Bardot, on CBC Gem

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Brigitte Bardot movies probably contributed more to France’s trade balance than Peugeot and Citroen combined. She is still France’s most iconic celebrity, even though she hasn’t made a new film since 1973 (and her politics are a bit awkward). Mother-son writer-director-creators Daniele and Christopher Thompson lean into the sex and scandal of the movie star’s life in the six-part Bardot, which premieres today on CBC Gem, up in Canada, where a lot of people like to pretend they speak French.

Bardot was raised in a strict, upper-middleclass household, but her conservative father Louis could never really control her. At the age of fifteen she started making movies and commenced an affair with twenty-one year-old screenwriter Roger Vadim. That sounds creepy, but they were French, right? However, her parents did not see it that way. Yet, they eventually allowed him to marry their daughter when she turned eighteen, after several years of strict supervision.

Their first project together was …And God Created Woman, which would be a breakout movie for both, especially her. Even though she was not yet a full-fledged star, the paparazzi swarmed her during the chaotic production (which is nearly the exclusive focus of the second episode) and their ferocity only intensified after the film became a scandalous sensation.

The Thompsons start with Bardot’s Lolita-esque teen years and take her through the tabloid-fodder aftermath of her work on Henri Georges Clouzot’s The Truth. A lot of fans will be disappointed the Thompsons do not stretch the timeline further, to reach Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, which many cineastes must consider her best film.

In many ways, the Thompsons and lead thesp Julia de Nunez reinforce all the sex-kitten-in-a-state-of-arrested-development cliches about Bardot. Throughout all six episodes, she seems incapable of making good relationship decisions and displays a marked aversion to accepting responsibility for her life. While the treatment of Vadim is sympathetic, they essentially suggest Bardot ruined the career of her second husband Jacques Charrier. Perhaps not coincidentally, several episodes also end with the observation that Charrier and their son successfully sued Bardot for the way her memoir portrayed their marriage and her attempts at parenting.

Frankly, Bardot the series lays waste to just about all the celebrities who crossed Bardot’s path, including her musical lovers Sacha Distel and Gilbert Becaud, producer Raoul Levy, and the “love of her life,” Jean-Louis Trintignant. Clouzot also comes off a bit rough at times, but he is redeemed at the 11^th hour—Louis Do de Lencquesaing’s gruffly charismatic performance also helps tremendously in this respect.

It is hard to pass judgement on the Franco-Argentine de Nunez (a newcomer who won the role of Bardot in a nationwide casting call reminiscent of that for Scarlett O’Hara), because she is always so impishly kittenish and naively immature. Yet, we feel for her in later episodes, as the overwhelmed Bardot’s privacy is constantly violated and she is repeatedly betrayed by those around her.

Clouzot’s Le Corbeau

In the 1940’s, it took considerable effort to write poison pen letters. It was literally a matter of pen and ink. These days, it can be done so much easier through social media. Always controversial as a production of the German-owned, Vichy-aligned Continental Films during the (second) French Occupation, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau feels timelier than ever. Freshly 4K-restored, it opens this Friday at Film Forum (trailer here).

Le Corbeau (The Raven) makes the provincial townsfolk so uncomfortable, because he or she is often correct in the accusations leveled against the apparently not so innocent villagers. For instance, Le Corbeau’s favorite target, Dr. Rémy Germain was indeed having an affair with the young wife of his colleague, grey-bearded psychiatrist Dr. Michel Vorzet. However, his main contention that Germain is an overzealous back-alley abortionist is most likely exaggerated. Nevertheless, he and Laura Vorzet find it prudent to put their affair on hold—at least temporarily.

Despite all the unwanted attention focused on Dr. Germain, he finds Denise Saillens, his landlord’s promiscuous sister is more than willing to take Vorzet’s place. He is not completely uninterested, but he has more than enough trouble without her attention seeking behavior. To clear his name, he will rather awkwardly team up with Dr. Vorzet, an expert in poison pen letter writers, after one of the Raven’s letters directly prompts a fatal suicide.

Le Corbeau is an absolutely fascinating film to analyze, both for what is on the screen and what was happening behind the scenes. Since it was produced by Continental Films, Clouzot and his two leads, Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc were banned from French film production and faced legal difficulties (including imprisonment in the case of Fresnay and Leclerc) after liberation. However, some critics read into it a subtle indictment of anonymous denunciations as well as a potent portrayal of the climate of paranoia that was true to life under occupation. Regardless, both the resistance and the establishment condemned the film, for either besmirching the French national character or traditional Catholic morality. Sometimes, you just can’t win.

Of course, it is easy to hear the Raven’s bitter moralizing voice in the social media cyber-lynchings of our times, such as the one that recently resulted in the death of adult film star August Ames. It is probably safe to predict there will not be a porn parody of Le Corbeau anytime soon, and certainly not with the participation of her harassers.  Social Justice Warrior intolerance has replaced Catholic prudery, but the psychology of their cold-blooded cruelty is strikingly similar.

Regardless, as Germain, Fresnay might be one of the most anti-heroic anti-heroes in motion picture history. At best, he is an adulterer and his professional bedside manner is distinctly frosty. Yet, as we come to know him and his backstory, Fresnay steadily stokes the audience’s sympathies. Pierre Larquey is just as terrific as the old but still sharp Dr. Vorzet. Modern viewers might find Leclerc a tad melodramatic as Mme. Saillens, but Liliane Maigné is wonderfully sly but sensitive as her scheming niece, Rolande.

Perhaps what most defines Le Corbeau is the ugly mob justice unleashed on the obvious (and therefore most likely innocent) suspect, Marie Corbin, Laura Vorzet’s rigidly judgmental sister. Again, this was probably not the messaging Vichy was looking for, but it would have been just as inconvenient for the épuration score-settling. Indeed, the Raven is an ornery beast, but it is wickedly clever. It also well-deserves its reputation as an early film noir forerunner, thanks to cinematographer Nicolas Hayer’s dramatically expressive use of shadow. Very highly recommended, Le Corbeau opens this Friday (5/20), at Film Forum.

Clouzot’s Quai des Orfevres

Inspector Antoine makes Inspector Maigret look cheerful and chipper. The former was born into mean circumstances and his police career always keeps him close to his rough-and-tumble roots. He is not exaggerating when he claims to often identify with the criminals he investigates, but he still plays a ruthless game of cat-and-mouse with his prey. The flirtatious music hall star Jenny Lamour and her nebbish music director husband will learn that the hard way in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s freshly restored classic Quai des Orfèvres, which opens this Friday at Film Forum.

Jenny Lamour is a hot number, but Maurice Martineau most certainly is not. He is prone to fits of jealousy, but it is always misplaced. Lamour is a flirt, not a cheater—or so she assures him. She is also sure she can handle a cad like Brignon. The movie producer-tabloid publisher is sort of like the Weinstein of his era. The old reprobate frequently brings over naïve starlest for scandalous photo sessions with Dora Monier, a friend and neighbor of Lamour and Martineau. It is shady work, but a single woman has to make a living, especially when she is a “confirmed bachelorette.”

Unfortunately, Martineau made some rather public threats to Brignon before he was inconveniently discovered murdered. Technically, Martineau is the first to find the body, but he keeps quiet, because he had constructed an elaborate alibi with the intention of killing Brignon himself. Somebody just beat him to it. Unbeknownst to him, both his wife and Monier also passed through the crime scene that night, so the Columbo-like Antoine should be able to ferret plenty of inconsistencies in their stories to pester them with.

Quai is a film with a lot of sly noir details, but it is reportedly quite different from Stanislas-André Steeman’s source novel, because in those pre-internet days, screenwriter Jean Ferry did not have a copy handy, so he just adapted it from memory—so the story goes. Regardless, one of them must have had a solid familiarity with the backstage workings of music halls and the Quai des Orfèvres (the French national police known by their former address, 36 Quai des Orfèvres).

Either way, Quai becomes deliciously fun when Antoine ruthlessly sets his sights on Martineau, albeit in an almost sadistic kind of way. Celebrated theater actor Louis Jouvet is absolutely terrific as Inspector Antoine, who looks like a wisp of nothing, but displays guts of steel and the cunning of a fox. As Lamour and Martineau, Suzy Delair and Bernard Blier look like a horribly mismatched movie odd couple, yet we believe they have that weird sort of bickering chemistry that keeps them together. Simone Renant is wonderfully sad and sophisticated as Monier, while Charles Dullin is spectacularly sleazy as Brignon.

Like many of Clouzot’s great films, Quai basically plays us, but we never resent getting played. Entertainingly dark and cynical, it is a perfect example of the suspense auteur’s competitive advantage for film noir. Very highly recommended, Quai des Orfèvres opens this Friday (4/13) in New York, at Film Forum.

Fashion in Film Festival ’18: The Inferno Unseen

It is maybe the most infamous unfinished film ever, with its poignancy heightened by its tragic star. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is now probably every cineastes’ favorite lost movie, thanks to Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea Annonier’s documentary (released in New York in 2010), but Romy Schneider would probably be the favorite of far more movie fans had she not died prematurely at forty-three, from cardiac arrest. She should be considered an icon on the level of Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren. Viewers will understand that assertion when they watch The Inferno Unseen (trailer here), a collection of surviving rushes and screen tests from Clouzot’s film that never was, assembled into a master-cut by Rollo Smallcombe & Marketa Uhlirova, which screens on the opening night of the Fashion in Film Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Clouzot was often dubbed the “French Hitchcock,” but his work seemed dated during the era of the Nouvelle Vague. However, the suspense auteur had a vision that would have leap-frogged all the New Wavers. As he originally conceived Inferno, it would have told the story of a jealous older husband possibly driven to murderous extremes by his highly desirable young wife, but there would have been experimental interludes that would have expressed his psychological turmoil through surreal imagery. Despite a lot of money spent by Columbia Pictures, it never came together.

The Bromberg-Annonier documentary tells that story quite compellingly. In Unseen, Smallcombe & Uhlirova invite us to engage with the images directly, with minimal filters, aside from a smattering of commentary from Bromberg. Taking in this footage is a weird experience. You feel like you are watching the ghost of a film that was stillborn, yet still haunts the cinematic collective unconscious, very much like the work print of Orson Welles’ The Deep that screened at MoMA in 2015.

Of course, Schneider makes it even more haunting. She was one of the few movie stars who could exude sexual magnetism through the screen yet was also totally credible playing classy and cerebral characters. In fact, the surviving footage is surprising steamy, thanks to Schneider and French starlet Dany Carrel, who both rock the frocks and swimwear designed by legendary film costumer Jacques Fonteray (whose credits include Barbarella, Borsalino, and Moonraker). There is indeed good reason Inferno Unseen is opening the Fashion in Film Festival.

Clouzot’s Inferno is one of the most tantalizing what-could-have-been stories in cinema history, along with Jodorowsky’s Dune and half a dozen unfinished Welles films. The assembled images in Inferno Unseen help satisfy our lingering curiosity, while also inspiring elegiac feelings for something that never was. It is highly recommended as a viewing experience this Friday (4/6) at MoMI, with a live electronic score accompaniment by Smallcombe, while the earlier documentary is highly recommended as some truly fascinating cinema history when it premieres on MUBI this Saturday (4/7).

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno

It would have been a case of an old master dramatically one-upping the young turks, but it was not to be. Instead, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s radical foray into psychological expressive filmmaking cratered during its chaotic production. However, 185 cans of film survived of Clouzot’s obsessive tests and aborted three-week shoot, giving viewers a tantalizing sense of what his creative vision might have looked like had he successfully realized it in Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea Annonier’s documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (trailer here), which opens this Friday at the IFC Center.

Often labeled the French Hitchcock, Clouzot was one of the most successful French director’s of his time. Yet, the Nouvelle Vague was often rather dismissive of the man who helmed classics like Diabolique and The Wages of Fear. In 1964, he easily secured the cast he wanted for his prospective new film. Romy Schneider was to portray Odette, the young vivacious wife of middle-aged inn-keeper Marcel, played by Serge Reggiani. Initially tranquil in their wedded bliss, Marcel’s obsessive jealousy would lead to his emotional implosion. If this premise sounds vaguely familiar, it is because Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer, starring Emmanuelle Béart, was based on Clouzot’s original screenplay. Ultimately though, Chabrol made a Chabrol film rather than the deliberately experimental work Clouzot envisioned.

Clouzot filmed the couple’s daily lives in black-and-white, but Marcel’s jealous rages were rendered in psychedelic color. With morphing faces, surrealist dreamscapes, color inversions, and other bizarre optical innovations, Inferno would have been one strange head-trip. It was also somewhat racy, featuring Schneider, already an international superstar, and French starlet Dany Carrel bare-breasted. This was completely unlike any previous Clouzot film, yet Columbia Pictures gave him carte blanche to do as he pleased.

Many of the surviving crew members speculate the blank check from Hollywood might have been a mixed blessing, removing the imposed discipline of financial constraints from a production that spun out of control. Relations deteriorated on the set, until eventually the whole enterprise collapsed. Yet, the swirling images that survive sans soundtrack still have a disconcerting effect.

Bromberg and Medrea Annonier interview a number of Clouzot’s surviving collaborators on the ill-fated project, including his assistant director Costa-Gavras. They also stage readings of Clouzot’s script with Bérénice Bejo and Jacques Gamlin as the troubled couple, but this seems somewhat unnecessary given the existence of the Chabrol film (which the documentary never references). Still, the combined effect their original footage and Clouzot’s extant film and story-boards give an intriguing impression of what might have been.

Documenting some compelling cinema history, Bromberg and Medrea Annonier’s film will drastically alter cineastes’ perceptions of Clouzot as an auteur. Indeed, forty-some years later, his innovative visual effects still retain a disorienting effect, and even in such unusual archival footage, Romy Schneider is always worth watching on screen. A great cinematic “what-if’ story, Clouzot’s Inferno opens this Friday (7/16) in New York at the IFC Center.