Louis Malle Retrospective in NYC
French director Louis Malle, while certainly celebrated and respected during his lifetime, somewhat lacks the cachet of his French New Wave contemporaries, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol. A few reasons can be cited for this. One is the eclectic and peripatetic nature of his films. Malle’s films took him to many diverse areas of the world; he made films in India, the United States, and England, as well as his native France. Also, his cinematic style wasn’t as immediately recognizable and easily imitated as, say, Godard. Malle followed his interests in many different directions, alternating between fiction and documentary, making it difficult to pin him down. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective, “Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle,” playing at New York’s Walter Reade Theater from June 24 through July 19, is a rare and valuable opportunity to assess this unique filmmaker’s place in the cinema pantheon. This near-complete retro shows us the complex variety of his oeuvre, and how he doesn’t fit easily into the category of “auteur” promulgated by his contemporaries.
Born in Thumeries, France in 1932, Malle’s privileged background (he was heir to a sugar-production dynasty) afforded him the financial independence to pursue his cinematic muse without having to worry about funding or finding a producer. Shortly after leaving IDHEC, France’s national film academy, he was asked by oceanographer Jacques Cousteau to co-direct The Silent World (1956), a film based on Cousteau’s best-selling book. Featuring impressive underwater photography (much of it shot by Malle himself), the film, while somewhat dated, is still a fascinating study of exploration and the drive to seek out the unknown.
This theme of exploration, and following the road less traveled, as it were, would be a major hallmark of Malle’s films. Many of the films feature protagonists who for various reasons veer from society’s accepted patterns of lifestyle and behavior. The Silent World won both the best documentary Oscar and the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival. It was an auspicious start to a career that would place him in many different milieus, and confirmed his status as “the lonely rebel,” to borrow the title from a biography of the filmmaker, the perpetual outsider who seemed to always have an affinity for the outcast.
Malle’s first feature, Elevator to the Gallows (1957), featuring Jeanne Moreau (a frequent star of Malle’s films), contained the hallmarks of what would later characterize the French New Wave: location shooting, dynamic visuals, allusions to American crime films, and an improvisational approach to filmmaking, finding its musical equivalent in Miles Davis’ score. Interestingly, Elevator to the Gallows shares more than a few affinities with Godard’s later debut, Breathless (1960).
Despite Malle’s congruence with the New Wave, his relationship to this movement was complex and ambiguous. Although stylistically his films had much in common with his contemporaries, and were championed by the filmmaker-critics of Cahiers du Cinema, he soon broke with their insistence on auteurism, and opposed the very idea of linking disparate filmmakers into a single group.
Some of Malle’s early films were quite controversial, even shocking for their time. His second feature, the still-astonishing The Lovers (1958), again features Moreau as a newspaper publisher’s wife, who has a not-so-hidden love life with another man. Later, after her car breaks down on the road, she meets an archeology student (Jean-Marc Bory), and invites him to her home. After spending one passionate night with him, she decides to leave her husband, her daughter, and her lover, walking away from the life she has so carefully constructed.
This scenario was an affront to bourgeois morality, depicting the casualness with which Moreau’s character carried on her affairs. The pivotal sex scene between Moreau and Bory was quite explicit for its time, and according to critic Hugo Frey, is perhaps the first filmic depiction (in mainstream cinema) of a female orgasm. The film was famously tried for obscenity in the U.S. and restricted in France to filmgoers above the age of 16.
Malle’s films were amazingly eclectic, even in this early period. He followed up the exuberant and surrealistic comedy Zazie dans le metro (1960) and A Very Private Affair (1961) (featuring the considerable star power of screen icons Brigitte Bardot and Marcello Mastroianni) with the somber and pessimistic The Fire Within (1963), chronicling the final days of a suicidal alcoholic. In this film, Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet) wants to remain in the cocoon of the clinic where he is receiving treatment for his alcoholism, despite his doctor’s insistence that he is ready to rejoin society.
The aftermath of the recent colonial war in Algeria, although only briefly mentioned, hangs heavily over the proceedings. Alain’s depression over his disconnection from the world and people around him, and his distress over his estrangement from his wife, is a reflection of the dark mood in France at that time. Malle effectively captures his protagonist’s claustrophobia and despair, aided by the strikingly moody cinematography of Ghislain Cloquet. The Fire Within, though one of Malle’s lesser-known films, is one of his greatest, and a major discovery of the series.
In the late 1960s, faced with turmoil in his private life and becoming dissatisfied with filmmaking, Malle had the opportunity in 1967 to travel to India to present a series of recent French films, including The Fire Within. Enamored with the culture and the people, he returned to India the next year with a three-man crew to shoot footage of the life around him. This resulted in the documentaries Calcutta (1968-69) and the seven-hour TV series Phantom India (1968-69). For the rest of his career, he would alternate between fiction and documentary films.
The documentaries afforded Malle the opportunity to recharge his creative batteries and explore themes and film techniques that would surface in his feature films. Malle returned from India more politically involved than in the past. He joined in the drive to reinstate Henri Langois, the recently ousted director of the Cinematheque Francaise, and was also instrumental in suspending the 1968 Cannes Film Festival.
Malle’s 70’s films would once again court controversy. Murmur of the Heart (1971) was a semi-autobiographical portrait about the relationship between a fifteen-year old boy and his mother that was eye-opening in its frank depiction of incest. Lacombe, Lucien (1974), set during the Nazi occupation of France (a subject Malle would later return to in his celebrated autobiographical film Au revoir les enfants), depicts the travails of a callow 17-year old.
He casually joins a group of French collaborators with the Nazi regime, despite the fact that his own father was a member of the Resistance. Lacombe, Lucien drew ire in some quarters for being too sympathetic to its amoral protagonist, but the film is in fact a moving and complex evocation of the tense mood of the time, where betrayal, exposure, torture, and death was the order of the day.
By the 1980’s, Louis Malle had settled in the United States, where he continued to be provocative and incisive. Pretty Baby (1978), featuring a very young Brooke Shields, raised eyebrows with its portrayal of life in a New Orleans brothel. Atlantic City (1980), another of Malle’s masterpieces, contained one of the greatest of performances by Burt Lancaster as a small-time gangster on the Jersey shore. The film also features an affecting turn by Susan Sarandon as his much younger girlfriend. Atlantic City was another career triumph for Malle, nominated for five Oscars and awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. My Dinner with Andre (1981) was equally successful, celebrated for the witty banter of its two stars, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory.
Malle continued to make documentaries in the U.S. His unique outsider’s perspective allowed him to create keenly perceptive portraits of America, often seen through the eyes of immigrants and others outside the mainstream. God’s Country (1986) is an insightful look at the town of Glencove, Minnesota, comparing life there in 1979, when he first began filming, and when he returned in 1985, in the midst of the Reagan recession. During this time of hardship, the latent hatred and resentment of some of the population towards blacks and foreigners comes to the surface, and exposes the darker undercurrents beneath this seemingly idyllic place.
Malle returned to France and the subject of the Occupation with Au revoir les enfants (1987), based on his experiences in a Catholic boarding school during this time. He avoided the earlier criticism of Lacombe, Lucien by more strongly emphasizing the evil that occurred and the resistance it engendered. Malle continued to make films in the U.S. and Europe until his death from cancer in 1995. His final film, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), an adaptation of Andre Gregory’s modern dress production of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya (translated by David Mamet) is a fascinating meditation on the nature of both theater and film, and the intersections between life and performance. It was a fitting end to an eclectic and brilliant career.
“Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle” is highly recommended to anyone who wants to follow the progress of this fascinating filmmaker and indeed, anyone who enjoys well-crafted and thought-provoking cinema.
