Aside from perhaps ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, Hollywood never quite manages to capture the eccentric essence of romance, too often settling for the easy fix of the chocolate box. Even a literary romance as beautifully bonkers as ‘Wuthering Heights’ was bowdlerised for its first well-known big-screen version (the 1939 one with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff), and as a cinematic genre, romance gradually settled into a comfy, soft-focus groove that utterly detached the subject from reality and fabricated a fairy tale it rarely veers from to this day. Not that there’s anything wrong with fairy tales, and I accept for many that cinema-going is all about escapism, pure and simple. I know my grandmother in particular was a huge fan of Doris Day movies, and that’s perfectly understandable; she lived in dull, monochrome 1950s Huddersfield, so I can imagine that going to see a spectacular Technicolor musical like ‘Calamity Jane’ must have felt like visiting another planet for the evening.
Perhaps fairy tales and fantasy tend to be the default backdrop for cinematic portrayals of romance because even in real life falling in love can be something of an out-of-body experience; how else does one illustrate the insane sensation without slipping into dependable cliché? Well, it can be done, but it takes a bit of imagination. I guess the main problem with the Hollywood approach is that its narrow fantasy is routinely lacking the element of surprise, being as predictable as ‘Snow White’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Moreover, such films are almost overwhelmingly aimed at an exclusively female audience, as though the spirit of romance only ever beats in the heart of a woman; I doubt any straight man ever had a craving to watch ‘Dirty Dancing’ or ‘An Officer and A Gentleman’, for example. No, if one of the most intensely electric emotional adventures either sex can be exposed to in life is ever done genuine justice in the world of cinema, it tends not to emanate from Tinsel Town.
I was thinking of this unlikely topic on account of hearing that the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo had passed away. He was never a household name in the English-speaking world, though he was a legend across the Channel; the fact that he declined to relocate to California as a means of capitalising upon a handful of brushes with iconic cinematic cool in the early 60s is perhaps to his credit. The trio of films he made with Nouvelle Vague auteur Jean-Luc Godard – 1960’s ‘Breathless’, ‘A Woman is a Woman’ (1961), and 1965’s ‘Pierrot le Fou’ – are all very different, yet each is a classic of the French New Wave. Despite the fact Belmondo became a mainstream movie star in France, the cult success of his collaborations with Godard in international circles were the films for which he remains best remembered outside of France. And both ‘A Woman is a Woman’ and ‘Pierrot le Fou’ are sublimely romantic movies that manage to avoid the corny tropes that constitute the lazy laurels of Hollywood. The former subverts them with mischievous glee, whilst the latter rewrites the rulebook.
On the surface, ‘Pierrot le Fou’ certainly doesn’t adhere to a conventional romantic narrative, featuring several casual murders and a couple of vicious gangsters who think nothing of water-boarding their enemies. However, in the finest tradition of Romeo and Juliet, the couple at the centre of the story – played by Belmondo and the effortlessly sexy Anna Karina respectively – both die at the end, with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s demise being memorably bizarre as he paints his face blue and wraps a dozen sticks of dynamite round his head; after lighting the fuse he has a belated change of heart, but can’t extinguish it on account of not being able to see it due to the dynamite obscuring his vision. Within seconds he’s blown to smithereens; it’s a dramatically stupid death worthy of Wile E. Coyote. So, yes, it’s not a pitch I could imagine being given the green light by a Hollywood studio executive, to be honest; but it is nevertheless a strikingly romantic movie.
Belmondo’s character is a restless married man dragged along to a dreary Parisian party by his bourgeois wife, whereupon he meets guests who speak in clichés that imply their words are being scripted by advertising agencies; I suppose it was a satirical comment by Godard on crass materialism or something, but the director had yet to squander his talents on Left Bank left-wing polemics, and it actually serves as a humorous way of setting Belmondo apart from his peers. Instead, his wavelength is tuned into that of the pretty babysitter (played by Karina), whom he offers to give a lift home to; he does so and then never returns to his own home. The two go on the run in the style of an existential Bonnie and Clyde, making their way down to the South of France and spending a period living a bohemian beachcomber lifestyle before the past crimes of Karina’s character catch up with them, prompting a fresh getaway.
Throughout the journey that follows their initial flight from Paris, Karina’s Marianne nicknames Belmondo’s character ‘Pierrot’, repeatedly provoking his virtual catchphrase, ‘My name is Ferdinand’. But it’s a novel example of the quirky affection the two quickly develop for each other, one that swiftly blossoms into passionate love. ‘Pierrot’ evidently has his suspicions about the unpredictable Marianne, but he’s seduced by this free spirit and she in turn gives every impression she’s as smitten with him. The stunning visual set pieces which became a hallmark of Jean-Luc Godard movies are never better than in ‘Pierrot le Fou’ and they work as a means of expressing the devil-may-care nature of the love affair between the two leads. The Nouvelle Vague as a whole was a breathtaking breath of fresh air, anyway, and Godard was its most innovative and original artist; ‘Pierrot le Fou’ has the same exhilarating rush of a Pop Art comic strip panel by Roy Lichtenstein or the opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, and as a romantic movie it brilliantly evokes the joyous madness inherent in love during its first stages in a way that few films do.
On paper, the story itself could have been filmed in a relatively conventional, linear fashion and would probably have made sense to an audience raised on less imaginative fare; but, as with Frank Carson, it was the way Godard told ‘em back then that enables it to convey a mood and a feeling with unique accuracy familiar to anyone who’s been there. Long before I got there, the film made a massive impact on me when I first saw it around 30 years ago and proved that romance wasn’t reserved for the soppy and the sappy; cinema could actually show love as crazy as it really can be, and whilst the film may be as much an example of artifice as a Doris Day musical, ‘Pierrot le Fou’ nonetheless offers a fresh take on the fantasy that is irresistible. Also, the fantasy is balanced by the eventual revelation that Marianne has been cruelly using Pierrot to aid her actual, criminal boyfriend in getting back at his rivals; this gate-crashing of crushing reality exposes the short shelf-life of such ‘too-good-to-be-true’ passion, a telling move more realistic than simply having the pair riding off into the romantic sunset.
The Nouvelle Vague was initially celebrated for its injection of realism into film, dispensing with the archaic, time-consuming methods Hollywood took to light its pictures in order to make the old actresses look beautiful. Francois Truffaut was renowned for taking his camera onto the street and hiring non-actors to create a groundbreaking aesthetic that proved hugely influential in the early 60s, especially on British ‘kitchen sink’ cinema. Jean-Luc Godard was responsible for bringing a touch of the surreal to the mix, and ‘Pierrot le Fou’ is perhaps the crowning achievement of his early career. It gives two adventurous actors permission to spread their wings and it gives the viewer permission to dream an alternative dream. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with fairy tales.
© The Editor
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Perhaps it’s a comment on both the limited online attention span and just how momentary sensation has now become. When the striking images of the first global lockdown – all those eerie photos of the world’s most famous capital cities deserted of people – went viral just over a year ago, reaction swiftly shifted from open-jawed shock at how these landmark locations now resembled the set of a Hollywood movie about the apocalypse to jaded shoulder-shrugging, suggesting everyone ceased to find the imagery remotely strange with 24 hours. Yeah, whatever, seen it. Yet what those empty tourist spots inadvertently highlighted was how a persistent headache for certain beleaguered world leaders had been unexpectedly resolved overnight. It’s almost hard to recall now – because life before Covid seems so distant and unreal – but prior to the coronavirus, many of those streets now devoid of a human presence had been teeming with people who hadn’t come to take selfies in the shadow of an iconic monument. Pre-BLM street protest was geographically localised and concerned with issues that concerned the majority; remember all that trouble in Hong Kong? China at least had something to thank its clumsiest scientists for there, for sure. And what about Paris?
Perhaps it’s a measure of the disproportionate attention given to US politics in the UK over politics nearer to home; but the non-event publicity stunt that was the second Trump impeachment trial received considerably more coverage here than events just across the Channel. In Washington, the chronically-cuckoo Nancy Pelosi was busy burning the bridges that President Biden professed to be building within days of Sleepy Joe’s inauguration, but perhaps the whole anticlimactic circus wasn’t so much another act of desperate revenge on the part of Democrats as a distraction from the new President’s hawkish ambitions. With all eyes still focused on the Bad Orange Man, maybe Biden hoped no one would notice him reviving America’s dormant tradition of warmongering by planning his bombing strategy for Syria. Meanwhile, somewhere in a country considerably closer to these shores than the US of A, a former President was also in the dock, only this time the outcome was a tad more damning.
I guess it’s the last thing the authorities needed right now – with the threat of one more national lockdown in the air, they could’ve done without a senseless murder in another country rousing thousands and bringing them onto the streets to protest and risk pushing up infection rates. Of course, you won’t have been able to avoid it on social media, what with the tech providers imposing a suitably fitting image upon their users, one that is an obligatory profile picture for a day of mass solidarity with the deceased; and, naturally, sportsmen and women are mirroring the mood by observing a moments’ silence with a symbolic bowed head – ‘taking the head’, I think it’s called; and Sainsbury’s will undoubtedly express solidarity too. Oh, wait a minute – for a moment, I forgot none of this is actually happening. No, somehow the barbaric beheading of a History & Geography teacher outside his school in Paris on Friday hasn’t generated an international response. Fancy that.
The story goes that the American entertainment industry ruled the roost and dictated popular culture until The Beatles appeared on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ in 1964 and then attention switched to the other side of the Atlantic. There’s a degree of truth in that, but until the Fab Four delved into Victoriana and the rich tapestry of British folk and chamber music, their look and sound was a perfect synthesis of America and Europe; Hamburg made them a band, but Paris gave them a haircut and a continental style unique to the UK. The trio of German art students (including photographer Astrid Kirchherr) who befriended The Beatles in Hamburg were war-babies whose disgust with the actions of their parents’ generation led them to look to Paris for inspiration. And Paris was the place to be at the turn of the 60s.
I would imagine the sigh of relief from Brussels can be detected in Paris tonight. As with the recent failure of Geert Wilders to claim victory in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen’s threat to win the French Presidency has been vanquished. Of course, over in EU Central, the potential panic wasn’t based on her far-right rhetoric and how it might impact upon those within France who don’t fall into her favoured demographic, but the explicit anti-EU bandwagon she’d attached herself to – a common thread amongst Europe’s contemporary far-right parties. In the wake of Brexit, the fear that the other leading Western European nations might follow suit and bring the whole bureaucratic house of cards crashing down appears to have been eased; but how long for, one wonders.
Apparently, 2017 is the first year since 1924 that General Elections have taken place in all three of Europe’s economic powerhouses – that is France, Germany and…yes…us. Back then, Édouard Herriot and his left-wing Cartel des Gauches alliance claimed victory in the French Legislative Election, Otto Wels led Germany’s Social Democratic Party to victory in the German Federal Election, and over here it was Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives who triumphed over Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour Government. The instability of Europe in the aftermath of the Great War was perhaps emphasised by the fact it was the second time German voters had been summoned to the polling booth that year, whilst in the UK, it was just ten months on from the last General Election; by contrast, it had been five years for French voters. However, these historical facts somewhat obscure the tumultuous changes our nearest continental neighbours underwent from 1789 to 1958.
Whatever words may be used to describe the Jungle refugee camp in Calais, as far as France is concerned, ‘unprecedented’ shouldn’t be one of them. It only seems so from a British perspective, and it has to be said that the considerable headlines the Jungle has garnered in this country have been largely due to its uncomfortable proximity – the fact that only the Channel separates ‘us’ and ‘them’, thus bringing something close to Britannia’s borders that is largely alien to the British experience in terms of immigration. To the French, this is certainly not the case.
Viewed as the latest faux-pas by a French politician in the Silly Season’s ongoing Burkini debate, the comment of France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls that the Republic’s Britannia-like national symbol Marianne is a more accurate portrayal of Gallic freedom than an imposed veil because her breasts are bared has ignited another episode of controversy. Marianne ironically tends to be painted or sculpted with her head covered, and though the headgear is the Phrygian cap associated with 1789, a covered head is surely something France’s female Muslim population could relate to. But it is Marianne’s breasts that are the contentious issue here.
The death of Gene Wilder at the age of 83 yesterday is worth a mention, if only for the string of superlative cinematic comedies Wilder illuminated in a golden period from the late 60s to the late 70s. Rooted in the same great tradition of American Jewish humour as Woody Allen, Larry David and Mel Brooks, Wilder enjoyed his most fruitful on-screen era in collaboration with the latter. His film debut was a cameo in the far-from comedic 1967 drama, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, though he is so funny in the small role of Eugene Grizzard that it was obvious here was a great new talent with plenty of potential. He proved it in Brooks’ ‘The Producers’ the following year, playing Leo Bloom, the neurotic accountant with a Linus-like attachment to a blanket.
A society that imposes a dress code upon its citizens would be one we’d probably regard as far from democratic. The spectre of Peter the Great, the reforming early eighteenth century Tsar, hovers above sartorial legislation, banning the beard in order to drag his medieval nation closer in line with the Western Europe he was exposed to on his travels; and autocratic feudal Tsarist Russia would hardly constitute a democracy in anyone’s books.
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