The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (411 page)

His next film introduced the character of M. Hulot in a provincial seaside resort. The bourgeois on the beach was well suited to Tati’s gentle but penetrating eye for our absurdities. Once more, he stresses visual comedy in preference to sound, and organizes several long, complex, but delicious constructed gags. If only because the balance of personality and style was best preserved in this first presentation of Hulot,
Les Vacances
deserved its great international success.

After that, however, Hulot moved into the city so that his mournful feyness could show up the brutality of progress. The point was well made, but tritely thought out and endlessly reiterated. The comedy was more quietist and sometimes lost within the dense texture of Tati’s habitual long shot.
Mon Oncle
opposed two ways of living in a city with a simplistic monotony;
Playtime
was a study of the excesses of modern tourism, and
Trafic
was devoted to the undemanding proposition that the motor car is a convenience that is inconvenient.
Trafic
was pretty and empty, not worth the car chase sequence in Bogdanovich’s
What’s Up, Doc?
American farce, from Keaton and Groucho to
Bringing Up Baby
and
Doc?
, has always let social significance look after itself and concentrated instead on plausible character studies and inescapable narrative spirals. But the Tati man moves with the tendentious vagueness of a monk, garbed in salvation but not visibly human.

Bertrand Tavernier
, b. Lyon, France, 1941
1963: an episode from
Les Baisers
(s). 1973:
L’Horloger de St. Paul/The Watchmaker
. 1975:
Que la Fête Commence/Let Joy Reign Supreme
. 1976:
Le Juge et l’Assassin/The Judge and the Assassin
. 1977:
Des Enfants Gâtés/Spoiled Children
. 1979:
La Mort en Direct/Deathwatch
. 1980:
Une Semaine de Vacances/A Week’s Holiday
. 1981:
Coup de Torchon/Clean Slate
. 1983:
Mississippi Blues
(d) (codirected with Robert Parrish). 1984:
Un Dimanche à la Compagne/Sunday in the Country
. 1986:
’Round Midnight; La Passion Béatrice/Beatrice
. 1989:
La Vie et Rien d’Autre/Life and Nothing But; Lyon, Regard Intérieur
(d). 1990:
Daddy Nostalgie
. 1992:
La Guerre sans Nom
(d);
L627
. 1994:
La Fille de d’Artagnan
. 1995:
L’Appât/Fresh Bait
. 1996:
Capitaine Conan
. 1997:
La Lettre
(TV). 1998:
De l’Autre Côté du Périph
(d) (TV). 1999:
Ça Commence Aujourd’hui
. 2001:
Les Enfants de Thiès
(TV). 2002:
Laissez-passer/Safe Conduct
. 2004:
Holy Lola
. 2008:
In the Electric Mist
. 2010:
La Princesse de Montpensier
.

The author of any would-be meticulous yet helplessly emotional work of cinema reference must give a special salute to Bertrand Tavernier. When we last met—on the streets of Telluride in 1990 (he was there with
Daddy Nostalgie
)—greetings quickly turned to his overpowering need to have an answer, “Tell me, if you can, exactly what is the year of birth for Robert Towne?” Such are the great enigmas of the compiler’s life.

Tavernier was engaged on
50 Ans de Cinéma Americain
, the work that he and Jean-Pierre Coursodon published in 1991—a much enlarged sequel to their 1970 book,
30 Ans de Ciné Americain
. Of course—as with Cole Porter observing Rodgers and Hart—one may marvel that it took two of them to do it. Nevertheless, and although only in French still,
50 Ans
is a work of love and scholarship worthy of two eighty-year-olds, yet written with the
essential
arrogance that peaks in the years seventeen to twenty-three. Bertrand is one of those non-Americans whose cherishing of the byways of Hollywood cinema shocks most Americans. They would be more shocked still if they could ever grasp that this very important filmmaker has a faith in knowing the history of the medium that feeds naturally into his own work.

As a youth, he founded a cinema club. He went on to be not just a ceaseless gatherer of facts and anecdotes but a critic and then a publicist in the French film business. He wrote for
Cahiers du Cinéma
and
Positif
, and as a publicist he worked for Melville, Kazan, Losey, Ford, and Walsh. When a publicist can retain his hero-worship without shame or sigh, then that man is possessed of mighty love, or need.

That career, and Tavernier’s lifelong vocation as a chronicler, have left time for him to be a director. After two decades, the most important thing to say about Tavernier is how versatile he is, how prepared for change. Further, while his films do benefit from American virtues (of a past age, admittedly)—intricate but rapid narratives, fluent mise-en-scène, fine acting—he has never aped American styles. He is an entirely French director, close to the generation of the New Wave, yet less concerned with formal innovation and more anxious to recreate the moral ambiguities of, say, Renoir, Jacques Becker, Melville, and Grémillon.

The Watchmaker
was a Simenon adaptation, set in Lyon, and using Philippe Noiret, who would come to embody the complexities of a leading male role for Tavernier.
Let Joy Reign Supreme
is costume history, set in 1719, yet as urgent and real as Rossellini, and it has a superb passage where the mood of fete turns dark and foreboding. It remains a dazzling work of recreation, and a sign of the historian in Tavernier.

The Judge and the Assassin
was, once more, provincial and period, and it had a note of Hitchcock or Preminger in its probing of power and ethics.
Spoiled Children
is about a movie director thrown off course by an unexpected love affair. It established Tavernier’s great sense of sex driving human situations, and in Christine Pascal it demonstrated his skill with actresses.

Deathwatch
is science fiction, and for this writer something of a mess—perhaps because Tavernier had American actors to work with.
Coup de Torchon
took Jim Thompson’s pulp novel
Pop. 1280
and transferred it to French colonial Africa. It was not quite Thompson, but it gave Noiret a fine chance to be the ambiguous monster.
A Week’s Vacation
had Nathalie Baye as a woman who begins to reappraise the nature of her own family.
Mississippi Blues
was a fond, if somewhat undisciplined, documentary.

Sunday in the Country
is a masterpiece, his greatest film. It is period again, about an elderly painter and the ways in which his family regard him. The influence of Renoir was obvious, but the film was Tavernier’s in its study of elaborate relations and hallowed interiors, in its use of just one day for all the action, and in glorious performances from Louis Ducreux and Sabine Azema.

’Round Midnight
was a sentimental favorite, a misty biography, and an overly romantic view of a hero, perhaps. But it was redeemed by the sheer idiosyncrasy of Dexter Gordon and the beguiled coverage of the music. For two hours, Dexter was at peace.

Beatrice
seemed to me a second failure: it is a brilliant remaking of the Dark Ages, but its severity of mood is so misanthropic as to seem forced.
Life and Nothing But
is a second masterpiece, however, and a clear signal of Tavernier’s urge to become more and more the historian. He appeared as an interviewer in Marcel Ophüls’s
Hotel Terminus
, and that seems to have prompted him to make
La Guerre sans Nom
, an Ophülsian study of the Algerian war.

In the nineties, Tavernier films no longer opened regularly in America or England.
La Fille
was a swashbuckler with Sophie Marceau.
L’Appât
was a tough-minded film about young people living rough.
Capitaine Conan
concerned a rogue warrior in World War I.
Ça Commence
is the story of a teacher who faces impoverished children and a tangle of bureaucratic relations.
Safe Conduct
is the biggest of the late pictures—a study of filmmaking under the Nazi occupation, of resistance and survival: a great picture.

Tavernier has slowed.
In the Electric Mist
was a thriller, with Tommy Lee Jones, set in the South, but filming had problems and in the end actor and director emerged with their separate versions.

Paolo Taviani
, b. San Miniato, Italy, 1931; and
Vittorio Taviani
, b. San Miniato, Italy, 1929
1954:
San Miniato, Luglio ’44/San Miniato, July 1944
(s). 1962:
Un Uomo da Bruciare/A Man for Burning
(codirected with Valentino Orsini). 1963:
I Fuorilegge del Matrimonio
(codirected with Orsini). 1968:
Sovversivi
. 1969:
Sotto il Segno dello Scorpione/Under the Sign of Scorpio
. 1972:
San Michele Aveva un Gallo
. 1974:
Allonsanfan
. 1977:
Padre Padrone
. 1979:
Il Prato/The Meadow
. 1982:
La Notte di San Lorenzo/The Night of the Shooting Stars
. 1984:
Kaos
. 1987:
Good Morning, Babylon
. 1990:
Il Sole Anche di Notte/The Sun Also Shines at Night
. 1994:
Fiorile/Wild Flower
.

The Tavianis encourage everyone to regard their work as that of one being—for they collaborate intimately at every stage, taking turns in actually directing scenes. That kind of compassionate tolerance, the lack of ego or pride, is vital to the glorious fusion of neorealism and spiritual grace in their best work. Occasionally (as in
The Meadow
) their work has yielded to sentimentality. But more generally—in
Padre Padrone, The Night of the Shooting Stars
, and
Kaos
—the kindness is set in a rugged, even tough view of human survival and social realities. They are country people, most at ease with peasants, but declining to ennoble them. They are also folklorists enthralled by the way story begins to alter or elevate factual incidents.
Kaos
—based on Pirandello stories—is their most complex and absorbing picture.
Good Morning, Babylon
nearly works. It is the story of two stonemason brothers who build sets for D. W. Griffith (Charles Dance) and
Intolerance
. But it is a touch too whimsical—as if romanticism had covered up their ignorance of early Hollywood. It feels like a shot at the big time, whereas at their best the Tavianis exist in a sublime harmony with an intricate eternity.

It’s clear in hindsight that the Tavianis are the fruitful inheritors of Rossellini’s approach. They did assist him in the 1950s. And their achievement, like his, is part of that neglected topic—the way in which films have helped build the folk culture of societies for whom reading is still a challenging process. In that sense, the Tavianis’ films should also be related back to popular Italian music and theatre. And even their Griffith movie shows how far early cinema helped link drastically opposed ages of man.

Elizabeth Taylor
, b. London, 1932
It is years now since Elizabeth Taylor made a proper movie. Yet we know she’s there, still: her face blooms for perfume promotions, and she’s always likely to be standing up for AIDS victims or Michael Jackson. Are we meant to think she has the same sincerity for all three? Or is she resting? That would be sad—for at one time, she seemed uncommonly engaged, in movies and scandal alike.

Though her love life and the soap opera of her health seem to have been with us as long as the H-bomb, Liz was younger than, say, Audrey Hepburn or Rock Hudson. When they made
Giant
(56, George Stevens), she was actually a year younger than James Dean. Brought up at a time when sexuality on the screen was still creatively suppressed by censorship, her private life was paraded by the press as that of a love goddess. That now looks like the last flare of classic star charisma, the last time the public could read any imagined voluptuousness into a decorous, sulky princess of
House & Garden
. Image and reality clashed like cymbals in
Cleopatra
(63, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). But though the chaos of that film’s making included Liz dangerously ill and Liz exchanging a fourth husband (Eddie Fisher) for a fifth (Richard Burton), her Queen of the Nile emerged a plump, complacent clotheshorse.

She may have been apprehensive about the lurid extreme of public attention; intrigued by the label of “acting” that trailed from Burton; and she was surely perplexed by the way fashion accelerated away from the sexual mode of 1958–62. In
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(58, Richard Brooks), as Maggie the Cat, she seemed aggressively candid about sex. But by 1970, she was a throwback to elaborate hairdos, fussy clothes, and earnest emoting. She had not matured, but regressed into that vague eligible debutante—or her mother—that she once infused with indolent wantonness, half asleep from being stared at. Even her good films were prominently signaled as “serious acting,” whereas there was once a poignant osmosis of young Hollywood doll and the parts she played. It is the difference between her two Oscar films—
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(66, Mike Nichols) and
Butterfield 8
(60, Daniel Mann)—the first based on a clever stage play, the second on a hack novel. Martha in the first is a “character,” far deeper and more demanding. You can hear Taylor thinking out all her complexities as she plays. In
Butterfield 8
, however, she serenely inhabits the melodrama in exactly the way that cinema encourages audiences to live through its stars. Like the audience, Liz had a superstitious preoccupation with glamour.