‘I’ve come to piss you off’: Deceased Artiste Bertrand Blier (Part 2 of two)

"My name is Bertie Blye.

"No, I’ve never stolen a car, or gone to prison, or abused Isabelle Huppert on the side of a road. 

"And yet I am the immortal author of Les Valseuses.

"I was born March 4, 1939, a good year, at Boulogne-Billancourt.

"My father was a good actor.

"Yes, he had an influence over me. As much as Boris Vian, James Cain, and Thelonious Monk.

"I am an old young director full of promise (Hitler, connais pas!).

"Sadly, I didn’t keep that promise (Calmos).

"And then, thanks to a group of friends and the flip of a wrist, I managed to pull myself together (Buffet Froid).

"You see how I can look at my work in a lucid way.

"If you ask me who are the best moviegoers in the world, I will tell you the Americans, because of a pretty little statue that sits in my library and that I caress once a day with a trembling hand. (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs)

"As to why my hand is trembling, I will let you guess. Sometimes it’s emotion.

"I am also the director of a film titled Beau-Père, the star of which has given us the slip. 

"The cinema is much more important than politics, believe me.” [Self-written bio, found on p. 160 in Blier, Pensées et répliques]

I ended the first part of this piece with a discussion of Too Beautiful for You (1989), which was a turning point in Blier’s work, as it saw him departing from the world he had depicted from the mid-Seventies on, in which he limned (and made fun of) sexist men and numb women, as well as curious ciphers who inhabited an absurdist universe. 

But just because his female characters became three-dimensional and one could feel genuine sympathy for them didn’t mean that Blier was abandoning his characteristic Theatre of the Absurd-ish situations and bizarre juxtapositions. He proved that brilliantly in the trio of films he made with actress Anouk Grinberg, who was his companion for most of the Nineties and the muse for his first films devoted to female protagonists.

Ad for the English translation of the novel
Going Places.

First, a word about his approach to filmmaking. One of the reasons I did 14 episodes about his films on the Funhouse TV show from the fall of 2021 to the spring of 2022 is that his work adhered to both the “high” and “low” sides of the material I cover. At first glance his films were sexual and appealed to the vulgar side of French farce; once one watches more than a few minutes of any of his films, though, it’s evident that a master storyteller was at work, who wanted to depict characters in certain situations, but never offered the easy (idiotic) answers you’d find in a simple sex farce.

He stated his goal in a 1988 quote: “From the beginning I try to identify strategies that will let me take the viewer by surprise. I’m particularly fond of using cliches and classic dramatic forms as my starting point. Then I completely reverse them. It upsets the emotional balance, shatters the cocoon of intellectual comfort in which spectators have hoped to bury themselves.” [1988 quote, cited in Harris, p. 20]

Blier and his wife,
actress Farida Rahouadj

Thus, the illogical universe that his characters inhabit may seem to indicate that the film is going out of control, but that universe is actually a careful construct through which Blier is up-ending any number of dramatic cliches. And there are no better examples of this than the first two films he made with Grinberg.

Sadly, though, U.S. distribution of foreign films got weaker in the Eighties and by the Nineties it reached new lows. Thus, of the eight films I about to discuss here — of which at least four are classic Blier, up there with his Seventies/Eighties best — only one (!) had U.S. theatrical distribution and two had DVD releases (with one other being released only on VHS).

Thus, some of Blier’s best work has never been seen by American cinephiles. And thus the image of him as a “misogynist” filmmaker was made even greater, as very few American viewers have seen the mature Blier. (His age when making these last eight films spans from 52 to 80!)

One of the great examples of this mature approach was his first female-centric film, Merci La Vie (1991). He said about the picture and its follow-up Un deux trois soleil, “I’ve begun my second career. I’ve invested more of myself in these last two films.” [1993 quote, cited in Harris, p. 130]

Merci is one of Blier’s greatest achievements, in that it does open up a new period in his work while also visually “quoting” his earlier works. It also is one of his most extreme experiments with temporal and spatial displacement, as we jump backwards and forwards in time and in and out of fiction. These “jumps” are indicated to the viewer via a series of differently colored sequences, as the film is in color, b&w, and monochrome depending on the environment or time period that we’re in. 

This sounds like it could be quite confusing, but Blier makes it easier to follow by giving us two lead characters who become the female equivalents of the two antiheroes in Les Valseuses (1974). In that case both of the men were charming but dumb; here the women are smarter, as Joëlle is a troublemaker (Anouk Grinberg) and the other, Camille (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is a younger student who is the more logical and less impetuous of the two. We follow them from adventure to adventure and eventually get to know them quite well.

The film’s time periods come about as a result of Camille studying for her finals about the subject of WWII and the fact that a film is being made about WWII that the two women wander into (and Joëlle becomes the star of). But is it really a film, or is it actually a different life for Joëlle, who apparently underwent a medical experiment without her knowledge: she was given a venereal disease by a crafty doctor (Depardieu) who wants to see its effects on the local male population. 

Again, when recounted in print, the plot doesn’t make much sense, but Blier was indeed a master of absurdism and so there is an inherent logic to the illogic we see. What is going on is that Blier is not only showing his two female leads bonding and protecting each other from harm; he is also making a subtle and stinging commentary on the then-current AIDS crisis, likening it to the Holocaust.

Blier addressed the changes in time and space by noting that Merci was “a channel-hopper’s film. That’s what it’s about. You zap, and suddenly it’s in black and white, it’s a war film…. Kids are great at it, they can even put on a cassette and call someone at the same time. It’s like gymnastics for viewers….” [1991 quote, cited in Harris on pp. 134-35.]

The thing that makes the film so special, though, is not the flow of events the women move though, but the fact that they are emotionally appealing characters. Camille cares much about her father (as Charlotte did with Serge Gainsbourg in real life) and Joëlle confesses her fear of dying young from the disease she’s been poisoned with. Merci is in fact such a special creation because of this counterpoint between an utterly absurd sequence of events and two deeply felt (and extremely well acted) lead characters.

The film is compelling from its opening image: Joëlle being smacked and left behind on a road in a wedding gown by her boyfriend, who drives away. Camille finds her and puts her in a shopping cart (a blatant reference to the opening of Les Valseuses) and tries to protect her throughout the rest of the film. (This is reinforced by the women’s height differential — Camille is taller and also has more common sense than Joëlle, so she comes off as an “older sister,” despite being years younger.)

The self-referential aspect seen in earlier Blier films reaches full flower here. The characters make references to the soundtrack music and the fact that they are in flashbacks. One particularly bizarre moment in the WWII plot finds Camille saying she might die, and her father (played as a younger man by Michel Blanc) notes that she can’t die, she hasn’t been born yet.

Then, in the weirdest twist, Depardieu’s doctor character urges the father to use a condom if he has sex with Joëlle. To which the father responds with a shout (after the characters have been nearly bombed by the Germans), “What period are we in, anyway? If there’s AIDS, there’s no Boches [Germans]. If there’s Boches, there’s no AIDS, and we can screw!”

Thus, Merci is not just a transitional work by Blier but an exceptionally weird and funny comedy with an undertone of longing for the past and sadness for the victims of both 20th-century nightmares. Camille’s love of her dad eventually comes to mirror Bertrand’s feelings for his father Bernard (who died shortly before he made the film); her father (as an old man, played by Jean Carmet) gives her a speech about being typecast in the acting profession and wishing he had been a “great actor.” “The plot never revolves around me… the best I can hope for now is to die playing a small part.” Clearly, this speech was built out of things that Bernard Blier said to his son as he got older.

Hopefully, someday Merci will get the cult it so richly deserves. It was hated by the critics in France, but it never even received U.S. theatrical distribution and was never released on any home-entertainment format. 

The next film continued Blier’s maturation as a filmmaker. Un deux trois soleil (aka One, two, three, freeze, 1993) received no distribution but thankfully did have a DVD release for a short time. At points he identified the film as “the most personal” of all his works. This is a fascinating statement, given that the film presents the life of a young woman, as we witness her moving through moments of her childhood, teenage years, and adulthood all in the same spaces (a housing project in Marseilles). 

As in Merci, Anouk Grinberg gives a terrific performance here, incarnating the heroine at different ages, with the jumps in time occurring suddenly. Her character is wistful, as she struggles with her overbearing mother (Myriam Boyer, Serie noire), memories of a boyfriend (Olivier Martinez) who died as a teenager, and pleading with her alcoholic father (Marcello Mastroianni) to give up booze. 

The above might indicate that the film is a melodrama; it is not. There are many great comedic moments, all of them utterly absurd, and a few of the plot threads weave in an element that was new to Blier’s work, namely magical realism. Her boyfriend is labelled as dead from the first, but during the events of the film her parents both die and reappear to her, driving her as nuts in their post-death incarnations as they did in life.

Blier spoke about the new approach seen in this film: “After a dozen years, I have the impression of being able to make dense and develop themes in a very personal way, freed from the classic structure of the first films.” [Predal, jeune cinema] 

In addition to the comedy there are genuinely moving moments, many of which have to do with the father character. Blier was clearly still haunted by his father’s death, and so he created an Italian father to stand in for his French father, who was an Italo-phile. Mastroianni is absolutely perfect in the role (again showing that, as an actor, he got better and better throughout his career), as his character is to be seen as both a drunken sot (who keeps wandering into the wrong apartments in the housing complex, mistaking Black families for his own) and a man who longs terribly to go back to Italy. 

One of the images that sums up the film best concerns the father: He is pranked by two teens from the apartment complex who keep appearing in his path carrying around a door for him to go through, with his correct apartment number on it. The final use of this door is absolutely moving and truly is one of the most unabashedly and beautifully sentimental moments in Blier’s cinema.

The film never was distributed in the U.S. (It did play at MoMA, where I saw Blier and Grinberg do an introduction.) Thus, there was no recognition in America of Blier’s stepping away from the more controversial “vulgar” themes found in some of his Seventies and Eighties work. What was noted by foreign critics who did see the film, though, was that Blier was finally including Black characters in his film and in Soleil is openly commenting on the manner in which poor families are huddled together in housing projects. (Though he does show the family units to be quite solid and nurturing — something Grinberg’s character has never had, thus a Black woman who becomes her surrogate mother.)

The critics clearly had misinterpreted Blier’s messages about society — his depictions of sexist characters found him branded Right-wing, but he was personally Left-leaning. When asked about it, he said,“... I believe that my films — me, perhaps not, but them, yes — are left-wing. Apart from Too Beautiful for You, where they are gentrified, all my heroes are from the wrong side of the street: thugs, lost people….” [Murat, Telerama]

Like Merci, Soleil deserves an audience. One can only hope that a programmer (or perhaps a prone-to-homages filmmaker like Wes Anderson) will move it out of the shadows and it will finally be seen as one of Blier’s best, most layered works. 

Blier’s last film starring Anouk Grinberg was Mon Homme (aka My Man, 1996). This film did get a distribution deal in the U.S. and appeared on VHS (via Artificial Eye and New Yorker). It is an excellent comedy but isn’t as groundbreaking as its predecessors. 

Here we find Grinberg playing a hooker who takes her work seriously (with one of her johns being played by New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud!) and who decides to take a big, bizarre step when she takes pity on a homeless man (Gérard Lanvin) and then makes him her pimp. He stays in that role, collecting her money, but then cheats on her with a woman (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who doesn’t want to be a hooker, so he keeps seeing her (and spending money on her) as a mistress. 

Blier had an interesting reaction to Mon Homme in later years. He said, “Mon Homme, this is my hardest film. The hardest. I don't claim it too much. There are times when we go too far... and there, I went there! I don't claim all my films, you know. Not Calmos, nor Mon Homme, nor My Friend's Girl. But I like Merci la vie and Un deux trois soleil….” [Murat, Telerama]

The film may have been a difficult one for Blier in terms of his scripting or perhaps his relationship with his star (this was their last film together). But it is a perfectly entertaining dark comedy that has some sexy moments and continues Blier’s run of films with complex female characters.

And it does boast one of the most interesting juxtapositions of music in any modern film. On its soundtrack can be heard the emotional, religious compositions of Henryk Gorecki and the sensual, earthy songs of Mr. Barry White. 

With the turning of the century Blier’s films disappeared from America’s movie screens entirely (although one of the films did get a brief DVD release; see below). The first movie in the run of five movies that went under the radar over here was Les Acteurs (aka Actors, 2000). The film circulated among English-speaking collectors as a bootleg from a subtitled version that aired on the SBS Channel in Australia.

Acteurs is Blier returning whole-heartedly to Theater of the Absurd comedy, with a who’s who of French actors “of a certain age” musing about their lives and careers, and the fact that they’re getting fewer roles as they grow older. We follow an initial group of them (André Dussollier, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Jacques Villeret) who find themselves in a restaurant, unsure of their lines. The initial group then wanders (in classic Blier style) through Paris, meeting different colleagues as they move on. 

The line-up of familiar faces is incredible, with Blier focusing most attention on the character people and a few superstars showing up in different guises: Depardieu crashes his motorcycle into a billboard near the group; Belmondo is a homeless version of himself (who gets a great death scene as jazz appears on the soundtrack); and Delon is shooting some kind of thriller (and says about himself “I’m a silent sort of guy, with a silent sort of face...”), but then points out the empty chairs on set (“you should always have a chair for a friend who may drop in, a chair with his name...”) emblazoned with the names of two great dead French stars (Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura). He then names others who need chairs (Bourvil, Louis de Funes, Simone Signoret, and Yves Montand).

One of the more surprising scenes for fans of French film who may not have been following the private lives of the stars involves Jean-Claude Brialy, a great star of the Sixties and Seventies. Brialy had come out as gay in his later life and allowed Blier to write a humorous scene related to this fact — but in the scene Brialy retains his dignity and reminds the other actor about Brialy’s place in cinema as a star in the films of the French New Wave.

Blier did also include two women in the parade of performers: Josiane Balasko (who claims to be André Dussollier) and Maria Schneider, whom he gifted with a nice monologue. At its end, she says, “I’m Maria Schneider. This scene has been good for me.” 

Blier and only *some* of his actor friends.

He referred to his cast in an interview as “an entire orchestra” and talked about how he conceived of the film (and its eventual failure at the box office): “...there, it was the public who did not want to get involved in the game, in this series of jokes and pleasantries in which the actors participated cheerfully. 

“I wrote with the phone next to me, and as soon as I came up with a scene for an actor, I called him. Each time, I gave that actor the names of those who had already accepted before him, and in that fashion I finally got everyone, with a snowball effect. The problem is that there should have been others, but the budget suffered drastic cuts, which forced me to reduce my ambitions, and I had to give up scenes involving younger actors. But the scenario was shot exactly as it was written.” [Predal, jeune cinema]

One watches the film wondering what set it in motion for Blier. That is revealed in the very last scene, in which the actor Claude Brasseur acts out a scene with a gun in a rainstorm. He is interrupted when he receives a cellphone call, which turns out to be from his dead dad, the great French actor Pierre Brasseur (Children of Paradise). Blier is revealed to be the director of the film; he and the crew watch Claude talk to his father. Claude soon turns back to Bertrand, saying his father is “with a pal who’d like to talk to you.” 

Bertrand takes the cellphone and begins a conversation with his father Bernard. He makes small talk and explains the film he’s making is about actors. He then responds to an unheard question, “Of course I think about you. Every day. In fact, as time goes on, I miss you even more.” [cut to credits]

This finale is about as personal as Blier’s art ever got. No more “stand-in” characters for his father, just Bertrand lamenting his death on film, at the end of his own meditation about older actors who are getting fewer lines, less calls with work, and have no idea which way to go with their lives. And, again, I note this is a thoroughly enjoyable and moving work that was never, ever seen by American viewers. 

The next film by Blier is probably my least favorite, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s just that the first half or so is directly adapted from a play that Blier wrote, which reportedly ran for two years in Paris. And, surprisingly, given that many of his films contain scenes (or entire portions of the film) that could be called “stagey” (read: two-character scenes in confined environments), Les Côtelettes (aka The cutlets, 2003), which was actually a play, comes off as a more “limited” offering, although the second half in which the film opens up is a lot more engaging.

The plot revolves around two pompous older men (Philippe Noiret and Michel Bouquet) who both fall in love with the same woman — namely the woman (Farida Rahouadj, Blier’s last wife) who works as a maid for one of them. Bouquet visits Noiret at the very beginning and notes he’s there specifically “to piss you off” (a classic Blier line). Soon, the men become embroiled in the triangle, which one can easily see as a kind of allegory for colonialism.

The film moves back to the world of Seventies Blier when the character of “Death,” depicted as an older woman (Catherine Hiegel), appears and says she is going to claim the maid. The two men end up attempting to stave the Grim Reaper off by screwing her in the hospital where their beloved is slowly dying – until there’s a musical number and the whole film goes wildly out of control. (And this time the out-of-control sequence is well-designed and performed, unlike the bizarre end of Calmos in which our antiheroes end up in a rather cheap-looking simulation of a vagina.) 

The “second career” of Blier reached a latter-day high point with the funny and characteristically bizarre How Much Do You Love Me? (2005), which was out briefly on DVD from Strand (with no theatrical release in the U.S. beforehand). The film is a densely plotted farce, which, again, is as good as anything Blier made in the Seventies and Eighties but was barely seen by American viewers.

Its initial premise is that a schnook (Bernard Campan) gets a beautiful hooker (Monica Bellucci) to live with him by convincing her that he is a lottery winner. The schnook is revealed to have a heart condition by his doctor friend (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who warns the hooker that she might kill him with vigorous sex. The hooker eventually disappears, and the schnook learns that she is the wife of a gangster (Depardieu), who offers to let the schnook have her for a certain sum of money (equal to his lottery winnings). That’s when it comes out that our antihero was lying and that he never won the lottery, and complications pile up. 

How Much is a beautifully stylized comedy with urban late-night landscapes, beautiful camera movement, and eye-catching set design. It shows just how vibrant and amusing Blier’s scripting can be and contains two scene-stealing moments, from doctor Darroussin, who delivers a touching monologue about a nurse he one loved, and neighbor Farida Rahouadj, who instructs the schnook and the hooker in how truly great sex should sound.

It also contains one of those memorably un-p.c. lines that made critics who gave only a cursory glance to his films the notion that he was a misogynist. The line in question? “Asses are meant to be touched. This is France!”

The last Blier masterwork is Le bruit des glaçons (aka The Clink of Ice, 2010). It’s not at all subtle but is wonderfully scripted and presents us with an absurdist scenario that is both very funny and quite moving at points. 

In an interview Blier spoke very eloquently about it. He called it “...my purest film. It's probably due to my age, to maturity. And more than the cancer plotline, it was for the love scenes between Anne Alvaro and Jean Dujardin that I shot the film…. When you have an incurable brain tumor, the fulfillment of the life you have left passes by necessity through the arms of a woman. We are looking for the one who will close your eyes, and it is not always the one we expect who does it.” [Murat, Telerama] 

The plot is beautifully fashioned. It concerns an alcoholic author (Jean Dujardin, The Artist and the brilliant, unseen-in-the-U.S. J’Accuse by Polanski) who receives a visit one day from a gentleman (Albert Dupontel) who claims that the author is dying and that he is the author’s cancer. The author’s Russian mistress can’t see his cancer and neither can his devoted maid (Anna Alvaro, Danton).

As the film moves on, the author argues with his cancer (in the classic manner of Blier’s comedy team leads) and eventually falls in love with the only one who truly cares about him, the maid. However, the maid has received a caller as well — a woman (Myriam Boyer) who claims that she is her cancer. She is not as well dressed and articulate as the author’s cancer, but that is because she represents “the cancer of the employed,” not the “cancer of the bosses.”

The film grows in bizarre activity until a scene in which the lives of author and the maid are threatened by crooks who break into the house, and thus comes a surprisingly upbeat ending. At that point we hear the stirring and beautiful rendition of Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” by Nina Simone; other music heard in the film is composed by Ravel, Handel, Schumann, Leonard Cohen, and Felix Leclerc (a terrific song by a singer-songwriter unknown in the U.S.).

Dujardin and Dupontel are great as the lead male characters, but Alvaro truly shines as the maid. She won a Cesar for her performance. 

The Maid (Anna Alvaro) and her "cancer"
(Myriam Boyer).

Glaçons returned to one of Blier’s favorite techniques, direct address to the viewer. He noted that “…in silent cinema, Chaplin did it. And if Chaplin did it, why not me?… In Le bruit des glaçons, it seemed essential to me. All the characters contemplate their death. Except cancer, who doesn't need to...”

And while Glaçons is Blier’s last masterwork, his final film, Convoi exceptionnel (aka Heavy Duty) (2019) is an enjoyable farce that returns to elements contained in his previous films. First of all is a shopping cart: Les Valseuses began with Depardieu in a shopping cart being pushed by Dewaere; in the opening of Merci La Vie Charlotte Gainsbourg pushes Anouk Grinberg in a shopping cart after she finds her unconscious by the side of a road; Convoi begins with Depardieu as a homeless man pushing a shopping cart with his possessions in it.

Note the shopping cart. (A symbol of Blier's
"wandering" characters.)

There are twists and turns in the plot, most of them heavy on the meta side. The film begins with homeless Depardieu meeting a wealthy-looking man (Christian Clavier) on the street. The wealthy man tells Gerard that they must hurry, as they have to kill a man. Why? “It’s in the script,” says Clavier, beginning a thread that runs throughout most of the film. 

Clavier is aware they’re operating from a script whereas Depardieu isn’t, until he is told. Then a further complication: new pages of the script are appearing with alarming frequency and neither man knows what he’s supposed to be doing. They wind up confronting the writers in their office and we learn then that what they’re involved in is seemingly a TV series (as the woman in charge is called a “show runner”). 

By this point Blier aficionados will recognize that the filmmaker is quoting his own work, as he was wont to do over the years. The notion of older men “losing their lines” and thus their direction in life appeared in Actors, and the inevitable obligatory killing hails from Buffet Froid.

As the rest of the film unfolds, we see the plot being constructed in front of us. First, there’s a woman (Farida Rahouadj) they meet who tells a sad story about her childhood, proving that, while these people might just be characters in a drama of some kind, they do have specific memories. 

Depardieu and Clavier then realize they have to kill Rahouadj, but once they do, the entire movie shifts gears — Depardieu’s long-lost girlfriend shows up and Clavier is left by his wife. The final movement of the film finds the two men’s lives completely flipped: Now Clavier is homeless and Depardieu is rich, living off the wealth of his 90-year-old wife.

Toward the end of the film the two leads talk a lot about food and how it should be prepared. One wonders why this discussion is so long, but by this time it was very clear that one of Depardieu’s main real-life addictions is food, so one gets the impression he didn’t actually need Blier’s lines to keep the scene going for as long as it does. It in fact serves another purpose, preparing us for a very sudden punchline to the film. 

The finale of Convoi might be sudden and perhaps not the “final statement” that one would’ve wished for from Blier, but early on he gives us another one of his flawless discussions, this time about art and death. 

In the latter half of the film, Depardieu and his girlfriend encounter a homeless man who turns out to be a film producer whose films all failed. He asks Depardieu if he knows “the difference between life and the movies.” He explains, “In life you die. In the movies, you never die. Never. For example, Mastroianni will never die.” 

Convoi may not be one of the “great last films” of a great filmmaker, but it does entertain and it places Blier’s absurdist universe into the current moment. And no, neither he nor his characters will ever really die. 

*****

Note: Thanks to friends Paul Gallagher and M. Faust for copies of the films. Thanks also to J-M Gregoire for references and translation, and Leonard Stoehr for inspiration.

Bibliography:
Blier, Bertrand, Going Places, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1974
Blier Bertrand, Pensées et répliques, le cherche midi, 2001, 2015
Harris, Sue, Bertrand Blier, Manchester University Press, 2001
Murat, Pierre, “Bertrand Blier en 2010 dans “Télérama” : “Pour moi, il n’y a plus de cinéma.” Telerama.
Predal, Rene, “Rencontre avec Bertrand Blier.” jeune cinéma, n°281, avril 2003

The best Sixties musical you’ve never seen — and the best Anna Karina vehicle that *never* plays in the U.S.

Anna Karina, who recently died at 79, had a rich and vibrant career after her divorce from Jean-Luc Godard, but she will forever be best known as Uncle Jean’s first muse and a living embodiment of the Nouvelle Vague — of which only a scant few are left (namely Leaud and Belmondo; Bulle Ogier, Piccoli, and Trintignant deserve honorable mention). Her legacy of collaborations with Godard is strengthened by her later work with other great directors like Rivette, Michel Deville, Agnes Varda, Eric Rohmer, Roger Vadim, Visconti, Schlondorff, Tony Richardson, Cukor, Benoit Jacquot, Ulli Lommel, Jonathan Demme, Raoul Ruiz, and Funhouse deity Fassbinder (not forgetting Anna herself).

Pierre Koralnik, a specialist in telefilms and episodic TV, wouldn’t ever be placed in that company, but he made one of the single best Karina vehicles, the musical Anna (1967). The film’s charm and rewatchability comes not from Koralnik’s deft, professional touch with the material, but from its stars and a wonderfully memorable score by Serge Gainsbourg.

Anna was a telefilm that first aired on January 13, 1967. It was notable for being the first French telefilm in color and for being Gainsbourg’s only full score for a musical — he wrote dozens of instrumental and vocal scores for dramas and comedies, of course, and created two perfect concept albums (Histoire De Melody Nelson and L'Homme À Tête De Chou), but Anna was his only full-fledged musical.

The film’s international distribution remains a puzzle. It has never acquired a U.S. distributor and hasn’t played in NYC arthouses at all in the last quarter-century, since Gainsbourg became a cult figure in America. During which time, of course, the Godard films with Karina have been restored and revived countless times, in theaters and on home entertainment media.

I acquired a copy of the film from a Japanese home-entertainment release in 2002, and discussed and showed scenes from it on the Funhouse TV show at that time. I have since rerun those episodes twice and will be showing them again this weekend and next. (The show, for those who are unaware, is a non-profit enterprise that has aired for 26 years on Manhattan access and remains the premier American TV series covering both arthouse and grindhouse cinema.)

If American viewers have wanted to see the film, they have to acquire it from vendors selling overseas DVDs, or they can watch the musical numbers from the film on YouTube — without the fairy tale plot that comes between them, or the finale. In 2018, I was in Paris and was informed by a cineaste friend that it was “Anna’s year,” because three of her films were being restored and shown in cinemas again. These three were one of the Godard films (which we have never not had in the U.S.), the first feature she directed (Vivre ensemble, 1973), and Anna (which the Gilles Verlant bio of Gainsbourg notes was unseen in France from ’67 to 1990). Of those three, we proceeded to get more 4K restorations of the films she made with Godard — and nothing else.

So this piece serves as both a discussion of the film and a plea for some U.S. distributor to acquire it. (According to its IMDB listing, it has none at the moment and has never had one, thus accounting for it never being shown in U.S. rep houses, or even museums and non-profit spaces.) At some point in the future, it may appear on disc and some other writer will be asked to do the notes for the booklet contained in the release. For the time being, this piece will hopefully serve as that “101” for a film that Americans can’t see, unless they purchase it from overseas vendors (or hunt around on the underside of the Net, which benefits none of the French rights-holders).

The film was clearly inspired by the success of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). It has a plot as flimsy as any great MGM musical and a look that is half-Demy, half-pop art.

The wafer-thin plot is a classic of convenient misunderstanding. An advertising man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who has a rich-kid, playboy lifestyle, searches Paris for a woman (Anna Karina) whose picture he took by accident at a photo shoot that was done at a train station. He doesn’t put 2 and 2 together and realize that the woman works in his own office, because she had dropped her glasses at the time the shutter was clicked and the pictures were taken. Upon such sweet misunderstandings great and timeless romances (and farces) are built and Anna is one of those, despite its utter invisibility in the U.S.

Karina is in full flower here. She is charming and resolute, and the bittersweet finale shows that her character is not made to simply melt into the scenery. She is a modern woman who, while pining for meaning in her life, doesn’t need or want the role of “dream girl” for a rich playboy. Although she is indeed a fantasy figure in certain scenes, most particularly in the oh, so Sixties dream sequences where she’s a sci-fi space traveler and a cowgirl gunfighter (!). (Part of a Fellini-esque dream seemingly added to stretch the film to 85 minutes; the sequence, which criticizes American militarism, overlaps with a later film that featured Serge in a supporting role, William Klein's Mister Freedom.)

Anna is both an object and a subject of passion in the film. Her specs-less image is put on posters throughout Paris by Brialy, and she becomes the subject of a glamorous “hunt.” On her own, though, she is a lonely soul, looking to take a vacation in a sunny clime. This is expressed in the film’s most beautiful song, an experiment in waltz-time by Gainsbourg called “Sous Le Soleil Exactment” (Right Under the Sun). He later recorded it himself, but Anna’s wistful vocals and the images Koralnik added (he had worked on pop-rock TV shows in France) are gorgeous.

In her stolen moments, Anna dreams of being a superhero, the “roller girl.” This song is by far one of Serge’s great pop-rock numbers of the period, with a riff that sticks to the brain pan (so much so that later songwriters ripped it off shamelessly). All of the tunes in the film are memorable, but this and “Sous Le Soleil Exactement” are the two that are sheer pop perfection. Unlike the later “Comic Strip” performed by Bardot and Gainsbourg, this sequence has no comic-book element visually, but it conveys its point and also gives us a glorious moment of fantasizing by the lonely, bored (slightly drunk) heroine.

In Le Petit Soldat (1960, released ’63), Godard has a character make a bet with the hero that he will fall in love with Anna instantly. The hero demurs, but instantly pays up as soon as he sees her. Viewers of Anna will have the same reaction, as she is thoroughly charming, especially when seen on her own, away from the playboy’s idealizing lens.

Brialy was notably the only performer to work with all five of the Cahiers du Cinema posse (in starring roles, yet). He is perfectly cast here as the conflicted, spoiled photographer. He had a somewhat flat singing voice, so he goes the Rex Harrison/Richard Burton route and recites-sings Serge’s gorgeously playful lyrics, which works perfectly in numbers like “Boomerang.”

Serge himself wasn’t the greatest actor, but his appearances here are wonderful because he serves as the “jaded best friend” — a Gallic version of Oscar Levant’s role in MGM musicals. Given the high quality and catchiness of the songs here, one is amazed that there was never a second Gainsbourg musical. (Thankfully, there is no “jukebox musical” in store, mostly because his greatest muse, Jane Birkin, has been touring the world with a live show called “Gainsbourg Symphonique.”)

He sings two songs in the film, with the second being a bravura piece of lyric writing in which he cautions his friend Brialy against love — the title “Un poison violent, c'est ça l'amour” translates as "Love is a violent poison." The lyrics posit that one’s behavior moves “from appetite to disgust” and back again — an irresistible notion for Gainsbourg to include in a lyric (one with rhymes and poetry that are untranslatable). It came from his reading matter at the time, an essay by 17th-century French theologian Jacques-Bénigne Lignel Bossuet. (This crap copy of the scene shows just how badly we need to actually get a quality, *legal* copy of the film here in the U.S.)

Serge is quoted in the official Gilles Verlant biography as saying, “[The score] was French rock before French rock existed. I think the soundtrack has aged poorly but the visuals still hold up. I always thought Koralnik was going to have an amazing career. He’s a great director….” [Gilles Verlant, Gainsbourg: the Biography, Tam Tam Books, 2012 (French edition, 2000), p. 286]. It is also noted that these songs were created “under enormous pressure” since Serge kept hitting creative blocks (per Jean-Pierre Spiero). [ibid, pp. 287-88] Half of the score was written in the final 15 days before shooting began.

A quote from Serge about the composition of the songs is included in the Verlant bio: “It was at that time I set my record for successive nights of intentional insomnia — eight nights. At night I’d compose music that would be recorded the next day. In the mornings I had studio sessions and in the afternoon I was playing a convict in the Loursais film, Vidocq. When it was over I slept for 48 hours straight…” [ibid, p. 288]

Anna and Serge sing "Ne Dis Rien" on a variety show.

Musicians are notoriously hard on themselves, and it has to be said that Serge was wrong about the inspired score he came up with for Anna. Sure, at points, it’s effervescent, frothy pop nonsense, but what other songwriter wrote bubblegum music that had the lyric “Baby gum, baby gum!” in a song that openly references (in the title, yet) Stendhal?

There are several beautiful melodies in Anna, but the most touching love song is “Ne Dis Rien” (Say Nothing). The song is performed as a duet with Brialy and Karina alternating not just full lines but small phrases in the verses. The result is a beautiful counterpoint that adds to the romance of the song.

And because Serge was truly in literary mode in the mid-Sixties, the key line is “Suis-moi jusqu'au bout de la nuit/Jusqu'au bout de ma folie...” (Follow me to the end of the night/to the end of my madness...)  This evokes Journey to the End of the Night by seminal dark humorist (and figure of great controversy) Celine.

Anna can be obtained by Americans on the "underside" of the Net, with or without subtitles. There are actually several different subtitled versions of the film floating around. The oddest one is the one that aired on TeleFrance 5 from Montreal, which provides literal English translations of Gainsbourg’s lyrics, losing nearly all of the brilliant wordplay and the emotion as well.

The original soundtrack LP.

The film is truly a missing link in Sixties pop cinema. From its paint-splattered opening (which overlaps, again, with the film work of Serge’s friend, American expat photographer William Klein), to the primary-colored images crafted by Koralnik and cinematographer Willy Kurant (Godard’s Masculin-Feminin, Varda’s Les Creatures), to the sudden guest appearance of Marianne Faithfull (singing her latest single, a Gainsbourg composition), and the triumphant finale, the film is a gem that needs to be seen on the U.S. repertory circuit and be legally released on disc.

As for Koralnik (whom Serge roomed with at one time) and Gainsbourg, they worked together one more time, not counting a TV pop-music variety show, on a rather lousy thriller called Cannabis (1970). Though uncompelling as a drug trafficking crime drama, the film stars Serge, Jane B, and Paul (“Cousin Kevin”) Nicholas. It contains, though, Serge’s other great film score of the Sixties. (The entire film can be seen here, without English subs.)

He deemed the score a fusion of Jimi Hendrix, who he was listening to at the time, and old fave Bela Bartok. Serge described his soundtracks as “laboratories” for music he wouldn’t put on his own or other’s pop albums. The score for Cannabis is a dazzlingly psychedelic creation that remains brilliant with each listen.

And, moving back to Anna, her post-Godard films— and the ones she made for other directors while married to him – will be rediscovered and re-evaluated as the years go by. Recently, one of her best Sixties performances, in Rivette’s The Nun (1966), finally appeared on disc in the U.S.

The films with Uncle Jean remain eternal. Oddly, in some write-ups of Anna it was noted that she “had never sung before” onscreen. Clearly those writers had never seen the absolutely perfect Pierrot Le Fou….

Thanks to Paul Gallagher for help discovering the different versions of the film, and Charles Lieurance and Laura Wagner for some of the Karina pics.

A cynic among the dreamers: Deceased Artiste Claude Chabrol

In the last few years, I’ve spoken on the Funhouse TV show about the sustained brilliance of the eight or so filmmakers who comprised the “French New Wave.” They have continued to make exquisite films well into their 70s and 80s, and remind us that artists can remain vital and inventive as they grow older. 

With the death of Eric Rohmer, the “eldest brother” of the Cahiers quintet who are considered the core of la nouvelle vague, the group finally began to diminish (to that point, only Truffaut had died). And now the most commercial filmmaker of the group, Claude Chabrol, has died at 80. 

Chabrol was the most remarkably prolific member of the group (as relates to full-length theatrical features) and was also by far the most uneven in terms of quality. His meager project-for-hire films are without question the most unabashedly “commercial” movies ever made by an New Waver (although, true to form for this group, even these were mighty strange and slower-paced affairs), but his masterpieces are far more despairing in tone than anything produced by even the resolutely serious Alain Resnais and the masterfully paranoid Jacques Rivette. 

Chabrol’s two heroes were Hitchcock (about whom he wrote Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films with Rohmer) and Lang, and, like those masters, he doted on the cruel side of human nature. In his best films, Chabrol showed how random violence can be, and how it is cruelest when it comes with a betrayal of trust. One article that can be found online clearly defines the five “periods” of his work, the weirdest being the time in the Sixties when he made colorful but low-budget spy thrillers for a few years to keep his hand in as a studio-backed craftsman.

Thankfully that and his other oddest period, which found him making a slew of mediocre international coproductions, were “broken” by brilliantly conceived features — Les Biches (1968) in the former case and Violette (1978) in the latter. Chabrol was thus akin to Dylan and Brando — every few years (usually following absolutely dreadful work), the artist emerges with a masterwork, as if to say, “I bet you thought I had lost it, didn’t ya…?” 

The most analyzed period of Chabrol’s career is 1968-’73, when he made a brilliant series of thrillers that critiqued bourgeois society, showing us the comforts and rituals of that strata of society, as well as (you guessed it) their petty cruelties. 

I have decided to dedicate this blog entry to his first four films, however, since they show the genesis of his style and display that style in its rawest form. The resulting pictures still have the power to disturb the viewer and are incredibly memorable — my least favorite movies from Chabrol’s last twenty years of work were the ones that one could barely remember as one exited the theater. 

The first four features are also most interesting because two have been MIA on American DVD and VHS; the other two are currently available on disc in pristine condition from Kino Lorber. Chabrol swore in later years that “films with a message make me laugh,” but he definitely had something to say about the sudden, swift cruelty that is an intrinsic part of daily life. 

His first feature, Le Beau Serge (1958), is an extremely downbeat tale of a young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns to his provincial hometown to recover from an illness, only to find that his old friend (Gerard Blain) is now a far-gone alcoholic. Brialy falls for a young woman in town, played by the wonderfully sexy Bernadette Lafont (The Mother and the Whore).

 

The film revolves around the fact that Brialy is shocked by the mean behavior in his hometown — perhaps the film’s nastiest twist comes when a scummy old man finds out that his daughter is not biologically his, so he rapes her. The act occurs offscreen but the emotional violation is forefront of the narrative. Here the father character threatens Brialy:

 

Beau Serge provides a good introduction to Chabrol’s elegant, fluid camerawork as well as his blending of “light” material with the ramifications of harsh acts of violence. With his second film, Les Cousins (1959), a collaborator entered the scene who received important mention in the better-researched Chabrol obits: screenwriter Paul Gégauff. 

Works on the New Wave that mention Gégauff note that he behaved like a fascist in public around his Cahiers/nouvelle vague friends and was a flagrant womanizer. His professional side was exemplary: he cowrote the classic René Clément film Purple Noon (1960) and collaborated with Chabrol on fourteen movies (thirteen features and a short), including some of the filmmaker’s finest.

The story about Gégauff that is most often repeated is how he wore a Nazi uniform to a screening of a British war film in 1950s Paris to shock members of the audience. He is most often depicted as a sort of macho inspiration for Chabrol and Godard (who supposedly modeled all of their early womanizing antiheroes after him); he has been called Chabrol’s “model of cynicism and amorality.” 

Chabrol was a self-professed Communist who hung around this provocative character (whom he said “posed as a fascist”) for quite a while, and definitely Gégauff helped mold Chabrol’s filmic worldview, as he collaborated on six of the first eight Chabrol features. In one interview, Chabrol praises Gégauff as having “extraordinarily courageous” ideas, but he also noted that: “He fascinated me by pushing at the limits of self-destruction, by his taste for extraordinary paradoxes and his real elegance. But he also showed me just how far this could take him into self-destruction.” 

This penchant lead to his end — Gégauff was stabbed to death by his second, Norwegian wife in 1983. Rohmer said in an interview: “Gégauff influenced all of the New Wave, with the exception of Truffaut. Or we, at least, all employed ‘Gégauffian’ characters.” The most fondly remembered characters in early Chabrol are definitely “Gégauffian,” particularly the “dandies” played by Jean-Claude Brialy. 

Gégauff’s first script for Chabrol, Les Cousins, is an utterly tormented (but curiously glamorous) affair about a young man from the country (Gerard Blain) who visits his cousin (the very decadent Brialy) in the city; both are students studying for their final exams. The film is filled with “debauchery,” or what was categorized as such in 1959 — and that includes wild parties (where Mozart and Wagner are played!), sexual liberation, and an un-fucking-believeable bachelor pad (see below).

 

The film is a masterwork of the French New Wave, and shows Chabrol to truly be the most cynical of the group. Rivette’s impeccable debut feature, Paris Nous Appartient (1961) offers an incredibly paranoid, existential vision of Paris at the turn of the Sixties, but Rivette’s approach is that of the “disappointed idealist” whose characters continue to dream even as they are circled by unknown forces.

Chabrol’s early work is severely bleak and the characters are amoral, thus offering a look at Paris “from the outside in,” where if we do identify with anyone (Blain in Les Cousins, the shop girls in Les Bonne Femmes), they are bound to be victimized — in Les Cousins, a gun that Brialy owns is shown more than once earlier in the film, so one awaits its use in the third act. But, in the meantime, everyone parties!

 

 

Chabrol was in fact very fascinated by hanging around right-wing types, and reportedly based the party scenes in the film on his experiences fraternizing with them between 1947 and ’49 (he was the “token” left-winger among them, perhaps because he was such a pleasant type…. or perhaps because he was a decadent sot himself?). Among the partiers he knew was the womanizing, binge-drinking French National Front party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who lost his position as head of the law students when he interrupted a church service.

Chabrol was annoyed by critics who labeled Les Cousins a “fascist” film, since he felt the message was that fascists were still alive and well in France. He said, “at the time people didn’t believe that there were Fascists in France. It was as stupid as that. So they thought I was a Fascist, because they didn’t want to think that the characters on screen were.”

It should be noted, however, that while Blain is a thoroughly virtuous character, Brialy is the one most viewers remember best (if only for his decadent lifestyle). 

The contribution of another Chabrol collaborator, cinematographer Henri Decaë, also can’t be overstated. Decaë worked on many of Melville’s finest (Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge). This sequence from the latter part of Les Cousins shows his subtle lighting in the bachelor pad, as Blain attempts to kill his debauched cousin. (This is the anti-climax, not the film's finale.)

 

The deceitful and treacherous go unpunished in Les Cousins, and Chabrol continued this theme in Á Double Tour (1959), his first color feature and first thriller. The film, which is available in the U.S. from Kino Lorber, offers more incredibly cruel dialogue from Gégauff:

 

It also is an unusually constructed work that springs its flashbacks on us with no telegraphed “memory” introductions. The rich family at the core of the film is empty and shallow, and so we begin to “attach” to the family’s sexy maid (Bernadette Lafont), the father’s foreign mistress (Antonella Lualdi), and her Hungarian friend, played by a scene-stealing Jean Paul Belmondo, who appeared in Á Double Tour around the time he made Breathless (the film was released right before Godard’s film made him a star).

 

Chabrol later said he regretted devoting so much of the film to Belmondo’s character (I notice he didn’t regret showcasing the ladies’ physiques), but when Belmondo isn’t on screen, Decaë’s exquisite imagery is commanding our attention. The plotline isn’t very involving as a result, but when one has Belmondo, Lafont, and Lualdi to watch, who really requires a compelling and logical plotline? 

Chabrol’s brilliant and disturbing fourth film, Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), also available from Kino Lorber, is arguably his best, and was the one that he referred to as his favorite. The film’s plot is very simple: four young shop girls deal with the rigors and pleasures of daily life in Paris. Chabrol and Gegauff create charming and sympathetic portraits of the ladies but, as the film moves on, we become aware of how the men around them control their every move. It first becomes apparent in comic scenes:

 

 And time capsules like this one where exotic dancer “Dolly Bell” performs:

 

The film’s tone changes as it moves along, from a seemingly innocuous and infectiously lively portrait of Parisian nightlife at the turn of the Sixties to a far grimmer drama about a young woman whose trust is tragically misplaced. Scenes like this one reflect the change in tone:

 

Like Hitchcock, Chabrol was known to make darkly humorous comments in interviews. On the subject of men dominating women, he said in one seminal interview conducted by Dan Yakir:

If there are men, women are the victims. This I admit quite willingly given what the poor things have to bear… Women in a modest milieu suffer terribly. It’s not amusing at all. It’s a cliché, but if they work all day in a factory and at night have to cook and wash — it’s terrible! We men are monsters [laughs uncontrollably] It’s funny… If women don’t laugh, I understand, but I find it funny….

On the other hand, he talked about Les Bonnes Femmes in some depth in another interview that can be found here:

I wanted to make a film about stupid people that was very vulgar and deeply stupid…. I don't think that it's a pessimistic film. I'm not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live. When we wrote the film the people were, for Gégauff, fools. It was a film about fools. But at the same time we could see little by little that if they were foolish, it was mainly because they were unable to express themselves, establish contact with each other. The result of naïvety, or a too great vulgarity. People have said that I didn't like the people I was showing, because they believe that you have to ennoble them to like them. That's not true. Quite the opposite: only the types who don't like their fellows have to ennoble them.

He added that “the girls aren't shown as idiots. They're just brutalized by the way they live.” The question of whether Chabrol and Gégauff were sketching realistic characters in order to show their eventual entrapment, or simply observing victims-to-be for the sheer thrill of watching the final trap spring shut, brings one back to the eternal question surrounding Hitchcock’s work: is it sadistic, sympathetic, or both? 

The lead quartet in Les Bonnes Femmes undergo numerous things that qualify the film as either a thoroughly sexist vision or a thoroughly feminist one — depending upon which lens you’re using. One can definitely see the sympathetic side in this scene beautifully depicting the boredom of the work day:

 

In the two films that followed Femmes — Les Godelureaux (1961) and L’Oeil de Malin (1962) — one is presented with an array of completely unsympathetic characters; thus, one is certain that Chabrol/Gégauff are showing society as filled with deceptive, unpleasant types (in articles of the time that condemned Chabrol, he was most often compared to Billy Wilder and obviously liked the comparison, as he used Wilder’s trademark tune “Fascination” in more than one picture). 

Les Bonnes Femmes does paint a sympathetic portrait of the shop girls, as in this scene, which does much to change the tone of the film. It is lengthy and uncomfortable to watch:

 

Watching some of Chabrol’s later films, I often felt that he should’ve veered sharply away from the influence of Hitchcock — much as I think some singer-songwriters desperately need to break their Dylan records and rely on their own original talent. 

However, early on, Chabrol used his fan-obsessions with Hitchcock and Lang to brilliant effect. In Les Bonnes Femmes one could argue that the camera takes an omniscient viewpoint on events, and the filmmaker is taking a certain glee in showing how arbitrarily cruel the world can be to the clueless innocent. 

Instead, Chabrol follows the film’s final outburst of violence — which I will not spoil here, and I urge readers not to watch the scene on YouTube if you haven’t seen the whole film — with a memorable scene involving a new young woman, not yet seen in the film, who just might end up like our unlucky shop girl. Or she might find companionship and love in the very cool, and very cold, world that is Paris. Hope continues to exist in this colorful but sad universe. 

Chabrol was indeed a diehard cynic when compared with his dreamer-friends Godard and Truffaut (and the “Left Bank” New Wavers Resnais, Varda, and Marker), but in his finest works he also offered sympathy for those trapped in situations that were definitely a good deal more menacing than anything found in the average whodunit. 

Thanks to the Claude Chabrol Project and Paul Gallagher for the Chabrol interviews.