Everything old is Nouvelle again: the French New Wave hits the Cinematheque Ontario

Bande à part

Ever since this past New Year’s Day I’ve been in a state of more or less perpetual amazement over the realization that 1959 was 50 years ago. Has it really been a half-century since Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, since Charles Mingus unleashed the tripartite assault of Roots & Blues, Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty, since Ornette Coleman revealed The Shape of Jazz to Come? Or since the first audacious, invigorating, iconoclastic crash of the Nouvelle Vague, this thing that Nigel Andrews once declared the “greatest criminal enterprise in cinema history?” The entropic upheaval of the world renders so many things aged, quaint and useless so quickly, so why is it so hard for me to believe that these landmarks have receded so deep into the past?

The 400 Blows

There are shards of time, colossal events that we automatically read as part of that grand Other we call history (sometimes even while they’re still happening). The lunar landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, shit, even the invasion of Iraq seem somehow to be much more enshrined by history than Antoine Doinel’s frozen gaze as he stands perched at the end of his line on that lonesome beach. Something happened in American music—a topic I’ll be getting around to later—and in French film that not only changed history but also changed how we view it. The French New Wave had a winning combination: it was rigorously fun and smart. It allowed us to look at the movies not as something disposable but as as an ongoing story, referring critically, affectionately, explicitly, irreverently to the medium’s past and its accepted formal and structural inclinations—and thus breaking with them, too. They ran wild with heady literary pretensions, a pivotal investment in youth culture, a taste for at times radical political discourse and, most especially, with new technology that gave these filmmakers—many of them critics—a new freedom. The best of the movement remains so dynamic to those familiar with it, so startling to the newcomer, that it seems to live and breathe still as an ongoing event. And with a few key figures still living and working, the waves wash up around us still, however becalmed they may now be.

Breathless

À Double tour

Paris Belongs to Us

Vivre sa vie

Shoot the Piano Player

Tonight, the Cinematheque Ontario launches what is probably their most anticipated summer program, Nouvelle Vague: The French New Wave, Then and Now. There are over three-dozen titles screening, among them the essential classics, but also rarities. Crowds will rightfully flock to screenings of the most popular and definitive films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard—The 400 Blows (1959), Breathless (60), Jules and Jim (61) and Bande à part (64)—but I’m really excited to revisit Jacques Rivette’s magnificently labyrinthine, conspiracy-riddled Paris Belongs to Us (60), which feels in some sense like a prismatic reflection of the other films happening simultaneously, as well as The Nun (66), which I missed during the Cinematheque’s recent Rivette retrospective. There’s also Elevator to the Gallows (57), Jean Eustache’s Bad Company (63), Godard’s rediscovered Made in USA (66), and several Claude Chabrols—including À Double tour (59), which features a jaw-droppingly sexy Bernadette Lafont flrting with the milk man from the window in her underwear and a delightfully slovenly, drunken Jean-Paul Belmondo in my new favourite eating scene of all time.

Méditérranée

There’s also something called Méditérranée (63), a 45-minute work made by Jean-Daniel Pollet with a lot of help from Volker Schlöndorff. It features images of medical equipment, barbed wire, seascapes, curving corridors, bull fighting, decaying ruins, Venetian canals, and a Greek party! Much of it accompanied by a portent-heavy score and captured in brooding lateral tracking shots like we’re surveying the aftermath of some stray apocalypse. There’s also a presumably helpful ongoing voice-over narration, and since I’ve only seen it without subtitles and my French is for shit I have absolutely no idea what it’s supposed to be about. I can’t wait to find out.

From fettered youth to youthful folly: two by François Truffaut

We have so few portraits of innocence like that of Antoine Doniel, who in his inarticulate stare alone combined undigested emotional damage with a spirited will toward childish anarchy that no amount of stern punishment seems able to fully repress. With his neglectful parents, impatient teachers and paucity of friends, he’s essentially alone in the movie, receiving lasting consolation only from the camera, or mise-en-scène if you prefer, itself, which fixed so memorably, so dazzlingly, on his physiognomy in that famous final shot, freezing the child in time just as he wades out to sea, escaping from the accumulation of bad turns alluded to in the film’s marquee-ready title. He’s played by the remarkable Jean-Pierre Léaud, who got the part by answering an ad in the paper. He was 14 at the time, pretty young to make this kind of impression, but his director trumped him—he was only 27.

One of a remarkable triumvirate of movies that gave birth to the French New Wave, The 400 Blows (1959), the autobiographical feature debut of critic-turned-filmmaker François Truffaut, is creeping up on its 50th birthday, yet it possesses a freshness and sense of freedom that still radiates from the screen. The sentimentality that clung to certain later Truffaut's can be sniffed out—Jean Constantin’s lovely music emphasizes this—but here it feels appropriate. The experiences addressed are raw enough to render the movie nimble, and frequently fun. We root for the preservation of Antoine’s delinquency. We watch him pass through his rituals of truancy and mis-education, of familial obligation and alienation, of developing awareness of adult unhappiness and dread, and Rebel Without a Cause (55) seems like it must have been from another age, or maybe it would have felt more palpably real if they’d shaved a decade off its lead. Maybe the French simply knew how to get at a brutishness in youth that Hollywood naturally molded into melodrama. Brilliant melodrama, but melodrama nonetheless. 

I saw both The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim (62), Truffaut’s third feature, when I was around 20. The former meant everything to me, while the latter struck me as more kooky or historically important than truly moving. When I see the films now my response is almost the reverse, with the former playing as still affecting if relatively less startling, and the latter revealing more depth and wisdom than its formal exuberance and inspired artifice initially promised. Both hit Edmonton's Metro Cinema this weekend in a Truffaut double-bill, so I guess comparison is inevitable, even between such heights. There’s a scene in Jules and Jim where the three central characters traipse through the wilderness playing a game which has them searching for the last signs of civilization. If given the choice between finding a copy of The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim to carry with me through some post-civilized world, I’d have to go with Jules and Jim.

The source material comes from Henri-Pierre Roché, whose artistic flowering occurred at the opposite end of adulthood from Truffaut’s—he was 73 when he wrote Jules and Jim, his first novel. Like Truffaut’s first film, Roché’s debut was autobiographical, but its telescopic perspective, looking 50 years into the past, laces the events with a heady mix of vitality and nostalgia, partially because its able to regard suffering with sheer admiration for youthful folly. The story, which begins on the cusp of World War I, is only partly about the titular characters. Jules (Oskar Werner), a German, and Jim (Henri Serre), a Frenchman, meet and become nearly instant friends, inseparable, even dressing alike, forming something like a platonic marriage. They meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau, whose extraordinary beauty was complicated by the darkness around her eyes that made her never seem exactly young), who enters the movie as a sort of magical creature, the living embodiment of an ancient sculpture the friends both adored. On their first afternoon adventure with Catherine she dresses in drag and Jim draws a moustache on her face. It is clear from the start who’ll wear the pants in this threesome.

Years later, after the friends fight on opposing sides in the war, Jules will marry Catherine and move to the country, while Jim tries to maintain an ostensibly bohemian bachelorhood. But the friends need to share everything, and when Catherine’s instability comes to wreak havoc on Jules’ quiet life the time comes for the romance between Catherine and Jim that always seemed inevitable. For a time the three live in uneasy harmony, in a house with many bedrooms and a daughter who takes her abundance of parents in stride. The actors are so beautifully cast that they make this chaotic equation, a prelude to the sexual inhibitions to come later in the decade, feel utterly natural. The movie is partly about Moreau’s siren-like, enigmatic allure, which it never dares to penetrate, and in fact needn’t. But it’s just as dependent on the friends’ unnerving sense of individual completion only through merging, something so well conveyed that by the time Jules it left alone in the world it’s impossible to imagine how he’ll go on. Maybe that’s why the movie ends so abruptly.

Truffaut’s recklessly inventive approach was a masterstroke. With a deliriously fragmentary editing strategy he careens through the story’s lengthy chronology at a galloping pace, while making constant stops to revel in epiphanies. He makes a clamorous parade of Thérèse (Marie Dubois) playing “steam engine” with her cigarette. He lets us luxuriate for the entirety of the song performed by Moreau and Boris Bassiak. He takes the reception of a letter as an opportunity to stage a strange, dreamlike sequence where Moreau’s face appears in the centre of a sweeping shot of a passing rural landscape. And he cuts through the frenetic with a voice-over that, juxtaposed against moments of stillness, reminds us how uncontainable the past can seem. In some ways it’s even more youthful and undisciplined than The 400 Blows, but its dizzying detours are so elegantly of a piece, a full expression of a very particular method of storytelling that makes a whipped-up jazz of life and finds an emotional truth in the very blur of things. It stops you in your tracks, hoists you up on the ride and sends you over the edge before you’ve caught your breath. A treasure.