50 films: #6. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg / The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

It’s by the luck of the draw that I find myself writing about this film barely a week after an excellent piece about it appeared in the blogosphere. There may not be a great deal of interest I can add to that, but I will preface what follows with a warning that it contains plot spoilers. I don’t believe the watching of this film is harmed by advance knowledge of what happens in it, since the arc of the story relies on banal romantic conventions and clichés to such a degree that it is quite possible for the perceptive first-time viewer to divine its outcome on the basis of having watched only the first ten or fifteen minutes. One of the things that interests me about Les Parapluies is how a film with such an ostensibly hackneyed plot should be so successful in shunning banality.

I was in my mid-teens when I first became aware of Les Parapluies. I’d been devouring French films at a steady pace for a few years, but a French-language musical was a novelty to me – furthermore, a musical containing no spoken dialogue at all, in which even the most mundane lines are sung. It sounded bewilderingly exotic.

In spite of the sumptuousness of all that follows, I love the opening title sequence most of all. The sound of a foghorn ushers in the aerial view of a cobbled Cherbourg street, a picture-postcard impression of a seaside town, as that familiar, bittersweet tune begins in Legrand’s tender, minimal scoring. The rain falls vertically, the meticulously choreographed pastel umbrellas and bicycles move across the screen, and the heart is automatically enraptured by the impeccable care and attention paid to the film’s colour and surface and style. Well, my heart anyway.

The action begins in the garage where 20-year-old Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) works. His workmates are the campest mechanics imaginable. One sings of his plans to go dancing, while Guy is excited about seeing Carmen. He is mocked mercilessly: ‘L’amour est enfant de Bohème, la la la la-la-la-la la la!’ His colleague cannot abide the artifice of people singing everything. ‘Tous ces gens qui chantent, moi tu comprends ça me fait mal!’ he sings.

Guy, it transpires, is straight. After clocking off he meets his beloved, 17-year-old Geneviève, whose mother, Madame Emery (Anne Vernon), owns the eponymous umbrella shop. He must have met this girl quite a few times already, as he evinces no shock at her being Catherine Deneuve. Despite Madame Emery’s well-intentioned naggings, Geneviève persists in stepping out with this older man.

A digression now about Michel Legrand’s magnificent score. It is through-composed in the way that a Wagnerian opera is. (I think a direct comparison of Legrand and Wagner might see the former come off pretty badly, though as the writer of ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ he probably wins in the hummability stakes.) There are only a couple of free-standing songs capable of being extracted from and sung independently of the musical: the one everyone knows (‘Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi’, rendered into English as ‘I Will Wait for You’ and sung by a thousand Lesley Garretts and Susan Boyles the world over), and Roland Cassard’s sweet little aria that later became ‘Watch What Happens’. Melodically, Legrand relies on the Leitmotiv, with the jaunty ‘C’est toi, Guy?’ / ‘Bonsoir, Tante Elise’ as Guy returns home to the elderly aunt he lives with (Mireille Perrey); and then the sensuous ‘Bonsoir, Guy’ / ‘Bonsoir, Madeleine’, which recurs whenever Guy meets his aunt’s young carer (Ellen Farner). Much later in the film, Guy will sing to Madeleine, to the same tune, of his dream: ‘Être heureux, avec une femme, dans une vie que nous aurions choisi ensemble.’ Harmonically, Legrand relies heavily on the circle of fifths. Few composers have exploited the potential of the circle of fifths so effectively, and none so often.

Guy and Geneviève talk (sing) of the future, which is rarely a good idea at such an early stage of a film. Incurable romantic that Guy is, he dreams that they will one day own a petrol station. Geneviève is more interested in children, and informs him that they will have a girl called Françoise. But what if it’s a boy? asks Guy, reasonably. Geneviève explains, ‘Il y a toujours une fille dans la famille.’ These are the prophecies that will be both fulfilled and shattered by the end of the film.

Before long, Guy receives his call-up papers and bids Geneviève a tearful farewell to go and serve in Algeria. Soon after his departure, she finds she is pregnant. For the sake of respectability, and at her mother’s behest, she marries a jeweller, the kindly Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), and stops writing to Guy. He returns from the war to find everything changed, and marries Madeleine. An epilogue shows Guy and Geneviève meeting again, a few years down the line.

It reads like the plot of a second-rate romantic novel, and the twists in the tale revealed at the end – that Guy does now own an Esso filling station, that Geneviève has called her and Guy’s daughter Françoise, and moreover that Guy has called his and Madeleine’s son François – may seem like the customary clichés of popular fiction. And yet they are gutting in their way, like the twist of the knife at the end of Manon des Sources. Surely it is a combination of the film’s visual style and its intoxicating music that produces this effect.

Roger Ebert, from whom I am seldom minded to dissent, writes that the film’s style, i.e. constant singing and thereby, presumably, whimsicality, ‘would seem to suggest a work of featherweight romanticism, but “Umbrellas” is unexpectedly sad and wise, a bittersweet reflection on the way true love sometimes does not (and perhaps should not) conquer all … The very last scene, of a final meeting between Guy and Genevieve, is one of such poignancy that it’s amazing the fabric of a musical can support it.’ Of course, opera supports this kind of thing all the time, and some of the bolder musicals (West Side Story) have a stab at it (no pun intended), but Les Parapluies is a rare creation in this regard. You don’t expect a musical to have such a profound effect on you. I remember watching it with my mother and brother a few years ago, and at the end sitting in silence for maybe twenty seconds, all of us too choked up to talk. I don’t think my memory has played me false in this recollection.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for five Oscars. A new print, restored under the supervision of Jacques Demy’s widow, the director Agnès Varda, was released in 1996. It is currently available for viewing online here.

IMDb | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

50 films: #5. Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)

Misery is not a film of great depth. Neither is it a film of great visual style. What you see is what you get, and what you get is a faithful and in some respects, it might be contended, pedestrian adaptation of a pulpy horror novel. I love it.

Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a writer who longs to be taken seriously but has fallen into the rut of writing a series of florid but marketable novels set in the 1870s featuring the central character Misery Chastain. To free himself from the shackles of Misery, Sheldon writes a serious and worthy autobiographical novel about life in a slum (which sounds just as dreary as his other books, but that’s by the by), his completion of which coincides with the publication of the final Misery book, Misery’s Child, in which Sheldon has killed off his heroine. As he travels home from the remote Colorado retreat where he traditionally goes to finish each book, his car comes off the road. He is rescued by Liberace-loving nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates).

Rescued isn’t exactly the right term, it turns out, since Wilkes turns out to be his ‘Number One Fan’. Her initial hero worship of Sheldon quickly becomes something more sinister, and when her discovery of Misery’s fate prompts a violent reaction he realises his life may be in danger. From this point, the film is a battle of wits between the two characters, as the incapacitated Sheldon plots his escape and the increasingly deranged Wilkes foils him at every turn. She also has to contend with the local police’s efforts to track down Sheldon after the discovery of his car. The film’s climax is gratifyingly gruesome.

If so much of the film is apparently unremarkable, what is it that makes it special? Primarily, I think, the character of Annie Wilkes and the performance of Kathy Bates, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar. Wilkes’ simple-mindedness, her puritanism and abhorrence of profanity, her stomach-churningly twee quirks of speech, all make her quite delightful to watch. She is giddily excited as she starts to read the latest Misery book. ‘What’s the ceiling that dago painted?’ she asks Sheldon. ‘The Sistine Chapel?’ he tentatively suggests. ‘Yeah! That and Misery’s Child – those are the only two divine things ever in this world!’ There is a dry vein of humour running through the film. Wilkes later complains, ‘People just don’t respect the institution of marriage any more,’ while she punctuates the air emphatically with the bottle of urine in her hand. The moments when she turns from harmless to menacing, when the eyes go dead, have the capacity to chill, provided you’re not laughing too much.

There are nice supporting turns from Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen and Lauren Bacall, but the film’s essentially a two-hander. Caan is perfect as Sheldon, tolerantly amused at Wilkes’ kookiness to begin with, and becoming more rebellious as he realises the fate she has planned for him. The end sees the liberated Sheldon (spoiler, I suppose, but the grammar of the genre permits no other possible outcome) reunited with his agent – but there is still a final little twist in store which is creepy and inspiredly comical in equal measure.

So there you have it. A black comedy, I’d say, with a lot of cheap thrills along the way – but there’s nothing wrong with cheap thrills. Like cheap music, they have their potency.

IMDb | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

50 films: #4. Mies Vailla Menneisyyttä / The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki, 2002)

Ha! You thought I’d forgotten about my 50 films, didn’t you? What, sorry? You’d forgotten about them? Oh.

In January 2003 I was one of the ‘performers’ (and I can only use the word in its loosest possible sense) in a ‘performance’ (ditto) of Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique in the Dome at New Hall (now Murray Edwards College) in Cambridge. This is a work in which 100 metronomes are wound up and set off simultaneously, at different speeds. Initially cacophonous, it gradually becomes possible to discern individual metronomes as the others drop out one by one, until a single metronome is left, whose eventual silence signals the end. A fascinating piece, but a tricky one to stage, not least because of the practical impossibility of finding a reputable metronome hire company anywhere in the world, let alone in East Anglia. Still, we did some begging around and somehow got enough to make a performance viable (I confess I don’t remember as many as 100, though I feel sure we reached 50).

The reason I recall this is that I had planned to go to the cinema that same night to see the new Aki Kaurismäki, The Man Without a Past. I don’t think I’d seen any Kaurismäki before (perhaps Ariel and/or Hamlet Goes Business), but I’d read about it and it sounded absolutely my kind of thing. But the Ligeti dragged on interminably. The last few metronomes clung on … and on … and the minutes grew steadily longer. I have an unshakeable terror of turning up late for plays or films or concerts, but I could hardly leave this one before it had finished in order to go to the cinema. Finally, silence stole over us. The audience applauded the magnificent display of machinery arranged before them while presumably muttering things about an evening wasted, and I made my getaway. I rushed down Castle Hill and made it to the Arts Picturehouse in time to buy the last ticket available, in the leftmost seat of the front row.

This is Jaakko Antero Lujanen (Markku Peltola), though his name is not known until the end of the film, and in fact he is referred to in the end credits simply as ‘M’. The opening sequence shows him approaching Helsinki on a train from somewhere far away, looking in his stone-faced dejectedness not entirely unlike Cary Grant. On his arrival he sits down on a bench and falls asleep. Later that night, he is brutally beaten by thugs, who steal his money and dispose of his wallet – and, effectively, his identity, since when he regains consciousness in hospital he has no idea who he is.

My straightforward description of the setup omits a number of characteristic details one observes in the opening minutes, of the kind that give this film its magic. Take the director’s use of music, always thoughtful. The mournful bandoneon and piano track that accompanies M on his journey, or the victorious brass chords from the last movement of Leevi Madetoja’s 3rd symphony, which emanate from M’s radio, turned on by one of the thugs to accompany the beating, while he dons M’s welder’s mask – the only clue among the man’s possessions to his identity. After the beating, he covers M’s face with the mask, a beautifully symbolic representation of the loss of M’s identity, and exhilarating despite the violent tragedy that accompanies it. In hospital, M’s face is still covered, but by bandages. He dies, but then returns to life when the doctor and nurse have left his bedside, pausing only to straighten his crooked nose (one of a number of inspired and unexpected touches of humour) before discharging himself and returning to the world. I think this may be one of my favourite opening sequences in all cinema.

M is taken in by a poor but kind family. They help to set him up in a home of his own (it’s actually a shipping container, but he brightens it up by the addition of a jukebox which plays blues and rock and roll, and cultivates a small vegetable garden). His lack of identity and his ignorance of his former profession make it difficult for him to find work, but a visit to the Salvation Army for a free meal one Friday evening helps to give purpose to his life. Not only does he get some new clothes from their store, but he begins to fall in love with one of the workers, the unassuming Irma (Kati Outinen). He also has some suggestions for updating the music played by the Army band, and persuades them to abandon their insipid hymns in favour of blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. ‘We’ve heard about rock,’ says the drummer, who plays a single snare drum. M then puts a record on, and the band members start slowly to respond, like the queuing metalworkers in The Full Monty. The band’s transformation is impressive, and M becomes a small-time rock manager.

Just as M has started to be able to live again – a place to call his own, a girlfriend, a sort-of-job – he sees a man welding, which unlocks something in his mind. Presently, the police contact M to say that his wife has identified him. This throws his life into disarray, not that you’d know it from his eternally impassive facial expressions. He bids a tender farewell to Irma and travels back home to Nurmes. There is play with the shifting of the concepts of home and identity throughout the film. Which M is the real one? Does the discovery of his old life automatically invalidate his new one? He makes a final train journey at the end of the film, back to Helsinki, replicating his journey at the start. Is this a homecoming?

Thugs apart, the characters of the film are, almost without exception, kindly, taciturn and passive. There is a scene where a lugubrious robber locks M and a cashier in a bank vault. ‘I must close the door to give myself a head start,’ he apologises. ‘Perfectly understandable in your position,’ M replies. The sparse range of facial expressions on display, typical of Kaurismäki’s characters, heightens the tenderness of the scenes between M and Irma, these two lonely, unremarkable people who have established an unlikely emotional connection. When someone smiles in a Kaurismäki film, it really counts.

For me, there is one character who does possess genuine charisma, and that is Matti Wuori (above right), a noted Finnish lawyer and politician, who makes a cameo appearance as himself. Like an angel, he appears as though unbidden (in fact at the behest of the Salvation Army, it transpires) to help get M out of police custody. His brief scene is one of the most joyous I have ever seen, and gives the same thrill as when Marshall McLuhan pops up in Annie Hall. Outside the station they shake hands, Wuori gives M a cigar, and they go their separate ways.

This film was shortlisted for the Best Foreign Film Oscar but lost out to the comparatively sterile German/African film Nowhere in Africa, a decision which still rankles with me. Markku Peltola died in 2007 at the age of 51. This film is an fine monument to him as an actor, and a beautiful introduction to the bittersweet world of Aki Kaurismäki.

IMDb | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

50 films: #3. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

It’s taken until the third post for me to break my vow to choose the order of these films at random, but I felt obliged to write about this one now for the sake of neatness, as it ties in so neatly with the first two. Like Walkabout it is concerned with the descendants of European colonists meeting untamed Australia, and like The Go-Between it is set during the summer of 1900 (though of course this is the end of the Australian summer, in February). And Dominic Guard reappears, transformed from the prepubescent Leo into the young gentleman Michael, though his advanced years have not made him any more comfortable socially.

On Saturday 14th February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without a trace …

So reads the opening title card of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. Appleyard College is a fee-paying girls’ school where formality is the order of the day. The widow Mrs Appleyard (Rachel Roberts), a formidable martinet, hair dressed with military precision, oversees everything. All the girls save one, the orphan Sara, travel with two teachers to Hanging Rock. A group of four – Miranda, Irma, Marion and Edith – leaves the party to explore the higher reaches of the rock. Apparently in a trance, Miranda, Irma and Marion leave Edith behind to venture further upwards, oblivious to her cries. Edith alerts the rest of the party, and the stern Maths teacher Miss McCraw goes to investigate. Neither she nor the other girls return.

The first words we hear in the film are poetry, a misquotation of Poe spoken as a voiceover: ‘What we see / and what we seem / are but a dream / a dream within a dream.’ Poetry and poetic aphorisms recur throughout the film, which opens with scenes of the girls reciting verse to each other as they share Valentine’s Day cards. Poetry is their currency. It is also a weapon. ‘You little ignoramus!’ cries Mrs Appleyard indignantly at Sara’s protestation that she cannot memorise a poem. ‘Evidently you don’t know that Mrs. Felicia Hemans is considered one of the finest of our English poets.’

The film itself is a dream-poem, operating at a level of not-quite-reality. This grows from Weir’s awe at Hanging Rock itself, and invites comparisons with Walkabout. There are certainly parallels: take for instance the soundtrack, which juxtaposes original music by Bruce Smeaton, the primal flûte de Pan of Gheorghe Zamfir, and the most refined of Western classical music. As the girls are driven towards Mount Macedon, we hear the first prelude from Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Clavier. The music seems to personify the youth and gentility of the girls, but it also highlights the gulf between the order of the school and the disorder of the wilderness. Weir also takes several opportunities, as Roeg does, to show the wildlife of the rock intruding on the lives of the girls – ants swarming over a piece of cake; a lizard crawling past the reclining Miranda. There is a strain of sexuality running through both films. In Walkabout it is unchecked because the children have abandoned the restrictions of their society, but in Picnic it is always bubbling under the surface. Michael admonishes his ocker servant Albert (the superb John Jarratt) for making crude sexual insinuations. ‘I say the crude things,’ replies Albert, ‘you just think ‘em.’

It seems to me that Weir has a greater instinct for telling stories than Roeg. It is not by chance that in the BAFTA David Lean Lecture he gave last December Weir dwelled heavily on the subject of storytelling and oral tradition, even suggesting that if he weren’t a filmmaker he would be a storyteller in the manner of the French trouvères. It is natural then that Picnic at Hanging Rock should be a more plot-driven film than Walkabout, and yet its plot is anything but conventional.

Critics compared it to Michelangelo Antonioni’s groundbreaking L’Avventura on its release. L’Avventura centres around three principal characters: Sandro, his girlfriend Anna, and her friend Claudia. 25 minutes into the film, Anna disappears. Sandro and Claudia spend the rest of the film exploring various avenues by which they hope to find her. Anna never turns up, and her disappearance remains unexplained. By the end, what one might have expected to be a mystery has turned into a psychological study of the people left behind. Antonioni subverts the viewer’s expectations of the narrative, and produces something far more interesting than a mere mystery.

Picnic follows the model of L’Avventura closely. Once the girls have disappeared, the focus changes subtly. The viewer is given tantalising hints that the mystery will be explained – Edith’s sighting of Miss McCraw; Michael’s discovery of a telltale piece of lace; perhaps most devastatingly of all the reappearance of Irma, dehydrated but alive – but by the end, although the stories of many of the protagonists have been resolved, the mystery has not. One can understand some viewers feeling swindled, but to lament the lack of resolution is to miss the point. The viewer should disregard the possibility of the girls’ return and look instead at the tangible aspect of their disappearance: the ripples that radiate outwards, affecting those left behind. Michael becomes obsessed with discovering Miranda and goes nearly mad on the rock; one by one, parents withdraw their daughters from Appleyard College; Mrs Appleyard has a breakdown. By the end there is barely a character in the film whose life has not assumed some tragic aspect.

There is a common apprehension that the film is based on a true story, which the presentation of the film, with its title card and final voiceover, does nothing to dispel. In fact it is based on a novel by Joan Lindsay. Lindsay was a fine writer and a delightful woman (for a demonstration, watch this interview from 1974 where she talks about the novel), but the periodic statements she made about the story’s origins can appear to contradict each other, making the mystery even more enigmatic than it already is. I believe it is a fiction, but that its power is not lessened by its not being true. When she first wrote the novel, Lindsay contemplated appending a chapter giving a supernatural explanation to the disappearance, but decided against it. It was a wise decision.

IMDb | Buy from Amazon.co.uk