The Film Club Reviews #6: Ten Thoughts Inspired By: A Bout de Souffle

1. Before I ever saw the film I saw this poster. A classic of graphic design. As soon as I laid eyes on it I knew I had to see the film. It radiated cool energy. And that title. At once a declaration of the film's style and the viewer's response to it. A promise and a boast. Stylish. Sexy. Breathless.



But its original title, A Bout de Souffle, translates as Out Of Breath. That's a B-movie title, slang for death, like Chandler's The Big Sleep. Consider if they'd used that as the English title instead. Would the film have attained such a cool reputation? Just imagine it on the poster. Stylish. Sexy. Out Of Breath.
Suddenly it's not so much an intimation of awed wonder as middle-aged decline. My younger self probably wouldn't have been so impressed, but so what? Does it matter? A title's just a title, after all, a way of identifying one film from another. Sure, mostly, but it's not always that simple. Consider these titles for example: Stranger Than Paradise. Some Like It Hot. White Heat. Touch of Evil. Now each of these could, at a push, describe what happens in their respective films, but I don't think that's what's going on when we read them. They're not merely labels, they're suggestive, free-floating, haikus of compressed mood. Yes, a good title can define a film, capture its essence, but it can also add to it, deepen it, complicate it. It's a chemical reaction. Just think of the mysterious, symbiotic relationship we have with names and they have with us. Do they shape us, do we grow into them? If you don't believe this then consider these possible alternative titles for the films above; Losers. TransAmerica. Mother Love. The Mexican. Does it make a difference? It's hard to say, but this much is clear, the anonymous translator tasked with finding an English version for A Bout de Souffle clearly thought so.

2. The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. - Francois Truffaut

The famous dedication is to Monogram Pictures. Monogram were a poverty row studio specialising in cheap genre flicks, serials and westerns. So what was the attraction for serious French cinephiles like Truffaut and Godard?



Well, for starters, because they were largely ignored or unknown they were an undiscovered continent, ripe for reappraisal. They often relied on genre conventions, offering rich ground for theorising, for detecting encoded meanings, hidden ideas, themes build up across a body of work. Also because they had less to lose they could show the seemier side of existence more freely than bigger studio productions, the kind of exploitation subjects considered beneath proper art. The French saw passed all that bourgouis respectability, understood that the life of a petty thief could be as worthy of great art as the noblest king, that an absence of craft or style might represent a film's phychological meaning, its hard indifference to the lies of romance. They were the first to realise that serious artists could exist outside the mainstream, might find the fertile confines of genre more to their liking, might prefer playful indifference to highbrow pretention.
But even the worst of these films taught them about innocent enjoyment, the pleasure of transformation, how much easier it was to bring the moves, clothes and dialogue into your life when they were ritualised, repeated, how cliches spoke to the yearnings inside ordinary people. By dedicating his film to Monogram Godard was sticking two fingers up at the industry, rejecting its middlebrow concerns with craft and rules, alligning himself with the outsiders, the dreamers, with those great American values of outrage, adventure and play. This is a game, he's telling us. We're playing here. So can you.

3. The famous opening line is: I'm an asshole, a provocation from the start, followed by a close up of a skantily clad girl on the front of a newspaper, lowered to reveal our hero, Michel, hat over his eyes, puffing on an enormous cigarette. He's cool, but posing too, a kid playing dress-up.



Then he runs the side of his thumb across his lips. It's a signal. To us. Thumb across lips. That's all it takes. Your Bogie. Your life is a movie. It's hard to appreciate now the impact of this message. A Bout de Souffle was the first film to acknowledge people's desire for movie grace in their lives, wanting their everyday existence transfigured by it, blessed with purpose and shape, ordinary personas imbued with unified glamour. You don't need to be famous, a star. The magic isn't out there somewhere, owned by producers, studios, agents, fans. It's in you now, once you've seen the film, it's yours, a gift, not a privilege. This is what cinema is, the democratisation of play. It's an evolutionary tool, teaching poor regional kids moves and gestures to help them escape impoverished lives, to face the twin terrors of adolescence and neighbourhood streets. After all, when you live in a non-verbal environment knowing how to stand on corners with cool indifference is a vital art. This is another thing the film is already telling us. The street is a movie set too.

4. We first see Patricia ambling down the Champ-Elysees in her flat shoes, sweetly calling 'New York Herald Tribune! New York Herald Tribune!' She's played by Jean Seberg, proof that nationality is a notional concept at best. She's supposed to be the American chick but comes across, in her clothes, her manner, her cropped hair, as ineffably French. It's hard to imagine any other contemporary American actress playing the part, actually American but spiritually in tune with the Frenchness of the whole enterprise. (The film too is at once American in its conventions and French in its style and ideas.)



It was that way from the start. Her screen debut was as Saint Joan (1957), hand-picked from 18,000 hopefuls by Otto Preminger. It was Preminger again who brought her to France the following year to play the spoiled Celine in Bonjour Tristesse. The same year she married film director Francois Moreuil. By the time of A Bout de Souffle they were divorced and she'd taken up with French author Romain Gary, marrying him in 1962. Was it fate or inclination that drew her to the French and them to her? Or was it the hair? The gamine prettiness? Whatever it was, it went on, until her tragic, mysterious death in 1979, found dead in her car on the same Parisienne streets she'd watched Belmondo play dead on all those years before, back when they were all young enough to think of death as a romantic game, something to be bargained with.

5. Leaving Patricia behind Michel passes a poster for a film called Ten Seconds To Hell (1959), its tagline proclaiming 'Live dangerously till the end!'



It's a lovely moment, not just for the renegade cheek of using the poster without permission, but for the serendipity of it being there in the first place, articulating the film's key theme - defying death. (You know you're in the zone when the world starts to speak to you like this, send you secret messages, when you see connections everywhere, when you start to believe there's no such thing as a coincidence, that luck, in fact, is just fate in disguise).

6. Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. - Ernest Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon'

'It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained,' Hegel wrote, somehow defining the essence of A Bout de Souffle over a century before it was made. The spirit of the film may be its exhilerating sense of freedom, it's jazzy liberation from social, artistic and cinematic conventions, but it's also obsessed with death, from its title to its conclusion. Or rather, with invoking it in order to feel more alive. If the taking of life could, as Hemingway suggests, ward off your own death, than so could acting it out. In this sense, the film is as ritualistic as a bullfight, a bloodless rebellion against death.
Just as ancient Greek rites evolved into formalised drama, the death of a tragic hero offered to the gods rather than the sacrifice of a goat, so too with cinema. It may be a game, Godard suggests, but it isn't frivilous. It's as serious as any religion, as vital to our happiness as freedom itself. It was a message that hit the new decade like a molotov cocktail, starting a creative blaze that lasted twenty years and engulfed the old Hollywood studio system in its wake.

7. 'What is your greatest ambition?' Patricia asks the novelist (played by director Jean-Pierre Melville) at the kind of pretentious press conference only the French would have. 'To become immortal', he replies, looking straight into the camera, 'and then to die'.




It's a joke, a contradiction. He might as well have said his ambition was 'to wake and then to dream'. It's an impossibility, mutually exclusive states, waking/dreaming, immortality/death. Except, of course, there is one place where the impossible can happen. When we watch a film, especially in the dark of a cinema, what else are we doing but dreaming while still awake? And when we watch the great stars of the silver screen like James Cagney, Bette Davis or Steve McQueen, what else are we doing but watching the dead walk again, forever alive in their films, made immortal by them?

8. Which is what Bogart represents in the film, not just a role model but an icon of immortality. Dead only three years when A Bout de Souffle was made, already he's becoming a cult, his moves, clothes and dialogue remembered, repeated and fetishised.



But why Bogie? What was it about him that so obsessed the French? Maybe he was, in some way, more French than other Hollywood stars, more ironic, fatalistic, ugly? Maybe the characters he played, men with secrets, with shadowy pasts, were more in keeping with a nation haunted by defeat, collaboration and existential dread? Whatever it was it went deep, just think of the hats and coats in Melville's own films like Le Samourai.



Of course, the Bogart of The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The Big Sleep was also the coolest man on the planet, a dream of tough grace under pressure. He crystallised the essence of cool long before Brando and Dean turned up, a man's cool, not a grumpy adolescent's, someone who's lived, seen things, been betrayed by events, by his own heart, hides his honour like a dirty secret. But we know it's there, we know he does care, does know which side is right, he just won't be played for a sap anymore. Being a man, he seems to say, is a moral act. If you don't know how to read people, if you don't know when to keep quiet, if you don't understand that sometimes cynicism is just the truth no one wants to hear, then you deserve what you get, you leave yourself wide open, cannon fodder for conmen, Nazis and certain kinds of women.

9. Then there's the lovely extended scene in Patricia's apartment. She arrives home to find Michel in her bed. What follows is spontaneity, calculation and natural light, cultural allusions everywhere. She poses before a poster of Renoir's Mlle Irene Cahen d'Anvers and asks who's the prettier. He caresses her bum and asks can he piss in her sink. She washes her feet and tell him she's pregant. He sits beneath a Picasso figure wearing a mask. She quotes from The Wild Palms by William Faulkner: 'Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.' Michel says he'd choose nothing. 'Grief', he adds, 'is a compromise'. They talk, flirt, test each other and eventually make love, fumbling under the covers like kids, not sure what their parents really do under there.



The claim that capturing Seberg's beauty on film matches Renoir's achievement on canvass is hardly worth noting now. But it's a reminder of a time before the triumph of popular culture when film was considered an upstart medium, devoid of true craft, a nickelodeon distraction for immigrant hordes and over-excited housewifes, not something to be taken seriously as high art. This was the fight Godard, Truffaut and the rest of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics were waging in the late 50s, rescuing great artists like Hitchcock and Hawks from the neglect this pompous snobbery had consigned them to.



And what about Michel's claim that grief is a compromise? Is it an existential statement, like Beckett's 'every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness', or is he just trying to sound cool. Is he suggesting that emotions are a refuge, a refusal to accept the truth? It's an interesting idea in an age when personal grief has become everyday currency. Would Bogie give in to grief, cry and wail, take to his bed, sell his story to the tabloids? No, he wouldn't. He'd take it inside him, order a drink, light a cigarette, another lesson learned, another test passed.
The cigarette is vital of course. Just consider how important they were in all this. Michel smokes non-stop throughout the film. Even his dying breath is a puff of smoke. Can you imagine a time when smoking was this cool? When things weren't ghosted by consequences, by health warnings, when people drank at work and smoked in cinemas, weren't constantly fretting about their health, short-changing their youth for a few extra years at the end? When looking cool now was more important than being alive then? It's all about how you look, y'see, masks, uniforms, encoded signs, the transformative power of objects and faces. 'The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible,' as Oscar Wilde rightly pointed out. Open your eyes (and dream). We're being movie stars here. They're immortal. They never die of cancer or liver failure.

10. 'The film of tomorrow will be an act of love - Truffaut

Above all it's a film about love, love of cinema, love of life through cinema. There really was no difference to these young men. Cinema was life. Watching a beautiful woman and capturing her on film was the same thing to them. It was very chauvinistic, of course, but very romantic too (essentially the same thing). Romance has no time for feminist aspirations. It wants to be taken out of this crappy world, wants to idealise, heighten, improve. It's foolish, a youthful folly, but where would we be without it?




For a few brief years, as the world woke up from it's post-war slumber, a handful of young men believed that cinema was the new language of happiness and truth. A Bout de Souffle bottled that moment. It's a time machine. The spirit and energy of that moment can be revisited every time you watch it. You could even say it's immortal. Or to put it another way: Devil in the Flesh. Rififi. And God Created Woman. Scarface. A Bout de Souffle. The best film around.

The Film Club Reviews #5: Ten Thoughts Inspired By: Happy-Go-Lucky

happy-go-lucky: adj carefree, easy going, blithe, casual, devil-may-care, heedless, improvident, insouciant, irresponsible, lighthearted, nonchalant.

1. Just think of the ways it could've gone wrong, the cheery lie it could've been, ticking all those lovely Oprah buzzwords along the way; feelgood, life-affirming, heart-warming. This is the danger you invite when making a film 'about' happiness of course. Isn't happiness shallow and delusional? Isn't the greatest art edgy and dark, gazing unflinchingly into the existential doom of it all? Happy films, by contrast, are for undemanding children and maiden aunts, those for whom life is merely a series of illustrated Hallmark slogans.

2. Notice, however, the subtle but crucial difference between happy and happy-go-lucky. One's a fleeting emotion, the other's a state of mind. One's something you aspire to, the other's a question of character. Poppy is thirty, no boyfriend, no kids, no mortgage. She lives with her best friend Zoe in a rented house, works as a primary school teacher. She's managed to avoid most of life's responsibilities up to now while retaining her independence of spirit. How can she carry this on into her 30s and beyond? Isn't it inevitable life will wear her down, that her youthful exuberance will wane? The film seems to ponder her on the cusp of all this. It's both a love letter to and a kind of elegy for a way of life that soon may disappear forever.

3. ''I think the bravest thing you can do in the world today is be happy...The people I most admire are those who’ve got the guts to face life, and deal with it, and live it completely down to their toes, and not escape anything....''



Bjork could be defining Poppy's world-view there. It's brave to be happy in a world that's trying to break your spirit every day, as long as you face life honestly that is. Being mindlessly happy, ignorant of life's complexities, unfairness and drudgery is, on the other hand, the delusional refuge of a prize ninny. Poppy isn't like that, although a lesser actress might have failed to find the moments of soulful doubt needed to offset the irreverence, those brief glimpses of wistful acknowledgment that let us know how hard it really is to keep this blithe optimism going.

4. ‘‘Real happiness comes from things that deserve gravity. There’s no punchline to those things. Moments of happiness aren’t light-hearted. If you watch people fucking, it doesn’t look like they’re trying on a joke.’’



It's a commonplace default position for many would-be intelligent people to view optimism and happiness as a kind of dereliction of duty, a failure to take THE TRUTH seriously. And they have a point of course but maybe there's a counter-argument to be made, as in the quote above by Kristen Hersh, that only taking dark subjects seriously is a pose, a crutch for immature minds. Maybe it's only the truly serious who appreciate what a grave business happiness can be, the pursuit of it, the experience of it, the preservation of it.

5. Don't get me wrong here, though. I enjoy being as grumpy as the next man. I'm not suggesting all the shiny happy people march on the Heartbreak Hotel and burn it to the ground. Oh no, far from it. I worked in a shop once where we had to endure some management consultant from the States trying to instill into us this idea of PMT, positive mental attitude. I couldn't imagine anything worse, still can't. It a fatuous lie, a way for the bosses to keep us in our place, happy with our lot, dreaming the American dream as our souls calcify. Being cynical, angry or fed up are all vital human emotions, it's just they're not necessarily better than the happy ones, don't automatically occupy the moral high ground.

6. I read a few years ago about a survey of American poets which found that the vast majority of them had never learned to drive, completely at odds with the general population. Poets, of course, are renowned for retaining a more childlike view of the world, necessarily seeing it as if for the first time. These two things then, retained innocence and refusal to learn to drive, are surely connected.



Notice we first see Poppy merrily riding through the city on her bike. She's never learned to drive either. But then her bike is stolen and finally she gives in, decides it's time to learn. It says a lot about the position cars have in our society that they've become so linked with our ideas about growing up. Your first car is a milestone, an initiation rite of passage, one of the first wrungs on the ladder of adulthood. Anyone who reaches their 30s and still hasn't learned to drive is viewed with, at best, bemused incomprehension. But instinctively some people avoid them because they don't want to climb that ladder, are perfectly happy where they are thank you very much. They don't want to grow up, or at least not in the way every one else does.

7. So Poppy starts driving lessons with a ball of barely suppressed rage called Scott, whose flimsy grasp of sanity rests on his belief in his abilities as a driving instructor. But Poppy doesn't take him seriously from the start, openly incredulous of his rules and rants. Poor Scott gets more wound-up with every lesson, bellowing En-ra-ha! at every turn, infuriated by her refusal to take anything he says seriously. Here, in fact, her blithe indifference is close to mockery.



It's a mark of the film's emotional intelligence that when Scott inevitably loses it, pulls Poppy's hair, explodes in an irrational, hate-filled rant, we kind of feel sorry for him. It doesn't negate how thoroughly wrong he is, how paranoid, racist and damaged he is, to see the bullied boy he once was/still is, how once we let grievance and self-pity in, it can eat us alive.

8. All this is funny of course. In fact, it's easy to imagine the Poppy/Scott scenes as a 30s screwball comedy set-up. Uptight, life-shy instructor has his world turned upside down when carefree hieress Poppy jumps into his car (by accident of course). Happy-Go-Lucky could be an exercise in seeing how a screwball heroine would cope in the real world. Carole Lombard, say, or Katherine Hepburn, could have played Poppy with that blithe indifference to consequence that is the hallmark of the screwball actress. Which would make Scott the kind of shy doofus usually played by Cary Grant or Gary Cooper, except with bad teeth and panicked eyes. This is what it means for men like this to really have their lives invaded by feminine chaos. Rage and fear are the secret subtext of all screwball comedies.

9. Poppy is concerned about the happiness of others. She's compassionate, wants to help people like the young boy in her class being bullied at home. It's a desire that can make her stray into areas she shouldn't, though, like her encounter with the homeless man. Coming home on her own at night she hears his mutterings and goes to investigate into a dark, deserted clearing behind some buildings.



It's crazy, halfway unbelievable, and ultimately mysterious. It's the heart of the film really. One of those rare scenes that don't tell you what to think. What does it mean? Is this her possible fate? The fate of all good-hearted people, to be broken by life, hiding in the shadows from the rubber knocker man?

10. Mike Leigh's created some annoying women in his career, a gallery of wittering, over-mannered characters going all the way back to Alison Steadman's iconic turn in Abigail's Party (1977). And Poppy could have been another one, to rank with the nadir of this tendency, Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman's epic competition to see who could out-quirk the other with headflicks and facial tics in Career Girls (1997). Seriously, I still wake in a cold sweat some nights thinking about it. But thankfully, the brilliant Sally Hawkins managed to take in all the usual Leigh characteristics while still creating a living, breathing human being, an intelligent woman determined not to take life too seriously, to laugh at it, take the piss, despite being perfectly aware of how truly serious it really is.

Ten thoughts inspired by: Notorious

1. First of all, there's the symbiotic dance between directors and actors. Many of the best directors, those interested in psychological states, often struggle if they haven't got the right actors. Look at how often Hitchcock's lesser films are saddled with actors ill-suited to the roles, actors with no depth to begin with or whose guarded personas don't allow him anything to mine. (Think of Paul Newman in Torn Curtain). Look at how his well-known yen for beautiful actresses is matched in every respect by actors who brought the best out of him, Cary Grant and James Stewart mainly, but also Joseph Cotten,(Shadow of a Doubt) Robert Walker,(Strangers on a Train) and Barry Foster (Frenzy) to name just a few.

2. Look at how Hitchcock brings out things in these actors no-one else did, but equally, look at the riches flowing the other way too. He needed them, these conduits into transgressive areas. When he was lucky enough to get them he was brilliant at finding their hidden dark sides, all that alienation, misanthropy and self-hatred not far from the surface of charming exteriors (Cotten, Walker & Foster), how easily Stewart's pious do-goodery, his martyr's passion for justice could tip over into obsessiveness and destruction.



3. In Notorious he strips away Grant's easy charm, strips away 'Cary Grant' really, leaving this sauve husk, this dangerous void, (think of the first time we see Devlin in the film, just the back of his head, ominously watching the other party revellers). As an Englishman Hitchcock would have been more aware than most of the constructed nature of Grant's Hollywood persona, of the real Cockney hiding behind it, the slum-dog acrobat Archibald Leach. Surely the day he met Grant was the day he began to be fascinated by what's hidden behind charming exteriors?



4. Hitchcock's relationship with his screen women is no less fascinating and collaborative. Sure it graduated towards sadism in his later years but in the 40s it was romantic, an exploration of emotional complexity and a product of the natures of the actresses he worked with, mainly Ingrid Bergman.



5. No actress gave herself up to suffering like Bergman. Vulnerability, defiance, self-hatred, sadness, bravery, watch her take on all of these and more in Notorious, from drunken floozy to endangered heroine, beautiful all the way. You can sense Hitchcock's spellbound fascination with her, not just visually, but emotionally too, the way she's leading the film into places it might not have gone without her. Imagine what kind of film it would've been with a different actress, Rita Hayworth, say, or Jean Arthur?



6. Then there are those poor forgotten puppies of the movie business, the writers. Consider that Notorious was written by Ben Hecht, probably the geatest screenwriter of the golden age of Hollywood. He seems to have brought a new seriousness to Hitchcock, a grown-up respect for emotional terrain, for the classical marriage of form and content. You feel that everyone's on their game because Hecht has given them something better than usual. You also feel that part of what makes Notorious work so well are the details. Hitchcock was frequently sloppy when it came to details, openly deriding the plot devices (the famous McGuffins) at the centre of his movies. You sense that Hecht, that good newspaper man at heart, researched his locations and made sure the McGuffin here, uranium hidden in wine bottles, had a hint of truth to it (a year before the first atomic bomb was detonated.)

7. And don't forget the sly pleasures of Claude Rains. He's every bit as complex a character as the leads. With a little tweaking it could easily be his film, poor man, trapped by evil Nazi cronies who'll kill him at the slightest hint of betrayal, in love with a woman who turns out to be a spy and in thrall to a vicious, manipulative mother, forced to be a Nazi when all he really wants to be is a playboy, as charming and witty as Claude Rains.



8. And then there's patriotism, the last refuge of the scoundral. Devlin is seemingly willing to let the woman he loves whore herself for a greater cause, for the greater good. Is he right or wrong to do this? If this was post 9/11 rather than post WW11 would it look any better? And is it really patriotism or something else entirely, a desire to punish her for all those men she's slept with before him. Notice the cold way he looks at her sometimes. She's making him weak and he hates her for it, complicating everything, the simple certainties of good and evil, of allegience to job and country, of knowing who the enemies are. He looks at her and all certainty disappears. Only love can do this. It's superbly complicated, the kind of love rarely seen in Hollywood movies, then or now.



9. But it is love, and despite all its noir darkness this is a very romantic film. So let's not forget the famous, Hay's Code defying, extended kiss, a genius scene capturing the true carnal pleasure of lovers, all nuzzling little kisses and the addiction of closeness.



10. And finally, there's the truth of the camera, Hitchcock's eternal belief in movement for its own sake, for the pleasure of it, yes, but also for the way it could illustrate thoughts, feelings and situations better than anything Ben Hecht or anyone else could conjure up in words. So see it give you set-up and secret in one elegant swoop from staircase longshot to key-in-hand close-up or watch it thrillingly capture the heart-in-mouth shock of discovering your husband and his mother have been poisoning you by zooming into their smug, conniving faces.