Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960)

Jean Keraudy, Marc Michel, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, and Michel Constantin in Le Trou

Cast: Michel Constantin, Jean Keraudy, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, Marc Michel, Jean-Paul Coquelin, André Bervil, Eddy Rasimi. Screenplay: Jacques Becker, José Giovanni, Jean Aurel, based on a novel by Giovanni. Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet. Production design: Rino Mondellini. Film editing: Marguerite Renoir, Geneviève Vaury. 

All prison break movies have to be judged by the standard set by Robert Bresson's 1956 masterpiece A Man Escaped. Most of them are found wanting, but Jacques Becker's last film, Le Trou, though it lacks Bresson's moral intensity and political significance, makes a good try at it. What Becker's film has going for it is a fine ensemble of actors, including one of the men who participated in the attempted prison escape in 1947 on which José Giovanni based the novel that Becker turned into a film. Under a screen name, Jean Keraudy, Roland Barbat not only plays the prisoner Roland Darbant but also introduces the film as a "true story." This touch of documentary realism gives Le Trou a solid grounding, and Becker uses it to great effect, especially in a long take in which the prisoners break through the subflooring of their cell into the basement beneath. For a long time we see them hammering away almost ineffectively at the concrete, but just as we fear that this is going to be like watching paint dry, the seemingly impervious substance begins to chip away, revealing the larger rocks and looser material underneath. It's a tour de force of sorts, because the concrete must have been poured especially for the filming and designed to resist the hammering just enough to build suspense. What plot there is other than the elaborately detailed escape focuses on Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel), a young prisoner who is moved into the cell after the other four have already made their plans for the escape. Initially they mistrust the newcomer, but he earns their acceptance -- up to a point. The film eschews a music soundtrack, relying instead on the sounds of the prison for atmosphere. There are some darkly comic moments, as when two of the prisoners, having made it into the basement, have to hide from guards making their rounds. We don't see how they do it at first, but then it's revealed that one of the prisoners is standing on the shoulders of the other, dodging the patrol behind a convenient pillar, around which they just barely manage to make their way as the guards circle it. In hindsight, there are lots of things to cavil about, such as how the escape plan was devised and the necessary tools acquired -- matters that A Man Escaped details more interestingly -- but Le Trou holds up well while you're watching it, relying on solid characterization and vivid details to disarm skepticism.

Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)

Nadine Nortier in Mouchette

Mouchette: Nadine Nortier
Arsène: Jean-Claude Guilbert
Mouchette's Mother: Marie Cardinal
Mouchette's Father: Paul Hébert
Mathieu: Jean Viminet
Schoolteacher: Liliane Princet
Undertaker: Suzanne Huguenin '
Luisa: Marine Trichet
Grocery Shop Owner: Raymonde Chabrun

Director: Robert Bresson
Screenplay: Robert Bresson
Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Pierre Guffroy
Film editing: Raymond Lamy
Music: Jean Wiener

I used to think that Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) was the most depressing and enigmatic of Robert Bresson's works, but I hadn't seen Mouchette. It's an unsparing film, in which I can't find even a feint at Bresson's usual religious consolation or symbology. Mouchette's name means "little fly," and her existence is as brief and mucky as that. Yes, I've read the essays on Bresson and on Georges Bernanos's source novel that posit some kind of redemptive motif in Mouchette's bleak life, but experiencing the film doesn't reinforce that for me. Abused endlessly, Mouchette is no martyr, no saint; she is as spiteful and deluded as you might expect. She refers to her rapist as her lover, and once her mother, to whom she was at least dutiful, is dead, there seems nothing to which she can connect, even her baby brother, whom she carelessly swaddles, and when she goes out to get milk for him she dawdles, leaving him at the mercy of her gin-soaked father and brother. She is too proud to accept charity, scrubbing her muddy shoes into the carpet of the crabby old lady who at least is kind enough to give her a shroud for her mother and some clothes for herself. When she goes out to roll down a slope next to a pond, it looks like she's spitefully dirtying these gifts. And then we realize that what looks like mean-spirited play is in fact preparation for a most unusual suicide, which Bresson doesn't actually film but leaves us to infer. The film has been called tragic, but it looks to me like unfettered naturalism.

The Fire Within (Louis Malle, 1963)

Maurice Ronet in The Fire Within

Alain Leroy: Maurice Ronet
Lydia: Léna Skerla
Dubourg: Bernard Noël
Eva: Jeanne Moreau
Solange: Alexandra Stewart

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle
Based on a novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Bernard Evein
Film editing: Suzanne Baron

The Fire Within seems an ironic title for a film about a man whose internal fire has become so low that he plans to, well, snuff it. The French title is Le Feu Follet, which means "will o' the wisp," proverbially "something just out of reach." The thing out of reach for Alain Leroy, a recovering alcoholic whose stay in a clinic has been so effective that his doctor thinks he should go home, is any reason to go on living. Estranged from his wife, who now lives in the United States, he searches for the elusive raison d'être in sex, work, family life, drugs, politics, society, and a return to alcohol, but the quest ends in failure. It's the midlife crisis writ large, but what saves Louis Malle's film from slumping into yet another ennuyant portrait of ennui is the keenly internalized performance of Maurice Ronet as Alain as well as the perverse vitality of the world he is seeking to leave: i.e., Paris in the early 1960s. Malle's vision, in tandem with Ghislain Cloquet's rich black-and-white cinematography, gives us a milieu that presents almost too many reasons to stay alive, so that the problem -- Camus's familiar "one really serious philosophical problem" of suicide -- remains centered in Alain himself. The film crackles with the tension between the world as Alain sees it and the world we see through Malle's eyes.  

The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)

Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in The Young Girls of Rochefort

Delphine Garnier: Catherine Deneuve
Solange Garnier: Françoise Dorléac
Yvonne Garnier: Danielle Darrieux
Andy Miller: Gene Kelly
Étienne: George Chakiris
Maxence: Jacques Perrin
Simon Dame: Michel Piccoli
Bill: Grover Dale
Josette: Geneviève Thénier
Subtil Dutroux: Henri Crémieux

Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Bernard Evein
Film editing: Jean Hamon
Music: Michel Legrand

I appreciate Jacques Demy's hommage to the Hollywood musical, but I think I would have to like Michel Legrand's songs more to really enjoy The Young Girls of Rochefort. Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) has been known to seriously divide and damage friendships, though when I last saw it I rather enjoyed its cheeky sentimentality and bright colors. Rochefort takes a similar approach to Cherbourg, setting a musical romance in a French town and filling it with wall-to-wall Legrand songs, but by doubling down on the concept -- giving us multiple romances, extending the time from Cherbourg's 91 minutes to Rochefort's more than two hours, and bringing in guest stars from American musicals -- it begins to try one's patience. Catherine Deneuve, who starred in Cherbourg, is joined by her sister, Françoise Dorléac, and the two of them have great charm, though Deneuve's delicately beautiful face is smothered under an enormous blond wig for much of the film. They are courted by Étienne and Bill, who often seem to be doing dance movements borrowed from Jerome Robbins's choreography for West Side Story (Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961), in which the actor playing Étienne, George Chakiris, appeared. (Rochefort's choreographer is Norman Maen.) But Solange winds up with an American composer, Andy Miller, while Delphine keeps missing a connection with Maxence, an artist who has painted a picture of his ideal woman who looks exactly like Delphine. Meanwhile, their mother, Yvonne, doesn't realize that her old flame (and the father of her young son), Simon Dame, has recently moved to Rochefort. (She had turned him down because she didn't want to be known as Madame Dame. No, I'm not kidding.) And so it goes. The movie is given a jolt of life by Gene Kelly's extended cameo: At 55, he's as buoyant as ever, though somewhat implausible as the 25-year-old Dorléac's love interest. He would have been better paired with Darrieux. It's a candy-box movie, but for my taste it's like someone got there first and ate the best pieces, leaving me the ones with coconut centers.

Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

Anne Wiazemsky in Au Hasard Balthazar

Marie: Anne Wiazemsky
Jacques: Walter Green
Gérard: François Lafarge
Marie's Father: Philippe Asselin
Marie's Mother: Nathalie Joyaut
Arnold: Jean-Claude Guilbert
Grain Dealer: Pierre Klossowski
Priest: Jean-Joel Barbier
Baker: François Sullerot
Baker's Wife: Marie-Claire Fremont
Gendarme: Jacques Sorbets
Attorney: Jean Rémignard

Director: Robert Bresson
Screenplay: Robert Bresson
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet

In his book Watching Them Be, James Harvey calls Au Hasard Balthazar "probably the greatest movie I've ever seen," and goes on to quote a number of others, including Jean-Luc Godard, who pretty much agree with him. I can't deny the movie's excellence, though I wouldn't quite go as far as Harvey does. It's a film that will try your patience unless you're willing to take Bresson on his own terms, which means not spelling anything out explicitly about his characters and their relationships. You're left to surmise a great deal about what they're doing and why. In fact, the only character in the film who gets a more or less fully fleshed-out story line is Balthazar himself, and he's a donkey. As usual, the performers are people we've never seen before on screen, and as usual with Bresson, that works out well, especially in the case of Anne Wiazemsky, who plays Marie. Only 19 when she made the film, she brings a freshness and vulnerability to her role that radiates through the deadpan non-acting that Bresson imposed on his performers. (The following year, she made  La Chinoise with Godard -- which may help explain the extent of his enthusiasm for Balthazar -- and became his second wife after his divorce from Anna Karina.)  I happen to be somewhat averse to films that center on animals, particularly if they carry the symbolic freight that Balthazar (whom one character refers to as "a saint") does, but even I couldn't help being touched by his story. This was Bresson's first film with Ghislain Cloquet as cinematographer, and the contrast with his previous film, The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), shot by his longtime director of photography, Léonce-Henri Burel, is startling. Burel tended to follow Bresson's lead in providing austere images for austere stories, whereas Cloquet brings a romantic edge to his work. I think it only emphasizes the purity of Bresson's intentions.