Tag: Jean-Claude Brialy

Les surmenés (1958, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze)

Les surmenés answers the burning question: What if the French New Wave directors made a sitcom? In this sitcom, country girl Yane Barry comes to Paris. She’s won a typing contest, so she’s able to be a… typist, but she’s also engaged to her sister’s boss (Jean-Pierre Cassel), which is funny since they have no chemistry. Of course, she also doesn’t have any chemistry with Jean-Claude Brialy, who plays the other guy. She meets Brialy in the first scene, on the train ride in. Now, it’s not clear if Barry doesn’t have any chemistry with Cassel or Brialy because of some acting deficit because the short is committed to not letting her have any actual scenes. Either there’s narration explaining everything or Barry’s getting chastised for not being serious enough. Any scenes where she seems to have agency quickly turn into montage sequences.

See, Barry doesn’t want to live in Paris and not have any fun. She wants to live it up, all night, every night. Just like her brother-in-law (Jean Juillard) does. Excerpt Juillard is just working (he works nights and he’s addicted to that work). Barry’s addicted to partying. Cassel doesn’t want to party because he works. Will horny guy Brialy want to party with her?

Throw in a lot about Juillard working and his wife—Barry’s sister—Chantal de Rieux not liking him working all night and there’s the short. There’s not a lot to it. Certainly nothing dramatic and not much filmic either. The most creative thing in the film is the animated opening titles. I guess Jacques Letellier’s photography is fine, but director Doniol-Valcroze’s composition is (apparently intentionally) boring. Got to have the boring shots to make the montages work with the narration. But none of it actually works so… Les surmenés is just tedious. It doesn’t help the script—by François Truffaut, Michel Fermaud, and Doniol-Valcroze—is really hostile to Barry for some reason. Well, not some reason. It’s because Barry’s a young woman who wants to have fun in the big city. They could tell the exact same story, hit the same beats, same “emotional resonances” (quotations because no), and not be jerks about it.

I suppose the attitude does give the short some personality. Unpleasant personality, but personality; nothing else in it has any.

Wait—except Georges Delerue’s music, which starts fun and ends up being a sitcom score.

Une histoire d’eau (1961, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard)

Une histoire d’eau has a sense of humor, which ought to do it some favors, but none of the humor connects. The short, which co-director Truffaut apparently intended to be a romance, is instead this rushed, peculiar… blathering would be the best word for it, I think. D’Eau is about college student Caroline Dim trying to get to Paris for class. Only it’s the seasonal mountain thaw and there’s massive flooding so she can’t take the bus in. After a series of mildly amusing traveling on the flood waters to get to school—there’s a boat, there’s a bicyclist—Dim hitches a ride with Jean-Claude Brialy. Now, Brialy shows up in the narration—opposite Dim—only it’s co-director and editor Godard doing the voice. It doesn’t make much difference, Brialy’s character doesn’t get enough narration it’d be good if someone better than Godard were doing it. Given Godard edited the short and co-wrote it, the narration seems his contribution. So when he doesn’t even give any enthusiasm to his performance of said narration… well, it’s not a good sign.

Of course, worse is how Godard edits d’eau. He cuts in other footage of the flood from a helicopter, which would be fine but then accompanies it with some silly, jazzy music. There’s no rhythm to the cuts and especially none to the sped up film he eventually goes with. At one point Dim and Brialy are walking across a flooded marshy area and Godard sets it to a dance number. Only they’re not dancing. And even if they were doing physical activities reminding of dancing, he cuts it together all wrong. It’s kind of amazing how little Godard seems to care about the short.

Later on they do stop and do an official dance, which is utterly charmless.

The last bit, when Dim reads off the credits in her narration, is all right. Not enough to make d’eau worthwhile, but it’s all right. And the short’s only twelve minutes and the flood footage is compelling. Nothing else about the short is compelling and no doubt a natural documentarian would do a better job, but the flood’s something at least.

Le coup du berger (1956, Jacques Rivette)

I wish Le coup du berger had some kind of subtitle, like An Experiment in Head Room. Something to acknowledge the short’s constant issues with framing. It’s not clear who’s responsibly for the lousy head room. Director Rivette is the obvious culprit; there are a lot of shots where people move into better (and sometimes out of) better framing. But the frequent camera tilts are artless and rough, so maybe it’s cinematographer Charles L. Bitsch. But the tilt was presumably Rivette’s bad idea in the first place. And then there’s Denise de Casabianca’s editing, which is at best rhythmless and at works inept. The cutting on Anne Doat’s big scene arguably ruins the effectiveness of her performance.

Then again, who knows how good the performance would be with better editing.

The film’s about Virginie Vitry. Doat’s her sister. Married Vitry uses Doat as cover for going to see her lover, Jean-Claude Brialy. Brialy hangs out in his apartment and… does little else. Vitry’s husband, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, is an aloof Renaissance man. He plays the piano, he sketches, he paints. I think one of his nude subjects is supposed to be someone in their circle of friends. Of course, Brialy is also in that circle but it’s never explained. He’s just Vitry’s lover. And Vitry is just an adulterer. Three screenwriters—Rivette, producer Claude Chabrol, cinematographer Bitsch—and nothing in the way of character. For anyone. Doniol-Valcroze does the most at implying character and not when he’s supposed to be doing the big reveal. It’s when he’s sick of talking to Vitry after a few minutes. Coup runs thirty minutes. Vitry gets tiring by her third scene.

There’s story in those thirty minutes: Doniol-Valcroze gives Vitry a fur coat because they smash. Only she can’t bring it home because her husband doesn’t know she’s smashing one of their friends (who it turns out she doesn’t even like very much—I’m not sure if coup’s got enough energy to be misogynist; if it doesn’t, it’s just misanthropic). So Vitry has this plan to put the coat in a suitcase and put it in storage at the bus (or train) depot. She’ll “find” the ticket and send Doniol-Valcroze to get it. What could possibly go wrong? Well, you’ll probably be able to guess before the short even hits the halfway point. Maybe not all the details, but at least the plotting ones.

The music’s nice? It ought to be; it’s Baroque composer François Couperin’s work. Otherwise… Le coup du berger is far from the best way to spend a half hour.

The Bride Wore Black (1968, François Truffaut)

I watched this film on a recommendation, since I’ve mostly sworn off Truffaut. I’d read it was one of his Hitchcock homages (and anything has to be better than Mississippi Mermaid) but I really wasn’t expecting so much “homage.” Besides the Bernard Herrmann score, which is identical to his more famous Hitchcock scores, mostly Vertigo, Truffaut fills the first act with enough Hitchcock references, I almost thought I was watching a Brian DePalma movie. The film starts fairly bad–there are no sympathetic characters, except a child, his mother, and his schoolteacher, none of whom are particularly pertinent–and Truffaut asks a lot for his first thirty minutes. He expects the audience to watch not because it’s interesting, but because it’s Jeanne Moreau. Now, while this sort of practice drives old Hollywood films and some Hong Kong films today, Truffaut doesn’t do the extra work to make Moreau interesting. She does eventually get interesting, but it’s an hour in, when the film’s already beginning its long, predictable wrap-up.

Moreau is going around killing sexist pigs (which actually has nothing to do with the plot–all the men in the film are sexist pigs) and part of the grabber is supposed to be the audience’s ignorance as to her motive. Unfortunately, once the motive is revealed and is innocuous and lame, the film loses a lot of potential energy. Worse (since it was only potential energy), after killing two of the men with detailed plans, the others go offhand (and in one case, off camera). Since all the male parts are bad guys and all the non-Moreau female parts are microscopic, there’s not a lot of interesting acting going on in the film. Michel Lonsdale, as a slimy politician, has a lot of fun and he gives the film’s best performance. Moreau is fine, but so distant, it’d be hard for her not to be fine. She’s not doing anything….

While I know Truffaut is the guy who brought Hitchcock back, I really don’t think he gets Hitchcock. I’ve never seen any of DePalma’s gratuitous Hitchcock films so I don’t know if he gets it either (I doubt it), but a lot of what works with Hitchcock is the characters. The extreme is probably Rear Window, when all of the characters are likable, but Vertigo is up there too–when the characters make you feel. Even when Hitchcock wasn’t getting it to work, wasn’t making people care about the characters (The Birds), he was at least trying. Janet Leigh and Martin Balsam give the two most important performances in Psycho, after all. Truffaut doesn’t get that aspect of the films. His characters are flat and he’s all about the set pieces throughout the film. The end is particularly bad, when Truffaut goes and shows he doesn’t think his audience has an iota of intellect.

I should have stuck to my boycott.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by François Truffaut; written by Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard, based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich; director of photography, Raoul Coutard; edited by Claudine Bouché; music by Bernard Herrmann; produced by Marcel Berbert; released by Lopert Pictures.

Starring Jeanne Moreau (Julie), Jean-Claude Brialy (Corey), Michel Bouquet (Coral), Charles Denner (Fergus), Claude Rich (Bliss), Daniel Boulanger (Holmes) and Michel Lonsdale (Morane).

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