Ascenseur pour l'echafaud

Jeanne Moreau

Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) is a crisp and sleek thriller released in 1958. The film was based on an Série noir novel by Noël Calef published in 1956. Jeanne Moreau stars as Florence Carala, the unfaithful wife of a munitions magnate played by Jean Wall. Florence, we immediately discern, is involved in an affair with a subordinate of her husband named Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), a former soldier in the French Foreign Legion. We first see the lovers talking to each other on the phone, expressing their love for one another and going over the last few details before Julien attempts to rub out Florence's husband. Malle frames Moreau in enormous close-ups here, heralding her arrival in a role that helped make her a major film star after a decade of playing bar girls in B pictures; albeit, usually superbly.

I first saw this film nearly fifty years ago through the snow on my television on a broadcast from Washington D.C. 's WETA. Viewing the Criterion Collection's disc gave me a greater appreciation for the high contrast black and white cinematography of Henri Decaë, but my overall impression of the film remained the same. The film is effective when it focuses on Tavernier and his somewhat unbelievable plight after he manages to get stuck in an elevator while trying to escape from the site of the murder. Even better are the scenes following Florence as she prowls the streets of Paris searching for her lover. Moreau's face, like Garbo's at the end of Queen Christina, becomes a mask that both hides and projects a myriad of conflicting feelings. Malle's tracking shot of Moreau striding down a boulevard, shot apparently by Decaë using a pram, cemented her as a cinematic icon.

What still didn't work for me was Malle's handling of the two beatniks in love who steal Tavernier's car and go on a spree that ends with murder. Part of this is due to the actors. Malle was tentative at this point in his handling of his players, so that those actors who needed the least guidance (Moreau, Wall, and Lino Ventura as a homicide chief) fare best. One thing I can better glean from this viewing was the effects of Malle's influences on this picture. Malle confessed that the film was an amalgam of Bresson and Hitchcock. He had been an assistant to Bresson on that master's A Man Escaped and that picture informs Ascenseur's interiority: especially Florence's monologues and the trapped Tavernier. The frisson of excitement in the film owes much to the cross-cutting utilized by Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train. What the film lacks is the lovers on the run fervor of Ray in They Live By Night and Rebel Without A Cause.

And that leads me to the question of Louis Malle's artistic personality. Ultimately, it was more malleable than forceful. His best films display a lively intelligence and some sensuality, but lack the flair or intellectual rigor of great filmmakers. I like Ascenseur, The Fire Within, Atlantic City and a few others, but the impression they leave strikes me as the work of a nice man, but not an artist who wants to break ground. His disasters were numerous: Zazie dans le Métro, A Very Private Affair, Black Moon, Crackers. I warn all semi-interested parties to avoid these pictures. They are among the worst films of anyone considered a major director

Small Things Like These

Cillian Murphy

I enjoyed the film adaptation of Claire Keegan's novel Small Things Like These more than I expected to, if enjoyment is not quite the right word for a work concerning the depravations of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries. Set in 1982 or so, both film and book concern a simple and honest lorry driver named Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) who discovers dark secrets about the local church run facility while making his deliveries. The laundries employed and sheltered Ireland's unmarried mothers who were forced to give away their babies for adoption. The laundries were Dickensian work houses, David Copperfield figures prominently in Small Things Like These, that became satanic mills of abuse and exploitation. Screenwriter Enda Walsh has streamlined the novel, yet retained its very Gaelic flavor.

What worried me about the material is that there is no subtext, book and film are both righteous screeds against the Laundries. Fair enough, but not necessarily the stuff of multi-dimensional art. However, the film is superbly acted by all concerned and director Tim Mielants' technique is interesting and evocative. He conjures the period by giving the film a throwback look and audio design. The colors are muted, appropriate for this grim tale of the 1980s. The sound is multi-layered and scratchy like an old cassette mixtape. Furlong is constantly going back in time within his head to revisit his troubled childhood. Mielants includes many shots of characters looking through windows conveying how we are constantly rewitnessing the past, but are forever cut off from it. The past is a foreign country as L.P. Hartley put it. Mielants uses long and slow pans to give the viewer a queasy sense that some undiscovered horror is just around the corner or in a disused coal bin. Furlong is a virtual saint, devoted to his wife and five daughters. We have little doubt that he will do the right thing even if he has to oppose his beloved church. As in Oppenheimer, Murphy underplays beautifully in what was a pet project for him. Emily Watson delivers in the juicy role of the Mother Superior who personifies the corruption and hypocrisy of the Catholic clergy.

El

Delia Garcés and Arturo de Córdova

Luis Buñuel's Él (Him), from 1953, is probably the most personal of his masterpieces from his Mexican period. Buñuel and Luis Alcorize's script was derived from Mercedes Pinto's 1926 novel Pensamientos. That novel was a roman à clef about Pinto's relationship with her jealous husband who descended into paranoia when he could not control her. The first part of the film focuses on Francisco (Arturo de Córdova), a middle aged business magnate and his wooing of the much younger Gloria (Delia Garcés). Francisco spies Gloria in church during a Maundy Thursday service and with one look at her ankles, the torch is lit. Buñuel indulges full bore in his foot fetishism in this one. Even though Gloria is seeing the dependable Raul (Luis Beristáin), an employee of Francisco's, she is swept away by Francisco's profession of love and he soon manipulates her into a hasty marriage.

The second part of the film is a flashback that is from Gloria's perspective, as she recounts the horror of her married life to Raul some time in the future. Francisco's jealousy erupts almost immediately after they pledge their troth, ruining their wedding night and honeymoon. He moves her into his palatial family estate, an art nouveau palace with surrealistic flourishes, brilliantly designed by frequent Buñuel collaborator Edward Fitzgerald. This house soon becomes the prison it resembles on the outside, a gilded cage for Gloria. Francisco's behavior descends into the pathological and goads Buñuel and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa into some of their most disturbing imagery: a pin through a keyhole with the intention of blinding a imagined peeper, Francisco collecting tools in order to sew up Gloria's vagina; a harbinger of That Obscure Object of Desire. It is no surprise that Él tanked with critics and audiences in the repressed 1950s. There is a bell tower scene that prefigures Vertigo, Hitchcock was an avowed admirer of Buñuel, in which Francisco threatens to throw Gloria to her doom and castigates the people below as "worms".

Gloria tries to find an ally who will help her in her plight, but no one will listen to her. Francisco's servants, his business associates, the local curate, all buy into Francisco's projected image as magnanimous yet traditional bourgeois grandee. Even Gloria's mother is fooled. When Gloria goes to her mother for counsel, she responds by, in essence, telling Gloria that boys will be boys. The final third of the film goes back to Francisco's perspective as he becomes more paranoid and delusional. He stalks Gloria after she wisely leaves him and endeavors to get out of Dodge. Francisco mistakes a couple for Gloria and Raul and follows  them into the church we encountered earlier in the film, bringing us full circle. Francisco imagines that the parishioners are mocking him. Buñuel cuts between reality and Francisco's delusions in purposefully crude cuts, the line being thin between reality and delusion. The coda, a sop to the conventions of melodrama, shows Gloria wed to Raul. They are parenting Francisco Jr. Francisco has retreated from society and is now a brother in a monastery. His mustache, an emblem of his machismo, is gone. The final shot is of Francisco walking a crooked path, as he did on the stairs of his mansion. His madness still lingers.

The fact that it is Buñuel in a cassock in this last shot is indicative of his identification with the divided nature of Francisco. To the world Buñuel was an icon of Surrealism and Leftist humanism, or, as Dali dismissed him, an atheist and a Communist. At home though, he was a traditional Spanish patriarch, stern and unyielding. He demanded unconditional fealty from his wife and children. Disobedience was not to be tolerated. Now, the fact that Él can be read as an auto-critique makes me think that Buñuel was not the domestic tyrant that some have made him out to be. Still, boys will be boys. He does deemphasize the theme of divorce and the difficulty of obtaining one in a Catholic country compared to the original novel. The subject is briefly mentioned, but then ignored. Buñuel was so in thrall to his own Romantic agonies to ever be fully sympathetic to feminism. 

Él may have the best lead performances in any Buñuel film. The line on him is that he let his professional performers be while micro-managing his amateur ones. If this is true, and I've read and seen nothing to contradict this, then he was very fortunate in the casting of Delia Garcés and Arturo de Córdova. Garcés was an Argentine actress who took a hiatus from her homeland with her husband during the Perón era. We can glean what Francisco sees in her, she is a dish, but Garcés gives Gloria a backbone even when Francisco tries to spatchcock her. Cordova was the greatest leading man of the Mexican cinema, appearing in over a hundred Mexican features and quite a few American ones (like For Whom The Bell Tolls). One of the delights of Él is watching Córdova and Buñuel gleefully deconstruct Córdova's image as a romantic leading man.