“La Chinoise” - Jean-Luc Godard (1967)

To appreciate Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) today, we need to see it in the context of his artistic progression at the time, which extends over a period even before his filmmaking, when he was a strident young film critic for the “rebellious” film journal Cahiers du Cinema [1].

With his first feature film, Breathless (À Bout de Souffle, 1960), Godard had jumped from being a leading film critic to being the signal film director of the French New Wave (“Nouvelle Vague”), an iconoclastic movement reflecting the cultural turbulence of the time.  Besides Godard, the New Wave featured other young Cahiers du Cinema critics-turned-directors, such as Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivetter, as well as other emerging film artistes, such as Alain Resnais, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Louis Malle.  But Godard was the iconic figure of the movement, persistently innovating, provoking, and challenging the status quo of film narration.  Within a few years of Breathless, he had directed a string of hits, notably A Woman Is a Woman (Une Femme est une Femme, 1961), My Life to Live (Vivre sa Vie: Film en Douze Tableaux, 1962), Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part, 1964), A Married Woman (Une Femme Mariée, 1964), Masculin Féminin (1966), and Two or Three Things I Know About Her ( 2 ou 3 Choses que Je Sais d'Elle, 1967). 

All the way along, Godard was expressing his dissatisfaction with the way we conventionally romanticize our relationships within the world.  Thus, as I argued in my review of Breathless, Godard was a frustrated romantic and kept on venting his frustrations over his reluctant conviction that the narrative romantic narrative that pervades our culture is ultimately false. 

"In most of Godard’s movies, starting already with Breathless, there is a depiction of the romantic narrative being crushed by an unfeeling world ruled by capricious, uncontrollable forces.” [2]

True, he seemed to be saying, there are short-lived romantic fantasies that sometimes capture our fancy, but in the end they are all doomed to fail. 
   
This frustration with a capricious, unmanageable, and unfeeling world also extended to – perhaps it even underlay – Godard’s interest in radical politics.  Over the course of the 1960s, Godard became more interested in sociopolitical issues  –  reflected in his Le Petit Soldat (1960 ), Les Carabiniers (1963), and Alphaville (1964) – and more fervently attracted to leftist politics, particularly Marxist-Leninist communism.  Here again, though, there were frustrations emerging over the yawning gap between the communist ideals and the miserable progress that had been made towards achieving those ideals.  So by the latter 1960s, Godard was not only a frustrated romantic; he was a frustrated social activist.  La Chinoise represents his expression of that sociopolitical frustration.

La Chinoise concerns the activities of five leftist student radicals who are struggling to clarify and advance their revolutionary aims.  The title refers to the emerging split at that time between  Russian Marxist-Leninism and Chinese Maoism that was accentuated by the recent (May 1966)  launching of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The student radicals in this film prefer the extremist notions of the Chinese version of communism.  Thus, like Godard, these earnest revolutionaries have become disaffected with the conventional communist narrative and are looking for something more.  But Godard’s scepticism on this front is what comes across.

The main characters are loosely based on those from Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed (1872), though the story, such as it is, wanders off in a somewhat different direction.  The principal characters are

• Véronique (played by Anne Wiazemsky, who had starred brilliantly in Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and was soon to be Godard’s wife, 1968-79).
• Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud, a Nouvelle Vague favorite since his debut in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959)).
• Henri (Michel Semeniako)
• Yvonne (Juliet Berto)
• Kirilov (Lex De Bruijn)

Now one could attempt to analyze La Chinoise to see how far it represents a modernization of Dostoevsky’s tale, but I don’t think that is a useful path to follow. Godard’s focus here is different – in some ways it is more politically acute, but at the same time it is dramatically deficient.  And the dramatic deficiencies are ultimately too much for the film to bear.

As for the political ideas, we note that in any cinematic presentation of this type, there has to be some opposed “differences”, even conflicts, that generate interest.  In La Chinoise there are two such conflicts:

• the different directions envisioned by pragmatic Marxist-Leninism and radically revolutionary Chinese Maoism.
• the opposition between words and action.

It is the latter opposition that is Godard’s most interesting point, but his presentation of the stasis induced by an over reliance on words is narratively self-defeating.  The entire proceedings become soporific without a progressive narrative movement.

Much of the action takes place in a Parisian apartment, where the five students are discussing their Marxist philosophy stances.  This is presented in long, static monologues, with the characters looking directly into the camera and giving their accounts of themselves.  Their principal concern is that

1. The only way to cure the world’s problem is to have the working class undertake a full-scale, world-wide revolution.
2. The only way this revolution can be launched is for there to be a capitalist crisis.
3. There is no capitalist crisis in the foreseeable future.

So they are determined to carry out terrorist acts in order to generate such a crisis.  What attracts them in this regard is Chairman Mao’s perceived sincerity and violence.

As the long monologues (and occasional dialogues between Guillaume and Véronique) proceed, it becomes evident that these people are obsessed with the verbal articulation of their theoretical ideals.  Many of the shots last more than three minutes, and one wonders if these characters really know what they are saying.  Or are they merely wallowing in their own reflective self indulgence?

In one of her monologues, Véronique says, “If I were brave, I’d dynamite the Sorbonne, the Louvre, the Comedie Francais.”  But still she espouses study and theory.  Later she tells her romantic partner Guillaume that she doesn’t love him anymore, but she says it in a coldly analytic fashion.  She has decided not to love him.  For Véronique and her friends, radical terrorist activities are abstract and disconnected from reality. 

A little further on Henri, who is the most pragmatic member of the group, is purged, because he disavows contributing to their proposed goal of a terrorist act of violence.  Then we come to the most intellectually interesting sequence in the film, which is at the same time the most static.  It is a 13-minute scene showing two people in a railroad car facing each other, Véronique and real-life philosopher Francis Jeanson, are talking about Véronique’s upcoming plans to carry out an assassination.  Jeanson, in fact, was a real-life activist and had been actively involved in aiding the Algerian FLN during the Algerian War of Independence [3]. Although he is a man of action, he is shown to be a pragmatist, who does things for reasons that are part of carefully thought-out plans – in stark contrast to Véronique’s abstract dogmatism.  For Véronique there are no sociopolitical narratives, just decisive acts of violence that bring about a supposed endpoint.  Clearly Jeanson’s views are presented by Godard in a sympathetic light.

At the end of the film, Véronique’s intended act of terrorism, the assassination of rhe Soviet Minister of Culture, which is supposed to help incite a revolution, serves as an ironic reminder of how an overemphasis on text and symbols can be crippling.  She goes to a hotel where her intended victim is staying and mistakenly misreads the hotel register to learn his room number.  Since she is looking at the register upside-down, she reverses “room 23" to be “room 32" and proceeds to kill the wrong man. Because symbols have no intrinsic connection to what they represent, a dyslexic reading can bring about disaster.

This is the problem that the film presents, but it struggles to overcome its single-minded attention to words.  Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard try to liven things up by various means.  There are many brightly-colored flash shots of provocative text – and the color red dominates almost every interior shot. The principal characters are shown play-acting various brief political psychodramas. There are several interjected cinematic self-references to the filmmaking, itself. And the performances of these characters, particularly those of Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Léaud, are curiously sensuous, sincere, and innocent all at the same time. But it isn’t enough. The power of cinema to overcome the dead weight of words has not been effectively utilized in this film. And so the final result is a curiosity, but ultimately a disappointment.

★★

Notes:

1. Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, Tom Milne (ed., trans.), The Viking Press, New York, 1972.
2. “Breathless", The Film Sufi (17 September 2015). 
3. Rosa Moussaoui, “An Insubordinate Named Francis Jeanson”, l’Humanité in English,  (translated by Kieran O’Mear – original title in l’Humanité: “Un Désobéissant Nommé Jeanson”, which appeared on 4 August 2009), (3 September 2009).

“Breathless” - Jean-Luc Godard (1960)

Jean Luc-Godard’s first feature, Breathless (A Bout de Souffle, 1960), was not the first French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) film, but it soon became its signature work.  Made on a low budget and shot entirely on the street and in urban locations, the film proved to be a box-office sensation and had over two million admissions in France alone. Not only that, it made the New Wave an international brand and catapulted Godard and others associated with the film’s production, such as Raoul Coutard and Jean-Paul Belmondo, to worldwide stardom.

In fact much of Breathless’s fame today is tied up with its New Wave origins, a major current of which came from a clique of ambitious young critics writing for the anti-establishment film commentary magazine, Cahiers du Cinema [1,2].  These critics dismissed mainstream French studio films of the day and championed, instead, film noir, a term they gave to moody B-Grade American crime films of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, which they felt had more panache and psychological authenticity.  This group – which included Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette – then went about putting their critical theories into practice by making their own independent and “rebellious” feature films.  (Other young French filmmakers of that period who were not part of the Cahiers du Cinema clique but who came to be associated with the New Wave included Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Demy.)

Of all those Cahiers du Cinema critics, Godard was probably the most argumentative and uncompromising, so it is perhaps not surprising that his film stood out and was even more distinctive than those of his colleagues.  Thus Breathless is often seen today as a historical landmark that affected the course of cinematic expression.  Nevertheless, the film is not just of historical interest, in the fashion, say, of The Birth of a Nation (1915), but still has an electric vitality when viewed today [1].

Although the New Wave critics were avowed auteurists, I believe that the success of Breathless is not solely due to Godard’s undoubted abilities. There was a fortunate concurrence of disparate talents that helped make the film the masterpiece that it is [3,4,5].  For one thing, there were contributions from his Cahiers du Cinema colleagues.  Claude Chabrol, who had already had success with two features, served as a technical advisor for the film.  In addition the original story and treatment came from Francois Truffaut, who was then a good friend of Godard’s and was fresh off the success of his own debut film, The 400 Blows (1959).  Truffaut’s scheme told the noirish story of a young criminal’s desperate efforts to avoid police pursuing him and gather up his girlfriend in Paris so that the two of them can make a getaway to Rome.  This treatment provided Godard with a basic narrative structure for the film – which was not the kind of thing, it seems, that naturally emerged from his own inspiration and was not so apparent in his subsequent films.

Also noteworthy, and crucial to the film’s dramatic impact on audiences, was its gaudy cinematography.  The first thing that stands out is the proliferation of jump cuts – jolting cuts without changing the frame – that would normally be regarded as film-editing faults in other contexts.  Here, however, the jump cuts work to positive effect, and help give the film a sense of a hectic, out-of-control haste that is constantly jumping the story forward.  This is presumably what is alluded to by the film’s French title, “A Bout de Souffle”, which literally in English means: “Out of Breath” and which would probably have been a better English title for the film.

Further accentuating the nervousness created by the jump-cuts were opposing moments of slowed-down pace due to long-duration tracking shots of conversations mostly between the  two main characters.  These slow-moving passages in the middle of hectic circumstances with the clock ticking made for a maddening stop-and-go tempo that makes the viewer even more mindful of the criminal’s dire situation.

Now you might say that this back-and-forth temporal movement between skittishness and languor represented a brilliant piece of mise en scene on Godard’s part; but I wonder if perhaps this ingenious effect was actually an accident of Godard’s somewhat ad hoc production circumstances. Although Godard was writing the script each day as the film was being shot, the shooting was carefully planned and all the dialogue was pre-specified and not extemporaneously created.  In fact the film was shot without sound, and all the pre-specified dialogue was dubbed in later.  Godard was fortunate to have hooked up with the resourceful young cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, who came up with practical ways to photograph Godard’s scenes in crowded locations.  Now while it is known that Coutard made innovative use of hand-held photography (not common in those days with the relatively heavy equipment in use), this does not mean that Godard and Coutard were winging it as they proceeded filming the script.  In fact the moving camera shots appear to have been carefully planned, with some of them lasting as long as three minutes.  These moving camera shots appear when the two main characters are engaged in key conversations.

However, during the final editing stages of the film, as Roger Ebert has pointed out, Godard discovered that the film was 30 minutes too long and needed to be shortened [6].  Godard couldn’t go ahead and cut up the lengthy moving-camera shots – they needed to be retained intact.  And he didn’t want to remove the dialogue that he had written.  So he was left with cutting a lot of the film’s transitions, creating all those jump cuts.  If Ebert is correct, then we are led to believe that the film’s nervous back-and-forth tempo was something of an accidental creation.

However, we shouldn’t let Breathless’s innovative cinematography, whether accidental or planned, dominate our perspective on the film.  The really fascinating thing about this work  is not so much the cinematography but more the edgy and winding romantic relationship of the two main characters.

Breathless was not the first film depicting the always fascinating situation of a romantic young couple on the run from the law, but it may have been the most inspired.  Its predecessors in this camp include Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950).  And we can see strong traces of Breathless in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1966), Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express (1974), and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974) [7].  In all these films there is a sense of fatalism and romantic desperation.  One of the two romantic characters in these narratives is totally reckless, with the partner helplessly following along and unable to prevent their ultimate destruction. 

In Breathless the romantic couple is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo (in the role of Michel Poiccard) and Jean Seberg (as Patricia Franchini), and the personae of these two actors very much dominates the film’s presentation.  Belmondo was 26 years old at the time, and his expressive face and sinewy physique gave a kinetic and emotional image to his character.  Seberg was only 21, but already a Hollywood star.  Her cool beauty and impenetrable innocence provided the perfect foil for Belmondo’s romantic shadow boxing.  One of the film’s strong points is the way Godard visually dwells at length and in repeated closeups on Seberg’s paradoxical allure.

In fact it is worth discussing their two characters a little further.

• Michel Poiccard. 
  He is perpetually rehearsing small narratives that he imagines to be glamorous decorations to his character.  In this connection he likes to mug and make outlandishly emotional facial expressions, in the fashion of how a teenager might make faces while looking at his or her image in the mirror.  As part of his attempts at self-glorification, he admires film noir and the screen personality of Humphrey Bogart, as well as gaudy, gas-guzzling American sedans.  His daredevil self image leads him to hot-wire and steal cars whenever he needs some transportation.  This recklessness makes him attractive to girls but is also fatally self-destructive.  Despite his adolescent and self-indulgent behaviour, though, Michel has the capacity to feel love and jealousy.  His braggadocio posturing is a cover for his personal insecurity, and he cannot help revealing his emotional vulnerability. 
   
• Patricia Franchini. 
  As played by Jean Seberg, who was born and grew up in Iowa, Patricia is very much a US Midwestern girl – in fact Seberg’s Midwestern accent calls attention to her distinctively non-European character.  By this I mean that Patricia is friendly and easy to approach, but difficult to know well.  Emotionally, she remains aloof even while she engages in friendly interactions.  She is looking for someone to capture her, to conquer her, and until then she is just along for the ride and can detach herself from a relationship at a moment’s notice.  In fact at one point she tells Michel,

        “I stayed with you to see if I was in love with you. . . .
        and since I’m being cruel to you, it proves I’m not in love with you.”   

The story of Breathless proceeds through three main stages.

1.  Michel Comes to Paris

In the first sequence the viewer is introduced to Michel Poiccard, a low-level hoodlum in Marseilles who hot-wires a parked Oldsmobile and heads north.  On the way driving while toying with his pistol, he talks to himself about his plans to head for Paris and pick up some money owed to him by someone, and then convince a girl, Patricia, to run away with him to Rome.  Along the way some highway cops start chasing him for speeding, and Michel shoots and kills one of them when he is approached.  This is all told visually with jump-cuts and at breakneck speed.

Upon arriving in Paris, Michel first steals some money from a casual girlfriend.  Then he tracks down Patricia, who is hawking the International Herald Tribune along the Champs Elysees, and as they talk, the pace dramatically slows down.  There is a long 3:20 tracking shot of the two of them talking, as Michel tries to convince Patricia to run away to Italy with him.  It seems that they had recently had a brief affair in Nice and slept together for a few nights.  Patricia clearly finds Michel to be cute, but she is noncommital.

Things speed up again as Michel attends to the matter of picking up some money owed to him by a person named Berruti.  While moving about the city, he also notices a newspaper headline reporting that the road cop-killer has been identified as Michel Poiccard.

2.  Michel and Patricia Together

Patricia goes back to her hotel room and discovers that Michel had stolen her room key at the front desk and is waiting for her in the room. Now the pace slows down again. This is a 23-minute scene in the small hotel room, which despite the cramped dimensions, features a series of long tracking shots – one of them a 3:20 shot of the two of them talking on the bed.  Most of this scene is small talk, but it importantly reveals the evolving relationship and the disparate personalities of Michel and Patricia.  At one point she mentions that grief is better than nothingness (i.e. death), and he responds by saying that he would choose nothingness: “I want it all or nothing”.  They make love that night, and the next morning attend to their respective obligations – he has to get his owed money, and she needs to conduct an interview for a journal she sometimes works for.

3.  To Get Away

Patricia’s immediate assignment is to attend a press conference held for a trendy novelist, Parvulesco (played by noted film director Jean-Pierre Melville). This interview scene serves as something of an intermezzo in the film and gives Godard the chance to offer up some of his provocative bon mots about the world through the mouth of the novelist. While Patricia offers up some sensible queries, the other interviewers only want to ask the novelist titillating questions about how men and women posture towards each other.  Parvulesco pontificates that  men want only women, and women want only money.  When Patricia asks him what is his greatest ambition, he answers that it is "to become immortal and then die".

Now the pace quickens again. After her interview assignment, Patricia is approached by the police, who inform her that Michel is a wanted murderer.  As with other such dramatic moments in the story, Patricia shows very little emotion upon hearing this. She soon helps Michel elude the cops, and as they drive away in another stolen car, she is surprised to read in the newspaper that the cop murderer Michel is a married man.  When she blithely asks him about this, he responds with equal equanimity,

“She dumped me. . . Or I dumped her, I can’t remember.”

They eventually find Berruti for Michel’s money, but the cops are closing in.  All the way along, Patricia has been agonizing over whether she really loves Michel or not. The closing sequences provide for an answer to that question.

Of the comparable lovers-on-the-lam films, perhaps the closest match to Breathless is Bonnie and Clyde. This is not too surprising, since Bonnie and Clyde's script writers, David Newman and Robert Benton, were fans of Breathless and even approached Godard about directing their script. And we can see definite traces of Michel Poiccard’s (Jean-Paul Belmondo’s) boastful vulnerability in Clyde Barrow’s (Warren Beatty’s) personality in Bonnie and Clyde.  But I think an even closer overall character match might be with the Kit and Holly characters of Badlands.  In that latter film, Holly is closer to Patricia’s personality than Bonnie is.

Many people have been attracted to Breathless’s hip references to American culture and general self-parody. They see the film as Godard’s taking the opportunity to call attention to how media inordinately shapes modern culture and its increasing tendency towards cliche and vicarious disengagement.  In addition to cultural references, there are celebrity cameo appearances. Besides the already-mentioned participation of film director Jean-Pierre Melville, there were several other figures in the cast from general French New Wave circles, including Philippe de Broca, Jacques Rivette, Jean Douchet (a Cahiers du Cinema film critic), and Jean-Luc Godard, himself, who briefly appears as a pedestrian that fingers Michel to the police.

All of this puckish cultural referencing was presumably part of Godard’s evolving and not entirely clear criticism of cinematic narrative, itself.  When Godard was asked at the time of this film’s production how he felt about cinema, he replied [1],

"I have contempt for it [the cinema]. It is nothing. It does not exist. Thus I love it. I love it yet at the same time I have contempt for it."

Godard was vigorously opposed to the traditional conventions of studio-based narrative films.  Over the following few years Godard made a succession of films that displayed a progressive retreat from cinematic narrative and looked more like cinematic essays concerning a theme, an aesthetic evolution that he explicitly embraced in an interview during that period [4].  In fact after the 1968 political events in France, his movement from dramatic narrative to visual political tracts became even more pronounced.

However, this evident retreat from narrative (in general) may have been an effect of a more specific, but deeper, underlying cause: the fact that Godard was clearly a frustrated romantic.  In most of Godard’s movies, starting already with Breathless, there is a depiction of the romantic narrative being crushed by an unfeeling world ruled by capricious, uncontrollable forces.  Of course some cynical hedonists might well be perfectly happy with that state of affairs.  Why subject yourself to the fantasy-laden constraints of selfless love?, they might ask – just seize whatever pleasures may be at hand.  But Godard is not one of these types.  He is clearly frustrated, and he forcefully expresses his frustration, it seems to me, over the fact that the romantic narrative is ultimately false – it is only short-lived and inevitably doomed to fail.  He tells us this over and over in his films.

In this regard of romantic narrative, it is interesting to compare Godard with filmmaker Wong Kar Wai, who also depicted the sadness of failed, unattained romance. Wong, the Master of the Broken Heart, often presented impassioned yearning for romantic fulfilment and the pain that comes from unrequited love. But Wong clearly believes in love, indeed he celebrates it with his visual poetics. He simply shows the inconsolable anguish that comes from the beloved’s being unattainable.  Godard, on the other hand and unlike Wong, had lost his belief in the possibility of love, and he expressed his unhappiness about it.  He did this best in Breathless.

★★★★

Notes:

1. John Powers, Breathless, The Criterion Collection, (8 July 1992).
2. Phillip French, Breathless Continues to Shock and Surprise 50 Years On, The Guardian, (6 June 2010).
3. Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), Conversations About Great Films: Breathless, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (26 February 2002).
4. Jean-Luc Godard, “Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”, Cahiers du Cinema 138, (December 1962), reprinted in Godard on Godard, Tom Milne (ed., trans.), The Viking Press, New York, 1972, pp. 171-196.
5. Dudley Andrew, “Breathless Then and Now”, The Criterion Collection, (28 February 2014).
6. Roger Ebert, “Breathless”, Roger Ebert.com, (20 July 2003).
7. Interestingly, most of these directors were relatively youthful when these films were made, and one could argue that these examples represented the respective high points of these directors’ careers.

"Jules and Jim" - Francois Truffaut (1962)

Perhaps Francois Truffaut’s most memorable film was Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1962).  It was the third feature film for the 29-year-old former film critic, coming directly after his outstanding Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le Pianiste, 1960), and for many people it ranks as the seminal film of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) in cinematic expression.

The story is based on the mostly autobiographical first novel of the same name by Henri-Pierre Roché, which he published in 1953 at the age of 74 and which described his experiences many decades earlier.  Truffaut is said to have run across this novel in 1955 at a used book stall in Paris and had been so enthralled by it that he vowed to make a film out of the story [1].  Truffaut and Roché gradually worked out the script of the film, although the author’s death in 1959 prevented his seeing the finished project.  Nevertheless, Roché did know about and approved the idea of Jeanne Moreau playing the pivotal role of Catherine in the story [2]. 

Actually, Jeanne Moreau’s performance is so electric that many viewers, particularly women, in my experience, feel that the film is really about her character.  Ms. Moreau’s lengthy career was full of acclaimed showings, often as a femme fatale, but most people regard her role here in Jules and Jim as her signature performance. It may well have been vitalized by the fact that she and Truffaut were apparently having an affair at the time of production [2].  The entire cast, though, is excellent and features:

• Jeanne Moreau as Catherine
• Oskar Werner as Jules
• Henri Serre as Jim
• Vanna Urbino as Gilberte, Jim's fiancee
• Serge Rezvani as Albert, a friend of Jules's
• Marie Dubois, who was wonderful in Shoot the Piano Player, has a memorable cameo role as Thérèse, a woman who has a brief affair with Jules.

In addition to the fine acting, Jules and Jim is graced by the dreamy music of Georges Delerue, who wrote the scores for many films, such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and several other Truffaut films, including Shoot the Piano Player.  Another key ingredient was the dynamic cinematography of Raoul Coutard, who apart from working with Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player and La Peau Douce) was more famously associated with several films directed by Jean-Luc Godard.  Here his cinematography is particularly enlivened by interestingly-composed long shots, moving-camera shots, and freeze frames.

This inventive mise-en-scene of Truffaut and Coutard is one of the principal virtues of Jules and Jim, because it imbues the film with a pervasive sense of melancholy, even including those early scenes representing care-free enjoyment.  We know from the narrative voiceover that this story is one of recollection, remembrance of things past, but the cinematography accentuates this psychological experience by highlighting (using, for example, freeze frames) those special moments that persist in one’s memories of long ago experiences. This contemplative, melancholy flavouring is one of the things that makes the film special.

The narrative covers the long-standing friendship of two men, Jules and Jim, and how they attempted to accommodate themselves to the love they both felt for the same woman. The two men have distinct personalities, which makes their friendship rather interesting.  Jules is sensitive, giving, and vulnerable.  Jim is gentlemanly, but also more self-sufficient – he plays by his own rules and doesn’t give in so easily to others’ demands.  Nevertheless, they formed a firm partnership, such that they were likened by others to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.  One might first think that the confidant Jim was the Quixote character, and the less dominant Jules was the Sancho Panza.  But recall in that ancient tale that Don Quixote was the idealistic dreamer, while Sancho Panza was the worldly and pragmatic operator.  In addition it appears that Jules is wealthier than Jim.  So I would say that Jules is the Quixote character, and Jim is the Sancho Panza of the twosome.  And yet one could also say that in a certain sense the truly “quixotic” one is Catherine. Anyway, the focalization of this tale is on Jim, whose perspective mirrors the experiences of Henri-Pierre Roché.  Just about everything that we see in the film is from Jim’s viewpoint or what Jim would probably have been told about.  Note that since this is all reminiscence, what Jim remembers could also be scenes that he devised in his mind from what he was told.

As the story of their friendship evolves, it passes through a series of stages.

1.  Jules and Jim Form a Friendship

The story begins in 1912 when Jules, a diffident Austrian, becomes friends with Jim, a bohemian Parisian, because of their mutual interest in culture and art.  Soon they are getting together daily to talk about everything, including their mutual pursuits after women, at which Jim is decidedly more successful.  It is in this sequence that Jules forms a romantic friendship with the capricious Thérèse, who memorably performs her inverted-cigarette choo-choo prance in front of Coutard’s closely tracking camera.

The two men visit Jules’s friend Albert, who shows them some slides of ancient sculpture, one of which, a sculptured head of a woman with an enigmatic smile, so captures the fancies of the two friends that they decide to go and see it firsthand on its Adriatic island.  Later they meet a young woman, Catherine, who reminds them of that statue and similarly haunts their fantasies. 

2.  Jules, Jim, and Catherine
Jules takes an immediate interest in Catherine, and pleadingly whispers privately to his friend, “Not with her, Jim, OK?”.  It is clear that Jules feels hopelessly inferior to Jim on the romantic plane.  But anyway, Jim already has a girlfriend, Gilberte, who loves him without reservation and hopes that he will ask her to marry him.

Gradually the volatile and intense personality of Catherine comes to the fore.  Although she is ostensibly Jules’s girl, Catherine frolics with them equally, in the fashion of a threesome.  In this group, she always wants to be the center of attention.  On one occasion Catherine dresses as a man, and the three of them take to the streets fooling people into believing that they are three men together.  At another point when Jim is helping Catherine with her suitcase to make a short trip, Jim notices that she packs a bottle of sulfuric acid to use against any man who might abuse her.

Later while they are walking in the evening after seeing a theatrical play together, Catherine becomes bored and frustrated with her companions’ intellectual reactions to the play.  Catherine says she liked the girl in the play, because “she wants to be free and live each moment of her life”; while Jules and Jim dismiss her psychological analysis and prefer to discuss the “metaphysics” behind the play.  After hearing them go on about this, Catherine impulsively jumps off a bridge into the Seine river.  The voiceover narration at this point tells how favourably impressed Jim was with Catherine by this act.

Finally, Jules telephones Jim to tell him that he and Catherine are going back to Austria to get married.  But shortly thereafter World War I breaks out, and the two men are conscripted to serve in the armies of their mutually opposed countries.  During the war, Jules writes passionate love letters to Catherine, while Jim manages to see Gilberte on one of his infrequent furloughs. 

3 Jim’s Postwar Visit to Austria
After the war, Jim, who is now working for a newspaper, is invited to visit Jules and Catherine in Austria for a month.  Although at first Jim seems to be visiting a happily married couple, now with a young daughter named Sabine, he soon learns that their marriage is failing.  Jules privately tells Jim that Catherine is unhappy with him and has already had several affairs, “one as revenge for something I did, but I don’t know what.”  He confesses glumly to his friend, “I am not the man for her.”

After hearing this, Jim recalls Jules’s past “errors” with other women.  This reflects more on the character of Jim than on that of Jules.  To the manipulative Jim, a successful relationship depends one’s abilities to perform the “correct” actions towards the other.

After a week, Jim and Catherine become more familiar, and they go for a walk alone in the evening.  Jim is now wrestling with the fact that he has always been attracted to Catherine, and he wonders what he should do.  While they walk, Catherine is amazingly frank in describing her failed marriage. 

“I hoped to heal him [Jules] of his crises with cheerfulness, but I realized that his crises were part of him.”
. . .
“Our last argument and true breakup was on his first leave [from the army]”.  I felt like I was in a stranger’s arms . . . He left.  9 months later Sabine was born.”
. . .
“As a husband to me, Jules is finished.”

She tells him that they now live in separate rooms and that she has only been back for 3 months, after being apart during a 6-month affair.  At the moment, she is having an affair with Jules’s old friend Albert.  In response to all this, Jim tells her that he always knew that Jules would be unable to hold on to her and that he has understood her; but Catherine defiantly answers by saying, “I don’t want to be understood.”

However, Jules still loves Catherine and desperately wants to be a part of her life, no matter how diminished his role might be.  He tells Jim to go ahead and romance Catherine and marry her, just so he will have the chance to see her sometimes.

4.  Jim and Catherine Get Together

The next evening Jim unleashes his passions and makes his approach to Catherine.  In a romantic scene, they kiss, and the voiceover says, “their first kiss lasted all night.”  (I have always remembered that line.) 

The next morning Catherine tells Jules that Jim should live with them.  They become a menage a trois, or perhaps un amour a trois.  It is truly three-way, since Jules and Jim love each other, platonically, too.

However, not long later, boredom for Catherine sets in again.  One Sunday afternoon, she decides to seduce Jules, much to the consternation of the now-infatuated Jim.  The “amour-a-trois” relationship has its limits.   Eventually Jim’s newspaper recalls him to Paris.  On departing, Jim tells Catherine that he wants to marry her and have children.

5.  Jim and Catherine Struggle

Back in Paris, Jim tells Gilberte of his plans to marry Catherine.  Then he writes to Catherine that he will be returning soon, but first he has to make “a few farewells”, a phrase that on receipt angers Catherine.  When he returns to Catherine, she provocatively tells him that she went ahead and made her own “farewells”, too.  They decide to go ahead and have a baby, but when Catherine doesn’t become pregnant straight off, she becomes frustrated with the mechanics off baby-making.  They quarrel, make up, and then quarrel again and finally decide to separate for three months.

Back in Paris and now sick with the flu, Jim receives a letter from Catherine that sets off a message exchange that highlights their mutual mistrust and unwillingness to surrender to love (only Jules and Gilberte in this story could do that).

1. Catherine’s letter tells Jim that she is pregnant, and for him to come immediately..
2. Jim writes back jealously saying he is sick and not coming back.
3. Jules writes to Jim saying they doubt that Jim is really sick and that he should come back anyway.
4. Jim writes back saying, given Catherine’s promiscuity, he doubts that he is the father.
5. But at the same time (their letters crossed in the mail), he gets a letter from Catherine saying that she really loves him.
6. So Jim writes a second letter to Catherine saying that he loves her and is coming.
7. Catherine, meanwhile, has received Jim’s earlier letter, and angrily writes back telling him to get lost.
8. Then Catherine gets Jim’s subsequent letter, and writes to him that she loves him and for him to come.
9. Finally, Jim gets a letter from Jules informing him that Catherine had a miscarriage and that Catherine wants to terminate their relationship.

Time passes. Jim and Catherine are now apart, but there are further occasions over the years when they meet up. Catherine continues alternatively to solicit Jim’s interest and provoke him.  Jim, the earlier avowed risk-taker, meanwhile, becomes more and more defensive and standoffish. For him Gilberte appears to be tactically the safer option.

There are increasingly dramatic encounters between Catherine and Jim, but things are not headed in an optimistic direction, and I will leave it to you to see what happens in the end.  In the final scene, Jules reflects that the relationship he had with Jim had no equal in love.

There are fascinating and attractive aspects of Jules and Jim, but there are weaknesses, too.  The story covers a considerable duration, some twenty years, and yet the passing of time is not well presented in the film.  The film begins in 1912, and by the end of the story we are aware of Nazi book-burnings, which must make it around 1933.  And yet the characters show no signs of aging or acknowledgements that considerable amounts of time have passed since their earlier encounters.  One could perhaps argue that this is the nature of memory – we situate our memories in the past, but we don’t emphasize the passing of time.  Our memories represent snap-shots of experiences that we have simply had in the past, which is “back there in time”, but may have little temporality to them.  We don’t think of ourselves as having changed very much, at least psychologically, it is only the external world of circumstances that has changed. 

What makes the film interesting, nevertheless, is its psychological exploration of love and friendship between men and women.  In particular, it highlights the fact that men can have strong, platonic love for each other that is not necessarily homoerotic. In the current cultural climate, people might accuse Jules and Jim of being “closet queens”, but that would be a misrepresentation.  Men can have this strong friendship, a form of love, without any physical attraction.  And I think this love is very different from that between a man and a woman.  In Jules and Jim we have both of these relationships and an attempt to reconcile the conflicts that can naturally arise in these circumstances.

In this respect we have three distinct, but realistic, personalities. 

• Catherine is willful and spontaneous.  She lives for the moment.  She can be likened to the Anny character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, who was always searching for the perfect moment.  This is not an exclusively feminine trait, as attested to by Goethe’s Faust.  But Catherine is also selfish and lacking in compassion.  She wants to be possessed by an “alpha male”, but only for a moment.  Then she wants to break free and look for something else.
• Jim is inspired to be the “alpha male”, but he is concerned about his own dignity and his faithfulness to higher principals.  In this connection, he is conscious of avoiding “mistakes” when dealing with women he wishes to possess.
• Jules is compassionate and giving, but he evinces neither the commanding nature or the mystery that Catherine desires. 

We encounter these personalities and conflicts all the time. The desire to be completely one with another entails a certain degree of possessiveness. There is no way to avoid this conflict when mutual friends like Jules and Jim run into such a situation. The beauty of Jules and Jim comes from its melancholy fatalism in this regard.

To a certain extent, I see both Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard as frustrated romantics.  Though they had different styles of cinematic expression, they both showed worlds depicting romantic possibilities that were thwarted not by bad luck, but because they were intrinsically doomed to be thwarted.  This is the nature of tragedy.  It is to Francois Truffaut’s credit that he could depict this kind of tragedy in a cinematic fashion that, by combining music, temporal sequences, and psychologically-inspired images, showed how far one could go beyond the written word to express these feelings.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Truffaut would later make another excellent film based on Roché’s only other novel, the also semi-autobiographical Two English Girls (Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent, 1971).
2. Chale Nafus, “Jules and Jim”, Austin Film Society, (2014).

“Shoot the Piano Player” - François Truffaut (1960)

François  Truffaut’s first feature film, the semi-autobiographical The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959), was a big hit for the former film critic and auteur-theory advocate. But his second feature, Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le Pianiste, 1960) did not meet the elevated expectations of the public or the critics, even though it stands today as one of the iconic French “New Wave” (La Nouvelle Vague) works.  Crafted as a mixture of comedy, romance, and film noir, the film was considered by many to be an artificial pastiche of homages and in-jokes that just didn’t add up to a coherent artwork.  Others, however, loved the film, sometimes without being able to explain why.  I am one of those who hold the film in high esteem, despite some evident flaws, and I will try to argue a case for it.

Truffaut later admitted that he was consciously trying to chart a new artistic direction with Shoot the Piano Player, in an attempt to avoid potential autobiographical typecasting arising from The 400 Blows. By making a film of an expanded narrative based on American crime writer David Goodis’s novel Down There (1956), he apparently wanted  to move away from the personal context and display his sympathies for the American films noir of the 1940s and 50s – and also perhaps demonstrate a full panoply (or at least try out a number) of cinematic techniques along the way.  Nevertheless, I feel that Shoot the Piano Player still lies in the personal psychological space of Truffaut.  Evidence for this can be seen in the fact that Truffaut modified the personality of the protagonist away from the confident and authoritative one fashioned by Goodis in the novel to a more introverted personality like Truffaut’s own.  Thus despite the stark contrasts in external trappings between these two early films, Shoot the Piano Player is still very much of a personal and existential journey like that of The 400 Blows.

To me, the main theme of Shoot the Piano Player concerns how a man enters into and establishes the most significant personal relationship in his life – the one with that woman with whom he seeks the deepest connection. This is explored here by presenting events that cast light on the internal mental landscape of the main character, Edouard Saroyan (aka Charles Kohler).  This role was played by the famous French singer and songwriter Charles Aznavour, although he doesn’t sing in this film. It is interesting, by the way, that the main character’s name indicates that he is an Armenian, which is also Aznavour’s own ethnicity (his real name is Shahnour Varinag Aznavourian) [1].

One of the striking aspects of the film is its rapid narrative movement.  The version of the film that I saw recently was only 81 minutes in length, but a lot of narrative ground is covered over that relatively short stretch.  In particular there are five narrative threads of interest, each of which represents a different “world” (sphere) of concern for, and reflects a different aspect of, the main character, Charles.  For the purposes of clarity, I identify these threads as follows:

CF: Charlie’s world at the piano bar where he works and lives nearby.
CB: Charlie’s world with his two older brothers.
CW: Charlie’s world with his wife Therese
CL: Charlie’s world with Léna
CT: Charlie’s world with the two criminal thugs, Momo and Ernest

These various narrative threads are presented in ten unequally-lengthed sections .

1.  Prologue (CB)
At the outset we see a man, who we will later learn is Charlie’s brother Chico Saroyan, running through dark city streets in a desperate effort to escape some pursuers.  In his frenzy, he crashes into a lamp post and falls down.  A passerby helps him to his feet.  The two strangers now cordially engage in a discussion of what will be the film’s principal theme: what is it about women that make men love them.   The passerby explains his love for his wife and why it grew gradually over time.  Then he disappears into the night and from the rest of the story.

2.  At Charlie’s Piano Bar (CB, CF)

Chico finds the piano bar where his brother Charlie works, and he runs in to hide from his pursuers. Charlie is a tight-lipped piano player who entertains the dancing customers with his playing.  Although Charlie hasn’t seen his brother in four years, he is familiar with his usually criminal activities and doesn’t want to have anything to do with him.  When two thugs pursuing Chico show up, however, Charlie reluctantly does help Chico escape out the back door.  In this section we are introduced to Charlie’s introspections in voiceover, and on this occasion he reflects on his ambivalent feelings for his dumb and troublesome but upbeat brother.

This section, by the way, also features a bizarre singing performance of a witless and boring song, “Framboise”. The reasons for why Truffaut included it in the film escape me. It is apparently supposed to be funny, but it takes up a full two minutes of this 81-minute film and is merely a distraction.  Later on in the film there will be another disruptive, time-wasting song that takes up a further minute-and-a-half of screen time for no reason.  Anyway, this section does show, at least, life at the piano bar, and we are introduced to the proprietor, Plyne.

3.  Charlie with Léna 1 (CL)

At the piano bar Charlie is informed by Plyne that the pretty waitress Léna (Marie Dubois) likes him. Plyne confesses to Charlie that he moons after Léna, himself, but that he doesn’t have enough class for her.  Charlie is interested, too, and walks Léna home, but his shy, introverted nature holds him back from making any romantic moves on her, and the opportunity is lost.  During the walk home, Léna sees the two thugs (Ernest and Momo) in her hand mirror, and she and Charlie manage to run around the corner and escape their pursuers.

4.  Charlie at his flat (CF)

Back at his apartment, we see that Charlie lives with his younger brother, Fido (played by Richard Kanayan, also an Armenian), who is a young schoolboy. Charlie tucks the boy into his bed for the night, and then welcomes into his own bed his voluptuous neighbor, Clarisse, a hooker who frequents the piano bar for her clients.  From this scene it is evident that Charlie is not so shy and inexperienced as he might have at first appeared.

5.  Ride with the Thugs (CT, CL)

The next day Fido goes off to school, and when Charlie goes out, he is confronted by the two thugs who force him into their car at gunpoint and shortly thereafter do the same thing to Léna, who was also walking nearby.  The thugs, who are still after Chico for some past debts they think are owed them, want Charlie and Léna to lead them to him – and they found out where they live by bribing the bar proprietor Plyne. This is an odd scene, because what starts out as sinister soon degenerates into jocular wisecracks between the four people riding around in the car.  Again there is a conversation about women – this time it concerns the thugs’ attitudes about women and why they cannot resist their charms.  By happenstance, though, the car is stopped at a police checkpoint, and Charlie and Léna escape while the police are questioning the two thugs.

6.  Charlie’s Past (CL, CW)

Charlie again walks Léna home, and this time she invites him up to her apartment.  It is now revealed to the viewer what Léna has known all along: that Charlie was once a famous concert pianist named Edouard Saroyan.  She wants to know why he is now using a different name and performing in a dive like the piano bar where she works.  The film then goes into a 17-minute flashback covering Charlie’s account of his past.

The Flashback:

Charlie/Edouard was married to a comely young woman, Therese, and struggling to come up in the world as a pianist. By chance, it seems, he meets a concert impresario who hires him to perform, and soon Edouard is famous. But later Edouard learns that his big break was brought about by Therese’s self-sacrificing submission to the impresario’s lustful demands, in an effort to advance her husband’s career. The resulting shame and Edouard’s jealous reactions led to Therese’s suicide, which utterly shattered Edouard’s life. Blaming himself for her death, he abandoned his promising career, disappeared from view, and changed his name to Charlie Kohler.

7.  Charlie with Léna 2 (CL)
The next section is really a continuation of the previous one, but since it is the highpoint of the film, it deserves its own status.  By this point in the story it is clear that Charlie has three miseries weighing on him: 

• his traumatic memories and guilt associated with his lost love, Therese
• his problems with the two thugs pursuing him (and Chico)
• his crummy life at the piano bar.

But Léna has fallen in love with him and is intent on solving all three problems.  There is now a visually lyrical scene showing her embracing and kissing him.  In her bed, she does all the talking, saying sweet romantic things to him while she caresses him.  This scene makes up for all of Truffaut’s (and cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s) other experimental misfires, and it features my most memorable images of the film.  Léna is determined that her love will revive the old Edouard Saroyan and restore him – to a happy union with her.

The next two sections of the film (8 and 9) are run in parallel, with intercutting scenes.

8.  Fido and the Thugs (CT)
The thugs now kidnap Fido from Charlie’s apartment and force him into their car.  They are still trying to find someone to lead them to Chico.  Again, these scenes with the two thugs show them engaging in small talk and telling jokes, making them appear human, even if they are desperately reckless.

9.  Léna and Charlie at the Piano Bar (CL, CF)

Léna takes Charlie back to the piano bar so that they can both resign their jobs.  But she is bitter about Plyne’s selfish betrayal to the thugs, so she mercilessly taunts Plyne.  Charlie sees that Léna’s taunts are too rough on the simple-minded and still moonstruck Plyne, but he says nothing, thinking to himself, “it’s none of your business. . . . nothing is.”  But Léna keeps at it. Pllyne, who says he worships women as angels, can't believe that Léna could act this way. Finally he goes lethally berserk and attacks Charlie in a blind rage. In the ensuing fight, Charllie accidentally kills Plyne, and barely survives, himself.  Now Charlie has another problem: the police will charge him with murder. 

But Léna whisks Charlie away from the investigating police and drives Charlie up into the mountains where his two brothers, Chico and Richard live.  At the same time, the thugs and their hostage Fido are also headed for the same place.

10.  Charlie at the Saroyan house (CL, CT, CB)
The climactic scene takes place at the snowbound Saroyan residence, where Léna, Charlie, his three brothers (Chico, Richard, and Fido), and the two thugs (Momo and Ernest) all converge.  Léna, fueled by her burning love for Charlie/Edouard, has solved all the problems up to this point, and she appears to have solved things here, too.  But not quite.  You’ll have to see the film to learn what happens in the end.

Truffaut and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard (who was a favorite of both Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) tried a number of film techniques in Shoot the Piano Player, and not all of them worked. But enough of them did work to result in an outstanding film that simultaneously conveys tension, vulnerability, and melancholy. All the characters, including Plyne and the two thugs, are human and almost innocent despite their violent recklessness.  This reflected a perhaps resigned, almost fatalistic, view of humanity – that each of us is just a captive of his or her own circumstances and no more or less deserving or guilty than anyone else.

For various reasons Truffaut chose to shoot in Cinemascope, and the wide-screen compositions actually contribute to a kind of expressionistic circumscription that adds to the mood. Truffaut used several mirror shots (i.e. images shown that include mirror reflections [2]) to good effect – some of them highly unrealistic but evocative nonetheless.  One example was when Léna espied the two thugs in her hand mirror when she was walking with Charlie.

The kissing scene between Léna and Charlie featured a series of superimpositions and dissolves along with jump cuts of Léna in bed talking to Charlie.  For me these work very well to convey a sense of tenderly romantic delirium.

I have already mentioned the speed of the narrative presentation, and this has a cumulative effect over the course of the film.  There are many tracking shots, but they are not leisurely – everything is moving fast in this story.  The editing is good, too – I particularly liked the intercutting of conversation among the characters inside the car driven by the two thugs. 

Returning to the movie’s principal theme about love between a man and a woman, I would say this is about love from the wistful perspective of a man whose existential survival, on the psychological level, is at stake.  It captures this feeling of loneliness and hesitancy, and its effectiveness is due perhaps as much to the memorable performances of Charles Aznavour, as Charlie, and  Marie Dubois as Léna, as it is to Truffaut’s cinematic techniques. 

★★★★

Notes:

1. Some of my favorite people are Armenians, and I have always admired their style and culture.  Regrettably, though, Aznavour is a staunch advocate of heavy-duty intellectual property restrictions, which I believe and have argued are harmful to our general welfare.
2. I have discussed mirror shots before – see for example Torment (1944).