Louis Malle

  • Black Moon (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) If you’ve understood why every scene fits in Black Moon, you have a good career as a film vulgarizer ahead of you. Considering that even writer-director Louis Malle recognized that the film is more based on dream logic than anything else, explaining it would be quite an achievement. This is one of those films where the Wikipedia plot summary is a lifeline. Taking place in an indefinite period with hazy characters acting out in crazy ways, Black Moon is supposed to be a dream given form, with various elements just mixed in an experimental fashion. It’s clearly something – I mean, I don’t think there’s any other film going for those same images and there’s always something to be said for filmmakers who are able to just be as weird and personal as they can be under the constraints of a film production. (Malle reportedly shot most of the film on or near his own estate in the French countryside, with copious nature footage offered as proof.)  I’m really not the target audience for Black Moon – and I’m struggling right now with the impulsion to simply dismiss it out of hand. But if you’re in the mood for an oneiric, occasionally nightmarish fantasy, then this is for you. Maybe solely for you.

  • Zazie dans le métro (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) It’s always thrilling to find an older movie that plays like a far more recent one, and it would be easy to assume that Zazie dans le métro is much more modern than its 1960 copyright date. An all-out comedy that is never afraid to be absurd or nonsensical in its pursuit of laughs, it features a foul-mouthed ten-year-old girl as she travels around Paris, wreaking havoc alongside an ensemble cast of characters. But no mere plot summary can do justice to the fast-paced, anarchic gags that pepper the film. Owing as much to Looney Tunes cartoons as any other film tradition, Zazie dans le métro reaches a comic peak in a foot chase sequence in which the young Zazie tries to escape a pedophile (yes, you read that right – and it’s funny) while the film goes crazy around them, with a zippy succession of gags that escape physics and logic just for jokes. Not that the rest of the film is a slouch, with sequences set at the Eiffel Tower, or a slapstick fight destroying not just a restaurant, but the set of the restaurant. Louis Malle’s direction is self-assured and crazy at the same time, with a succession of short quick cuts that do much to make this film an honorary precursor of the spoof comedy genre of the 1980s. Catherine Demongeot is quite good and game as the titular Zazie, while an incredibly young Phillipe Noiret (unrecognizable without moustache if it wasn’t for the distinctive voice) is having a lot of fun monologuing atop the Eiffel Tower. Zazie dans le métro is a pure joy to watch, especially if you go into it expecting some kind of dull French Nouvelle Vague forerunner – it’s more Zucker-Abrams-Zucker than Truffaut-Godard. I expect to rewatch it soon.

  • Les amants [The Lovers] (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) If you’re looking for the film that originated the famous Supreme-Court-approved “definition” of pornography, “I know it when I see it,” then Les amants should be on your viewing list. (For the record, the writer of that statement, Justice Potter Stewart, meant that the film was not pornography.)  It should also be there because it’s an early effort from French director Louis Malle and it’s a splendid exemplar of French cinema in all of its specific sensibilities. Moving away from the film noir style of his debut film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Malle here goes to that old French cinema chestnut: the married woman having an affair to emancipate herself. That recognition that women may find contentment away from inattentive husbands probably fuelled much of the American outrage about the film – seen from a twenty-first century perspective, Les amants has mellowed into an unremarkable drama of adultery, with a short moment of nudity to make it clear they’re not playing pattycakes. The film features Jeanne Moreau in a star-making role and she does deserve the attention she got – she’s at the centre of the film, and her performance spans quite an emotional range. As for the film itself, it’s now far more conventional than it was back then. Some episodes are still amusing (such as the sequence that brings the protagonist in contact with her lover, and then makes it clear that he’s not going away as quickly as she hoped for) and the feel of a French drama taking on matters of happiness, sex and love remains very distinctive. If you don’t know the film’s storied history in the United States, you may find yourself lulled into complacency about the very familiar result. But let’s cut Malle some slack here: Les amants predates almost all of the French Nouvelle Vague, so what was provocative then soon passed into comfortable norms within years of its release.

  • Histoires extraordinaires [Spirits of the Dead] (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, on Cable TV, March 2022) There was a small anthology movie craze in the 1960s, and it’s a surprise to take a look at the credits for Histoires extraordinaires and realize that no less than Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini (!!!) got together to deliver the film’s segments, all loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe short stories. The result, unfortunately, is not quite up to expectations: Vadim goes for medieval fantasy, Malle for a sombre crime story and Fellini digs into the inner life of an actor. I’m not going to pretend that it’s all dull. There’s quite a bit of fun seeing how Vadim directs then-wife Jane Fonda play an evil countess opposite Peter Fonda. Malle has a bit of fun re-creating an atmosphere of crime, religion and dissection with Brigitte Bardot and Alan Delon along the way. Still, neither of those two segments quite get up to where they should be. I’ll be kinder to Fellini’s concluding segment, as his exuberant approach to the material (Terence Stamp playing an alcoholic actor losing his grip on reality while attending an awards ceremony) feels far more exciting—in itself and in having Fellini do what he did best—than the rest. I’m disappointed by aspects of that third segment, most notably the drawn-out ending that takes far too long to deliver a foregone conclusion, but it’s easily the best of all three. In the end, though, Histoires extraordinares can’t quite transform a terrific cast and intriguing premise into better-than-average piece of entertainment. And that certainly explains why anthology films have remained such marginal propositions for the past few decades: it’s really, really difficult to get an even level of quality and enjoyment out of them.

  • Au revoir les enfants (1987)

    Au revoir les enfants (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) There’s a familiar quality to the blend of elements that Au revoir les enfants uses so intently — this isn’t the first film to confront the innocence of kids to the horrors of war, or to take less-obvious means to talk about the holocaust. But that doesn’t take away anything from the success of the result. Written and directed by Louis Malle from autobiographical experience, much of the film is set at a French boarding school during the Nazi occupation of France, as schoolboys in their early teens learn to deal with new schoolmates that are eventually revealed to be Jewish. Much of the film is about the growing friendship between the protagonist and a Jewish boy until, inevitably, the Gestapo comes knocking to take them away. For a movie in which not much happens during most of its running time (with much of it soberly directed as well), the ending is unexpectedly powerful, even more so given its restraint: We all know what’s going to happen to those Jewish kids and their older sympathizers, and the very final voiceover (by Malle himself) only drives the point home. There have been many movies revolving around the same topic, but Au revoir les enfants still packs a punch.

  • Ascenseur pour l’échafaud [Elevator to the Gallows] (1958)

    Ascenseur pour l’échafaud [Elevator to the Gallows] (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) French critics may have named the genre, but film noir is, in my mind, a clearly American art form. Still, writer-director Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud shows how close French cinema ever got to the heart of noir in several decades of affectionate homages. We can see here the bridge from noir to Nouvelle Vague, strong narrative links to Godard’s À bout de souffle, and playful stylishness. The plot is roman de gare stuff, with the protagonist murdering his boss (who’s also his lover’s husband) and seeing everyone’s lives spinning out of control in the best fatalistic tradition of the genre, leading all the way to an implacable conclusion. What the plot won’t tell you, however, is Malle’s sense of cool in directing this picture (his first!), the impressive performance offered by Jeanne Moreau, Miles Davis’ score, and the great black-and-white cinematography used to depict those crucial few days of the narrative. Ascenseur pour l’échafaud is not a perfect film, and its striking elements were later perfected by similar movies by French directors (all of whom, apparently, did a noir homage at some point or another), but it’s still reasonably entertaining to watch and emblematic of where French cinema was headed by the late 1950s.

  • Atlantic City, USA (1981)

    Atlantic City, USA (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) Cultural decades never end on December 31st of their tenth year—they linger on for a while and in retrospect often begin before they chronologically do. This is even truer for “The Seventies” in cinema, often used interchangeably with “New Hollywood”—a period in which American filmmakers understood that they could say anything without being beholden to the censorship of the Production Code or the aesthetic standards of glamorous Classic Hollywood. There was plenty of innovation during that decade, but also a lot of depressing and ugly films. Atlantic City, USA feels like one of the last echoes of that period, and another one of the reasons why the 1980s placed emphasis back on entertainment and spectacle. In it, director Louis Malle delivers a decidedly unglamorous vision of Atlantic City in the early eighties, focusing on an ensemble of characters eking out a meagre living in the shadow of the casinos. He does work with a great pair of lead actors at very different stages of their careers: Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon. Much of the story has to do with small-time scams and criminal enterprises—and not in a flashy film-noir way but as a disreputable grimy drama. Many of the characters are deluded in their own ways, leading to a very depressing result. While there are a few moments of comedy, it’s not fun to watch and not meant to be fun to watch. Given the film’s origins as a Franco-Canadian production, there are a surprising number of Canadian and French references in the story (starting with a lead character coming from Saskatchewan!), as well as Canadian actors in supporting roles. The film certainly has its fans—It figures on a few best-of lists, earned a few Academy Awards nominations, and got added early on to the National Film Registry. Still, Atlantic City, USA is perhaps best seen as one of the last statements made by New Hollywood before it got replaced by a far more commercial crowd-pleasing aesthetic. I’ll let others mourn for it.