Chimp Tango in Paris

After his let’s-give-Yves-Montant-a-hard-time trilogy of Z, L’AVEAU and ETAT DE SIEGE, and SECTION SPECIALE which, unbelievably to me, was criticised for being “caricatured” in its portrayal of collaboration (a certain level of cartooning seems permissable in a film with dozens of characters and a complex set of circumstances to convey), Costa-Gavras took a short break from political issues in 1979 and made the strange and haunting CLAIR DE FEMME (which translates as WOMAN LIGHT which is a terrible title, but the French version seems fine so let’s sue that), in which… Yves Montand has a hard time.

C-G insists that the personal is political but you would be struggling to find even passing references to the events of the seventies, and the film doesn’t seek to deeply investigate or question gender relations, which is the topic at hand I guess. Or maybe it does? But it’s still a very interesting piece, and part of its allure is the mystery of what drew the filmmaker to it.

I would characterise the film as a screwball tragedy — maybe PETULIA would be a good reference, but that film IS overtly political and has a bitterness that’s absent here. Montand keeps trying to fly out of Paris to Caracas or anywhere at all, as soon as possible, but then he keeps wandering out of the airport, missing his flight, and traipsing around Paris. The narrative is all meet-cutes and everybody’s a philosopher, which is why I see it as screwball. Plus the dialogue is epigramatic and the situations faintly absurd. A bereaved father speaks only gibberish, like he’s from Belugistan, Plus our leads evidently don’t worry about money: Romy Schneider pays Montand’s cab fare and doesn’t want paid back. Ever taken a cab from Charles de Gaulle?

The source is a novel by Romain Gary, who wrote WHITE DOG, and indeed one character (the spendid Romolo Valli) is a dog-trainer. He has a night-club act, described by Montand as “unspeakably horrible,” in which a chimpanzee tangos with a poodle, but he’s a nice, distracted, lonely man, dying of heart disease and worried about what will become of his animals. He’s not like Jules Berry in LE JOUR SE LEVE, my only other reference for Parisian dog-handlers. That movie may in fact be a reference, with its open-all-night narrative, elaborate, poetic dialogue… plus Montand himself is a link to Marcel Carne. With the face of a disappointed horse, God love him.

This damn film is weird, melancholic, funny-ish (Roberto Benigni plays a bar-man, but someone has sat on his head and got him to act proper) and disturbingly prophetic. When Gary wrote his book about a man whose wife is suiciding, his own ex-wife, Jean Seberg, was still alive. When Costa-Gavras made the film, Montand was not a widower yet, and Romy Schneider, whose character has lost a child in a tragic accident, had not yet lost a child in a tragic accident. Everything about the story and everything in the acting is so heartbreaking I assumed all those things had already happened and everyone was drawing on them and it was all a bit near the knuckle. Now it’s just distressing that they could do the emotions and yet they were still to have the emotions.

It’s about being bereaved and in love in Paris while wearing a raincoat, so it’s LAST TANGO without the misogyny.

This film deserves to be seen — I couldn’t look away and I couldn’t decide if it WORKED — the appeal of screwball has a strong flavour of “if only life were like this” so overlaying it on tragic events always creates a strange disconnect, a frustrating sense or irreality that never obtrudes when the subject is comic. But with some films, NOT WORKING is part of the charm, maybe even part of what makes them work.

The Other Drowning Pool

The Forgotten returns! Jacques Deray’s LA PISCINE, starring Delon, Schneider and Birkin, is just the thing for summertime. Watching it in winter could break your heart.

Here.

Forbidden Divas: All the Way to the Bank

Met up with David Melville Wingrove at Filmhouse yesterday — it was like one of those spy movie handovers of documents — and thus am able to bring you another of his marvelous works ~

FORBIDDEN DIVAS

All the Way to the Bank

 

“I don’t worry about the news. I am the news!”

–          Romy Schneider, La Banquière

A late friend who worked in films in the 60s used to grow misty-eyed whenever he spoke of Romy Schneider. “Ah, poor dear Romy,” he would sigh and gaze wistfully into the middle distance. “She was a lesbian, you know.” He made the word sound dangerously exotic and glamorous. He also gave the impression of not being entirely sure what the word meant. My friend is long gone and I have no idea where his story came from. Quite apart from her 25 years of screen stardom, Romy Schneider was famous in the European press for her colourful and rather tortured love life – which may well have included women as well as men. She had a very public affair in the early 60s with Alain Delon and they appeared together (notoriously) as incestuous lovers in Luchino Visconti’s stage production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore in Paris in 1961. Her death from suicide in 1982 (following the death of her eldest son) sparked an outburst of public mourning comparable with that of Princess Diana or Eva Perón.

Even in her earliest youth, it was difficult to separate the life of Romy Schneider from the fantasy of her life as it was seen by her adoring fans. From 1954 to 1957, the teenage Austria actress became famous worldwide with a series of four films based on the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (better known as ‘Sissi’) who was, essentially, the Princess Diana of the 19^th century. The films are hideous – stodgy and interminable operettas, minus the songs – but the young Romy gives them a zest that Ernst Marischka’s direction entirely lacks. She became, from that moment, the uncrowned ‘little princess’ of Europe and recreated her role as Sissi in the Luchino Visconti film Ludwig (1972). Her public throughout her life was largely European. Despite – or perhaps because of – her roles in What’s New, Pussycat? (1965) and Bloodline (1979) audiences in Britain and the United States never took to her at all.

From the late 60s, Romy Schneider was based primarily in France. She won the César for Best Actress twice – for Andrzej Zulawski’s L’important c’est d’aimer (1975) and Claude Sautet’s Une histoire simple (1978) – and was easily the most famous Austrian to become an honorary Frenchwoman since Marie Antoinette. It goes without saying that Romy was vastly more popular, yet what a lavish and sensational biopic that might have made! The Francis Girod film La Banquière (1980) is not exactly a biopic. It was based loosely on the life of a real-life businesswoman, Marthe Hanau, but the name and most of the details have been fictionalised. It is in no way comparable, on an artistic level, with the work of Zulawski or Sautet. But it is arguably the one film (post-Sissi) that best sums up Romy’s iconic star presence.

Her character in La Banquière is not simply a banker. She is a working-class Jewish left-wing bisexual woman banker. A difficult enough role to pull off at the best of times, but against the politically charged backdrop of France in the 1920s and 30s, even the attempt would seem little short of heroic. Emma Eckhert (as her character is renamed) starts off as a delivery girl at her parents’ hat shop in the years before World War I. She goes to prison at a young age for ‘moral turpitude’ – after she is caught in bed with an aristocratic lady client. Shot in black-and-white, this prologue serves to establish two vitally important facts. Firstly, that this lady has an eye for other ladies. Secondly, that she has a keen and far more discriminating eye for hats. Not since Silvana Mangano in Death in Venice (1971) has any star sported such a dazzling array of headgear as Romy Schneider does here. They are designed by Jean Barthet, who was best known for the Technicolor cartwheels worn by the Deneuve-Dorléac sisters in The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). The advantage of his designs for La Banquière is that one may wear them without posing a danger to low-flying aircraft.

Once out of prison (and shot now in radiant colour) Emma wastes no time in getting married to an aristocratic mari complaisant. We assume he must be gay, partly because he seems unfazed by her affairs with other women and partly because he is played by Jean-Claude Brialy, one of the few ‘out’ French actors to survive the unpleasantly macho climate of the New Wave. (With films by Marcel Carné, Jean Cocteau, Marcel L’Herbier and Marc Allégret, among others, the much-ridiculed cinéma de papa of the 40s and 50s was artistically less adventurous, perhaps, but also a good deal gayer!) Emma pours most of her energy into building up a banking empire based on a new and revolutionary concept. At a time when large and established banks dole out a measly 1% in interest, the Eckhert Bank pays investors a whopping 8% on their savings. This involves, inevitably, some reckless high-stakes speculation and some insider trading of frankly dubious legality. Yet its central tenet is that ordinary folk should get a share in the profits of the banks. This was as strange and subversive an idea in 1930 as it is today.

Before long, Emma becomes a heroine to the lower middle classes of provincial France, known and adored universally as ‘Madame 8%’. Refreshingly uninhibited by paltry notions of good taste, she decorates her Christmas tree with giant gilded baubles carved in the figure of 8%. We may take this as a sign that she has, by and large, left her Jewish identity behind her. The ethical issues around casting Schneider as a Jewish woman are multiple and complex. Her mother, the actress Magda Schneider, was an ardent Nazi supporter who took her little girl to play-dates with the children of Doctor Josef Goebbels. Romy – who suffered a degree of guilt over this later in life – worked hard both on-screen and off to distance herself from her mother’s political views. In the last decade of her career, she repeatedly played a woman who suffered due to Nazi atrocities. In Le Train (1972) and La Passante du Sans-Souci (1982) she would play a Jewish refugee. In Le Vieux Fusil (1975) her character is savagely raped and killed by Nazi troops.

Taking on any or all of these roles demanded a moral courage that would make Jane Fonda turn pale. They make doubly distasteful the comments of Dirk Bogarde, who turned down Romy Schneider as his co-star in The Night Porter (1974) on the grounds that: “She would have to play the Nazi and I would have to play the victim.” Her character in La Banquière does not survive to see the Second World War and the role of the French authorities in the Nazi holocaust. An affair with a young left-wing journalist (Daniel Mesguich) leads Madame Eckhert further and further into the progressive and anti-Establishment politics of France in the 1930s. It leads also – in a twist that could only happen in a French film – to an enduring if Platonic friendship with his wife (Marie-France Pisier). Yet it also earns her the enmity of the Big Bad Bankers, led by a malevolently glowering Jean-Louis Trintignant and his bland but insidious boy-toy (Daniel Auteuil) who goes so far as to wear lipstick in his very first scene. These men decide to put a stop to Madame Eckhert and her anarchic business practices. It is a measure of how grim our world is that we never have any serious doubt they will succeed.

The director Francis Girod was and is a sort of Stanley Kramer á la française. His speciality is stolid but star-studded dramas on vaguely controversial themes. La Banquière is not appreciably better or worse than The Infernal Trio (1974) which stars Schneider and Michel Piccoli or René la Canne (1977) which stars Piccoli, Gérard Depardieu and Sylvia Kristel. Yet it is produced with truly eye-watering opulence and who can dislike any film that boasts a full transvestite ladies’ orchestra, kitted out in 18^th century frock coats and powdered wigs? Such a film requires an overpowering star presence to sustain it and that is something Romy Schneider has in spades. She is by turns seductive, capricious, ruthless, generous, headstrong, courageous and doomed. You are left wondering why French people do not cut to the chase and appoint Madame Eckhert as President of the Republic for life. Most countries in the 30s could have done a lot worse. In fact, most countries still do.

David Melville