1980 Week: The Last Metro

          Polished and sophisticated but also a bit on the trifling side, the World War II drama The Last Metro was the final major international success for François Truffaut, a titan of the French New Wave and one of the most gifted storytellers ever to work in cinema. Telling the story of theater people who defy the Nazis in occupied Paris, The Last Metro is among Truffaut’s most visually beautiful films, thanks to luminous photography by the great Néstor Almendros, and it pairs French-cinema grande dame Catherine Deneuve with Gérard Depardieu, then a rising star of Gallic films. All participants operate at the height of their powers, creating a movie that’s humane, intelligent, romantic, and suspenseful. The Last Metro is bloated at 131 minutes, and the ending is so tidy that it makes much of what came before seem inconsequential. Yet The Last Metro is unusual among movies about occupied France inasmuch as the material is not inherently depressing or tragic. The Last Metro is an inspirational story about survivors who refuse to compromise their principles, thereby getting the last laugh on their jack-booted oppressors. It’s not quite a feel-good WWII movie, but it’s certainly not a feel-bad WWII movie.

          When the picture opens, actor Bernard Granger (Depardieu) arrives for an audition at a theater operated by the beautiful actress Marion Steiner (Deneuve), who manages the acting troupe and the building because her husband, acclaimed director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), is Jew who fled Paris to escape the Nazis. Or so it seems. Turns out Lucas is living in seclusion, using the theater’s basement as a hideout. Once Marion begins rehearsals for a new play in which she costars with Bernard, Lucas listens to their acting through pipes carrying sound from the stage to the basement. At night, once everyone else has left the building, Marion joins Lucas to get notes on the day’s work. Lots of things conspire to disrupt this delicate situation. French citizens collaborating with the Nazis discover clues suggesting that Lucas never left the country. Lucas gets stir-crazy in the basement, threatening to risk capture by leaving his hideout. And Bernard becomes romantically attracted to Marion, creating a complex triangle while the actors play lovers onstage.

          Despite being written, directed, and acted with the utmost care and refinement, The Last Metro has the feel of a soap opera, with characters pursuing crisscrossing agendas while guarding dangerous secrets. And while the pulpy nature of the material probably contributed to the film’s popularity, demanding viewers can’t help but expect more given the level of talent involved and the sprawling length of the movie. Taken for what it is, however, The Last Metro goes down smoothly. Deneuve is so exquisite to behold that she commands the screen even when she’s doing nothing, Depardieu hits the right note of brash arrogance, and Bennent is believable as a high-minded artiste. As always, Truffaut conjures an immersive sense of time and place.

The Last Metro: GROOVY

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978)

          Idiosyncratic French director Bertrand Blier reteamed with Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, the stars of his controversial Going Places (1976), for Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, another peculiar film about twisted psychosexual dynamics. Although Get Out Your Handkerchiefs isn’t as overtly cruel as Going Places, which was infused with sexual violence, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs betrays just as troubling an attitude toward women. To be fair, the film is skillfully made from a technical perspective, with attributes including elegantly naturalistic photography, and Blier’s script has a few fleeting moments of near-perfect satire. Overall, however, the picture is bogus and odd, more a literary flight of fancy than an examination of recognizable human emotions. That being said, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is compelling precisely because of its strangeness—the movie travels to so many unconventional places that it’s impossible not become curious where it’s going next. As to what it all means, and whether the journey is worth taking—well, that’s a call best left to individual viewers, because those who embrace the picture as a cerebral meditation are likely to find Get Out Your Handkerchiefs more rewarding than those who want a flesh-and-blood story about actual human beings.

          The opening sequence sets the off-kilter mood. Sitting in a crowded restaurant, exasperated Raoul (Depardieu) says he wants to help his depressed wife, Solange (Carole Laure), get out of her funk by granting permission to take a lover. He then tries to recruit Stéphane (Dewaere), a diner at a neighboring table, for the aforementioned stud service. This leads to a bizarre comedy-of-errors argument because each character reacts unexpectedly to accusations and questions. The comic notion is that everyone in Get Out Your Handkerchief overshares—except for the mysterious and withholding Solange—so each conversation goes from zero to intimate in record time, resulting in a mixture of bewilderment and connectivity. From a writing perspective, Blier walks a high wire throughout the entire film, but because Get Out Your Handkerchiefs takes place outside normal reality, it’s hard to say whether he keeps his balance. The movie is never believable, but it’s also never boring. Eventually, Raoul, Solange, and Stéphane form an extended family of sorts, because Solange alternates between nights with Raoul and nights with Stéphane. Things get even weirder when Stéphane takes a summer job as a camp counselor, because Solange becomes involved with a third lover, 13-year-old camper Christian (Riton Liebman).

          Through it all, Solange remains an enigma. One of Blier’s central jokes seems to be that men are incapable of understanding women—which means that Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is either sly or stunningly sexist or both. Every so often, the movie “works” in a conventional sense, albeit with a nasty edge. In one scene, Raoul slaps Solange, causing her to cry, so Stéphane pulls a handkerchief from his pocket—but instead of drying Solange’s tears, he dabs sweat off Raoul’s forehead. It’s a vicious barb, men valuing their emotional lives while ignoring those of women, but it’s a direct hit nonetheless. Still, for everything that impresses about Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, there are a dozen troubling elements. The abuse. The objectification of Laure, who is frequently naked. The pedophilia of the Christian subplot. Given the film’s provocative aspects, it’s a wonder that Get Out Your Handkerchiefs found an audience, and it’s downright astonishing the picture won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 1978.

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs: FUNKY

Going Places (1974)

          In some ways, the loathsome protagonists in French director Bertrand Blier’s gonzo dramedy Going Places are cousins to the madman played by Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (1971). Like McDowell’s character Alex, the hedonists in Going Places move through the world on pure instinct, stealing anything they want, destroying property when the mood strikes them, and using women as unfeeling receptacles for their hateful lusts. Yet while Alex occupies a world of consequences, the buddies in Going Places roam free, so it’s difficult to understand what sort of statement Blier, who adapted the movie from his own novel, wanted to make. Similarly, it’s tough to accept the notion that Going Places elevated Gérard Depardieu to star status. He’s extraordinarily loose and naturalistic in Going Places, so it’s not as if the film fails to showcase his talents. The question is why audiences responded to such a deeply unsympathetic character. De gustibus non est disputandum.

          Jean-Claude (Depardieu) and Pierrot (Patrick Dewaere) travel through France looking for adventures, sex, and thrills, usually making their way from one place to the next by robbing pedestrians or stealing unattended vehicles. One night, while burglarizing a shop that belongs to a pimp, they kidnap a prostitute named Marie-Ange (Miou-Miou). During the crime, Pierrot gets shot in the testicle, though he later rallies his energy to rape Marie-Ange. Afterward, he complains that she’s sexually unresponsive. Inexplicably, she finds the abuse endearing, so before the boys release her, she obliges their request to “touch her ass hairs” for luck. And this is only the first half-hour of the picture, which gets more depraved with each passing moment. In one scene, the degenerates pay a sexy young mother to let them suck her breasts for milk, and in another, Jean-Claude rapes Pierrot because, they, that’s what friends are for. Following a strange and tragic episode with a recently paroled criminal, played by the great Jeanne Moreau in an affront to her cinematic dignity, the boys reconnect with Marie-Ange, since they want to provide her as a sexual plaything for a young man of their acquaintance. Oh, and at some point the lads kindly deflower a virgin, played by Isabelle Huppert in an early role, and, naturally, she thanks them for the courtesy.

          In nearly any other movie, characters behaving this way would be portrayed as sociopaths, but given the lightness of touch he applies to his storytelling, Blier seems determined to portray his vile protagonists as playful anarchists. While it’s dangerous to view Going Places through the narrow prism of conventional American morality, whatever that phrase means, the sheer amount of damage inflicted by the men in Going Places is shocking, so the movie begs for contexualization.
          Setting aside larger questions, the film has virtues that surpass its bizarre narrative. Some of the performances are lively, while others, including Moreau’s, are intriguingly stylized. Peppy jazz-guitar musical interludes by Stéphane Grappelli add bounce, particularly when coupled with Blier’s technique of using scene transitions to create visual punchlines. Furthermore, cinematographer Bruno Nuytten’s lovingly crafted images exude warmth. It’s possible there’s a provocative satire buried somewhere inside Going Places, and the film unquestionably skewers the cosmic joke known as the male animal. (The original French title translates to The Testicles.) Yet even though Going Places is weirdly compelling thanks to jaunty pacing and provocative events, it’s nauseating to watch two hours of men cheerfully abusing women. Make what you will of the fact that Depardieu, notorious in real life for boorish behavior, later made seven more movies with Blier.

Going Places: FREAKY

1900 (1976)

         While much has been written about American auteurs of the ’70s derailing their careers with overly indulgent projects, the phenomenon was not exclusive to the United States. After notching a major international hit with the controversial Last Tango in Paris (1972), Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci created 1900, a five-hour epic tracking the course of Italian politics from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of World War II. The movie has all the heaviosity and scale it needs, and Bertolucci’s central contrivance—following an aristocrat and a peasant who were born in the same location on the same day—gives the sprawling narrative a pleasing shape. The film’s images are lustrous, with regular Bertolucci collaborator Vittorio Storaro applying his signature elegant compositions and painterly lighting, and the film’s music is vibrant, thanks to the contributions of storied composer Ennio Morricone. Beyond that, however, 1900 is frustrating.

          The presence of American, Canadian, and French stars in leading roles diminishes the authenticity of the piece; a subplot about a sociopath becoming a sadistic Axis agent leads to laughably excessive passages of gore and violence; and Bertolucci indulges his sensuous aspect to such an extreme that he comes off like a fetishist obsessed with, of all things, excrement and penises. The movie has too much of everything, eventually devolving into a lumbering procession of strange scenes expressing a trite political message about poor people having morals and rich people being assholes.

          The first stretch of the picture, essentially a lengthy prologue, introduces the grandfathers of the protagonists. Alfredo Berlinghieri the Elder (Burt Lancaster) is the benevolent padrone of an estate, and Leo Dalcò (Sterling Hayden) is a peasant in his employ. Both welcome grandsons on the same day in 1900. The children grow up to be close friends, despite one enjoying privilege and the other doing without. Later the boys become young men. Alfredo (Robert De Niro) has learned from both his humanistic grandfather and his scheming father, so he enjoys crossing class lines while also treasuring power and wealth. Olmo (Gérard Depardieu) is a political firebrand, resentful of the ruling class no matter what face it wears.

          As life pushes the childhood friends apart, they watch Italy split along similar lines, with aristocrats forming the backbone of the Fascist movement while laborers suffer. Personifying the rise of the Fascists is Atilla Mellanchini (Donald Sutherland), whom we first meet as an enforcer helping Alfredo’s father maintain discipline on the estate. Naturally, the movie has a love story, revolving around Alfredo’s relationship with the unhinged Ada Chiostri Polan (Dominique Sanda). After many twists and turns, the story transforms into a politicized morality play as vengeful workers reclaim power from the Fascists.

          Bertolucci and his collaborators present some meaningful insights about important historical events, so the film is strongest when it sticks to polemics. Matters of love, lust, and madness are handled less gracefully. The most extreme scenes involve Atilla performing grotesque acts of violence. Rather than shocking the viewer, these sequences render Atilla so inhuman as to be one-dimensional, which stacks the political deck unfairly. Bertolucci is just as undisciplined with bedroom scenes. It’s quite startling, for instance, to see an actress playing an epileptic hooker manually pleasuring De Niro and Depardieu in full view of the camera. Wouldn’t suggesting the action have communicated the same narrative information? Similarly, do viewers need to see the actors playing the younger versions of the leads examining each other’s genitals? And what’s with the scene of Lancaster stalking a young girl into a barn, asking her to milk a cow because it turns him on, rhapsodizing about life while squishing his feet up and down in pile of feces, and then forcing the poor girl to slide her hand into his pants?

          It’s tempting to believe there’s a clue about the source of the film’s excess during an elaborate wedding scene, because a character presents the gift of a white horse named “Cocaine.” After all, doing too much blow was the creative downfall of many a Hollywood director.

          Whatever the reason, Bertolucci lost control over 1900 as a literary statement fairly early in the movie’s running time. Perhaps no single moment captures the ugly bloat of 1900 better than the harshest Atilla scene. After Atillia rapes a young boy, Bertolucci shows Atilia killing the child, lest a potential witness to his crimes survive. Fair enough. But instead of simply shooting the child, Atilla picks up the boy by his feet, spins him around the room, and repeatedly smashes the boy’s head against a wall until it cracks open like a watermelon. In the twisted aesthetic of Bertolucci’s 19oo, too much is never enough.

1900: FUNKY