27Mar06
The Children Are Watching Us marks the first full blossoming of one of the most fruitful collaborations in world cinema history. The brilliant pairing of legendary Italian actor and hitherto commercial director Vittorio De Sica with Cesare Zavattini, the talented screenwriter who was to become the chief theorist of the neorealist movement that flourished in Italy right after World War II, created a synergy of magnificent proportions, which allowed each man to transcend his own individual limitations. Begun here, with The Children Are Watching Us, in 1944, at the height of the war, it was a collaboration that would produce the incomparable Bicycle Thieves in 1948, as well as such cinema classics as Shoeshine (1946), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Umberto D. (1952).
Though his real interest lay in serious theater, De Sica, who had tired of movie stardom, began directing films in the early forties that were little different from the reigning commercial films of the era. Zavattini had worked uncredited on the second of these films, Teresa Venerdì (1941), but something strange and miraculous happened with The Children Are Watching Us, De Sica’s fifth film as a director, which the screenwriter would later call "the most important stage in the evolution of my career as a filmmaker, and even of my career as a human being. Through the character of the child, we felt for the first time a human being, whereas all my previous characters had felt like puppets."
27Mar06
Murmur of the Heart (1971), Louis Malle’s comic masterpiece, is the most American of great French films. Indeed, with its youthful charm and rebellion, the film feels even more characteristically American than the mature and elusive masterpieces Malle went on to direct in America—Atlantic City, in 1980; My Dinner with Andre, the following year; and Vanya on 42nd Street, in 1994. From the start of his career, aspects of U.S. culture had always brought a special resonance to Malle’s movies: a Miles Davis soundtrack ignites Elevator to the Gallows (1957); the tiny heroine of Zazie dans le métro (1960) buys American jeans; the suicidal hero of The Fire Within (1963) chooses F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to be the final thing he reads. But Malle continually carbonates Murmur of the Heart with a Yankee-flavored fizz. Jazz by Charlie Parker and others fills the soundtrack. Visual and verbal references to American popular culture abound. Most importantly, Malle’s free-for-all view of haute-bourgeois family life has an American-style spontaneity and rambunctiousness. The adolescents in this film may be chic, but they’re iconoclastic, too. And even though the movie depicts psychologically charged material—including incest—that would normally resist comic handling, Malle gives the whole shebang a crackpot symmetry worthy of Hollywood screwball comedy at its peak.
Murmur of the Heart was, in fact, a turning point for Malle—or, rather, the turning point after a turning point. Malle emerged into world cinema seemingly full-grown, as a sleek craftsman boasting a rangy intelligence and stylistic invention and audacity. Whether codirecting Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s marine documentary The Silent World (1956); creating an inspired erotic update of an eighteenth-century short story (The Lovers [1958], from “No Tomorrow,” by Vivant Denon); or keenly rendering modern classics (Zazie dans le métro, from Raymond Queneau’s novel), Malle appeared to be the kind of director who became “personal” by melding his sensibility with that of a primary author. (Even Elevator to the Gallows comes from a thriller by Noel Calef.)
27Mar06
From Pauline Kael's 1974 New Yorker review. Reprinted with permission from the New Yorker.
Introducing himself to a delicate, fine-boned parisienne, the farm-boy hero of Louis Malle’s new movie does not give his name as Lucien Lacombe; he gives the bureaucratic designation—Lacombe, Lucien. He presents himself name inverted because he is trying to be formal and proper, as he’s been trained to be at school and at work, sweeping floors at his local, small-town hospital, in southwest France. When he meets the girl, France Horn—and falls in love with her—his new job is hunting down and torturing people for the Gestapo. He likes it a whole lot better than the hospital. The title Lacombe, Lucien refers to the case of a boy of seventeen who doesn’t achieve a fully human identity, a boy who has an empty space where feelings beyond the purely instinctive are expected to be.
The time is 1944, after the Normandy landings, and the Nazis and their collaborators won’t be in power long. Lucien doesn’t know that. He had tried to join the Resistance, but the local Resistance leader was his old schoolmaster, who thought him stupid, and Lucien stumbled into a job with the Nazis. Actually, he isn’t stupid; he has the kinds of talents that don’t show at school—he has a country boy’s skills, and he knows how to survive in the wild. The schoolmaster is right, though, in perceiving that Lucien is apolitical and unprincipled—that he just wants some action. Lucien is good to his mother, and in normal circumstances he would work on a farm, taking care of his own and not bothering anybody, and he’d probably be a respected, unconscionably practical member of the community. But in wartime, he’s a perfect candidate for Nazi bullyboy. Malle’s film is a long, close look at the banality of evil; it is—not incidentally—one of the least banal movies ever made. The actions are handled plainly, with restraint—with no attempt to shock anyone, or impress anyone; the actions are what we knew already. There’s no special magic involved in the moviemaking technique—it’s simple, head-on, unforced. The movie is the boy’s face. The magic is in the intense curiosity and intelligence behind the film—in Malle’s perception that the answers to our questions about how people with no interest in politics become active participants in brutal torture are to be found in Lucien’s plump-cheeked, narrow-eyed face, and that showing us what this boy doesn’t react to can be the most telling of all.
27Mar06
“Do you realize,” muses the twelve-year-old Julien Quentin, rapt in the entranced solipsism of early adolescence, “that there’ll never be another January 17, 1944? Never again? . . . I’m the only one in this school who thinks about death. It’s incredible.” As the date implies, he could hardly be more wrong. Many of those around him are thinking about death, and in far less theoretical terms.
The moment of adolescent crisis, the point at which the adult world, in all its messy ambiguity, drives in upon and disrupts childhood certitudes, always fascinated Louis Malle. From 1960’s Zazie dans le métro (whose eponymous heroine turns the tables with some disruption of her own) through Murmur of the Heart (1971); Lacombe, Lucien (1974); Black Moon (1975); and Pretty Baby (1978), his young protagonists find themselves confronted with a world that operates according to no rules they’ve been led to expect. With Au revoir les enfants (1987), Malle homed in on the autobiographical reference point of this theme, the moment that “may well have determined my vocation as a filmmaker,” when, aged eleven, he watched a Gestapo official enter the classroom of his Fontainebleau school and summon a fellow pupil by an unfamiliar, Jewish name. The film, a “reinvention of the past,” traces the wary, prickly friendship between Julien (Gaspard Manesse), Malle’s surrogate, and the Jewish boy, Jean Bonnet (played by Raphaël Fejtö, with the raw, wounded stare of the young Kafka).
