The deliciously cinematic perpetual storytelling of a transplanted thespian: Presenting Sacha Guitry on DVD

I hadn’t heard of him either, yet the writer, director and star of everything in Eclipse’s Presenting Sacha Guitry was Paris’ most popular and prolific playwright of the 1920s. Guitry’s reluctant turn toward the cinema—which seemed to him an inferior and technically fussy medium, one attempting to pickle the ephemeral vivacity of theatre—was initially done only as a method of reaching a larger audience. Yet the story of Sacha Guitry is as compelling a piece of evidence as I’ve seen that great things can arise when an artist is coerced to work in a form other than the one in which he or she feels most comfortable. I can imagine Guitry’s stage work as very fleet-footed, pithy and entertaining, but I’d be surprised if it had anything on the playful innovation or unbridled narrative accumulation or sense of quiet spaces within a noisy world that one finds in the quartet of movies collected here.

Far from stage-bound—it was actually based on Guitry’s only novel—The Story of a Cheat (1936) could only have been conveyed through Guitry’s rigorous, sometimes audacious embracing of montage, voice-over, and an audiovisual dissonance unique to movies. The Cahiers crowd would dub it “pure cinema.” As Guitry’s titular grifter writes his memoirs his words summon up images from the past, or in any case his own no doubt fabulous version of it—no one in these flashbacks speaks, so no one can contradict the narrator or subvert his total control. He was born to provincial grocers and had a litter of siblings, all of them killed by a poisonous fungus dinner the child cheat was denied because he swiped change from the register. So he learned very early that crime pays, and as his biography unfolds at absurd, breakneck speed, he moves between France and Monaco, becomes a card shark, a soldier, a master of disguise and a croupier. He tries to go straight now and then, but he’s always dragged back, perhaps because the particular rules of Guitry’s universe insist that anything that happens once will happen again and again.

A chronicle of crossed destinies that traverses continents and centuries in its attempt to follow the movement of small precious objects as they’re passed between royals and thieves, The Pearls of the Crown (37) seems ripe material for an Italo Calvino novel, but Guitry rendered it instead as a dizzying historical-apocryphal-completely made-up cinema spectacle, one incorporating over 80 locations and some 200 characters, many of them famous monarchs, three of which are played by Guitry, and another three by his spouse and regular costar Jacqueline Delubac, so witty and lovely and possessing of a smile that would later grace the visage of Brooke Adams. The Pearls of the Crown is in part a cosmic-comic study in simultaneity. The dialogue is divided between three languages—four if you count Guitry’s “Abyssinian,” which is actually French played backwards—though you need only understand one of them to get the gist of any given scene. Language lessons become grounds for seduction, half an entire conversation consists solely of adverbs, a statue comes to life—twice, lovely heads are chopped off, wars are fought, revolutions erupt, men scour the globe on wild goose chases, and those milky pearls are bequeathed from one generation to another. You feel like Guitry could keep telling the story forever, yet when it ends it ends at precisely the only place it could have.

A twisty comedy of complicated love, Quadrille (38) is chronologically the last movie in Presenting Sacha Guitry. It’s perfectly delightful, utterly engrossing, and most obviously based on a play. I’d rather end by describing Désiré (37), which seems much more modest than its predecessors yet might be my favourite. Guitry plays the dapper and meticulous titular valet who arrives very late one night in the hope of finding work with Delubac’s Odette Cléry, a retired and obviously wealthy actress currently involved with a starchy politician. From the start Désiré’s new gig is unnervingly tenuous—Odette telephones Désiré’s previous employer and discovers that his position was terminated only on account of certain romantic tensions that arose between the two—and you get the sense that Désiré’s gift for suddenly improvising monologues that feel like resolved conversations is the only thing keeping him off the streets.

Guitry’s age and portly figure—he resembles a cross between Jean Gabin and the elderly Fritz Lang—make his assuming the role of the haplessly seductive Désiré seem comical or simply the whim of a director’s vanity, yet this bit of counter-intuitive casting makes the protagonist only more interesting, and his situation far more desperate. Meanwhile, the off-screen action and dearth of locations feel less like canned theatre than an exploration of the cloistered world of servants, and the story’s focus on erotic dreams and private conversations provide a sense of intimacy and nocturnal quietude. It all ends as simply and strangely as it began, and for all its talk there’s so much left unsaid, leaving us strangely moved. Guitry is customarily compared to Noël Coward, but something in Désiré at least reminded me of Robert Walser. Here’s hoping that we can continue to discover more from this forgotten master.

Lasting impressions: Robert Walser's The Tanners

portraits of Robert Walser included in W.G. Sebald's essay

Here’s what seized my attention right away. A young man enters a bookstore, asks to be introduced to the proprietor. Upon meeting the old man he begins a rambling, effusive overture detailing his profound desire to enter the world of bookselling. “My love of humankind will be agreeably balanced with mercantile rationality which in fact bears equal weight and appears to me just as necessary for life as a soul filled with love…” The proprietor agrees to hire the young man on the spot, giving him a week’s trial period. A week later, after having made a highly favorable impression, the young man approaches his employer and unexpectedly demands to be let go. “I’ve come to realize that the entire book trade in nothing less than ghastly if it must entail standing at one’s desk from early morning till late at night while out of doors the gentlest winter sun is gleaming, and forces one to scrunch one’s back, since the desk is far too small given my stature…” His resignation speech is as deliciously excessive as his earlier declaration of vocational discovery. The sequence is hilarious, teetering on absurd, yet peppered with almost lyrical observations on the nature of work and youth and spiritual urges that resonate and will continue to resonate throughout this ambulatory, funny, hypnotic, strangely haunting work. It was the first novel from Swiss author Robert Walser, and the last to be translated into English—very beautifully, by Susan Bernofsky—more than a century after its 1906 publication.

Truthfully, it was the accolades alone that sold me on The Tanners (New Directions, $20). Walser was not widely read during his lifetime (1878-1956), but among his readers were Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and Walter Benjamin. Those who have pledged their admiration for Walser in the decades after his death include Susan Sontag, J.M. Coetzee and W.G. Sebald, who wrote the eloquent essay which functions as an introduction to The Tanners. “The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether… he was only ever connected to the world in the most fleeting of ways.” Sebald’s evocation of Walser’s ghost-like movement through life, rarely settling anywhere, always walking, owning nothing, not even his own books, being institutionalized in a psychiatric facility in 1933, where he retired from writing, and finally dying of a heart attack on a snowy pathway, is captivating in its mystery, a mystery that extends into Walser’s work. The Tanners is titled after the siblings who inhabit its pages, but its central character, Simon Tanner, seems to have been conceived somewhat autobiographically. Only 20 at the novel’s start, he’s bright, seemingly full of promise, an orator of marvelous talents. “I don’t like to spend too long considering before I speak,” Simon says, yet he speaks always with wit and precision. He’s a hard-worker when employed. He moves from job to menial job, from apartment to spartan apartment, at times from sibling to sibling—his sister is an unmarried schoolteacher, his brothers include an academic and a landscape painter. Each worries over him fruitlessly. Toward the novel’s end Simon offers a typically loquacious confession to one of many strangers drawn to him. “I’m still standing at the door of life, knocking and knocking, though admittedly none too forcefully, and breathlessly listening to see whether someone will decide to open the bolt and let me in.”

The Tanners is both melancholy and relentlessly good-natured. Simon is both fascinated by and removed from the world around him. The book is constructed to an unusually large degree of letters and monologues—open the book at random, you’ll likely find someone writing or talking. Many of the speeches are Simon’s, though in Walser’s universe just about everyone is gifted with the ability to hold forth on whatever passing notion, and Simon’s wandering journey yields countless, arresting portraits of characters, even those glimpsed only briefly. Rosa, who weeps alone for an unrequited love; Klara, who falls wholly under the spell of each member of the Tanner clan she meets; a beguiling dancer; a young, married explorer, home from his travels, who likes to fire guns into the forest in the middle of the night; an old man with a dripping nose; a teacher suffering from domestic abuse; a gay nurse; a reformed pedophile. While never overwrought or imposed upon with psychological dissections, each character drifts vividly in and out of Walser’s vivid scenes, each one a depiction of urban or rural landscapes, a contrast that embodies the divided spirit of the protagonist. Sebald notes how so much of what occurs in Walser’s stories slip quickly and inexplicably out of memory, and I see what he means, Walser’s transitions can be so unassuming as to barely punctuate epiphanies, events, entrances and exits. Yet once you’ve read through The Tanners I think you’ll find that its faces and places and states of mind cascade through your memory. The order is lost, but the impressions remain.

The Tanners was my first experience with Walser’s work and I rushed directly from it to another Walser, Jakob von Gunten (NYRB Classics, $16.50), published in 1909, which I gather is his most famous novel, and which some of you may know as the source material to the 1995 Brothers Quay film Institute Benjamenta, which I haven’t seen. This shorter novel, translated by Christopher Middleton, written in the form of a diary, describes a deeply mysterious school for boys where very little is actually to be learned, so says the titular diarist, who at one point writes, “pupils are slaves, young leaves, torn from branches and trunks, given up to the merciless gale…” Yet Jakob seems to like this very much. He has come here, having ran from an oppressive father—in more ways than one does this novel seem to have had a major impact on Kafka—is eagerly striving to become “a zero” and aspires to a career in servitude. But there is also something very sinister about the Institute Benjamenta, which promises to be revealed to Jakob as he’s gradually embraced by its staff of two, made a favourite, and ushered into secret chambers where he at one point is instructed to “fondle” a “Wall of Worries.” The intrigue is only partly paid off, yet the finale is nonetheless satisfying.