The "what's happening on stage is mirrored by what is happening in real life" trope is beloved by most of the great filmmakers. The screen inside of the screen; the frame framing; a window that looks out - or in. But honestly, not many of them have made their best films when they focus on become Cinematic Pirandellos. "The text is a tissue of quotations" said my boy Roland Barthes and, without trying to insist that viewers drink the Structuralist or Semiotician Kool - Aid, it would be great if people would stop focusing so much on the stories of these films and spend some more time thinking about how they engage with Films, Film, the nature of seeing, the nature of the porous, ambiguous relationship between "illusion" and "reality". I could see the great Student of Cinema in every frame - many films were evoked, but somehow I kept coming back to the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock) and The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir). But Truffaut's exhaustion is what resonates the most; everything feels trotted out, like a revival of situations and themes that were once vital and alive, and now have become habits and tics. Luckily for François, he met Fanny Ardant right around this time and was rejuvenated into making that really misunderstood and underrated Masterpiece, The Woman Next Door. All of the techniques of Classical American Cinema (Hitchcock, of course, but not only him) are used in that film with a freshness and a sense of rediscovery that is totally lacking here. When that scene featuring a wounded Depardieu comes in at the end, you can see the fact that it's - wait for it - actually a play! - coming a mile away; not that this in itself is bad, but even this use of the "Brechtian" awareness-of-the-"madeness"-of-the thing riff which was a major feature of the audacious early Nouvelle Vague has become a lightly amusing - not even, really! - riff that Truffaut must trot out in order to maintain some Middle Aged semblance of New Wave cred. "Maturity" is a double - edged sword. Renoir, considered in the 30's as the most "natural" of filmmakers, embraces "theatricality" more and more in his later works, and while this works brilliantly in The Golden Coach, many of his later films feel stiff and lifeless to me. I remember feeling like Picnic on the Grass was the geriatric version of Day In The Country. Mais on doit revenir a nos moutons...I'm not going to be as harsh as Godard, who, because of these later films referred to his former comrade as a "fake" and a "liar". First of all, there was life in the old dog yet (If Godard didn't like The Woman Next Door, he was a hypocrite; it's a good as the films of Sirk or Ophuls that he praised when he was a critic, and for the same reasons), and second, this film has its little pleasures, although there are still so many things I could tear apart about it. I just have to mention that scene of the first night of "Disappearance", the main play-within-a-play of this movie. At the curtain call, the camera searches around the theater, and gives a real WPA - style "look, people from all walks of life are transformed by The Theater" kind of shot. Rich! Poor! Gay! Straight! Nazis! Jews!...Something's wrong with that picture...no Cartier - Bresson, this wasn't the appropriate moment for a "Family of Man" shot, I don't think! The form of the shot and what it says clash in a jarring way. Maybe Truffaut was too exhausted to hate Nazis...Maybe he should have pulled out Sirk's A Time to Love and A Time to Die to get a little more nuance into the thing. I mean, I know he's a "humanist" and everything, but...
Yummy acting. Yummy actors. Yummy set design. Yummy cinematography. So what. The Occupation and The Resistance feel like a fancy dress - up party. No tension, no energy, no drive, no feeling of necessity. Cinéma de Qualité, in your face, yo!
Yummy acting. Yummy actors. Yummy set design. Yummy cinematography. So what. The Occupation and The Resistance feel like a fancy dress - up party. No tension, no energy, no drive, no feeling of necessity. Cinéma de Qualité, in your face, yo!