson (who lived to the ripe old age of 98). Out of the 13 features he directed, eight are absolutely terrific, two are very good, and three are uneven.

What was the word that his biggest critical advocates used to describe his films? Uncle Jean (aka J-L Godard) put it in his usual detailed style: “There are several good ways of making French films. In the Italian style, like Renoir. In the Viennese style, like Ophuls. In the New York style, like Melville. But only Becker was and remains French in the French style.” [quote from the 1960 article “Frere Jacques,” Godard Par Godard, p. 209; translation mine]

The filmmaker himself agreed, several years before: “It’s a bit of my entomologist side: [the films] take place in France, I am French, my work is about the French, I observe the French, I am interested in the French.” [Interview conducted by Truffaut and Rivette, Cahiers du Cinema, Feb. 1954; translation mine]
*****

His first feature, Dernier Atout (1942), was made during the German Occupation of France, and so it avoids political (or even humanist) messages entirely and is merely a frothy bit of entertainment. Oddly set in South America, the plot involves two French student policemen who compete for the distinction of being the school valedictorian. The slightly cross-eyed character actor Noel Roquevert (a favorite of Becker’s) plays their boss, and their assignment is to apprehend the second in command of an American crime ring.

The film is workmanlike and betrays none of Becker’s later mastery at depicting a criminal milieu. The most interesting thing is the convenient murder of one female lead, thus allowing the more handsome of our protagonists to take up with the second woman. (Atout also features way too much music on the soundtrack — Becker’s films after this contain scenes left silent, for dramatic emphasis.) 

Goupi Mains Rouges (1943), besides having a wild name (“Goupi Red Hands”), is Becker’s first masterwork. An uncategorizable picture that radically changes tone at least twice in its running time, Goupi starts out as a familiar tale of a city slicker visiting his (very) small town relations (the titular Goupi clan). His visit is initially quite nightmarish, with menacing events including a whipping and a murder.

The film then adopts a lighter tone as the city/country rift is emphasized, and then in its third act it is a well-constructed mystery that finds the most “backward” of the characters (the city slicker’s uncle, nicknamed “Red Hands”) turning into a sort of detective solving not only the murder, but the matter of where the family “treasure” is hidden.

An incredible leap forward from Atout, Goupi shows Becker in a more assured mode, switching effortlessly from genre to genre, and starting to use some of his trademark techniques, including an evocative use of music and a carefully subdued visual style.

Falabas (1945) presents more refinements, as this completely sincere yet wonderfully over-the-top melodrama begins with the sight of a dead man and a female mannequin lying on the sidewalk being gaped at by a group of women. We then track backward to find out how and why the “couple” landed there. With its tragic resolution already established, the film moves through its paces beautifully, as we see a ladies’ man fashion designer fall madly in love with one of his conquests.

Becker adopts the tone familiar to “women’s pictures” of the time but also moves the film quite deftly into obsessional territory, portraying the designer’s amorous fixation as une amour tres folle. Unlike the rather lengthy-for-its-plotline Atout, its 110-minute running time is perfectly utilized to show the designer’s increasingly crazy passion.

Becker’s fourth film, Antoine and Antoinette (1947), set the standard for Becker’s excellent run of love stories, which took place in a recognizable, realistic environment but contained fanciful plot twists and coincidences.

The film is considered the first of Becker’s “youth trilogy” — that term being a critical invention, since the films do not overlap in any way and the notion of a trilogy leaves out the fourth “young love” film, Rue de l’estrapade (’53). The plot is wafer-thin but beautifully executed: A young married couple are living on a tight budget until the girl (Claire Maffei) buys a winning lottery ticket… and the boy (Roger Pigaut) loses it in the Paris metro.

Here Becker devotes a good deal of time to setting up the characters and their colorful environment, an apartment building where the neighbors know each other very well, to the extent that one of Antoine’s friends (and Antoinette’s admirers) climbs out of his window and moves along the ledge to enter the couple’s apartment for a conversation. The only villain in the piece (besides fate, which lets Antoine lose his wallet with the lottery ticket in it) is a lecherous grocer, played by Noel Roquevert. 

One can see a clear line between Antoine and the later work of the New Wave. All of that younger generation looked up to Renoir (from whom Becker was carefully borrowing), but Truffaut’s work most clearly shows the influence of Becker. Many beautiful shots of Paris punctuate Antoine, prefiguring the shots of Parisian landmarks that appear in the first few films of every critic-turned-filmmaker in the Cahiers “posse” of nouvelle vague filmmakers. Becker also veered away from his mentor Renoir (who specialized in long takes) by including hundreds of shorter shots in Antoine. 

Rendezvous in July (1949) was the centerpiece of the retro, since Film Forum programmer Bruce Goldstein’s Rialto Pictures has acquired it for U.S. distribution (meaning, hopefully, there will be a fourth Becker film released by Criterion). This is the first time Becker adhered to an element he perfected in the next few films — presenting a story that has already begun (with the younger characters being differentiated from each other through a series of phone conversations that establish who each one is).

The Spanish critic Eulalia Iglesias points to Rendezvous as “the first film to treat the notion of youth culture.” [“Comedies of love, freedom, and youth,” Jacques Becker, 2016, p. 75] Given the fact that American movies had only previously focused on teens who were super-wholesome (the Andy Hardy pictures) or in a gang (the “Dead End Kids” movies, and later Forties dramas like City Across the River), Rendezvous is indeed an “early” study of young people who are neither ridiculously wholesome nor endearing crooks.

The film is just as charming as Antoine and yet it is not as sympathetic, because it is a group portrait and thus has more protagonists. The group-portrait aspect makes it a more fascinating time capsule, dwelling on the cultural fascinations of young people (college-age and twenty-somethings in this instance).

The lead male characters are interested in ethnography, jazz, and filmmaking; the lead females are both aspiring actresses who also have a love of jazz. Becker was 42 at the time of the film (Godard was later chided for being “too old” when he made the youth film Masculin-Feminin at the age of 36). He clearly felt connected to the characters, though, because he himself loved jazz and had the ethnographer/film student character — the conscience of the piece — lament that “The French aren’t making movies!”

Different viewers will latch onto different scenes as favorites. The jazz club scenes are the most joyful, while the moments in the theater-class are great satires of both pompous acting teachers and hammy acting students. The centerpiece of the film, though, is clearly the scene where the ethnographer freaks out on his fellow bohemian buddies, who have informed him that they can’t go on an expedition with him that was to be the subject of a documentary they would film as a team.

The scene seems to be one that could have easily utilized Woody Allen’s “author’s message” thought balloon (from What’s New Pussycat?), as Lucien (Daniel Gelin) tells his friends to “wake up, dammit!” and laments that the French aren’t making films (read: thoughtful auteur cinema, as distinguished from what the nouvelle vague writers later called the “tradition of quality” features). 

While the scene is overly preachy, one can see how it inspired (again!) the nouvelle vague critics, who were fed up with the films that Truffaut branded “le cinema de papa.” In a way, the sequence in Rendezvous is a “manifesto” moment in a film that has its share of dramatic sequences, but which will be best remembered for its light-hearted interludes — as when the lead characters ride together throughout Paris in an amphibious vehicle left over from the war (that takes them through the streets then into and across the Seine, and then back up on land) to drop off and pick up their little inner circle of friends.

Becker’s next love story, Edouard and Caroline (1952), is another beguiling concoction but, in comparison to the preceding two films, it comes off as a filmed play. The plot concerns a classical pianist (Daniel Gelin) whose wife (Anne Vernon) comes from a rich background. Her uncle is having a private party at which the pianist will perform — that is, if the couple can overcome their arguments.

Becker never made a bad romance, so Edouard is indeed very entertaining but it lacks the sense of place and feeling of community that Antoine and Rendezvous had. We also know from the beginning that the couple’s love is stronger than their petty squabbles and a happy ending is most certainly in the cards. (The film’s most notably odd aspect is that Vernon’s character is being seduced by her upper-class cousin, who likes reminding her of how poor her husband is.)

Interestingly, this film and his last young-couple film, Rue de l’Estrapade, were scripted by his real-life partner Annette Wademant. Perhaps this is the reason that Caroline and the female protagonist of Estrapade (both played by the wonderful Anne Vernon) are among the most fully realized women characters in Becker’s work?

The only onscreen interview with Becker that one can find online is this snippet from the INA archive, where he talks about Edouard and Caroline and his love of jazz (with no English subtitles):

Becker’s first masterpiece came out in 1952. Casque d’or was a flop at the box office in France when it first came out , but it became a big success in other countries and then returned to find a bigger French audience, and the richly deserved status of “classic.”

A beautifully constructed blend of romance and crime, the film is set in the “Apache” world of La Belle Epoque and the script was based on real-life individuals (whose fates in many regards were not as sad and doomed as the characters in the film are). Meek-looking Manda (Serge Reggiani) slays a gangster in a knife fight over the gangster’s moll (Simone Signoret). He and the moll then have an idyllic time together until Manda’s friend is arrested for the murder of the gangster, and Manda has to decide what to do.

The film works on many different levels, but most of all it is a moral tale, featuring a character with a very strict code of honor in a thoroughly dishonorable community (this emphasis on honor was one reason Casque was a favorite of Becker’s colleague Jean-Pierre Melville). The plot moves toward an inexorable conclusion and one of the best finales in Becker’s works (and cinema history), a heartbreaking gesture by Signoret that remains in the memory. Signoret and Reggiani are sublime in the film, and it loomed large in their filmography for the rest of their lives.

A beautiful scene from the film (with English subs):

Francois Truffaut was a major fan of the film and lionized it in his 1965 intro to the issue of L’Avant-Scene Cinema that contained the full script of the film: “Those of us who love Casque d'Or are clear in our minds that Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani had their best roles ever in it, even if the French public (but not the English, decidedly more subtle) was cool to this paradoxical coupling, so beautiful precisely because of its contrasts — a little man and a large woman, the little alley cat who is made of nothing but nerves, and the gorgeous carnivorous plant who doesn't turn her nose up at any morsel.” [Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life, 1975; 1978, Simon and Schuster, p. 177] 

Serge Reggiani in Casque d'or.

As is so common of great critics, Truffaut also summarized the appeal of the film in a single phrase when he noted that it evoked the past “with tenderness and violence by means of a refined use of tone changes.” [p. 178]

Here is some silent behind-the-scenes footage from the film’s production (which can be found on the Criterion release):

A wonderful bit of connecting-the-dots (which is what this blog and the Funhouse TV show have been all about for the last 25 years) appears in the bilingual book Jacques Becker [Festival de San Sebastian/Filmoteca Espanola, 2016, pp. 108], where it is noted that the memorable song “Le Temps des Cerises” is used at the end of Casque. This Utopian song, identified with the French Commune and then the Popular Front in the Thirties, has been used by filmmakers to summon up a feeling of a “paradise lost” (or about to be regained?).

Carlos F. Heredero notes (in his “Melancholy elegy for a defeated Utopia,”) that the song was later used prominently by other Funhouse deities – namely, Alain Tanner in his classic Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976) and Aki Kaurismaki in his dialogue-less melodrama Juha (1999). 

Part two to come.

In the meantime, here’s a beautifully edited clip-comp of Becker images:

Sources:

– Quim Casas and Ana Cristiana Iriarte (eds.), Jacques Becker, Donostia Zinemaldia-Festival de San Sebastian/Filmoteca Espanola, 2016, Bilingual edition – in Spanish and English (the only English-language book on Becker!)

– Jean-Luc Godard, Godard Par Godard, Cahiers du Cinema/Editions de l’Etoile, 1985

– Jean Quevel, Jacques Becker, Cinema d’aujour’hui series, Editions Seghers, 1962

– Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life, 1975; 1978, Simon and Schuster]

Web link:

– Four vintage articles by Becker and one interview with him. [in French] La Belle Equipe website.

Melody and melancholy: the Jacques Demy festival at the Film Forum, now until Oct. 17

Jacques Demy had one of the most curious careers in cinema history. He is often cited as being a filmmaker of the French New Wave but his work bears little resemblance to theirs – except for his debut feature Lola (1961), and even that is a more conventionally structured work than the early films of the nouvelle vague directors. He made three utterly sublime musicals starring Catherine Deneuve, but most of his other films are rarely revived, and the ones that were released on VHS and disc have for the most part gone out of print (or the companies releasing them went out of business).

Thus New Yorkers will get a rare treat when all thirteen of Demy's features will be shown at the Film Forum, running from today to October 17. I'm looking forward to the festival because it actually is two retrospectives in one: the first is comprised of the Demy films that have perennially been revived (these are the “essential” titles that everyone should see); the second is the group of films that *never* play in repertory. This latter group is the one that I'm eagerly anticipating, even though some of the rarer titles are reputed to be wildly uneven (to be kind about it).

Here is a quick montage of some of the livelier moments in Demy's films, compiled for a festival of his work at the Cinematheque Francaise in April of this year:

Demy was born in the village of Pontchateau and grew up in Nantes. After studying at the Technical College of Fine Arts in that small town, and the Technical School of Photography in Paris, he made a few short works, graduating to his first feature, Lola, in 1961. In that film he established his preoccupations: a broadly romantic love story, a simplistic plotline (one would almost say a “fairy tale,” but he got to those later on), and a bittersweet sadness underneath a cloak of gaiety.

His best films are all set in locations other than Paris. The second feature, Bay of Angels (1963), is a glamorous gambling drama starring Jeanne Moreau that highlights the city of Nice. Bay is a very good film, but its best moment happens right at the very opening:

Then came the trio of films with Deneuve (with a sojourn in the U.S. coming between the second and third). Here he took his love of American musicals and set to work evoking them while still creating something original and uniquely French with the aid of the great Michel Legrand. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) is his masterpiece and the film by which the rest of his works are measured.

It's a beautifully realized creation that becomes more and more poignant as the years go by, since Demy was evoking a type of musical that had died out by the time he made the film. In the nearly five decades since its release the film itself has been cited endlessly and has inspired a generation of European (and, in a cultural cross-current, American) filmmakers who want to pay homage to the “great musicals of the old days.”

The film has definitely become a cornerstone of Deneuve's career – take for example her role as Bjork's friend “Kathy” in the unsettling and brilliant Lars Von Trier musical Dancer in the Dark (2000). More recently, Francois Ozon evoked Demy's classic in Potiche (2010), with Deneuve playing a woman who successfully takes over her husband's business (which just happens to be umbrella-making).

Umbrellas solidified the aspect that I consider the most striking and important thing in his work – the bittersweet undercurrent that runs below all of his plots, whether they are happily resolved or not. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and was undoubtedly the high point of Demy's career. He followed it with another musical, one that is marvelously over the top.

The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) is a candy-colored, mega-hyper musical that finds twins (Deneuve and her real-life sister Francoise Dorleac) in love – while a sadistic murderer is at large. This last element is just a peripheral detail that is brought up from time to time in the film, and it is the one aspect that makes me certain that M. Demy possessed a definite air of melancholy (all right, possibly even depression) in amidst his sunny optimism.

He clearly loved the cinema of Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen, and Gene Kelly – who has a supporting role in Rochefort and is terrific, despite some rather feeble French dubbing provided for him (one needs to hear Kelly's gravelly, smiling voice). Unlike his Hollywood heroes, however, Demy's best films all have an acute sense of melancholy when they are not downright tragic (as in The Pied Piper and Une chambre en ville).

This aspect is what makes Demy's work so unique and rewatchable – Rochefort is just so goddamned “up” that the murderer subplot serves to *ground* his lighter-than-air ensemble. The score by Legrand is extremely catchy, and (for conceptual continuity purposes for the Funhouse), there is a moment in which the twins dress and perform exactly like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in the “Two Little Girls from Little Rock” number from Howard Hawks' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. 

Here is the trailer:

After Rochefort Demy's career started to go astray. I really like his next film, Model Shop, but it is downbeat from start to finish. It's an American remake of Lola (that functions plot-wise as a sequel), with Anouk Aimee reprising her role from the original film and Gary Lockwood playing her newest suitor.

When I interviewed Lockwood, he noted that he didn't much enjoy shooting the film (which is evident onscreen at points); he added that the film had received some kind of commendation in the early 2000s as a “great film about L.A,” which it is – his character and Aimee's ride around town, giving us an informal tour of what the city looked like in 1968.

The film is not a musical, but its soundtrack is memorable, as it blends orchestral music and tunes by the band Spirit, who play themselves in the film.

Here is one of the memorable “tour” scenes in the film:

Donkey Skin (1970) was the third and final film Demy made with Deneuve. It's an odd item that transforms a fairy tale into a musical with slightly hipper-sounding tunes (Legrand was apparently in the mood to get some lounge material out of this score). The plot concerns a king (Jean Marais) who wants to marry his daughter (Deneuve); the film makes reference to Beauty and the Beast by Cocteau in a few ways, including the casting of Marais.

In true storybook fashion, the film contains the recipe for baking a magic cake:

After the Deneuve musical “trilogy” Demy's films weren't critical or popular hits. As his career went into decline, his wife, Agnes Varda, went from strength to strength (due to the variety in the subjects she covered in her work). But Demy continued to make choices that resulted in great scenes, if not always terrific movies.

For instance in his next film, the British production The Pied Piper (1972) starring Donovan (performing his own songs acoustically, a major plus!), there is a scene that is *genuinely* creepy. At first glimpse the film appears to be another Donkey Skin, intended for viewers of all ages, but what would very little kids make of this lovely wedding party scene? 

Perhaps the strangest item in his filmography was his return to filmmaking after six years in 1979 (after the failure of Pied Piper and the 1973 Mastroianni-Deneuve comedy A Slightly Pregnant Man). Lady Oscar was a Japanese-produced adaptation of a manga about a woman who disguises herself as a man and becomes Marie Antoinette's bodyguard before the French Revolution. The film was in English with English stars, but was set in France and shot by a French director. It has been one of five Demy films “lost” to American audiences.

The Film Forum festival of Demy's work contains two week-long runs, the second being a new restoration of Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The first is yet another lost title, Une chambre en ville (1982). This sequence – which, until the advent of YouTube, had been available to American viewers in Varda's documentary The World of Jacques Demy (1995) – is highly operatic and make the film seem as if it was indeed a return to form for Demy. Music... and heartache:

Chambre is the most eagerly awaited of the lost Demy titles, but I am also very interested to see what his odd-looking Eighties update of “Orpheus” called Parking (1985) is like.

I've seen Demy's final film, Three Seats for the 26th (1988), which is, again, thoroughly charming, but a very strange (and none too credible) hybrid of reality and fiction. Yves Montand plays himself, journeying back to his home town of Marseille to perform at the opera house. While there, he relives parts of his past, including a (fully fictional) fascination with the beautiful young Mathilda May.

All that is charming *and* all that doesn't work in the film (that synthesizer beat!) is present in this scene from the beginning of the film:

One of the most touching things about Demy's filmography is how it has been enriched by three films made by his very loving wife, Agnes Varda. She has made one film dramatizing his childhood (Jacquot de Nantes in 1991) and two documentaries about his work (Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans and The World of Jacques Demy). She also devoted major segments of her documentary review of her life, The Beaches of Agnes (2008), to him.

While Mme. Varda was and is a superb filmmaker (her disparate fiction features supplemented by a number of documentaries and film shorts), her late husband did create his own instantly recognizable “universe.” He definitely made some missteps after the Sixties, but even his least works are enticing, as New Yorkers will be finding out for the next two weeks....

Some highlights, assembled for the French DVD box set of his work: