1960s, Auteurs, Crime/Detective, French cinema, Thriller

Les Biches (1968) / La Femme Infidèle (1969)

Director: Claude Chabrol
Screenwriters: Claude Chabrol, Paul Gégauff / Claude Chabrol

In memoriam: Jean-Louis Trintignant 1930-2022
In memoriam: Michel Bouquet 1925-2022

By Roderick Heath

For fifty years Claude Chabrol, as if slyly mimicking one of his apparently benign but quietly, roguishly purposeful protagonists, turned out deftly crafted movies with the taciturn relentlessness of a fine jeweller in a small, dimly-lit workshop. Amongst the ranks of the French Nouvelle Vague, Chabrol stood out for many reasons. A provincial lad rather than a Parisian, Chabrol was the son and grandson of small town pharmacists, but he became obsessed with movies from the age of 12 onwards. When he headed off to study pharmacology at the Sorbonne he also hung around Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française and other movie theatres, where he made a clutch of friends fellow young movie freaks with odd ideas, men with names like Godard, Truffaut, and Rivette. After a stint in military service, Chabrol joined his pals in working for a film commentary magazine called Cahiers du Cinema. Chabrol took up some of the ideas of their elder statesman Andre Bazin in advocating the use of deep focus photography in aiding a generally realistic kind of art that engaged the audience’s attention without compelling it. He became particularly obsessed with the films of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, the dark poets of genre cinema, although Chabrol would absorb their fascination for criminality and the abnormal impulses in seemingly ordinary people and wed it to a more particular palette.

Whilst his pals faced making the leap from critics to filmmakers by shooting short films and learning craft on film crews, Chabrol used a lucky windfall from an inheritance to finance his debut, 1958’s Le Beau Serge, often seen as the first true movie of the French New Wave (depending on how one feels about Agnes Varda’s La Pointe-Courte, 1954). Le Beau Serge, essentially a character study of two troubled young medical students, proved a success. Chabrol quickly followed it with Les Cousins, a film that more properly instituted Chabrol’s career as it became known, evincing his fascination with morally ambivalent characters belonging to the French bourgeoisie, punctuated by acts of murder. Chabrol wrote the film with his soon-to-be regular collaborator Paul Gégauff, who would eventually be stabbed to death by his second wife. Chabrol’s early financial successes allowed him to help several of his New Wave compatriots make their own debuts. But Chabrol had trouble maintaining his profile through much of the 1960s even as he evolved in a different, more commercial direction from his New Wave fellows. His few admired and successful films in this period, like Les Bonne Femmes (1960), a portrait of four young women working in the same store but on different paths in life, and a study of a notorious serial killer, Landru (1962), were interspersed with failures that betrayed an uncertainty about just what kinds of films he wanted to make.

The ones he did make included several comic spy movies, and a tilt at winning some international traction, with the bilingual-shot, Anthony Perkins-starring The Champagne Murders (1967), a film that pointed where Chabrol was heading, including in showcasing the talents of his actress wife Stéphane Audran. Chabrol wed Audran, with whom he first worked on Les Cousins, after his first marriage broke up, and she soon became the obsessive focal point and ingenious performing linchpin of his films. Beginning with Les Biches Chabrol began working with the producer André Génovès, and their collaboration churned out a string of icy-crisp psychological thrillers including La Femme Infidèle, This Man Must Die (1969), Le Boucher (1970), La Rupture (1970), and Just Before Nightfall (1971), all slow, unnerving tales punctuated with carefully observed and prepared acts of violence, and often sporting ambiguous resolutions. Pauline Kael would quip these films resembled sardines in a can even as they largely remain his most famous works. Eventually Chabrol resumed varying his output, interspersing the thrillers he was now famous for with political and personal dramas an even the odd dark comedy, right up until his death in 2010. Chabrol confessed at one point that he made lesbianism an aspect of the plot of Les Biches to try and juice up its commercial prospects, but it seems to have helped Chabrol nail down the texture of woozy, strange, displaced sensuality that would charge his movies in this phase.

Les Biches, a title which translates as “The Does” – as in deer, a female deer – wields elusive mesmerism as it counts down the moments to what one feels instinctively from the start will be a bad end. Les Biches also ends at more or less a point which La Femme Infidèle (which would receive a slick and Hollywoodised remake years later in the form of Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful, 2002), uses as its pivot, tweaking narrative formula several degrees by displacing the inevitable moment of rupture to the middle of the film, and then studying the aftermath with much the same blandly dissembling style as it offered the prelude. Chabrol had famously identified the “transference of guilt” theme in Hitchcock’s films, and it proved a shared point of interest for the two directors as a zone of concern where psychological phenomena and Catholic theology overlap. This is the fascination for the way characters find themselves inheriting and contending with the wrongs of others, often manifesting as some sort of false accusation of a transgressive act, with a subtler underlying game of affinities, and the way this currency of moral debt underpins “civilised” existence on an explicit and subliminal level, as every urge to break a rule is matched by a desire to restore it. It’s a tendency Chabrol ultimately identifies as close to essential in close human relationships like a marriage, although he first began playing with it on Le Beau Serge’s study of two friends.

Les Biches seems to sidestep that kind of traditional moral prism nonetheless by focusing on what were at the time considered perverse relationships, only to find such reflexes can be especially strong in such cases. Les Biches concerns the triangular love affair that binds the imperious, idiosyncratic rich girl Frédérique (Audran), the reticent waif known as only as Why (Jacqueline Sassard), and listless ladykiller architect Paul Thomas (Jean-Louis Trintignant), and tells it in five named parts – three central chapters named for the three characters, plus a prologue and epilogue. The prologue recounts how Frederique encounters Why one day whilst sauntering around the Seine, in a sequence that has a studied feeling of erotic portent, like a fantasy realised. Why attracts attention with the naïf chalk art of does she scratches into the paving, and with her scrappy beauty, swathed in faded blue denim, whilst Frederique looks like she could be auditioning for a Dietrich-and-Von-Sternberg-influenced Vogue photo shoot: she in turn gains Why’s attention by tossing her a 500 franc note. The pair adroitly cruise each-other, and Frederique takes Why back to her house, treating her to a hot bath as they flirt and skirt around the point until Why tries to dress. Frederique, after insisting on tying her shirt in a knot across her wet belly, that starts caressing and picking at the buckle of her jeans. One of the great sexy vignettes of cinema, and also a mere entrée to a film that carefully avoids giving sexploitation thrills whilst conveying a deep-flowing stream of erotic fervour.

Chabrol employs a quick, witty fade from Frederique opening Why’s pants to a title card announcing the first chapter proper, named for Frederique: the goodies are opened but the trove is going to prove troublesome. Frederique takes Why to stay at her villa at Saint Tropez, close to the Port de Cogolin, a yacht basin she owns and operates and inherited from her grandfather. Frederique is vague and evasive in explaining the site’s roots in some kind of wartime deal. Frederique and Why, strolling around the basin and lying in the sun on a yacht, as Why tells Frederique she’s a virgin, a fact she expects Frederique to be sceptical about (“I think it’s noble of you,” Frederique assures her with a listless yawn), and Frederique recounts her own listless affairs with local yobs during the boring winters (“Games of bowls and games of cards…and other games as well…and then there are the intellectual pleasures.”) but also says she feels Why needs exposure to her peculiar little world, and Why does indeed fit in well, proving an accomplished bowls player. As well as stalwart housekeeper Violetta (Nane Germon) Frederique is also keeping at the villa Robèque (Henri Attal) and Riais (Dominique Zardi), a pair of eccentric, prickly, possibly gay men, and she regularly hosts parties for the local bohemians. Frederique and Why’s affair seems to be fairly idyllic until, at one of those parties, Frederique plays cards with Robèque, Riais, and Paul, one her acquaintances around town. Let the games begin.

Chabrol took some inspiration for Les Biches from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (Gégauff had already written René Clement’s adaptation, Purple Noon, 1960), flipping genders but retaining the essential motif of a poor stray taken in by a wealthy host-friend-lover and finding they can’t stand being weaned off the teat when the time comes. The title evokes toe-dabbing sinuosity of deer, a deeply sarcastic evocation of the peculiarly feminine type of violence depicted, and the balletic strains of Debussy, infusing the dances of character and camera. Chabrol’s peculiar art soon evinces itself in the way he seems to be extremely plainspoken about most of what goes on in the movie, both dramatically and stylistically, and yet remains tantalisingly reticent about the most vital. At the outset Frederique seems to be the character with all the power, broadly conforming to a stereotype of a wealthy, decadent lesbian with her penchant for mannish if still chic clothing, doing what Why suggests is a man’s job, her roguish seduction, and playing the manipulative queen bee for all in her sphere. She has a collection of game trophies and relics obtained from safaris in Kenya and Mozambique, as “I love hunting.” She’s also the emblematic representative of a privileged class, drawing people into her orbit with money and then controlling them with it.

But as events unfold Frederique proves a more complex and rather less formed personality than she poses as. The card match that introduces Paul proves a subtle, visually and behaviourally charged set-piece, as Paul notices Why and constantly glances at her, whilst she hovers a distance behind Frederique, munching on a suggestive apple. Frederique, dominating the table in both deed and in Chabrol’s framing, becomes increasingly glazed with a heavy-lidded and tight-wound as veneer of stoic calm as she continues to fleece Robèque and Riais and starts bossing Why around. Later, when the party breaks up, Paul and Why go off for a drive together, and Frederique promises to le Robèque and Riais keep the money she won off them if they’ll follow the couple and tell her what happens between them. The proposition here seems initially obvious – Frederique, fearing her lover will be stolen from her by a man, manipulates her two hapless minions to keep an eye on them and see if her fears will come true. And yet as the story unfolds Frederique sets her own sights on Paul, initially perhaps for revenge, but possibly also having deliberately wanted Why and Paul to pair off, perhaps to get rid of Why, or to use her as a kind of test case in a scientific experiment, as if wanting to see if Why will lose her virginity and what will happen as a result. Why herself hesitates before letting Paul seduce her with a warning on her lips, whether to inform him she’s a virgin or she’s been sleeping with Frederique, only to decide whatever it was isn’t worth confessing. The innermost thoughts and experiences of Chabrol’s characters tend to remain opaque in this manner. But the detonations that punctuate their behaviour aren’t necessarily more explicable to them than to the onlooker.

This idea is most vividly illustrated in the pivotal killing in La Femme Infidèle, where the urge to commit the killing seems to come and go like a muscle tic. “Of course,” Chabrol told Time Out magazine in 1970, “I’m not interested in solving puzzles. I am interested in studying the behaviour of people involved in murders. If you don’t know who the murderer is, that would seem that he is not interesting enough to be known and studied.” And yet Les Biches holds its cards close to its chest until the very end about who will kill and will be killed, and the manoeuvrings of the three characters ultimately tells us who they are without revealing all of what they are. It’s conceivable Paul might catch Frederique and Why together and experience some spasm of chauvinist outrage, just as it’s credible Frederique could kill one of the other in a show of desperate power. Or that Why’s bouts of floating melancholia might be hiding a maniacal streak, sparked by a need to cling on to what little toehold she has in the world of wealth and human warmth she currently has as an eccentric exile, and offence at being ejected by not one but two lovers.

All of this exists nonetheless in a superficial state of flux in a movie that plays out for much of its length as a muted study of sexual and romantic disaffection and uneasy cohabitation. A seemingly casual joke early in the film in which Frederique can’t tell a first edition from a reprint encodes the lurking danger of smudging authentic and chosen affinities. Les Biches could be called, in the fashion of Chabrol’s friend Eric Rohmer, a winter’s tale (much as Rohmer’s films often play as Chabrol films without murders, carefully inscribed legends about small but life-changing epiphanies): Saint Tropez, playground of the rich and famous in summer, is in the off-season just another dull resort town, the local beds as much refuges as playpens. The situation could easily be played for Buñuelian black comedy, new-age Lubistch, sex romp teasing, or hardcore porn. Instead Chabrol pushes cinematographer Jean Rabier’s camera on in motion, refuses to let anything resolve, forcing the sense of flux, travelling without moving. The sense of inertia extends to the careful art direction and costuming, mostly brightly lit and carefully dressed in pastel shades, rather than colours redolent of consuming passion. Frederique is often glimpsed in arrays of black and white, her authority and security encoded in hard clean hues, and a habit sufficiently signature that Why making herself over in Frederique’s guise becomes a statement, a game with identity suggesting interchangeable personas: “Using other people’s things is like changing your skin,” Why notes to the bewildered Paul.

The cult of the idea of the actress, thing of at once specific beauty and chameleonic prerogative, one Chabrol played more overt games with on The Champagne Murders, bobs to the surface here again as Why tries repeatedly to become Frederique. Frederique herself, smouldering in uncertainty after Why’s tryst with Paul, seeks him out, and finds him fairly nonchalant about his experience with Why: he is instead much more intrigued by Frederique herself as she hovers, robbed of her characteristic hauteur around him, and in his distraction Frederique forgets he was supposed to meet her “protégé” for a date. The pair drink up the dregs of a bottle of cognac and Frederique tosses the bottle in the bay. “She’ll be hurt,” Frederique comments. “Not as much as she would be if I dropped here in two or three weeks,” Paul replies. Paul and Frederique’s affair turns out quickly to be a hot one, and Frederique calmly tells Why they’re going to leave her in the villa and head off to Paris together. Audran and Trintignant’s toey chemistry on screen together can be put down to the fact they briefly married when much younger: Chabrol was fond of such casting stunts. Left on her own, Why wanders around town in a state of anxious disaffection, and pestered by Robèque and Riais as they presume to entertain her, as when they try to draw her into a game of making animals noises with aggressive weirdness: when Why starts silently weeping they guess she’s a crocodile.

Frederique and Paul’s return is inauspicious for Why: the ever so slight flinch Frederique gives when she moves to give Why a greeting kiss when she and Paul return, moving from an on-the-mouth kiss to one on the cheek, is a signal with enormous ramifications. Soon Frederique comes to Why’s bedroom and lies down beside her to report with hints of perplexity her love for Paul, so smitten that even getting books on architecture from him seems a romantic act. Paul moves into the villa, which means room has to be made as Robèque and Riais get increasingly bitchy and Why starts acting increasingly strange, including dressing up as Frederique. Riais describes himself as a revolutionary and encourages Why to act like one, but Why declares she’s fine with the things the way they are. Nor are the revolutionaries up to much. Robèque and Riais are thrown out of paradise when Frederique thinks they’ve spiked their dinner with unpleasant flavouring. Chabrol notably repeats the key framing of Frederique from the card match here, as if to visually declare her power is resurgent, but the impression is undercut with droll comedy as the two men immediately start wheedling money out of her (“It’s not enough for second class…and taxi fare to the station…and dinner on the train.”), which she hands over irritably but obligingly, finally handing over one large note and snatching back the wad of smaller ones. Noblesse oblige.

Finally Chabrol delivers the film’s true climax, which depicts not a murder but a drunken party involving the three lovers in the now-private villa. Paul tries vainly to tell an obscure joke about a man searching for a source of wisdom and failing, whilst Why tries to coax the other two into bed and realise the ménage-a-trois that’s been potentially percolating between the three. Locked out of the holy sepulchre of the master bedchamber, Why crouches at the doors, listening as Frederique and Paul have sex, Why writhing in remote sympathy and gnawing on her fingers whilst envisioning their contortions. Talk about the trickle-down effect. The radical shift of style here delivers an ironically orgasmic switchback that forces Why’s fervent, cheated, distracted state of mind into view as well as the sexual spectacle, one that’s also a dark joke on cinema itself, offering transmissions to the audience basking in the spectacle of other experiences. When she awakens the next day Why finds the other two gone, fled again to Paris, leaving her with some cash and the now totally empty villa.

Why finally begins her rebellion, selecting a poison-coated dagger from amidst Frederique’s African reliquary, and travelling to Frederique’s Parisian house. There she confronts Frederique and confesses her equal love for her and for Paul, a form of passion Frederique, for all her supposed sophistication, can’t or won’t understand: “Your love disgusts me.” Why also describes constantly hearing shouts, as if from people quarrelling, and isn’t sure if they’re living in her head or not, but says they want to make the leap from her to Frederique. “I’d like to throw someone out,” Why retorts when Frederique tells her to leave, “I’m fed up too.” Why stabs Frederique in the back with the dagger as Frederique touches up her makeup, trying to maintain a fierce and fetishised veneer. Chabrol hacks the moment of death up into a succession of quick cuts, life not simply ending but identity fracturing, as Why claims the very being of Frederique: “Have I told you, Frederique, that we look like one-another?” Faced with the choice of being reduced to a psychosexual parasite or to obliterate and subsume objects of ardour, Why chooses the latter. She dresses up in Frederique’s evening gown and gets into her bed: When Paul telephones, Why mimics her voice, breathlessly expressing her desire for his return. Chabrol, with the dry cold of a liquid nitrogen spill, brings up the end title card over the sight of Paul letting himself into the house, leaving whatever comes next to the viewer’s undoubtedly vibrating imagination.

La Femme Infidèle wields a more bluntly declarative title than Les Biches. What happens in it does indeed entirely flow from the central transgressive person and act mentioned in the title, even as its focus and meaning slowly complicates. Said unfaithful woman isn’t the focal point of the tale. Chabrol’s customary terseness again manifests immediately, opening without fanfare in a scene that introduces that woman, Hélène Desvallées (Audran), and her seemingly idyllic state, talking with her mother-in-law whilst seated in the spacious yard of their large house outside Paris. The first shot, a tracking shot moving like an idle trespasser with trees drifting between camera and the seated duo, sets up a motif returned to in the last scene. The two are soon joined by Helene’s husband Charles (Michel Bouquet), a successful insurer, and their young son, Michel (Stephane Di Napoli). Helene and mother-in-law chuckle over a photo of the young Charles, whose middle-aged visage has gained an aspect of roly-poly joviality in his soft and unharried salad days. This very brief pre-credit sequence has a similar flavour to the opening of Les Biches, presenting an islet of fantasy perfection of a kind, before the digging commences. Charles has an ideal job and often gives his wife a lift into Paris so she can spend the day shopping and running errands. Signs of trouble in paradise surface nonetheless when the predictable patterns of life are disrupted, when Charles can’t get Helene on the phone where she said she would be.

Where Les Biches obliged the viewer to offer sympathy and patience to some peculiar people, La Femme Infidele purposefully retells one of the oldest stories around – the tale of a jealous husband who, faced with his wife’s infidelity, kills his rival and tries to get away with it. Chabrol doesn’t offer new twists or present unusual slants on the characters. On the contrary, he strips away as much distraction from the central matter as possible, focusing in on this essential drama and watching it unfold with his customarily cool gaze, almost to the point of offering elemental myth. A key early scene is executed with a stark, satirical directness in portraying a marriage gone to seed: Helene prepares for bed by painting her toenails and donning a brief negligee and laying herself beside Charles, who, saying good night, turns out the light in complete apparent obliviousness to his wife’s evident desire for some connubial attention. Chabrol’s deadpan gaze doesn’t however register it as comedy, presenting it rather as the anecdotal flipside of the opening portrait of an ideal French bourgeois family. The whole film, in a way, follows this pattern, like a farce with the jokes cut out. Charles’ disinterest isn’t however the result of not loving his wife, or loving someone else. He has opportunities to be unfaithful, including with the keen, ditzy, miniskirted Brigitte (Donatella Turri) who’s been hired as a secretary in his offices and who’s already slept with one of Charles’ colleagues. But that’s not what he wants. Perhaps he doesn’t want anything.

Charles is then the victim of a brand of tepid complacency that viewed by Chabrol as a law of nature as pervasive as gravity or thermodynamics, at least in the world of the comfortable upper-middle class. He and Helene are drawn out to a nightclub with a friend who’s recently broken up with his wife, perhaps for the same reasons, where Helene makes a passable show of getting down to the hip-twisting pop music, but Charles looks comically out of place in, and they take too long to get out on the dance floor together to make good use of a slow dance number. Once they’re home bed Charles lies awake whilst his wife sleeps, meditating on his wife’s flimsy excuses for not being where she says she is (she tells him after one such occasion she went and saw Doctor Zhivago again and liked it the second time; and of course that’s a film about infidelity too). When he’s again unable to reach her during one of her Parisian sojourns, Charles unease blooms into outright suspicion, and when meeting with a private investigator he uses to look into insurance claims, he also hires him to follow Helene. When they meet again by the Seine a few days later, the investigator tells Charles his wife has been meeting with a man named Victor Pegala, an author with some independent wealth, visiting his apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine for two hour stretches, three days a week. This marvellous little scene sees the two professionally bland, discreet, unemotional men discussing the blatant and undeniable truth of a deeply wounding breach in clipped and businesslike terms, the plainly gut-punched Charles nonetheless retaining his calm and handing over wads of cash to the investigator, amidst an iconic Paris-is-for-lovers locale caught with its humdrum pants down.

Charles continues to dissemble his way through apparently normal events of life, like celebrating his son coming first in his history class with some champagne. Domestic bourgeois life as kabuki art. But part of Chabrol’s droll implication here is that, rather than this being mere fake window dressing, this is also the texture of ordinary life, of the willed-into-existence state of pleasantry that constitutes civilisation, and from which any extracurricular escapes are merely that. Certainly this seems to be the attitude Charles wants to take, but he cannot resist the urge that comes to pay a visit to Pegala (Maurice Ronet), who (recalling the doubling of Frederique and Why) resembles Charles, if more fit and robust and recently divorced and so ready and able to indulge a casual affair with a bored housewife. The hell of it is Pegala seems like a perfectly good fellow, one who Charles could easily be friends with. He’s solicitous and welcoming when Charles turns up at his door and lulls the lover into being upfront, by telling him that he and Helene both regularly have affairs but he’s a little perturbed by how long this one’s been going on.

By this point Chabrol has already shown a brief scene showing Helene and Pegala together, Helene lounging post-coital in his bed as rain pours outside and pegala bringing tea and snacks in: Chabrol fades from them kissing each-other goodbye (a moment itself modelled of the long kiss in Notorious, 1946), to Helene walking through the rain afterwards, lending their parting a breath of ephemeral poetry and a suggestion of the way these trysts linger on in Helene in revivifying fashion back out in a cold and dreary world, as well as offering tragic foreshadowing: neither knows this is the last time they’ll ever meet. Charles premeditates his visit to Pegala, presenting himself as a smiling charmer at his apartment door: “I’m not a salesman or a beggar…” As the pair settle and sip cordially at whiskey, Charles manages to manoeuvre himself with the skill of a salesman into a position of authority in his exchanges with the pleasant but understandably tense Pegala, not by acting irate and tough but by acting the worldly indulger he becomes a kind of detective, gleaning the tale of a sordid affair. Charles nonetheless loses his control when he sees, in Pegala’s bedroom on a table near his rumpled bed, a large novelty lighter Charles gave her as an anniversary present, but now passed on to Pegala because she felt Charles had forgotten it. After seeing this, Charles starts to act woozy and rambling. Pegala is concerned, and comments, “You look awful.” “Yes, I know,” Charles responds with a sudden flash of sickly amusement. He grabs up a bust from a table, bashing Pegala on the head twice with awful, killing blows, leaving him dead on the floor with rivulets of blood spreading on the floor and flecks of it on Charles’ shuddering hands.

Charles, quickly getting hold of himself after this abrupt act of bloody violence, begins calmly and methodically cleaning up any trace of his presence in the apartment, washing off the bust and other items, before bundling up Pegala’s body in a rug. This he carries downstairs and out to his car, stowing the corpse in the boot, and starts driving out of Paris. One can argue La Femme Infidele comes close to uniting the distinct influences of Lang and Hitchcock on Chabrol, as well as illuminated Chabrol’s distinct personality. The inevitability of Pegala’s killing recalls the relentless march to Siegfried’s assassination in Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), whilst Chabrol also recalls House By The River (1951) in depicting a murderer coping competently with his crime and even seeming to profit from it but facing being consumed by the reality-cracking implications of his act. The extended sequence of Charles tidying up the crime scene and disposing of Pegala’s body, also presents an extended variation on Norman Bates cleaning up Marian Crane’s murder in Psycho (1960). This is the centrepiece of the film in terms of technique and design: Charles, his face reset to its usual ice cream flatness, moves about the apartment with remorseless purpose, doing his best to erase every trace of his presence and even the appearance of a crime having been committed, all done with studious calm and boldness in broad daylight.

Chabrol taps this sequence not just for pokerfaced suspense but a level of carbolic humour. Charles has to contend with such petty difficulties as opening and closing a gate whilst manhandling a corpse like a bag of dirty laundry, and then gets tailgated by another driver (Zardi again) when he’s driving out of the city. The accident scene immediately becomes Charles’ worst nightmare as a crowd of gawkers gather to watch and yammer whilst the other driver insists on swapping insurance info and a gendarme comes to mediate and inspect the damage, feeling around the edges of the buckled rear hatch, whilst Charles becomes increasingly irate in his eagerness to escape. This scene is grimly hilarious in itself whilst also feeling like a Parisian in-joke that’s likely even better for anyone in on it. Finally Charles manages to continue on, reaching a bog somewhere in the countryside, into which he drops the body. Charles waits with tooth-grinding patience, peering down as the bundled body soaks up water and leaks out bubbles, sinking with agonising slowness until it finally vanishes under the soupy film of floating weeds.

Chabrol’s careful use of colour as a dramatic signifier provides associative psychological meaning and becomes important in the aftermath of this long central sequence. Pegala’s apartment is decorated in pale blue shades. Not long after his seemingly successful escapade, Charles joins his wife and son at a garden tea table: the shade overhead and a railing and tablecloth below, both blue and seeming to squeeze the image into a kind of cinemascope burlesque, framing the people between, including Helene who’s silently morose over her lover’s apparent vanishing and abandonment of her, and the upbeat, empowered Charles. Helene goes into the house and lies down in her bedroom where the drapes and sheets are also blue, contrasting the general greys and browns of the house’s décor: Helene lies back on the blue sheets and weeps. The tension ratcheting under the surface of the family soon begins manifesting as young Michel becomes distraught over losing a piece of a jigsaw puzzle he and his father are trying to assemble, whilst Helene stares dolorously into the television in the rear of the shoot, between arguing father and son. The visit of a pair of policemen, Inspector Duval (Michel Duchaussoy) and his partner Gobet (Guy Marley), is almost a relief. They’ve come to talk to Helene because they found her name and details in a notebook of Pegala’s. She claims to have only been a casual acquaintance who met him at a party. The cops are coolly professional and seem entirely accepting of all they hear, but their intense gazes speak another language. “We’re making progress,” Duval assures Helene, “In our hit-and-miss way.”

Despite the debts owed and paid to Lang and Hitchcock, Chabrol was really working within a common and popular tradition of French crime storytelling. Indeed, the greater sympathy French critics offered those directors than many did in other countries likely owed something to a crucial sense of recognition. That style was exemplified on the page by Georges Simenon and essayed by filmmakers Jean Renoir in films like La Chienne (1931) and La Bete Humaine (1937), and H.G. Clouzot in thrillers like Le Corbeau (1943) and Les Diaboliques (1956), as well as the poetic realist films of the 1930s. Chabrol’s aesthetic approach couldn’t be more different to the stylised effects of the poetic realists, even as he engaged with their fatalistic concerns, concerned much less with the mechanics of detection and action than with the processes that lead people to bad ends. This tradition arguably had some roots in the French novel tradition of Zola and Balzac, with their fascination in a quasi-zoological fashion with the presence of moral blight and corruption as it manifests in all sectors of society.

Chabrol is also notably good at deploying comic relief in both Les Biches and Le Femme Infidèle, in a way that helps intensify his theses as well as break up the tension. The wilful zaniness of Robèque and Riais in the former and the goofy appeal of Brigitte in the latter present characters strayed in from other worlds – the two men represent bohemia in all its perpetually improvising, smoke-blowing, opportunist skill, as well as a different, more absurd but also anxiety-free version of queerness to the strange kind the women enact. Brigitte impersonates the hip new generation oblivious to the niceties of the bourgeoisie as well as a possibly illusory promise of an age with different values coming on. Chabrol’s protagonists meanwhile are builders and maintainers as well as prisoners of their imploding universes. Just as Frederique ultimately invites her own destruction by refusing to countenance a fluid and multipolar kind of love, Charles and Helene are ultimately doomed not by the absence of love but by the processes of proving its survival. Helen eventually finds the photo of Pegala the private investigator gave Charles in his coat pocket, and burns it not just to dispose of evidence but as a votive to the proof of ardour it represents. She drifts back to Charles as he labours in their garden and the pair swap looks, locking them into the ultimate deed of mutual implication. The title then becomes perfectly ironic: in the last measure Helene is entirely, perfectly faithful, as is Charles. The very end returns to a stance of suggestive ambiguity, with the two cops returning and Helene and Michel looking on as Charles goes to talk with them, possibly to confess all. A mere aftershock, anyway, to Charles telling Helene what she already knows: “I love you like mad.”

2020s, Auteurs, Comedy, Drama

On The Rocks (2020)

Director / Screenwriter: Sofia Coppola

By Roderick Heath

Here there be spoilers…well, sort of

Sofia Coppola’s latest film obviously harkens back to her breakthrough success with Lost in Translation (2003) in reuniting her with Bill Murray and casting him again as the well-lived father figure to a woman experiencing a tailspin of life purpose. But On The Rocks is far from just a sequel-cum-revision or an attempt to recapture old magic. Coppola’s seventh feature is an oddity. On one level I felt like it was another of the films she’s made in the past decade that hasn’t lived up to her potential and seems at first glance conspicuously unambitious; and yet at the same time it’s another that works some kind of extra-dimensional emotional kung fu on the attentive viewer. This simultaneous feeling, that Coppola is at once an underachiever and a remarkable film artist on a finite level, has kept me both wary of and engaged in her cinema. The spry, elegant, cultural tourist mode she explored in Lost in Translation and the post-modern historical pageant of Marie Antoinette (2006), still my favourites of her films, has nonetheless given way appropriately to attempts to ask more questions of scenarios involving characters on the losing end of situations defined by an excess of options and indulgences for others, and how they rebel.

On The Rocks is also the second film by a major director this year, after Woody Allen’s A Rain Day in New York, to chase what could be described as the cinematic equivalent of a Chet Baker vocal performance, jazzy in a dry, minimalist way, loping in intonation and self-deprecatingly melancholy: Coppola even opens the film with Baker singing “I Fall In Love Too Easily.” On The Rocks revolves around Laura (Rashida Jones), who at the outset is seen having just married Dean (Marlon Wayans), two good-looking young people on the cusp of great undertakings who duck out from their own reception and sneak through the halls of a palatial hotel. Finding a swimming pool fringed by brass statues and clinging ivy, Laura jumps in still wearing her veil to join Dean in the water, leaving a trail of her stripped bridal finery behind her. A lush and witty little vignette that nods to the high life fantasias of Coppola’s early films and her intrigued delight in the accoutrement of female sensuality, as well as offering a thumbnail for Laura and Dean’s early relationship, depicting an Edenic state they must inevitably fall from.

Cut to several years later: Laura is a writer with two kids, glimpsed after the title is flashed treading her way gingerly cross a floor littered with rubbish and picking it up with parental diligence. Dean is an entrepreneur, whose blurrily defined business is beginning to grow very successful and chew up more of his time, obliging him to jet off to locales like London and Mexico for “big deal” conferences and meetings. Laura, stuck in the domestic role despite having her own career purely by dint of being the one working from home, is stricken with writer’s block as she’s trying to work on a book she’s sold but not written, sitting at her computer but mostly staring out the window of their spacious Manhattan apartment. When Dean returns from a business trip to London, he finds her in bed and kisses her, only to retreat, seemingly surprised or disorientated by some aspect of the reunion. Disturbed, Laura begins to theorise that in his jetlagged state he thought she was someone else, someone he’s been having an affair with.

On The Rocks sees Coppola shifting from the Hollywood scenester mirth of Lost in Translation, Somewhere (2010), and The Bling Ring (2013), to the tonier climes of New York, a move that ironically threatens to rob her work of its specificity, great as she has been at describing the absurdities of celebrity culture whilst constantly noting something more ambivalent and pathos-charged behind it – the rich and famous are people too, you know. Whereas here Coppola incidentally moves into a stratum of American cinema that’s been growing of late set amidst the haute bourgeoisie of New York as practised by directors including Noah Baumbach, Tamara Jenkins, and Azazel Jacobs, directors laying claim to being Allen’s heirs as observational artists hovering in that specific milieu of the creative and pretentious and making movies blending drama and comedy. Unlike most of that breed Coppola doesn’t have a penchant for theatrically loquacious characters and has too elegant a filmic touch for the mumblecore crowd. Laura’s status as a generic, well-educated, arty-lefty type who could readily fit into such movies is part of the point here: she knows what a cliché she’s threatening to become, and moreover she has to be the stuck-in-the-mud counterpoint to Murray’s bon vivant.

Coppola’s deftly observational and satirical eye and ear are still fine-tuned enough to let her spin a movie out of a minimum of dramatic elements. Coppola wryly indicts Laura as the type who’s married to a swashbuckling black capitalist and has stickers for Bernie Sanders and Stacey Abrams on her apartment door. Early scenes depict Laura moving through a roundelay of big city mothers’ play groups and schools, and efficiently paint a phase of life as inevitable for most people as it is alternatively a joy and a chore, when one’s own wont is submerged in the business of corralling kids. In a recurring role reminiscent of Anna Faris and Leslie Mann’s hilarious character turns for Coppola, Jones’ former costar in the sitcom Parks and Recreation Jenny Slate appears as Laura’s acquaintance from such settings, Vanessa, who insists on narrating her dating life to Laura in such situations as cueing in school corridors: the whole arc of her latest, absurd relationship is charted in fragments. The crucial early scene of Dean’s suspiciously alien kiss is given a strong charge by the way Coppola films it, capturing the mood of somnolent and spacy intimacy, and then the lack of it: the key point of uncertainty that dogs Laura after this is whether Dean through he was kissing someone else or rather that he realised he wasn’t kissing the same person in Laura herself, that she is growing into someone she isn’t entirely sure she recognises.

Laura’s simmering anxieties are raised a few degrees when she lunches with her grandmother (Barbara Bain), her mother (Alva Chinn), and her sister (Juliana Canfield), who ask pointed questions about Dean travelling with his “new assistant”, actually his account manager, the posh and glamorous Fiona (Jessica Henwick). This potential liaison seems to gain some credibility when Laura finds a bag of Fiona’s stuff in his suitcase, which he claims she asked him to carry because her luggage was full. Later Laura attends a birthday party thrown for Dean at his workplace where she registers the discomfort of some of the women who work with him in meeting her, whilst Fiona presents Dean with his birthday cake. Laura rings her father, Felix (Murray), an art dealer by profession, gadfly and roué by habit, to ask him for his opinion: he unreservedly agrees with her suspicion, and dashes to New York to offer emotional support and investigate at the absolute faintest sign of interest, arriving outside her building in a town car with his stoic chauffeur Musto (Musto Pelinkovicci) behind the wheel.

Laura’s struggle with the fate of being inserted into the domestic realm echoes the theme of young women cocooned from the flow of life in The Virgin Suicides (1999) for whom self-destruction is ultimately their only gesture of self-actualisation. On The Rocks avoids such melodramatic gestures, preferring to posit itself as a tribute to jauntier old movies like George Roy Hill’s The World of Henry Orient (1964), Blake Edwards’ farces, her own father’s You’re A Big Boy Now (1967), and the gadabout chic of ‘60s Italian cinema, in unleashing its dynamic father and daughter duo in a comedic romp around New York and, later, Mexico, trying to prove Dean’s perfidy. But On The Rocks ultimately isn’t that kind of movie: indeed it can be described as a movie about people who want to live in that kind of movie. Felix’s choice of roadster, a vintage red Ferrari, underlines the lineage, and for a few brief moments when Felix hits the accelerator and gives chase to Dean and Fiona in a taxi through the streets of Manhattan the fantasy becomes enveloping. Ultimately On The Rocks’ palette is more ironic and realistic. Felix is rich and cunning enough in handling people to live out such fantasies to an extent, but even he finds himself subject to consequences. That exhilarating cross-city chase ends abruptly when Felix is pulled over for speeding.

The film’s first dialogue, heard in voiceover over the black screen, presents Felix as laying perpetual claim to his daughter even as she’s about to marry. Two watches given as presents signify Laura’s dual fealties to father and husband. The elephant in the room when it comes to On The Rocks of course is the temptation to take it as a self-analytic struggle with being the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, and perhaps also her relationships with some famous beaux like Spike Jonze and Quentin Tarantino, high-powered male artists all. Sofia had dealt with the feeling of living in the shadow of a father whose very presence shifts the gravity of the world around him more allusively in earlier films but here directly contends with the theme of trying to forge a separate identity from a man who’s a genius at charming and dealing, whose ethos is extraordinarily hard to reject because it’s so blithely attractive on many levels. Coppola doesn’t however designate Felix as an artist, but rather a merchant of culture, so his adventures are immediately rendered less epic, despite his plain sense of pride and achievement as he recalls selling his first major artwork. Felix’s method of talking his way out of a speeding ticket, cleverly creating a sense of familiarity and intimacy between him and one of the cops through pretending to have known his father, depends on a certain roguish confidence that he can wriggle his way out of many a situation lesser mortals will be consumed by. “It must be very nice to be you,” Laura comments with sour amusement.

Laura’s conversations with Felix are regularly punctuated by his flirtations with waitresses and strongly charged encounters with some of his female buying clients as well as one of Laura’s fellow moms despite his advancing age. Laura is irked as she perceives how adroitly he weaves webs of contacts that allow him to sell artworks even whilst helping her out. Felix is a show that doesn’t stop, leading to the perhaps inevitable moment where Murray-as-Felix sings, regaling a crowd of tourists with a rendition of “Mexicali Rose” that walks along the edge of absurdity and yet keeps its footing. Of course, Coppola is also satiating the audience’s presumed desire to hang about with Murray, relaxing within the electron field of his dryly witty, pseudo-blasé persona whilst also harnessing it to make a deeper point about Laura’s journey. Felix’s skill with keeping people and children entertained is repeatedly evinced, including one shot where Coppola captures him sprawled like an Orientalist painting’s harem girl on the floor of Laura and Dean’s apartment with their kids in trying to teach them to play cards, completely relaxed in his personal bubble. Meanwhile he regales Laura with his opinions on the impossibility of sexual monogamy for men with facetious bravura: “That’s hardwiring. Keeping the species alive. The woman passes through an emotional filter. Man doesn’t pass through the emotional part. It goes directly from the eyes to the ass.”

Of course, as the film unfolds the self-serving edge to Felix’s rhetoric is gradually unwound, more about justifying his own appetites and lapses than arriving at some deep truth about human sense and sexuality. He likes reciting the kinds of scientific theories about sex and evolution Sunday newspaper editors love (“When we finally stood up two legs, it was the women with the rounded breasts that mirrored the haunches that were most exciting to the males.”) His advice on how to avoid losing a man to Laura is to retain her own sense of sexual worth and charisma, advice that Laura of course is having a small crisis in not being able to follow. In Lost in Translation Coppola’s avatar was similarly suffering through worrying about her husband’s fidelity and the problems of being subsumed into a marriage, but where there Murray provided a liquid-state all-purpose celebrity pal /father figure/boyfriend here Felix is a more specific dramatic creation, one reminiscent of the role Jim Jarmusch gave him as the aging lothario in Broken Flowers (2005). Laura’s decision to contact Felix after being weirded out by Dean proves more consequential than she suspects as he, actually rather lonely and bored, is all too happy to jet in from Paris to the rescue to energise and upset his daughter’s life, but what’s really in play is a story where father and daughter slowly work their way towards a reckoning that’s been a long time coming.

On The Rocks tries to deal with some states of mind and being that are by and large difficult to make movies about, something Coppola has managed before, achieved in such striking and sinuous contrast to her father’s grandiose visions of society and history as achieved in epics like The Godfather films and Apocalypse Now (1979), but not so far from some of Francis’ personal films like The Rain People (1969) or One From The Heart (1981). Sofia rejects even the stylistic grandeur of such movies: Coppola chases singular, crystalline portraits of emotional and psychological straits. More exasperatingly, On The Rocks faces a particular problem in that its core theme doesn’t feel fresh: in fact, it lies well over the border in a realm of the hoary. Tales about the offended offspring of carelessly priapic papas have been a dime a dozen from Gen X writers and directors, constantly avenging the allure of the missed sexual revolution with their latchkey kid angsts. What makes the film work, and partly if not entirely escape the scent of mould, is the way Coppola goes about telling it. Setting up the investigation theme almost inevitably proves to actually be a chance for father and daughter to come to terms with each-other and to reach a moment of catharsis, both characters projecting their neurotic impulses onto Dean who proceeds oblivious to the whole enterprise, and indeed emerges from the whole exercise smelling like a rose.

On The Rocks is a difficult film to pin down in giving an overall verdict because I both liked what it managed to pull off, whilst also wishing Coppola had developed it more. Laura’s emotional journey doesn’t compel as much as it might because it ultimately affirms her choices to an almost hermetic degree. On the other hand, it does manage to chart the mood of frazzled emotional tension and mental exhaustion that’s pretty accurate to the moment. It’s a movie that manages at once to be a break of escapism and one of piercing pragmatism. As a work of emotional autobiography the film feels at once like an addendum to her woozy remake of The Beguiled (2017), a film which didn’t work for me overall but certainly conveyed Coppola’s choice to leave behind the perma-adolescence that afflicted many of her earlier characters and contend, through the viewpoint of Kirsten Dunst’s repressed spinster losing the bloom of youth aroused and then terribly spurned by the fox in the henhouse, with the pains of getting older and losing what gave you hope without yet having gained what you need. On The Rocks pursues a similar evocation of questioned sexual self-worth whilst also wrestling with Laura’s sense of poisoned expectations of marriage.

Such expectations ultimately stem from Felix’s infidelity and break-up with her mother, and their conversations throughout the film zero in on this topic with increasingly revealing and truthful layers. Murray’s restrained but still potent showmanship dominates, but it’s Jones who has to stitch the film’s human drama together. Part of what hampers On The Rocks is that Laura isn’t a particularly entertaining or vital character: she’s a writer but her profession feels a bit too much like one of those jobs sitcom characters have, and too often Coppola uses her as the sounding board for Murray-as-Felix’s monologues. To be fair, that’s part of the point: I’ve known some wilted progeny of high-powered, egocentric personalities. Jones’ excellence, stuck with playing the potentially thankless role, forces it into focus. Jones expertly counters Murray in their game of acting chess with subtle body language, as in the way she stiffens and takes on a languid air of indulgence when Felix first starts off on one of his sexual theorems, and registering Laura’s air of forlorn panic as when Felix informs her that his sources have told him Dean bought something from Cartier’s, the sensation of her borderline irrational fantasies suddenly becoming more tangible and her face stretching out ever so finely as if all the blood in her body just fled down to her feet and nearly dragged her expression with it.

Laura registers Felix’s past actions as specific crimes against her sense of familial security whereas Felix describes them as the result of a simple parting of the ways between himself and her mother in terms of where their lives were heading, before noting with finite heartbreak that the woman he left her mother for, his former assistant and an artist, died earlier in the year, and becomes clear that Felix has reconnected with Laura because he desperately needs someone around to help ease his own sense of panic in mortality. It’s this steady, refined, almost imperceptible accumulation of personal and emotional detail that makes On The Rocks work. Coppola winnows the film’s emotional texture down to one astounding shot of one of Laura’s tears falling into her martini in languorous slow motion whilst Baker’s version of “I Get Along Without You Very Well” murmurs on sound. This is close to Coppola’s finest, most exactingly crafted bit of directing to date.

The air of forlornly romantic desolation connects with the general adoration of New York as a physical and psychological space, shot by cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd as a great bauble of glass and metal and colour, hovering always in promise and also alienation, much as Coppola filmed Tokyo and Versailles. Eventually Laura and Felix follow Dean to a Mexican seaside resort where they hope to catch him with Fiona, a place where Felix seems in his element regaling tourists with songs, casually arranging potential big sales, and calling greetings to new friends from the hot tub, whilst Laura sits locked in a Hopper composition in her bedroom, stewing in disquiet and detachment from the phony conviviality. The actual climax of father and daughter’s quest is gained in comedic diminuendo as Laura receives a cell phone call from Dean, who’s had to dash back to New York, just as she and Felix sneak up on his booked room where they’ve glimpsed Fiona swanning about. The film comes close to another major cliché in this sort of thing insofar as the film doesn’t quite reveal Fiona to be a lesbian, although she introduces Laura and Felix to her “friend” in equivocal manner.

But again Coppola rescues things by delivering a sly punch. The sting of humiliating self-revelation here proves perhaps worse than uncovering infidelity, as it shows Laura that her own neurosis and Felix’s glib propulsion have brought her to such an end. Laura soon unloads on Felix for taking things over and encouraging her worst impulses, and dresses him down for his many failings. “You can say it to my face now,” Felix says, in a brilliant little bit of acting from Murray, twitching ever so slightly as you see Felix forcing himself to turn off any temptation to retort or defend himself and withstand Laura’s upbraiding. “What happened to you?” Felix eventually does comment with a sad, isolated gaze: “You used to be fun.” Which might indeed be Coppola’s way of defusing that question of her own artistry: growing up is always a prickly, often joyless process. This sequence is also superbly shot by Le Sourd, capturing the strobing of lightning out to sea and the sparks of beachfront bonfires, wind-twisted curtains and jutting agave plants, touristy affectations of the picturesque accumulating genuine dreamlike beauty. Laura finally falls asleep on the waterfront and awakens in the bleary morning, forced to accept herself for company. The script doesn’t finally paint Felix as any sort of villain; quite the contrary, his confessions throughout eventually indicate that his rhetoric is a way of shielding himself from still-bewildering cruxes of behaviour where the real pain lies in the way he can’t quite see how they couldn’t have happened, even if he’s not exactly let off the hook. Ultimately, frankly, his pathos ultimately feels more substantial and intriguing than Laura’s.

The ultimate frustration of On The Rocks is that in spite of its quality and honesty you’re still left with the feeling Coppola could and perhaps should have done more with the themes and actors she has in play: too much of the film left me with the feeling of Murray and Jones caged when they should have been unleashed, the nods to exploiting their talents as farceurs left as just that, nods. Some of On The Rocks’ concluding shorthand gestures feel a bit obvious and vestigial, too. We know when Laura complains that she can’t whistle since giving birth she will be whistling very well by film’s end and it never stops feeling like a device. The symbolism of the swapping of watches, Felix’s vintage gift boxed away in favour of Dean’s flashy Cartier present, reminded me of the rather clunky opening of Somewhere that showed its hero literally going in circles: for a subtle artist Coppola can try a too hard. It could also be said that Dean ultimately never feels like a particularly convincing character. Wayans plays him well enough, broadcasting on a low-wattage frequency of affection for Laura that makes it difficult to take seriously the idea he’s really having an affair, but he’s still something akin to Schrodinger’s Husband. Dean could be revealed to be loyal or adulterous and either way it wouldn’t give him much defining characteristic and Laura is ultimately willing to think he’s unfaithful because otherwise he’s a bit too good to be true. The note of romantic mystery sounded at the outset, the arc of bewilderment and seeking sounded in that fateful kiss between husband and wife that opens up gulfs of identity to be explored, suggests possibilities that the film ultimately swerves around. Perhaps that’s a field of exploration for Coppola’s next film.

1960s, Auteurs, Horror/Eerie, Swedish cinema

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

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Vargtimmen

Director/Screenwriter: Ingmar Bergman

In memoriam: Max von Sydow 1929-2020

By Roderick Heath

The hour between night and dawn…when most people die, sleep is deepest, nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their worst anguish, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most babies are born. – note in the screenplay of Hour of the Wolf

As a filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman synthesised two vital artistic modes, the psychological realism of Scandinavian theatre, and the essential faith of Modernism, that understanding of the world depended on perception and therefore art had to find ways to replicate modes of perception, groping towards a rational understanding of the irrational impulse. And yet Bergman’s fascination, even obsession with pathological behaviour and with the dark and tangled roots of the modern psyche and civilisation repeatedly drew him towards the fantastical, the hallucinatory, and the oneiric, conveyed through cinema that often reached back to the supple blend of naturalism and expressionistic stylisation achieved in early masters of Scandinavian cinema like Carl Dreyer, Benjamin Christensen, and Victor Sjöström. So, much as it might once have infuriated some of his high-minded worshippers in his heyday to say so, Bergman’s films very often grazed the outskirts of Horror cinema, and sometimes went the full distance. The anxious, unstable, beleaguered tenor of Bergman’s mature work often employed imagery sourced from the same wellsprings as Horror’s lexicon of preoccupations and metaphors.

The Seventh Seal (1957), the film that made Bergman an international star of the art form, revisited the traditions of medieval folk tales and images of Death personified and triumphant, inhabiting a world of wind-thrashed coastlines and cavernous castles. The Magician (1958) was a queasy lampoon of gothic horror imagery and the mystique of the carnival sorcerer. Through A Glass Darkly (1961) featured a young psychotic who envisions God as a giant spider resting in the centre of a web. Persona (1966) annexed imagery redolent of both Horror and Sci-Fi in its exploration of mental collapse and psychic merging, mental landscapes, climaxing with its two heroines’ faces blended into a monstrous visage fit for a B-monster movie. Bergman in turn had a deep influence on the genre. The Seventh Seal heavily informed the revival of Gothic Horror in the late 1950s, including Mario Bava and Roger Corman’s Poe films, particularly The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Most famously, The Virgin Spring (1960), with its folklore-inspired tale of a medieval patriarch who avenges his saintly daughter’s despoiling and murder by some brigands, provided the springboard for Wes Craven’s notorious Last House On The Left (1972), and through it a vast number of films revolving around rape and vigilante violence.

1968’s Hour of the Wolf and 1978’s The Serpent’s Egg represent perhaps the closest Bergman came to making proper Horror movies. The latter, the result of Bergman’s brief exile from his native Sweden over a tax dispute, is a bleak and miasmic portrait of the waning Weimar era in Germany where proto-Nazidom is engaged in voyeurism and grotesque experimentation. Hour of the Wolf belongs amidst a string of films Bergman produced in the 1960s preoccupied with the flailing of the artist before the interminable pressures of the modern world and the impossibility of entirely escaping it, and the accompanying morbid psychology resulting from the tension between inner and outer worlds. The film in context mediates the portrayal of an artist retreating from reality in Persona and the depiction of being plunged back into its brute immediacy in Shame (1968). Hour of the Wolf also reflects Bergman’s adoption of the island of Fårö as a base for working, a place of untrammelled creative freedom where he built a film studio and retreated to make movies each year after expounding his other great artistic pursuit, directing theatre. Hour of the Wolf has been described as the first film of a distinct Fårö trilogy, followed by Shame and The Passion of Anna (1969), in offering the island not just as a shooting location and artistic retreat but a muse in itself.

The movies Bergman made around this time might be said by a sceptical soul to explore the ground between exploiting the freedom to meditate and know one’s inner world and licence to navel gaze mercilessly. But Hour of the Wolf drags something rare and transfixing out of such depths, at once a patently autobiographical movie for Bergman, who was experiencing insomnia and anxiety during its making, and a fantasy that inverts the usual struggle to rationalise in his work. Bergman might have essentially invented the title concept though it has some echoes in folklore, to explain the long and harrowing nocturnal vigils he was experiencing, and later claimed to have successfully exorcised once the film was made, filled in with remembered childhood nightmares and conjurations. Bergman’s notoriously unstable private life, already with a string of marriages and mistresses behind him, was experiencing one of its periodic moments of calm, as he was in the middle of a five-year affair with Ullmann, who was pregnant during the film’s shoot. Not surprisingly, then, the film is also a portrayal of sexual guilt and self-recrimination. Earlier Horror cinema is also stitched into its texture, the imprint of Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921) in style and theme, dealing as it did with a self-destructive husband claimed by dark forces, and Bergman’s love in his teenage years for Hollywood Horror movies, particularly Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), affection and inspiration paid heed to in the casting of Georg Rydeberg, who bears distinct resemblance to Lugosi.

Hour of the Wolf stands as probably Bergman’s most surreal and visually imaginative work, a highpoint in his collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, carefully removing the usual props for certainty in cinematic narrative without entirely dissolving into incoherence. Hour of the Wolf commences with an opening title sequence sporting credits unspooling in stark white letters upon black, with the sounds of a film crew working to prepare the set and beginning the shoot on the soundtrack. Bergman originally intended for this metafictional touch to be more overt in a manner close to what he had offered in Persona, where the texture of film itself stands in for the psychic reality of his protagonists, but eventually abandoned it, leaving this supernal aspect perhaps to underline the draft-like nature of the drama here, his refusal to elucidate in the manner of his more realistic dramas driven by a need to engage with a portrayal of the irrational as its own consuming zone. An expository scrawl, offered as a direct statement from Bergman or rather from an authorial stand-in, tells of how he interviewed Alma Borg (Ullmann), the wife of famed painter Johan Borg, who had mysteriously vanished on the Frisian island of Baltrum where the couple were living. Very pregnant Alma is then presented as speaking directly to the camera, not exactly as if appearing in a documentary but rather speaking to the audience as an immediate and personal presence. Alma, calm and melancholy, declares as her first line, “I have nothing more to say.”

Alma tells her interviewer that she’s handed over Johan’s diary and that she’s expecting to give birth in a month: she was found to be with child by a doctor shortly before she and Johan came back to the island. She comments that they came there for quiet, and that Johan liked her because she was quiet, and reiterates her intention to remain in the house they shared for seven years. Cut to the arrival of the couple back on Baltrum, with Johan played by Bergman’s favoured acting alter ego Max Von Sydow. The arrival, as if being carried across the Styx on a motor boat, gives way to a deadpan long shot of them tramping their way up a rocky shore, Johan pushing a wheelbarrow that squeaks interminably during their ascent. Already we’ve made a free-fall out of any kind of modern world or any sense of safely cocooning society, back into a zone not really that different from the medieval world Bergman explored in The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring. Alma’s comments at the opening suggest she and Johan were a very mutually supportive couple early on, back when he was struggling, occasionally taking work to help keep them going. Now Johan has become successful and lauded, but the couple still maintain the same Spartan, retreating lifestyle: when Alma asks Johan for money to take care of a budgeting shortfall he hands over a wad of cash, only for her to complain because she takes pride in her bookkeeping and wants to explain how rigorous she’s been.

Alma and Johan’s sanctuary is evidently supposed to contain an idyllic bohemian lifestyle, spurning distractions and living sufficiently together in splendid isolation. But the dark side of such a life quickly begins to manifest when Johan returns from a painting jaunt looking distracted and coldly rebuffing Alma’s show of affection. A note of unspoken strain persists between them as Johan begins staying awake all night to the dawn, and eventually he suddenly presents Alma with his sketchbook and begins showing her characters he claims to have recently met out on the island. His record of perverse, demonic presences includes a woman who always threatens to take off her hat (“Her face comes off with it, you see.”), various spider-like and insectoid hominids, and “the worst of all,” a bird-man Johan claims is related to Papageno from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but seems far more threatening than that character. These strange visions and weird people Alma at first takes for artistic fancies welling from Johan’s ambiguously troubled mind, until she is visited whilst doing laundry by an elderly woman (Naima Wifstrand), dressed all in white including a broad hat in a rather antique style, mentioning she’s 216 years old (“What am I saying? I mean 76.”). She seems to know not only about Johan’s sketches but tells Alma she should prevent Johan destroying them as he intends, and also that he keeps his diary with them in a satchel. After the woman leaves, Alma digs out the satchel and begins reading the diary.

Johan’s entries recount a string with encounters with some of the people he’s sketched, who all seem in flashback to be ordinary if sometimes odd folk from the island’s smattering of social elite. Baron von Merkens (Erland Josephson) drives up to Johan whilst he paints and invites him and Alma to his house for a dinner party. A frantic fellow in a beret in glasses calling himself Heerbrand (Ulf Johansson) pursues Johan as he trudges home and explains he’s a school counsellor, his job to “probe souls and turn them inside out.” Johan, aggravated beyond all reason by the man possibly because he’s the one Johan has previously mentioned to Alma as possibly homosexual, suddenly struck him and demanded he shut up. He also records an encounter with a beautiful blonde woman (Ingrid Thulin), who stalks up to him on the beach and immediately falls into an intimate rapport with the distressed artist: later it’s revealed this woman is Johan’s former lover Veronica Vogel, with whom he carried on a long affair that overlapped with his marriage to Alma before it was exposed to the world.

Veronica reads to Johan a disturbing letter she received full of veiled threats: “Dreams can be exposed. The wells will run dry, and other liquids will moisten your white loins.” When the Borgs attend the dinner party, they meet Von Merkens’ wife Corinne (Gertrud Fridh), brother Ernst (Bertil Anderberg), mother (Gudrun Brost), friend and archivist Lindhost (Rydeberg), as well as Heerbrand, who calmly remarks that “we’ve met before” as he shakes Johan’s hand. During dinner and after, the couple are regaled with their hosts’ discomforting knowledge of their private lives as well as public fame. Corinne keeps Johan’s portrait of Veronica in her bedroom as a combination idol and fetish, and shows off bruises left by her lover. Heerbrand needles Johan by recounting their meeting and his assault to the party, not mentioning his name but still with the apparent intent of provoking him.

Bergman’s theatrical side and his cinematic imagination grew in tandem and indeed drew from each-other: whilst his creative palette remained almost strictly interpersonal, often indeed interiorised, he had by this stage in his career grown into a genuine cinema master. Hour of the Wolf exemplifies Bergman’s ability to, with a few quick, deft cuts and camera set-ups, create effects with an almost physical impact on his audience in describing the emotional and psychological world of his characters. The hazy blend of fantasy and veracity that permeates Hour of the Wolf is bolstered by perturbing film grammar. Johan’s encounter with Heerbrand is a prime example, starting with a close shot of Johan marching up a slope, in motion with the sounds his feet crunching grass in forced long strides as he glances behind him, before cutting next to the pursuing Heerbrand also in a close shot, the sense of motion, exertion, and tension made manifest before the retreat to a long tracking shot as Heerbrand catches up with his quarry, now imbued with an edge of cruel comedy. Elsewhere his static framing constantly seeks a sense of trapped energy. Johan embracing Alma tenderly before turning from her coldly is framed with flapping laundry entering the frame, somehow describing both their forlorn domestic space and the frantic movement of their mutually locked minds. Both Alma and Veronica are filmed from over Johan’s shoulder as they make desperate appeals, electric in emotional intensity and yet not quite able to take whole and proper form beyond the range of the man they share.

Alma holding her hands around a guttering candle during on the night vigils becomes a veritable emblem for Bergmanesque drama, replete with religious connotations and a feeling for the mental and physical strain of lasting out long, assailed nights in a cold country. The beginning of the dinner party at the Von Merkens’ house begins with a point-of-view shot that may be for Johan or Alma or both as they’re introduced to the family and other guests, looming faces caught in Nykvist’s lens, before a hard cut to the diners taking their chairs at the dinner table, the camera circling at speed and the arc broken up by edits, creating a sense of both sociable excitement and an unpleasant edge of the frenetic amidst the tony splendour and fake conviviality of the aristocratic entertainment. The overheard talk is discontinuous and confused, littered with totemic phrases. The Borgs become increasingly uneasy as strangely barbed pieces of conversation flit by, like Von Merkens noting that he once bought a painting and invited the artist and other around to get a good laugh because the picture was hung upside down deliberately: “What do you say, Mister Artist? Wasn’t that a good joke?” whilst Corinne boasts of travelling the world to lose weight. “It’s supposed to be pleasurable to be humiliated,” another guest notes, which seems to be the name of the game.

Lindhost entertains the crowd by putting on a performance with the Von Merkens’ puppet theatre, a record playing a passage of The Magic Flute as he manipulates the figure on the tiny stage: in one of Bergman’s weirdest, almost subliminal flourishes, the figure on stage proves to be not merely a puppet but an actual human figure, going through the motions of singing. After the performance Lindhost talks through the splendours of Mozart’s music, particularly the passage where the chorus sings the name of the heroine Pamina in fractured syllables, turning it into a ritual chant to bring the dead back to life. Seeds here, obviously, Bergman’s filming of The Magic Flute in 1975, but his use of the opera here brims with a emblematical sense of its music and staging, conjuring a state between the liminal and subliminal, sane and insane, even life and death, which does not otherwise exist; the artistic creation itself forges a dream-life that henceforth retains its own peculiar reality sustained in the minds of those who encounter and truly enter into it. Johan’s celebration of his carnal lust for Veronica was transmuted into artistic achievement, but the legend of its making is now inseparable from the creation, and so both the Borgs are forced to cringe their way through the exposition of the deeply private and personal furrowed into art and then reflected back through the audience. “I have in any case,” Corinne tells Alma, “Bought a considerable piece of your husband.”

Hour of the Wolf knits a daisy-chain of images strip-mined directly from Bergman’s subconscious, as he admitted to incorporating many dreams into it, some dating back to his childhood, linking them together less with story and character than the pervasive mood of disturbed meditation that eventually dissolves into an approximation of madness. Hour of the Wolf nonetheless has a certain narrative similarity to Jean Ray’s novel Malpertuis, later filmed by Harry Kuemel in 1972, in the theme of a grand house crammed with beings with seemingly banal, harried exteriors resembling housebound gentry, and true natures of frightening import, as well as many a haunted house tale where a crumbling manse provides the shell for haggard old leftovers and proper phantoms, like Corman’s House of Usher (1960) and Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Mario Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio (1960) and Operazione Paura (1966), or Antonio Margheriti’s Danza Macabra (1964). As a project from Bergman, it also resembles a particularly toxic and self-exposing riposte to Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), taking up the same basic idea of an artist lost amongst his memories and contending with his inability to rest comfortably in a marriage but turning the intense and hermetic atmosphere created in Fellini’s dream and fantasy sequences into a sustained mood.

Whilst presenting ambiguous and threatening emblems of Johan’s ills, the Von Merkens and their circle are also sardonic caricatures of devolved nobles and hangers-on from a frustrated intelligentsia who certainly feel like accurately observed types: Hour of the Wolf suggests Bergman had spent many such an uncomfortable evening amidst such crowds, sensitive to the adulation of celebrity rather than true artistic rapport and to backhanded compliments of people resolved to steal some fire from the gods by proving a level of intellectual superiority to art and artist. This fear is underlined in the film when the guests applaud Johan for making a speech spurning any sense of personal greatness and claiming to have finally proved immune to megalomania. They also resemble the kinds of large, genteel clans that often flock around Bergman’s characters in his contemporary dramas with their urbane uncles and ancient grandmothers, and particularly twisted, diseased mirrors of the pleasure seekers of Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), by-products of repression and perversion turned cannibalistic.

Bergman often wove personal experiences and autobiographical touches into his films, eventually dedicating the last handful of films he would direct and write to entirely anecdotal portrayals of his family. Hour of the Wolf depicts one tale that would recur in other films, of being imprisoned in a cupboard with the promise that a small troll will emerge in the dark and eat his fingers and toes. Johan explains this memory to Alma during one of their night vigils and its consequences, as he calmly accepted punishment by beating from his parents rather the face the terror conjured by his own mind. The title card for the film is repeated half-way through, just before Johan tells Alma what it is. Earlier in the film, in a suffocatingly intense vignette, he sits with a watch and, proving his thesis that “a minute really is an immense amount of time,” counting the seconds as Alma is held transfixed and apprehensive. The rule of cinematic time, which usually has no relation to physical time, is thrown out here and the audience is forced to experience the mortifying tick away of the minute with Bergman’s characters, the sensation of claustrophobia enforced by the unfolding of the scene in one, long, rigorously framed shot. Alma, answering Johan’s request for her to speak about anything, mentions an observation that old couples eventually seem to resemble each-other in face and mind, moulded to each-other’s shape by time and familiarity: Alma even confesses that she hopes one day they’ll be two old, shrivelled, virtually indistinguishable beings.

Such an end seems rather to feel Johan with revulsion, having praised Alma for seeming complete in herself, liking that “God made me in one piece, that I had whole thoughts and feelings,” a complete and self-sufficient being who would be a companion and not a mystical addendum who might invade and disrupt his creative world. The Von Merkens’ circle embody much that Johan loathes and fears, a bleak survey of beings trapped together beyond natural limits, husband and wife with appetite but not love, authority and learning without purpose, dilettante appreciation without real creation. Another, vital aspect of Hour of the Wolf’s sickly texture is anxiety over the child Alma is carrying. A pivotal scene late in the film sees Johan confessing to her a dreadful deed: fishing on the rocks one day during a break from painting, he realised he was being watched by a boy of about 10, dressed in swimming trunks. As the boy came closer and crowded him before then lying on the rocks nearby in a vaguely suggestive manner, he and Johan finished up in a tussle, the boy biting him and Johan ramming him against the outcrops. Finally Johan clubbed him in a fury to death with a rock and dumped his body in the sea. Bergman and Nykvist shoot this scene as a silent movie-like sequence like they did the dream sequence in Wild Strawberries (1957), but with a new edge of the alien, lightly overexposed film making everything overbright and scorched and grainy, only atonal music heard on sound, amplifying the savagery apparent in the struggle and killing.

The vision of the dead boy suspended in the dark water bobbing to the surface briefly before sinking into the murk, reminiscent of the images of the submerged murder victim in Night of the Hunter (1955), presents a languorous blend of horror and beauty, filmed from directly overhead, white skin, dark water, black blood all afloat like an abstract painting trying to regain form before losing it altogether. Johan’s confession to this crime nonetheless remains uncertain in terms of veracity. He seems more likely to be trying to communicate to Alma some dread dream or vision regarding his fear of their child interfering with his work, as well as calling to mind the homophobic panic inherent in his reactions to Heerbrand in the boy’s provocative, sylph-like recline, everything around him charged with intimations of cloying sexuality. Meanwhile Alma’s body is growing bigger with the seed he planted in it. The allure of Veronica as a temptress contrasts the way Bergman often shoots Ullmann in close-up without make-up, snub nose and freckles the image of a raw, peasant-like form of beauty out of a Dürer or Holbein painting. Alma and Johan initially seem to be happy in the regulation form of genius male artist and adoring muse, as Johan interrupts a moment of sublime leisure where they sit embracing on their doorstep and makes Alma pose for him.

The rest of the time Alma pursues her domestic role without complaint, even satisfaction; she succeeds perfectly in her part as wife up to and beyond the point of losing Johan to his demons, and carries on as if now embodying them both, which might indeed be the ultimate meaning of Johan’s comment about her wholeness. Alma stands at a telling remove from Bergman’s celebrated run of complex and reactive female characters, although she is simple rather than crude, dedicated to her own ideal of life: she is the all too sane counterbalance to her neurotic husband, wedded to earthy things, a fort to guard against the sea swell. Nonetheless the exploration of people whose identities become inextricably joined, merged into ungainly chimera, begun in Persona recurs here, as Alma eventually confesses that she has no idea whether the Von Merkens and their circle and the demons of Johan’s visions were actually real or hallucinations she felt bound to share, compelled to enter into his reality rather than keeping him compassed in hers. At the end she even questions if the intense sensitivity of her love for Johan ultimately helped destroy him precisely because she could not provide that alternate, rock-fast beacon.

Alma’s perfection in such regard is indeed what Johan seems to find so hard to take, even as he clearly cares for her deeply, witnessed in one moment of sidelong affection as he wraps a scarf about her neck with a comforting gesture amidst the dinner party, or kisses her in trying to maintain something like mutually protective intimacy between them as the ordeal goes on. Such gestures highlight the brilliance of Von Sydow and Ullmann, caught at their height as Bergman’s ideal screen actors, with their easy chemistry and intuitive mutual awareness. Where Von Sydow was so often cast as villains and menaces and plummy oddballs in his international acting career, here Bergman depends on him absolutely to play a character threatening and pitiable all at once, a bundle of nerves who seems to set the entire, passive island landscape to vibrating. Few actors in cinema have ever managed to depict incipient instability as skilfully as Von Sydow does here, eyes lit as much by sadness as erotic compulsion and mania when he finally invades the Von Merkens castle in search of his tempting succubus, and the final wounds to his mind and heart registering as bottomless pain and absurdity upon which been pecked and gnawed to death by hovering demons is mere injury piled upon insult.

Ullmann manages to inhabit the opposite role, limpid and preternaturally sensitive to warning signs and gestures, often held as the transfixing focus of shots, particularly in her final monologue delivered in close up direct to the camera, as if Bergman wants to turn her into the human equivalent of that candle flame, a pool of brilliance in a dark universe. The tumult of Johan’s relationship with Veronica entirely contrasts his one with Alma, full of mess and fury, an addictive form of love, and Johan is driven deeper into a recessive and obsessive place as the carefully placed harpoons in his thoughts draw him back to Veronica. Von Merken eventually reveals she is now his lover, but feels obliged to surrender her to a night with Johan. Heerbrand visits the couple and invites them to another party, this one with Veronica in attendance, and also gifts Johan a small pistol to protect himself for “small game,” but which Johan quickly turns on Alma, shooting at her three times and thinking her killed. Bergman punctuates the gunshots not with familiar sound effects but with blasts of discordant music.

Johan advances towards his date with Veronica and enters the Von Merkens’ house, now a labyrinthine space, stark and largely barren, corridors stripped of all furnishing and décor and flooded with madly flapping pigeons. Amongst Bergman’s touchstones here Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) might stand up with its similar sense of unmoored geography and irrational space, strange manifestations and ghostly parties. Johan glimpses increasingly bizarre and impossible sights as he wanders the castle, like the jealous Von Merkens driven literally up the wall by his imminent cuckolding, dancing on the ceiling whilst begging Johan not to look at him. Lindhorst sprouts wings and seems to transform into a bird just after telling the hapless artist, “You see what you want to see.” The wizened old lady really does takes off her hat and her face with it, Johan struck by utter horror as he glimpses the void revealed, fake eyeball dropped into glasses of wine with the mask-face resting beside it. This image right out of nightmare succeeds in illustrating the deep-set anxiety running through most of Bergman’s films, the stripped façade of civilisation as symbolised by an icon of bygone courtliness, leaving a grotesque shell, not even a skull, but a plasticine simulacrum pocked by black holes.

The ritual of humiliation gains momentum and sting as Johan has to abase himself and perform erotic delights for the old Countess, and Lindhorst insists on preparing Johan for his lover’s role, pressing him into an antique and fanciful dressing gown and painting his face in rouge and lipstick, his macho disquiet given a mocking makeover into a drag parody that plainly identifies him as the whore in the scenario. When he finally gains the chamber where Veronica lies waiting for him, laid out stark naked upon a shroud-draped bier like a corpse delivered up for autopsy: Johan caresses her bare form worshipfully and moves to kiss her, only for Veronica to begin laughing with boisterous and sadistic delight. The sound of other laughing turning Johan’s attention aside to see the rest of the household watching on with leering, mocking pleasure at the spectacle of his utter reduction. Johan can do nothing more than thank them for “finally crossing the line – the mirror has been shattered, but what do the shards reflect?”

The fracturing of Johan’s ego and sensuous side is also, it seems, the breaking of the whole man. If the circle are vampires they’re a kind who gain sustenance from a different kind of drawn blood; if they’re Furies avenging Johan’s sins real or imagined, trolls from out of the cupboard come to punish his wild passions, they’re avengers he’s carved out of his own flesh. The last vision of Johan comes through Alma’s eyes, as the film returns to her as narrator to explain how, only lightly wounded and playing possum after John’s shooting, she ventured out after him, tracking him into a swamp where she seemed to find him slumped over a log, battered but alive. But this Johan transformed suddenly into a grimly victorious-looking Von Merkens. Johan himself is glimpsed deeper in the swamp, surrounded by the cabal, who strike at him, drawing blood: Lindhorst transforms into a black raven who delivers a savage peck whilst Johan suffers their blows without cries or attempts to flee, as if resigned to accepting whatever fate they have for him, before he finally seems to vanish into the black swamp water, the demons disappearing too, leaving Alma alone in the dark and tangled mire.

The coda returns to Alma speaking direct to camera, still unsure if what she witnessed was real or the product of a mutual psychosis, beginning her own watch in the hour of the wolf with new life waiting within her. Hour of the Wolf ultimately makes a virtue out of a central premise that might seem to limit it, that the kinds of anxieties that keep artists awake at night, kept in a constant churn by creative process, have a value in themselves, speaking to the part of us that is most human and the part most monstrous. Hour of the Wolf was long underrated amidst Bergman’s films, but today it seems like of his greatest achievements, a by-product of artistic angst that finds a brilliant and disturbing form for it. Where many of Bergman’s films spoke with uncanny precision to like minds of his moment, Hour of the Wolf retains a special edge precisely because it is at once more vague and more allusive in tracing the edges of the psyche’s recesses. It’s also one that’s had its own, peculiar influence on films at the nexus of metafiction and genre film: it’s difficult to imagine works as disparate as The Shining (1980) or Mulholland Drive (2001) without it.

1970s, Auteurs, British cinema, Horror/Eerie, Scifi, Thriller

The Shout (1978)

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Director/Coscreenwriter: Jerzy Skolimowski

By Roderick Heath

Jerzy Skolimowski was born in Łódź, Poland just before the outbreak of World War II, and like many film talents of his time and nation, his life was doomed to be a strange tale of exile and wandering. After enduring a terrifying childhood in the midst of war, Skolimowski found repute early in his early twenties as a writer with a sideline passion for boxing. Skolimowski encountered Andrzej Wajda, then at the forefront of his generation’s film talents in Poland, and Wajda challenged him to rewrite the script of Innocent Sorcerers (1960), in which Skolimowski also acted, playing a pugilist. A spark of passion for a new art form lit in Skolimowski, who started attending film school and studied under Andrzej Munk, and graduated with a near-complete feature film to be assembled from all the fragments he had shot in that time. Skolimowski wrote the dialogue for Roman Polanski’s debut film, Knife in the Water (1962), before he began to make a name for himself with his autobiographical tales of growing up in post-war Poland, particularly Walkover (1966), about a boxer who defeats an opponent in the ring but is felled by him in a street fight. The political commentary of Hands Up! (1967) got him in trouble with authorities, and he found himself unable to return home. He drifted around western Europe for a time, and washed up in London, where his experiences would eventually be transmuted much later into his acclaimed 1982 film Moonlighting. Skolimowski debuted in English-language cinema with Deep End (1970), a story about a teenager’s sexual obsession with a slightly older woman that unfolds in tragicomic fashion. Sinking instantly from sight at the box office upon release, Deep End soon gained a dogged cult following.
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Skolimowski’s follow-ups, adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle — The Adventures of Gerard (1970) — and Vladimir Nabokov — King, Queen, Knave (1972) — were also flops and critically derided to boot, so Skolimowski did not get to make another film until 1978’s The Shout, an adaptation of a short story written by Robert Graves. Graves, best-known for his poetry and his diptych of erudite and blackly witty historical fiction I, Claudius and Claudius the God, is not a name usually associated with fantastical literature, but The Shout was an eerie and bizarre tale about magic and madness, one that was to prove a perfect springboard for Skolimowski’s talents. The resulting film captured him the Grand Prix at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Marco Ferreri’s Bye Bye Monkey). The Shout stands today as a lonely island in cinema, one of a handful of entries in the history of the cinefantastique that evokes vast possibilities with a spare, even abstract, method. Then again, to call The Shout a fantasy film might be to misclassify it. Actually, most any description of it runs the same risk. It also isn’t quite a horror film, not quite a domestic drama, not quite a sex farce, not quite a shaggy dog story that both describes and enacts abuse of credulity as to how convincing a well-told story can be even when it seems utterly lunatic.
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Skolimowski starts the film with images of a woman, Rachel Fielding (Susannah York), driving quickly through the countryside, springing out of the vehicle in a nurse’s uniform, and dashing inside an institutional building to behold three corpses laid out on tables under sheets. Checking the faces of each body, she comes to the last, and just as she draws the sheet back, Skolimowski teasingly dissolves into an eerie and tantalising shot of a man advancing slowly over a region of sandy dunes that could be deep desert, a sandy beach, or the cold and lonely stretch of the mind Dali constantly tried to paint. The figure advances on the camera until it can be seen properly as a black man wearing an old military jacket and clutching a pointed bone, a being of strange shamanic power and menace. From there Skolimowski leaps again in time to focus to a man riding a motorcycle, Charles Crossley (Alan Bates), passing the same Citroen mini Rachel drove earlier. This time Rachel is in the company of her husband, Anthony (John Hurt). Rachel drops a glum-looking Anthony at the same institution his wife was speeding to at the start. Both Anthony and another young man – Tim Curry, playing the role nominally that of Graves himself as ears to the story – advance into the institutional grounds wearing cricket gear. All this splintered time has more than mere arty intent, as it sets up a zone where identity, time, cause, and effect are all in flux. Graves has been asked to keep score of a cricket match between a team from a nearby town and a team partly comprised of people from the institution, which is a hospital for the mentally ill.
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Graves speaks to the chief psychiatrist (Robert Stephens), who seems to be encouraging the match for therapeutic reasons, and anticipates Graves’ encounter with the other man who’ll be scoring with him. When Graves asks if this man is mad, the psychiatrist illustrates the lack of a clear dichotomy by pointing to a tree that has a sane appearance and another one with less leaves and twisting limbs that is not quite so commonplace. Graves soon finds his companion is Crossley. The game of wits that persists between Crossley and the psychiatrist is suggested as each describes the other as the most intelligent person in the place and Crossley guesses that the doctor has used the line about the trees on Graves: “Very repetitive fellow.” Crossley spies Anthony walking out to the cricket pitch and becomes excited, and proposes to Graves to tell him the story of how Anthony lost his wife. Crossley’s story quickly proves to be his own as well, and the reason behind his agitated eagerness in seeing Anthony again proves to be contained within it. The earlier shot of the shaman marching across the dunes is deployed again, joined with Crossley on a subliminal level, a spirit-shape sneaking up upon Anthony and Rachel where they lay sunbathing on sand dunes near their Dorset home. They both snap into wakefulness in quivering alarm, as they think they’ve shared a dream of the same advancing figure. Rachel soon finds she’s missing a buckle from her sandal.
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On one level, under its atavistic hints and air of inscrutable numinous threat, The Shout is a portrait of a very English nightmare: the guest who invites himself in and won’t take the hint to leave, and swiftly proves so much more charismatic and interesting that he claims everything about him by right of psychic conquest as domestic courtesy is extended and abused. This facet is reminiscent of the sorts of stories of middle-class infidelity and marital tension often sarcastically referred to as the “infidelity in Hampstead” genre, as Anthony squirms regardless of his double standards at the spectacle of his wife being seduced by another man. But there’s also a crucial likeness with Knife in the Water as a tale of a troubled marriage given new and competitive zest by the inclusion of a third party, as well as sharing with Polanski a fascination for the fringes of the settled, civilised world, a place where all sorts of transformations, both lovely and repugnant, can occur. As a transplanted artist in a foreign culture, Skolimowski foregrounds the very Englishness of the story he tells here even as carefully portrays the feeling of being alienated from the landscape, and conveys that sense of hazy horizons through Crossley as a man who smudges the barriers between places and people. The rituals and uniforms of cricket are given totemic importance for a reason, for the psychiatrist tries to use them as a way of securing his patients in the game’s bucolic unfolding. But as anyone who knows the game well, it is actually defined by tension and the constant provocation of frustration by its jittery, trying rhythms. So Skolimowski drolly observes an underlying edginess under the equable surfaces of the match, and The Shout constantly rubs raw nerves in the same way. The asylum’s star player is a former test cricket bowler who loses his temper easily, and has it quickly stoked to boiling point by bad umpiring. One patient-turned-player (Jim Broadbent) has to retrieve a ball from a cowpat, getting shit all over his hands, and he becomes increasingly jittery and hysterical as the match proceeds. As Crossley recounts his narrative, the atmosphere constantly darkens and becomes more pregnant, as a thunder storm approaches, its dull rumbling thunder echoing through the leafy hospital grounds.
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Anthony is an experimental musician who spends his days creating new and unusual sounds in a makeshift studio in his house, whilst occasionally filling in playing organ in the church in the nearby town. Skolimowski depicts Anthony at work with a mesmeric fascination for the techniques he uses to make his effects, each creation an act transmuting a commonplace object into something extraordinary, like a haggard sardine tine scraped with a violin bow, or a fly trapped in a bulb taped to his microphone. When Anthony dashes to town on his bicycle after getting so wrapped up in his work he nearly forgets he’s due at the church, he pounds on the keys whilst making eyes at his lover in the town (Carol Drinkwater). When he returns to his bike, he finds the tyre flattened, an act performed by Crossley to contrive their meeting. Anthony tries to dodge Crossley’s angular, unwelcome conversation, but after gallivanting around the countryside with his lover finds him waiting for him again outside his house. Crossley claims to be on a walking holiday, and having only recently returned to England after spending eighteen years in the Australian outback. He invites himself to tea and entertains the bewildered Fieldings with his accounts of life with a remote Aboriginal tribe, and gives his testimony to having taken advantage of the tribe’s law and killed the four babies he had with his tribal wife, so that he would leave nothing of himself with them when he departed their society. This report drives a distraught Rachel from the room, in part, she admits later, because the Fieldings’ own marital unease is sourced in part in their own failure to have a child.
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Crossley also speaks about various magical feats he has witnessed or mastered himself when he submitted to the schooling of the indigenous sorcerers, referring to his soul as split in four pieces, and describing the shaman of the Fieldings’ nightmare, who was his principal teacher and a man even Crossley describes as “a genuinely terrifying figure.” Crossley recounts that man’s greatest feat of magic, in which he sliced the skin of his torso right around his navel and pulled the skin up like a shirt, an act that brought on torrential rain to end a long drought. Anthony sees that Crossley himself has a scar just like this around his belly. Crossley turns himself into a house guest with a fainting spell. He later offends Anthony by telling him he’s listened to his music and found it empty, but Anthony, though he throws a private tantrum, can’t quite work up the proper pith to toss his guest out. Distracted as he keeps dashing off to see his mistress, Anthony returns home to find Crossley developing a connection with Rachel that soon shades into outright erotic domination, a grip that might be facilitated by his possession of her sandal buckle, a personal trinket that he claims allows him to bend another to his desire. Another of Crossley’s claimed skills is his mastery of the Shout, which allows him to kill by releasing an ear-splitting cry. Anthony declares his disbelief, so Crossley agrees to demonstrate it for him. After leading him out on a long march to the centre of the coastal dunes and advising him to plug his ears with wax, Crossley draws a deep breath, and performs the Shout.
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The very 1970s quality of The Shout is a part of its appeal, the sense of eccentricity and experimental attitude inherent in both the storyline and Skolimowski’s expostulation of it, and its exemplary status as perhaps the greatest entry in a peculiarly British brand of fantastic filmmaking that’s mostly been buried in the intervening decades. As near-forgotten a quantity as The Shout has become, some filmmakers clearly remember it however. Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) referenced it several times, whilst The Duke of Burgundy (2014) took on a similar proposition of melting realities amidst a self-sequestered couple. Recent works of arthouse note like Carol Morley’s The Falling (2015) and Hope Dickson Leach’s The Levelling betray its remnant spirit in trying to evoke the primal, hostile, protean aspect of the countryside and the spaces between people. David Yates nodded to it in a very unexpected context, in the sequence of alienated wanderings of a British landscape turned alien and desolate in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One (2011). Skolimowski uses seemingly very casual scenes to begin knitting the unique mood that defines The Shout, as one game gives way to the equally calm yet increasingly overwrought process of Crossley entering and influencing the lives of the Fieldings. Graves’ story was written in the late 1920s, but updating it to the present day of the 1970s allowed Skolimowski, whose contexts are usually sharply observed even when his dramas are usually more interior, like the swinging London backdrop to the portrait of painful adolescent neediness in Deep End, to encompass a host of pertinent likenesses. Although apart from the cars and Anthony’s technical gear there’s little to nail down the period, nonetheless The Shout incidentally records the shaggy, shambling, depleted spirit of the post-counterculture era: the refugees from city life permeating the countryside, their former lustre of revolutionary adventures transmuting into fiddly obsession and petty rather than exploratory sexual dalliances, confronted by a figure who both threatens and appeals in wielding mystic power, a guru figure teasing constantly with the suggestion of wisdom hard-won and rigorously applied.
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Crossley’s air of command and acumen burn beneath his veneer of shambling, unkempt, almost tramp-like look. The Shout came out in the same year as the infamous Jonestown cult’s mass suicides and murders, and Crossley has the air of a cult leader who needs only to find apt soil to plant himself in, wielding dangerous magnetism and the ability to fixate and unnerve others until they put faith in his strength, needing to be cut down quite before he can work up the right wild verve to enthral more than just the Fieldings. In making The Shout, Skolimowski took advantage of the relatively new Dolby sound recording technology, which had been before that only been a tool for large-budget blockbusters. This allowed him to toy with his film’s sonic dimensions in a rich and layered way. The audio is pitched throughout with a restrained hush occasionally punctuated by a violent or peculiar sound in the same way that a random shout of “Out!” during the cricket match breaks the spell of Crossley’s narration, and the cry is taken up like a chain bark, the illusion of sense and placidity turned into an echo chamber of lunatics. Part of the challenge of making The Shout clearly lay in conveying the awful power of the eponymous concept, the idea of a Shout that can set the world’s spirit in chaos. And Skolimowski pulls it off. The quelled soundtrack persists until the fateful moment when Crossley shouts, a noise that explodes with shattering force, as if raw sound might punch its way out of the screen, Bates’ yawing mouth filmed like a great cavern as he releases the mighty cry. Sheep fall dead at the impact, and even with his ears blocked Anthony contorts and faints. When he awakens, he clutches a totemic stone in his hand, and is momentarily convinced he’s a cobbler — which happens to be the profession of his lover’s husband. Skolimowski casually reveals a shepherd lying dead near the sheep, his death unnoticed by the two men, incidental victim of the conspiracy between heedless will and equally heedless curiosity.
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Skolimowski’s touch of making Anthony a musician compelled by process and fascinated with what wonders simple tools can produce is preffectly apt on the thematic level, but also allows Skolimowski to make a spectacle of his own intents and effects evinced throughout. Much as Anthony labours to create his noises, Skolimowski here stretches cinematic sinews, conjuring a sense of potent mystery and the advancing pressure of the irrational, and terrifying eruptions of preternatural power, purely through means naturally available to his camera and his editing desk, with scarcely any special effects. The Shout anticipates the Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker from the following year in attempting to create credulity of a destabilised reality on screen purely through carefully parsed use of basic film craft. Aiding Skolimowski immeasurably in creating his mood is the droning, otherworldly electronic music soundtrack provided by Michael Rutherford and Tony Banks, aka the other guys from the band Genesis. The scoring suggests Anthony’s head-space in the course of his labours, whilst touching the landscape the Fieldings inhabit in the same way Crossley does, turning it from homey pastoral stretch into a zone where the coding of nature seems to be pixelating – rocky shores reaching fingers into the ocean, the grass-thatched sand dunes, the old house tucked into the folds of the land, at once a perfect English landscape and an outpost on the moon, a land hovering on the edge of nothingness.
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Anthony’s studio sports clipped-out art work like Munch’s painting “The Vampyre,” and an artwork depicting a perverse imp on all fours, suggesting the zones of surreal and sublime perversity Anthony retreats into in his mind, whilst his exterior life remains timid and largely conventional, even in his tawdry affair. Crossley turns up like a demon to torment him precisely for his transgressions, whilst in the course of turning into a rampant, even mindless sensual being under Crossley’s influence, Rachel mimics the crawling imp figure. Although Crossley is nominally telling the story here, Anthony’s own psychic mindscape seems to be blurring into the drama we see, perhaps harvested by Crossley as he ventures into Anthony’s studio. The framing sequences are true to Graves’ story whilst also situating the film in a cinematic tradition kicked off by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), as a tale whose inferences cannot entirely be trusted because of who is telling the story, even as evidence accumulates that Crossley is not merely entertaining his fascinated companion with sick and stirring fancies. Storytelling itself is an act of conjuring in The Shout, and an untrustworthy weapon.
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The question as to whether or not Crossley is merely a madman and manipulator or actually possesses the sorts of power he claims is a narrative mystery to be solved by the end, but it’s also connected with Skolimowski’s deeper objective, as the way The Shout is pieced together makes the way reality is represented on screen, as a usually seamless flow of images linked by codified grammar, becomes a nebulous zone through straightforward touches – a simple cut from one action to another can completely unmoor a viewer from a sense of cause and effect. The synergy Skolimowski finds between the various layers of his story and his method of telling it means that even at only a very trim 82 minutes, The Shout is near-endlessly rich. Crossley’s preamble to telling his story could be Skolimowski’s own: “It’s always the same story but — I change the sequence of events and — I vary the climaxes a little because I like to keep it alive.” In the same way, although films are static things, Skolimowski’s games with the unfolding his story, his flash cuts forward and back in timeframe, sometimes for good reason and other times just to stir bewilderment.
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Casting Bates as Crossley was a particularly inspired move on Skolimowski’s part, for he had the right kind of verbal dexterity for the role of a man who must compel the viewer as well as the characters about him with his conviction and ability to intrigue, in addition to the necessary cobra-and-rabbit mystique of sexual threat. Bates’ pale-hued eyes, so strikingly expressive and romantic in films like Zorba the Greek (1964) and Women in Love (1969) still glow out from behind his grizzled four-day-growth, whilst his tongue is able to twist the metre of his speech from intimate confidant, as he plays for Rachel, to maniacal prophet out of the wilderness, as he otherwise readily postures. The Shout plays upon a quality in Bates Ken Russell had exploited well in Women in Love whilst also incidentally depicting the decay of the messianic figure from that film’s prophet of a new age to a shifty bum whose great ambition for his tremendous gifts consists of cuckolding a hapless musician. Hurt, with his pale, rubbery physique and York with her stark blue eyes and tensile, honed body, round out a major cast notable for their physically palpable qualities, counterpointing the hovering mood of mystic peril with one of immediate corporeal anxiety.
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That anxiety is sometimes played for laughs, as when Graves is met upon arrival at the asylum by a woman who’s paranoid he’s going to peek up her dress. Anthony tries to negotiate a conversation with a naked Crossley, and later he is plucked out of the bath where was getting amorous with Rachel, obliged to converse with the village priest (Julian Hough) about performing at the shepherd’s funeral whilst struggling to hide his erection. But the undertones of sensual strangeness build to electric and unnerving moments too, as when Anthony catches a glimpse of a tell-tale scar ringing Crossley’s belly, and when Crossley appears to Rachel in his room as she tries to pull on a shirt, staring down through the folds of linen at her blankly adoring face, and her moments of ecstatic undressing and seeming transformation into an animal, York offering visions of carnal identity suddenly freed and given reign. Skolimowski also makes memorable use of animals as barometers of human activity. The staring, disinterested cattle who watch the cricket players mimic the ideal of bovine calm that game is supposed to engender. The sheep who pitch limp and very dead after being pulverised by the Shout. A bird that slips into the Fieldings’ kitchen and flits about madly over the head of Rachel, who weeps as she senses her marriage and sense of self dissolving in the face of infidelity and Crossley’s compulsion of her affections, her distress embodied by the animal overhead.
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Crossley’s very arrogance, his desire to prove his power as well as possess it, proves to be his undoing, however. When his lover’s husband reveals to him that he experienced a similar dissociation as Anthony knew when Crossley performed the Shout, Anthony intuits the stone he awoke with in his hand after the event might have become invested with some of Crossley’s power, so he goes back to the dunes to dig it up. When Crossley makes it clear he intends to stay on in his house and subjugate Rachel to his will, Anthony calls the police, who try to arrest and charge him with murdering his children, and when Crossley tries to kill his harassers with his Shout, he only manages to fell one before Anthony shatters the stone, robbing Crossley of his power and allowing him to be captured. By now the import of what we’ve seen at the outset has become clearer: Rachel works at the hospital to be close to Crossley, who still holds some power over her, and Crossley is excited to see Anthony because he hopes to get a chance to enact revenge upon him. But the arrival of the thunderstorm sets the cricket match in chaos, whipping up Broadbent’s hysteric until he strips naked and begins pushing the score box back and forth around the pitch, whilst the psychiatrist and Crossley struggle, and Gaves wisely darts off. Crossley tries to peform the Shout, and a bolt of lightning strikes the box, killing both him and his medical nemesis as well as the hapless patient. Has Crossley’s Shout called down the lightning and felled them all, or was it just a coincidence? Either way, Rachel’s dash to the scene as glimpsed at the opening gains proper ending, as she removes her shoe buckle from Crossley’s neck, his influence finally ended. It’s typical of Skolimowski’s ingenious touch that he’s able to retain a note of ambiguity underneath what we’ve seen even as it seems all has played out to its literal end, and equally indicative of his refusal to indulge any familiar triteness that he fades out upon the sight of Rachel restored, yet still lingering over Crossley’s body – did he really control her, or did he simply claim her affections in all his mad stature? The Shout can still tantalise, madden and perplex. It’s certainly a film of great craft and art that badly needs rediscovery.

1940s, Action-Adventure, French cinema, Romance

Remorques (1941)

aka Stormy Waters

Director: Jean Grémillon

By Roderick Heath

Jean Grémillon was little-known outside France until relatively recently, in spite his place as one of the progenitors of French cinema’s deeply influential “poetic realist” style. Some of his lack of repute might have stemmed from his wayward career, which suffered through a series of bruising switchbacks in fortune, taking him to zones of both great success and ignominy. A violinist by training, Grémillon’s interest in the link between music and film’s sources of rhythmic propulsion was stirred when he was employed as an accompanist for silent film screenings, and became fascinated with the arts of film editing. He soon started making experimental short movies and then documentaries. When he advanced into feature films in the mid-1920s, he found initial success with an aesthetic approach that attempted to forge a new path at a time when cinematic style was being dominated by German Expressionism’s overt weirdness, Russian cinema’s showy montage schemes, and Hollywood’s straightforward efficiency. Grémillon set out rather to mix naturalistic aspects, including location photography and realistic storylines, with careful visual and dramatic stylisation.

Marcel Carne, soon to be probably the most significant of the poetic realists, worked as an assistant on Grémillon’s first movies, and absorbed his ideas. In spite of initial success, the coming of sound saw Grémillon’s efforts to adapt foiled by audiences struggling with the new format, so he went to make films in Germany and Spain. He regained traction at home when he started working with French cinema’s big new star Jean Gabin, who was infamously difficult to manage on set, and yet with whom Grémillon found some measure of rapport. Grémillon became well-known for making romantic melodramas that tackled ordinary lives through a prism of vivid, heightened situations, and a feel for the less-travelled corners of French provincial life and labour, particularly Brittany, usually with strong admiration reserved for ordinary workers and labourers. The bleak years of the Occupation saw Grémillon’s creativity raised to its highest pitch in the eyes of many, with the three films he released during the war, Remorques, Lumière d’été (1943), and Le Ciel est à vous (1944), usually cited as his greatest achievements.

Grémillon’s career ran out of steam in the mid-‘50s as he tried and failed to make several ambitious historical movies, and he went back to making documentaries before dying at 61, whereupon his friend Henri Langlois, the legendary director of the Cinémathèque Française, read a eulogy celebrating Grémillon’s role in modern French film and condemning the studios who cheated audiences of more great Grémillon works. Remorques was a particularly troubled production, as the outbreak of World War II had halted the initial shoot. Grémillon had originally wanted to make it as authentic as possible with location filming around Brest and on ships in his depiction of the working lives of the crews of ocean-going rescue tugboats. But he was left without enough footage, and a brief recommencement of filming in mid-1940 was quickly scuppered by the end of the Phony War. The film’s two stars, Gabin and Michele Morgan, soon fled to America ahead of the Nazi invasion. Grémillon, left to ride out the tides of war and occupation, eventually managed to finish the project by shooting model sequences. His efforts to get the film patched together were rewarded as Remorques became a big hit when it was finally released in cinemas in late 1941.

Although it placed many constraints on filmmakers, the Occupation proved an ironic boom time for French movies, as they had no imported rivals to worry about. The delay for Remorques‘ release might even have been beneficial to the vision of Grémillon and his collaborator, the brilliant poet-turned-screenwriter Jacques Prevert. The cumulatively desolating tale of masculine mission and fleeting passion rendered pathetic in the face of inexorable fate and death found in Remorques, which might have struck an audience in the anxious pre-war days of 1939 as too dour, as happened to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, surely packed the power of public myth two years later, when the country had been beaten to its knees. Remorques – the title, literally translated, means something close to “Tuggers,” although the film’s usual English title is Stormy Waters – opens with a swooping model shot descending on a mock-up of the old, fortified section of Brest, the great French sea port. The opening sequence depicts a social ritual, a wedding, an event for the crew of the tugboat Cyclone, captained by André Laurent (Gabin), as one of his crewmen, Pierre Poubennec (Marcel Duhamel), is marrying Marie (Anne Laurens). The wedding offers a panoramic view of both the tug’s crew and their ladies, and the ways of relating between the two camps.

The first flush of young love is plain in the just-married couple, whilst another crewman, Tanguy (Charles Blavette), is the half-witting target of common mockery because his wife Renée (Nane Germon) is having affairs behind his back. Laurent has been married for ten years to Yvonne (Madeleine Renaud), and they express themselves at first as a perfect union, barely able to believe so much time has passed since their own nuptials. But Yvonne confesses to her husband, in a quiet moment away from the drunken bonhomie of the celebration, that she gets very nervous when he’s away at sea, but immediately dismisses the problem as trivial when Laurent laughs disbelievingly at her words. A messenger interrupts the gaiety with word that a ship is in trouble, and the crew have to return to the Cyclone and get under way, just as a thunderstorm rolls in from the sea. One crewman, Le Gall, is late getting aboard because he’s been having a quick one with Tanguy’s wife, and Laurent dresses him down for it. The tug travels out into the increasingly violent storm, ploughing with agonising difficulty through heavy seas, but eventually beats their main competitor, a Dutch tug, to the crippled ship. Captaining the Cyclone is actually the closest thing Laurent can withstand temperamentally to a desk job, as he used to regularly make long voyages and be away for months at a time during the early days of his marriage to Yvonne. During the night with their husbands off at sea, Yvonne cheerily entertains Marie, but also confesses her dangerously frayed nerves, which are exacerbating a creeping heart ailment diagnosed by her doctor Maulette (Henri Poupon), a man she describes as too good a friend to be fully honest about how bad her disease has become.

Meanwhile, the Cyclone nears the crippled cargo ship, the Mirva XV. The Mirva’s owner-captain, Marc (Jean Marchat), is reluctant to be rescued however, as the bill will be large. He bullies and berates his crew and his wife Catherine (Morgan), who return the contempt happily, whilst Marc refuses to rig a tow rope for the Cyclone, nominally in his anger at their slowness in coming to the rescue. Bedraggled and irate, Catherine at first demands he think of his crew and her before his own hip pocket, and when he continues to screw everyone around, she and some other crewmen abandon the Mirva and row over to the tugboat. This proves a foolhardy exercise that creates great hazard for all involved, including getting two of the just-married Poubennec’s fingers crushed and amputated. Finally, Marc lets the Cyclone take the Mirva in tow, and by morning the seas have calmed. Travelling along the coast, the improperly tied tow rope breaks, forcing Laurent to string a new one. This accident gives Marc an idea, and just as the two vessels enter Brest harbour, he contrives to have the rope give way again, and then makes his own way to dock, cheating the Cyclone out of its salvage prize. Laurent, smouldering with rage, hauls Catherine back aboard her husband’s ship, and clobbers Marc once he gets an earful of his obfuscations.

Gabin and Morgan had first been featured together in Carne’s Port of Shadows (1938), one of the canonical works of poetic realism’s flowering, and Remorques similarly locates itself in a smoky, gritty, lightly stylised version of a working port. Taking on such a milieu, Grémillon courts romantic evocations in essaying seagoing stoicism and embracing the rich atmosphere of Brest and the tugboat community. But Gremillion also emphasises the wearying, nauseating experience of spending hours being tossed about in a tin can on the open ocean, and delves into this job as a rough and dangerous business that regularly claims lives or leaves its practitioners scarred and mangled. Laurent is extremely proud – perhaps to a fault – of his record as a captain, although he’s really only an employee for a shipping company. He complains bitterly after one job goes wrong that now the company will be pleased his record has been spoiled: they don’t like their underlings so unbowed. The humanitarian aspect of the tuggers’ ventures is constantly suppressed in the face of fiscal demands and the daunting realities of the angry ocean. Laurent’s forceful presence and hitherto unquestioned competence as a captain have given him standing and respect unrivalled in his world, befitting France’s top male movie actor.

Gabin, whose career had been boosted playing the voice of plebeian cynicism amidst the decaying aristocratic world in Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), had been the perfect embodiment of romantic fatalism in the likes of Pepe Le Moko (1936) and Le Jour Se Lève (1939), playing figures pushed into criminality, defying authority until their luck runs out, people close to the very bottom of society’s priorities but invested with unique stature by cinema’s ennobling imagistic force, through which even the most wretched character can become the axis of the universe. Gabin’s role in Remorques pushes this persona and the attendant aesthetic to almost hallucinatory extremes, but also quietly revises and undercuts it. Still the working class hero, Laurent is however also a confident authority figure, one whose looming downfall is informed more by personal blindness than malign fate and social degradation, whilst still invoking something close to cosmic when the axe falls. Laurent’s laughing disinterest in his wife’s delicate warnings of trouble brewing soon gives way to more urgent implorations and finally a memorable crack-up when Yvonne lets loose on his egotism; even his expressions of tedium and exhaustion are symptoms of his overweening sense of himself as necessary stalwart and linchpin. “People always know where to find me,” he says when chewing out Le Gall, setting the stage for his own degradation.

Catherine’s entrance into Laurent’s world, appearing out of the sea like a siren, her remarkable feline eyes burning bright and wrathful in the face of her husband’s sleaziness, seems at first just another absurd vignette in such a working life designed specifically to further goad Laurent’s stern professionalism. But soon of course Laurent is utterly smitten with this lady as she parts ways with Marc once in port and takes refuge in a hotel. She calls Laurent over for a talk, and he lends a sympathetic ear as she explains how once she was a desperate youth in Le Havre who snatched at the first offer of marriage just get out of her rut. Meanwhile Laurent’s sad-sack boatswain Kerlo (Fernand Ledoux, one of classic French cinema’s most quintessential faces) muses on life’s absurdity with proto-existentialist humour when he notes to the cook, “It’s impossible to escape boredom. I know, I’ve tried everything.” Much of Remorques is set at night, with overwhelming elemental forces looming on the horizon when not already thundering about Grémillon’s protagonists. Photographer Rene-Jacques took a much-loved picture of Gabin during the production which he entitled “La Homme de nuit,” a perfect encapsulation of a certain brand of archly masculine mystique, the iconic French hero almost but not quite dissolving amidst rain and murk.

Remorques is obsessed with this quality, but is also more sophisticated as it injects irony and inspects dichotomies until they lose shape. The special effects Grémillon was obliged to shoot for seagoing scenes are weak, but they’re employed in a manner that fleshes out this sense of primeval furies on the loose, as the ships, expressions of human will and rigour, bob amidst crashing waves, staying afloat under all assaults. The warning call of the Cyclone, loud and strange enough to be audible and identifiable from miles away, pulling in the crew for action and alerting the ships they sail out to help of their presence, sounds vaguely monstrous. It’s an appropriately bloodcurdling sound for when the tug circles the disabled Mirva under flare light, wounded ship and prowling tug dancing around on heavy seas.

The dichotomy between the reasoned, orderly, settled world left behind back in port is illustrated with perfect economy, and no small technical skill, by Grémillon when he stages a camera movement retreating through the window of Laurents’ apartment, a shot of Yvonne and Marie left behind to their contemplations passing invisibly through the glass into wild rain, in a moment that presages, and in some ways outdoes for thematic relevance tied to cinematic effect, the more famous nightclub roof shot in Citizen Kane (1941). These contrasted spaces, calm, well-found home and chaotic universe, are presented in near-surreal contrast, but Grémillon carefully probes appearances and quickly finds termites in the structure of domestic bliss, as Yvonne is slowly being killed by anxiety although she never ventures out onto the sea herself, slowly dissipating whilst playing out the role of loving wife. “Everyone’s got troubles,” Laurent rebukes Catherine when she first arrives on board: “They should be left at home. Like women.” But his neat distinctions don’t stand up to any pressure.

Catherine, the one piece of salvage successfully recovered by the Cyclone, is cast as sylph temptress tossed onto the shore by the storm to lure in the virtuous Laurent. Except that no-one in Remorques quite fits their part, and Catherine, trying out her land legs again after years entrapped with the despicable Marc, reaches out to Laurent as the closest thing to a friend. Soon they’re drawn into a quick fling both are willing to mistake for eternal passion, before the call of responsibility takes Laurent back to Yvonne’s side and Catherine prepares to move on with the simplicity of someone who knows this drill, giving Kerlo a keepsake to give to his captain as a memento if ever he needs one. Morgan’s eyes, rimmed with tears and phosphorescent with melancholic triumph, attract Gremillion for an epic close-up in her last moments on screen here, as she wishes happiness for Laurent even as she’s already moving on. Remorques manages to coexist in both the rugged vicissitudes of a genre film close to the Warner Bros. working class action films and the Women’s Pictures of the same era.

But Grémillon also stands back to consider how the two styles relate to each-other, the web of cultural assumptions and personal fantasies invested in both, the tension between the official doctrines of manly workaday pride and the feminine art of knitting a safe space, whilst adding that most French of topics, infidelity, the hunger for passion that, like the storm, sets all settlements in riot. Arching over all is a metaphysical aspect, something close to the cosmic level found in Frank Borzage’s films, if essayed in a grimmer hue. In spite of the unions civic, sexual, and contractual in Remorques, everyone is some form of solitary vessel floating around the others. “Unhappy people easily recognise one another,” Kerlo tells Catherine: “Life would be too sad otherwise.” The undercurrent of proto-feminist feeling that flows through the film, with both Yvonne and Catherine fighting in their way to avoid being dragged down by the contrasting yet ultimately similar obsessions of their husbands, is wound in uniquely with its accidental status as an Occupation-era film, as frustrations are voiced, taboos abruptly ruptured, suppressed feeling suddenly explode, everything suddenly thrown into flux.

Grémillon would take this confluence further on Le Ciel est à vous, where he would cast Renaud as an aviatrix valiantly pursuing a flying record, purveyed as a metaphor for resistance against the fascist yoke. The first half of the film is close to one, long sequence unified as a series of interlocking events, commencing with careful deployment of the complex mesh of personalities and tones of the wedding, an event that encompasses modes of expression from pompous homilies to wine-soaked bawdiness in the margins, and seguing directly into the Cyclone’s voyage out to rescue the Mirva. This is a sequence of careful, layered physical detail, interwoven with the continuing arguments and running jokes of the crew. The crew of the Cyclone, and the attention of the audience, only finds relief the following day when the tugboat returns to port, after the storm has died. The watery sun invades the humdrum parlours and cafes, presenting the illusion of returned stability and rationality, and washes over the coastline, just in time to catch Laurent and Catherine walking on the beach. There they toe the flotsam left on the sands, and retreat into an abandoned beachfront house where they play-act creating a home, whilst finding a good stage to finally enact what’s been arcing between them unacknowledged.

The serious romantic travails are contrasted lightly with Tanguy’s cuckold status, a popular subject of allusive jokes and teasing around the tug. Laurent encourages him to confront his wife, but Tanguy is swiftly disarmed by her dissembling chattering. Later, Laurent, weighing up his own rapidly evolving hypocrisy, tells him to forget what he said, as no-one outside a marriage can really understand what makes each one persist. By this time he’s committed his own crime by being hard to find, away with a woman who’s not his wife, discovered by one of his crew combing the coast on a motorcycle. Yvonne’s awareness that her husband has probably been off with another woman precipitates a gruelling scene of marital grievance-airing, punctuated by Yvonne’s frantic demands Laurent recognise the reality of her problems. Her shots at his very identity, his pride as a worker and leader and a man, by claiming he likes to own things, from his boat to his wife, drive Laurent away in a fury, believing his marriage finished.

The atoll of romantic fulfilment Laurent tries to retreat into with Catherine proves exceptionally short-lived, as Catherine predicts: “The storm is coming to get me. I know what he’s crying. ‘It’s over. You’ve been happy too long. Now it’s time to go.’” Quintessential fatalism for poetic realism, the doomed lovers sprawled on a hotel room bed, transient feelings from beings snatching a moment of bliss. But Remorques shifts into a more intense and spectacularly woeful key for its finale, as Yvonne experiences a heart attack, bringing Laurent back to her bedside for a desperate interlude of pathos as Yvonne suddenly dies begging for Laurent’s avowal of love, his anguished scream echoing out to the others waiting in his apartment. When he appears to them, he’s just the staring shell of a man, obligated to answer the call of duty even in the eye of utter desolation. He paces down to the dock to join the Cyclone, which has to go out on a mission, in another stinging irony, to save their Dutch rivals.

As Grémillon tracks Laurent’s progress through the drenching rain and the cold stonework and wrought-iron forms of the Brest waterfront, a strange liturgical recital begins to resound on the soundtrack, invocations of saints and angels dogging his footsteps, surging on to a creepy orchestral accompaniment that cuts out just before Laurent orders the tug to get under way, heading out into the dark. Grémillon’s background in music surely played a part in executing this fantastical yet perfect matching of vision and sound in a climax that counts as one of the strangest, bleakest, and greatest in cinema. It’s an incantatory moment that sets the seal on a domestic tragedy that has a conventional moral aspect, but which expands thanks to this startling flourish into something far more wild and unique. Here Remorques generates a frenzied aspect of baleful prayer, offering a requiem for an entire falling, drowning world, the end of a cinema genre and a human age.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Tag Archives: infidelity

Les Biches (1968) / La Femme Infidèle (1969)

On The Rocks (2020)

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

The Shout (1978)

Remorques (1941)