|
Zazie
dans le Metro by
Michael Atkinson
Of
the French New Wavers, only Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette
and Eric Rohmer held on to the critical esteem the movement
had garnered from its inception. They managed it by virtue of
consistency – in the auteurist world of cinephiles, or of art
culture in general, nothing spells "genius" like years
of work that follows the same star, expresses the same ideas,
exudes the same sensibility. Claude Chabrol prioritized crime,
but then he made Madame Bovary (1991). Francois Truffaut,
probably the wave’s most popular figure, had always suffered
in the cognoscenti’s eyes for his own catholic range of interests
– romance, historical drama, Hitchcockian thriller, dystopian
sci-fi, whatever piqued his interest. Probably the most fickle
of the pack from the outset, Louis Malle has been impossible
to nail down: one minute he’s doing gritty New Wave street romances,
the next he’s making documentaries in India, the next he’s helming
bizarre international productions and then quirky American indies
and then autobiographical sagas in France again, and then literary
adaptations in London and New York. Along the way he’s had spectacular
box office successes and humiliating crash-&-burns the other
New Wavers never knew from. And he romanced Susan Sarandon,
Alexandra Stewart and Candice Bergen.
Even so, nothing in Malle’s filmography, or in the French New
Wave in general, could prep you for the departure that Zazie
dans le Metro (1960) represents – it’s like a film from
Mars, a very *French* Mars. It bears no discernible relation
to his previous two features (nor the pioneering documentary
made with and about Jacques Cousteau in 1956, The Silent
World), and amid the Wave’s DIY burst of indie creativity
it seems ludicrously out of place. Shot in effervescent color
while the movement’s other films were indelibly black-&-white,
and seemingly employing the entirety of a caught-in-amber 1960
Paris, Malle’s movie is an anarchist farce, baldly, bravely
approximating the worldview of its titular heroine, a spritely,
irreverent, vandalizing brat (an eleven-year-old tomboy named
Catherine Demongeot) as she visits her uncle (Philippe Noiret)
in Paris while her mother departs for a romantic weekend.
Zazie’s destructive, carefree asocial escapades make up what
passes for a plot; her uncle and an identity-swapping policeman
(Vittorio Caprioli) pursue her across the city (or sometimes
forget to, overwhelmed as they occasionally are with romantic
distractions), as she, a country girl, is determined to ride
the Metro trains whether they’re striking or not. Based on an
impish novel by Raymond Queneau, Malle’s film uses the whimsical
semi-story as license to break the bank in terms of absurdist
schtick and high-flying nonsense. Virtually no old-school gag-trick
is left out: silent-comedy fast motion, gobbledygook language
play (rather impressively translated into pidgin English in
the newly restored subtitles), in-camera sleight-of-hand, splats
of comic-book animation, musical impromptus, non sequitur cutaways,
social satire, surrealistic touches (random shoes sold at a
market play music when Zazie picks them up), even a climactic
food fight-slash-set-demolition. It’s a frenetic chaos, often
evoking the Keystone Kops but actually more often a mash-up
between the Three Stooges and Jacques Tati, as imagined by Tex
Avery.
The odd thing about Zazie is that it is rarely funny
– despite its Tasmanian Devil-like efforts toward silliness,
confrontational disrespect and loopy character excess (or, perhaps,
because of them), there’s precious little visual or textual
wit at work. There may be something more serious, more daring,
going on. There is a conscientious effort in Zazie
at facing down scandalous ideas with a kid’s guileless smile
– sex is on everyone’s minds and molestation of the heroine
is a constant threat (and a constant suspicion), albeit one
that never dampens Zazie’s spirits. In one breathtakingly taste-violating
scene, Zazie recounts to Caprioli’s cop over a messy plate of
mussels how her father came to be killed by her mother – alone
with the girl, the faceless patriarch was drunk and under the
impression that the mother was gone for a long shopping trip,
a scenario that we’re led to believe will lead to a pedophilic
episode. But as Zazie begins to tell what happened next, throwing
mussel shells into the sauce and splattering the jacket of her
fussy companion, Malle runs her dialogue backwards, and only
makes it intelligible again at the end of the story, in which
the mother returns, catches the bastard, and kills him with
an axe.
Perhaps Zazie isn’t even intended as a comedy – it
just uses the tropes of screen comedy (overuses them, you could
say) to express a child’s perspective, a point of view that
may be inherently joyful but isn’t necessarily funny, and which
sees the world of adults as an assbackwards carnival of pointless
propriety, sexually motivated idiocy and self-importance. The
film makes light of sexual deviance (of various kinds), not
merely because it is French (Malle made his first authentic
international splash in 1971 with Murmur of the Heart,
in which a moment of mother-son incest serves as the story’s
warm-hearted resolution), but because from a child’s position
sex is often preposterous, scary nonsense, fruitlessly pursued
at all costs by grown-ups who become foolish in its grip. Seen
this way, the elan that bubbles out of Malle’s film is not only
genuine but heroic.
The film is also, on the most superficial level, a time-trip
– back to the sizzling Paris of the late 1950s (never photographed
as pristinely as here), and back to the heyday of imported foreign
films in the US, when there were so many sexually frank European
films on the market that the American middle-class could organically
arrive at stereotypical ideas about what’s "French"
(or "Swedish," or "Italian"). Zazie
was one of those movies, a viewing experience that helped
erect a pop myth in our heads about woozily horny Frenchmen,
supercool French women (here, the cat-eyed Carla Marlier), a
perpetually sunny Paris where no one has a real job, and a France
where the pursuit of pleasure is the highest calling. Ironically,
of course, the point of Malle’s movie is that this vision belongs
only to a fidgety, troublemaking preadolescent. Reality is something
else altogether.
Michael
Atkinson writes for Turner Classic Movies.
|
