foolish men
by Douglas Messerli
André Barde (libretto), Maurice Yvain (original
score, with additional music by Bruno Fontaine, Alain Resnais (director) Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips) / 2003
It is tempting—and many critics have given into
it—to become dismayed over the fact that experimental filmmaker Alain Resnais
chose in 2003 to film a 1925 French musical, remaining fairly faithful to the
original. Not only does the film seem odd coming from such a grand experimenter,
but the work itself contains basically silly patter lyrics (generally rhymed in
the English subtitles), and the music (the original score by Maurice Yvain) is
seldom very interesting.
André
Barde’s original libretto seems like a lightweight Feydeau farce, yet having
little of the frothiness of the boulevard comic author.
Like any
wealth Parisian socialite, Gilberte Valandray (Sabine Azéma) loves her
businessman husband, while flirting with several admirers, including the older rather
foolish Fardel (Daniel Prévost) and the young Dada-Cubist-Surrealist artist
Charley (Jalil Lespert). Her husband Georges (Pierre Arditi), knowing of his
wife’s flirtatious nature, is nonetheless unworried about the consequences
since he is under the strange notion that it is always the first sexual partner
that defines a woman, convinced obviously that he is his wife’s first lover.
Meanwhile
Gilberte has kept an important secret from him, that she has been briefly
married to an American, Eric Thomson (Lambert Wilson), a relationship that was
quickly unvalidated (we never quite discover why). The only one who knows of
her relationship, other than Thomas, is her unmarried sister Arlette (Isabelle
Nanty).
Obviously, sparks fly, particularly when Gilberte’s friend Huguette
(Audrey Tautou) admits that she has fallen in love with Charley, and begs for
Gilberte’s help in catching him.
It hardly
matters what happens in the rest of this predictable contrivance: characters
flirt, hide their true feelings, and inevitably wind up in Faradel’s bachelor
flat, where in one room Charley is being seduced by Huguette, while in the rest
of the rooms the other cast members rush in and out busy with their own
apparent seductions while at the same time believing that each other is
involved with someone they shouldn’t be, resulting in comic confusion.
What I
think one has to recall in this quite beautifully filmed musical is Resnais’
life-long interest in the past. In some respects, nearly all of Resnais’ characters—even
in his most disjunctive works—with the consequences of their past lives and
their loves from years before. So this theme, one quickly comprehends, is a
natural one for the great filmmaker.
Moreover,
while exploring these themes with some postmodern perspective, Resnais treats
the genre quite seriously, which only makes it appear more ridiculous than if
he’d filled it with knowing nods and winks. As in musical theater, Resnais has
chosen singers who can also act, let his designers create the most elegant sets
and costumes possible, and encouraged his actors to speak directly to the
camera as they would to an audience.
The outsized American, moreover, is such a
blustering individual who heavily tromps through the French language, and
refuses, it turns out—perhaps the reason for his invalidated first marriage—to kiss
any woman on the lips, making it a kind of splendid satire of French-American
differences. In this case, Gilbert’s sister, Arlette, saves the day, by
insisting that it was she who was once married to Thomson; and to prove it,
kisses him, for the first time, on the lips. Not only does it silence him, but convinces
him that French women are better in getting what they want.
Let us
just note that this work was quite popular in France, while attacked as
mindless froth in England. It had no distribution in the US.
Los Angeles, August 2, 2016
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August
2016).
No comments:
Post a Comment