Tonight we got back in the van and reversed course to travel south, heading back to France. When we arrived we unloaded our Time Machine, hopped in and set the date for 1904. When we got there, we met up with our old friend, the director Claude Autant-Lara and his muse, the actress Odette Joyeux.
You will remember Autant-Lara from last month, when we watched and reviewed three of his romantic fantasies that were made in the 1940s during the German Occupation of France. These movies were part of a four film set that was recently released by Criterion, and as we stepped out of the Machine and acclimated ourselves to our new time zone - with some "jet lag" - we sat down with our friends and watched the fourth film of the dvd set, which we had ordered from The Libe several weeks ago.
The title of the movie is "Le Mariage de Chiffon". Odette Joyeux once again plays a variation of her Precocious Teenaged Girl Who Is Verging On Womanhood, and who desires to establish her own identity, having been brought up by, in this case, a domineering, wealthy mother who shuts down her independence. Now, as I said in a previous review last month, thank God our director is Autant-Lara, because this relationship between mother and daughter is not presented in a tragic or lurid way, but in the lightly comic and artistically sharp manner of American farce, albeit with a French Twist, as I also said last month. Mother is overbearing and haughty, but daughter Odette is - as always in these films - much smarter than given credit for and she is very attuned (as all teens are) to the conflicting emotional truths of the relationships between the adults who surround her in the grand mansion where she lives.
She is the bored but emotionally intelligent young woman who sees through the pretense of her elders, and calls them on it. She is in turn, in love with her "Uncle" Marc, who is 25 years her senior and who is not her Uncle by blood (more of a step-Uncle) so the romance, which may be mutual, is not forbidden in the familial sense. Still, she hides her love for "Uncle" Marc in her diary, while her grandstanding Grand Dame of a mother plots to have her married to a middle-aged Colonel in the army, who lives in a nearby hotel and who is also an old acquaintance of Uncle Marc. The movie begins with a night meeting, by chance and in the rain, between the older Colonel and young Chiffon (Joyeux), who has snuck out of the house for the evening, and is a play on the Cinderella story. Chiffon loses her shoe on the sidewalk and the chivalrous Colonel obliges to carry her home. He is gallant and to be trusted; he has no bad intentions (this is a French film from the 1940s, after all), but she is a Young Girl and given to romantic fantasy.......and aren't we all. That is why her character represents all of us, because she allows herself to believe that the fantasy is real, and as a youth, she has not yet developed any cynicism towards love, which has come to affect the lives of the adults around her.
Except for the Colonel, who is gallant and would never take advantage, and also her beloved Uncle Marc, who dotes on her and gives her "life advice", but in general behaves like an Uncle, which he is not, by blood at any rate.
Uncle Marc is also independently wealthy. He owns land and buildings, and he uses his resources to finance his true calling in life : To Fly.
The year is 1904, as previously noted. No mention is made of the Wright Brothers. For all we know, Uncle Marc, with his hand-built Biplane, will be the first man to fly, if he can just get his contraption off the ground, and, most importantly, if he can avoid his creditors in the process. It seems he has mortgaged his fortune on his experimental airplane and is verging on bankruptcy.
Chiffon is desperate to gain his romantic attention and also to see him succeed, and so she agrees to marry the Colonel in order to collect her dowry from her mother, which she plans to secretly use to pay off Uncle Marc's debts, so that he can keep his airplane.
Well, I have told you most of the plot, and I've gone beyond what I usually reveal, but it's because of the script.
Yet again - and I will mention this every time - there is so much happening in a movie of this type, and in particular in these four films by Claude Autant-Lara, that each script could fulfill enough story to play out two films, or to stretch these 90 to 105 minute films into longer excursions.
But Autant-Lara never does that, and that is part of his genius.
Listen up, you screenwriters and editors. Here is a filmmaker who had scripts with so much story that he could have made a miniseries, or sequels, out of each of the four films in this Criterion set. In those days of course, there was no television and no miniseries, and the franchising of motion pictures had yet to become dominant.
Stories were the thing, in all their emotional and human complexity.
Humans and their emotions, and the machinations that result when those emotions are repressed or not repressed, are the stuff of real human stories. Such was the blank page on which the early screenwriters had the chance to work and to create.
The result in films like these, was of a story that had as many facets as a fine diamond, turned and viewed by the human hand and eye.
There are many stories contained in 105 minutes of a film like "Le Mariage de Chiffon", and each facet of the sweeping story is portrayed with the same deft artistry by the actors as was used to direct the film and to write the script.
According to the pamphlets that come with the dvds, these films by the director Autant-Lara were made, and allowed by the German censors, to provide a romantic escape for French audiences, to give the audience an uplift in a time of World War and Occupation, much like the films of Shirley Temple were designed to lift American audiences during the Depression.
Autant-Lara succeeded with his films on a grand scale. Watching them, it's as if the war is not happening, nor the Occupation, and that the only thing at hand is the story he is telling.
All of the four movies are about love as seen through the eyes of the Odette Joyeux character who has no experience but sees all and knows all by studying the adults around her.
In all of the films, she triumphs, and the war does not exist.
My highest recommendation for this box set by Claude Autant-Lara. The films are deserving of ten stars, double the usual highest amount, and I will be looking for anything else I can find by him.
See you in the morn. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment