French New Wave Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

[domino harvey]

Pierre Kast's 1957 sci-fi comedy Amour de poche finally has subs on back channels. This film is oddly never mentioned in conjunction with la nouvelle vague despite the director going on to direct several key works and its bevy of in-joke cameos, including Alexandre Astruc and Jean Pierre Melville (though it being a studio film starring Jean Marais and the recently departed Genevieve Page probably has something to do with that...)

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, it doesn't feel like a nouvelle vague film despite some familiar players. It's basically reworking The Incredible Shrinking Man into a sex comedy, and then repeatedly abandoning that concept to focus on a love triangle that's barely fleshed out. The two female leads (Geneviève Page and Agnès Laurent) are way better than the material deserves, and Jean-Claude Brialy steals his brief moments, while Jean Marais does a competent job as the slightly-screwy, straight-man scientist. This is a perfectly fine time at the movies, but doesn't elevate any of its ideas into a particularly creative space. The script isn't strong enough to provoke many laughs, and there's a strange absence of effort to capitalize on workshopping a premise that's begging for it. I wish the relational drama yielded more narrative wit or heightened antics, but everything's rather tame. That's the real issue here: It's a film that needs to take risks in order to be any good, and plays each beat safe, with every plot turn foreseeable and expected. I liked how digestibly pleasant it all was, but I was looking for more grace notes in a French screwball from this era

[domino harvey]

Wow, when it rains it pours, as now we have La Récréation with subs and got La bataille de France a few weeks ago as well. There are surprisingly few gaps left for non-subtitled films from this movement that are circulating at all (however, still plenty of completely MIA films out there, or rather, not out there)

La bataille de France is not really worth watching though-- lots of purple narration and self-importance. It's also incredibly indebted to Mein Kampf without any of that film's cleverness in construction. Better to just watch the inspiration or Chabrol's later newsreel portrait of Vichy France, L'OEil de Vichy

[domino harvey]

La Récréation was better than I expected, with some actual Nouvelle Vague playfulness (and it even presents the dubious claim that teenage girls would be excited by the promise of a screening of Les bonnes femmes ) and good sense of youthfulness by Jean Seberg, looking like this was filmed directly after Godard’s film (and like Bonjour Tristesse, this is another Sagan adaptation). This is a minor film in both senses, but I got kinda sad realizing it might very well be one of the last films of this sort from this period that I’ll ever see again for the first time

[domino harvey]

Le Jeu de la vérité (Robert Hossein 1961) A bunch of wealthy frienemies gather in an ornate living room and then never leave once the most feared member of the group is murdered. This is bad wannabe Agatha Christie bullshit, made worse by Hossein being left to his own devices so he can't even come up with a crackerjack resolution to the set up here. For most of the movie I thought Trintignant was playing his character intriguingly offkilter and then by the end I realized he was just directing himself to do whatever he wanted and Hossein didn't stop him because he didn't know any better (and is himself awful in this). [P]

La Mort d'un tueur (Robert Hossein 1964) I've been haunted all week by something I was struck by while rereading Michel Marie's book on the New Wave. Marie discusses an early convening of young filmmakers and how the most "idealistic" of the directors was Hossein, who eagerly suggested a kind of support council for other young directors and was more or less publicly embarrassed by polite disinterest or worse from his peers. I realized I had been approaching Hossein all wrong, perhaps because I have seen him be one of cinema's greatest assholes so many times that I just assumed he was one in real life. But with reframing I now see him for what he is: the eternal student. Each of the eight Hossein-directed films I've seen has almost no stylistic relation to any other of his films. What's more, all but one can be summed up by the director he's trying to emulate-- and when he did make an original and striking film, Les Scélérats, no one cared, so why bother, right? Approaching Hossein in this light makes this film even more endearing-- Hossein, who knows he is never getting waved in to the Cahiers du Cinema club, and coming several years too late to the party, decides he's going to make a full-throated Nouvelle Vague film. If I had not seen his other films and thus knew this movie is wholly inauthentic, I might think this was a widely regarded classic of the movement. While clearly indebted to both films you'd expect (A bout de souffle, Tirez sur le pianiste) and some you may not even know (Versini's Horace 62), the film has a convincing scrappy charm and humor. Hossein is a director who believes in nothing and has no style of his own, but this is a movement that welcomes amateurish invention and there is a lot of that on display. And yet. This is clearly not a sincere product of the wave. Hossein may not be talented beyond the material he is working with, but he clearly knows what he's doing here. And what is that? Making a movie that will be rejected outright by those he'd most like to impress, for an audience that already has left behind this style of filmmaking. Maybe I just am drawn to these bizarre doomed projects with no conceivable audience, but I found this fascinating. If I ever teach another class on the New Wave, I think I'd probably end it with this. Is it good? Is it bad? Like the unforgettable Vadim Sagan adaptation I wrote up a few years back, I don't think this film lives on a conventional plane of assessment. But it's sure as hell worth seeing as a fascinating pastiche.

[therewillbeblus]

I didn't care for La Mort d'un tueur quite as much as you did, but I did enjoy the nouvelle vague touches especially throughout the repeated recaps of the past, and the climactic roulette game was surprisingly tense and effective rather than the silly yarn it could've been. The final climax played out more in service to the Western, but I guess the film felt more diverse in its influences to me in general. Hossein gives a great silent perf. Ultimately a bit too thin and shallow - and not just in the deceptively surface-level way of the movies its aping - but a breezy and intermittently fun ride

[domino harvey]

One of the touches I loved was Hossein casting his gunsel pals with comic actor Jean Lefebvre and the eternal barman Robert Dalban, both of whom never utter a word until the end of the film (and of no great consequence even then). Dalban’s open collars and little mustache were killing me too. Hope you punched your card Zardi Spotting too!

Re: the finale, I thought it was a humorously deflated riff on

Spoiler

A bout de souffle, with no final cryptic message just immediate abandonment by Pisier. Hossein also seemed to take Godard’s comments on thinking he’d made Scarface with his film to heart with the whole Pisier angle!

[therewillbeblus]

Spoiler

I thought about the Godard film too, I just meant the way it played out felt like a different genre - though I did think it was cheekily almost mean spirited how there’s neither a final exchange nor a shred of intimacy in camera placement afforded to Hossein et al. like there is in Breathless. They’re gunned down from the furthest vantage point he can probably point his camera from.. now that’s one way to send a message about the insignificance of your characters - in contrast to Godard’s own cheeky riff on ‘signficance’!