Princes Among Frogs
FRENCH MOVIES HAD been losing their clout even before the Freedom Fries backlash. Not that there aren't good ones (Son Frère and Strayed are two of the finest movies this year), but the zeitgeist has lately taken direction from other national cinemas. The fact that Son Frère and Strayed never commanded the attention they deserved indicates that moviegoers have lost sight of what made French cinema important. Bon Voyage and the current Intimate Strangers are modest hits that attract audiences for laudable reasons, but the truth is, they're part of a great tradition without actually being great. Fortunately a significant reminder appears in Criterion's newly released Jean Renoir DVD box set Stage and Spectacle. The three films included, The Golden Coach (1952), French Can Can (1955) and Elena and Her Men (1956) put contemporary notions of greatness and the avant-garde in humbling perspective.
Renoir's influence on French movies is incalculable (Truffaut in tribute named his production company Les Films du Carosse after Renoir's reinvention of movie esthetics in La Carosse d'Or). But those lessons that Renoir absorbed like the climate, also matter to world cinema. As even Robert Altman declared in the recent Rules of the Game release, Renoir's cinema is the foremost example of how to observe human behavior, how to perceive politics stemming from psychology and how to variously use film style.
In each of the movies that compose Stage and Spectacle (The Golden Coach recreates commedia dell' arte, French Can Can tells the history of the Moulin Rouge and Elena and Her Men revisits the Belle Epoque), the style may seem conventional but, like all Renoir's best films, they subtly reinvent the rules of their genre. Theater, Dance and Life are made to reflect one another. These may look like stage plays (as if Renoir in his 60s had retreated to the safer environs of the soundstage rather than the exhilarating outdoor shooting of his younger days), but, in fact, Renoir uses both the proscenium and the camera frame to make compositions that combine theatrical artifice with cinematic realism. (Anna Magnani's legendary performance as Camilla in The Golden Coach makes those extremes indistinct. Camilla is transfixed by art and in turn is transfixed by her abundant life force.)
Unlike the more famous films Renoir made in France in the 30s, this trilogy pronounces its style. As Andrew Sarris describes in a featured essay, "One must not merely look at The Golden Coach. One must look through it to discern?" In other words, these movies still have an unappreciated radicalism. Renoir's deceptively simple visual technique may appear to lack nuance for viewers accustomed to the mad, silly affectations of Michael Mann, Baz Luhrmann or Guy Maddin. But it comes down to a problem of not recognizing the value of the plain humanity that Renoir films, the romantic turmoil, ethical crises and behavioral gestures that are endowed by the stage-like artifice with a re-imagined grace.
Farcical plots take the place of naturalism in these movies, yet the action is extended (through speeches, musical numbers) rather than sped up. If it gives an impression of not being cinematic, it is actually quintessentially cinematic, a technique of pure affection for mankind's folly. Renoir's great bequest to world cinema was making our ability to understand human nature the crucial part of film culture. That's why each of these very French movies (even the English-language Golden Coach) stages the spectacle of people dealing with big-L love. Renoir knew there's no greater movie subject.
A BETTER ENGLISH title for Intimate Strangers, one that more closely approximated the original Confidence Trop Intime, might be Too Close for Comfort. It would give a finer sense of the relationship that develops between a depressed housewife, Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire), and William (Fabrice Luchini), the tax lawyer whose office she accidentally enters, mistaking him for a psychologist. Anna divulges too much of her personal life to a total stranger who-captivated-goes along with the charade. Even after William comes clean, he and Anna find they have constructed a confidence that stirs them both personally. During its best, early stretch, Intimate Strangers entertains as a dry satire of the trust and pretenses that describe psychotherapy. As Anna and William come to know each other's habits, secrets continue to surface. The more each person reveals, it exposes the easily broken rules of therapeutic conduct.
Their unorthodox meetings resemble assignations in an affair. Anna is married, but her conjugal relationship has dwindled (which is what made her seek out therapy); William continues to see his ex-lover who has taken on an additional lover (a man who is in every way William's opposite). This complication suggests that William also needs the sort of therapy that his confessions with Anna provide. In essence, these two talkers do have a sexual relationship, just not a physical one.
Since director Patrice Leconte's speciality is voluble restraint, the film's comedy and drama occur when Anna and William suppress their animal instinct. As in last year's Man on a Train, which starred Johnny Hallyday and Jean Rochfort as alter egos, Leconte's storytelling here also becomes a model of deliberately tricky discretion. Leconte indulges his characters' fantasies while also pointing out the paradoxes of their day-to-day life habits. Leconte's narrative signature is Leconte following a pair's sexual arrangements and interweaving emotions as the substance of their unique relationships. He devises emotional crossword puzzles.
Like Leconte's previous movies, Intimate Strangers is frivolous, but the stylized mystery-suspense chic first exhibited in the 1989 Monsieur Hire has become even more commanding. Intimate Strangers is a taut and interesting demonstration of Leconte's meticulous esthetic control, which goes along with Anna's and William's efforts at self-discipline. Their wary and flirtatious conversations are fastidiously edited to maintain a sense of intimacy and revelation. You always notice Leconte's tastefulness: the way William's green eyes match the tax law books on his shelf; the green-leather upholstered door of his office that is coordinated to the blue door of the actual psychologist's office down the hall; the way interpersonal cruelties never get ugly.
It is through such immaculate details that Leconte is able to successfully conduct a rhythm of appealing surface gestures. Intimate Strangers gets nowhere close to the moral and intellectual excavation of an Eric Rohmer movie; it avoids the emotional extravagance of a Claude Sautet film and downplays the dread and suspense that would distinguish Claude Chabrol's telling of the same tale. This is the lapidary work of a minor craftsman. But its current success is understandable, because Intimate Strangers is at least, clearly superior to the pretend intimacies of Before Sunset, that facile talkathon that might be titled Too Glib for Comfort.
Leconte offers a pleasant divertissement on the follies of psychotherapy now rampant in movies and tv shows as a substitute for actual moral inquiry. But Leconte's small art-house embellishment can be recognized as having genuinely cerebral aspects. From William's Baudelaire quote ("Couches deep as tombs") that sums up the analyst profession to the invocation of Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle" (which Anna mistakes for a bestseller on finance) Intimate Strangers stays sharp enough to rise above the increasingly shopworn Siggy Freud genre.
Few shrink-patient, yap-it-all-out movies can boast a duet as fine as Intimate Strangers. Bonnaire, as usual, presents a terrific capacity for wantonness that is matched by brainy reticence. She'd capsize less capable circumstances (say, the analyst plots of Woody Allen's Another Woman and Everyone Says I Love You). Bonnaire was a simplistic siren in Monsieur Hire, but here she is a woman of infinite allure. Leconte has given her an ally who is equally intriguing. Fabrice Luchini, who played annoying, overly civilized gents for Rohmer, brings this movie a hint of that gravitas but has gained substance of his own. Luchini's face is now jowly, but his personality is also weighty. William seems to have embarked on a moral wager rather than a sleaze trip. A funny private moment occurs when Anna begins to appeal to him and, home alone, he dances-unwinds and boogies-to Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour." That's one way to make sure a French art film got soul. o