I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  The subject matter of Shoot the Piano Player, as of Breathless, seems small and unimportant compared to the big themes of so many films, but it only seems small: it is an effort to deal with contemporary experience in terms drawn out of that experience. For both Godard and Truffaut a good part of this experience has been moviegoing, but this is just as much a part of their lives as reading is for a writer. And what writer does not draw upon what he has read?

  A number of reviewers have complained that in his improvisatory method, Truffaut includes irrelevancies, and they use as chief illustration the opening scene — a gangster who is running away from pursuers bangs into a telephone pole, and then is helped to his feet by a man who proceeds to walk along with him, while discussing his marital life. Is it really so irrelevant? Only if you grew up in that tradition of the well-made play in which this bystander would have to reappear as some vital link in the plot. But he’s relevant in a different way here: he helps to set us in a world in which his semi-normal existence seems just as much a matter of chance and fringe behavior and simplicity as the gangster’s existence — which begins to seem semi-normal also. The bystander talks; we get an impression of his way of life and his need to talk about it, and he goes out of the film, and that is that: Truffaut would have to be as stodgy and dull witted as the reviewers to bring him back and link him into the story. For the meaning of these films is that these fortuitous encounters illuminate something about our lives in a way that the old neat plots don’t.

  There is a tension in the method; we never quite know where we are, how we are supposed to react — and this tension, as the moods change and we are pulled in different ways, gives us the excitement of drama, of art, of our life. Nothing is clear-cut, the ironies crisscross and bounce. The loyal, courageous heroine is so determined to live by her code that when it’s violated, she comes on too strong, and the piano player is repelled by her inability to respect the weaknesses of others. Thugs kidnaping a little boy discuss their possessions with him — a conversation worthy of a footnote in Veblen’s passages on conspicuous expenditure.

  Only a really carefree, sophisticated film maker could bring it off — and satisfy our desire for the unexpected that is also right. Truffaut is a director of incredible taste; he never carries a scene too far. It seems extraordinarily simple to complain that a virtuoso who can combine many moods, has not stuck to one familiar old mood — but this is what the reviews seem to amount to. The modern novel has abandoned the old conception that each piece must be in place — abandoned it so thoroughly that when we read something like Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes in which each piece does finally fit in place, we are astonished and amused at the dexterity of the accomplishment. That is the way Wilson works and it’s wonderfully satisfying, but few modern novelists work that way; and it would be as irrelevant to the meaning and quality of, say, Tropic of Capricorn to complain that the plot isn’t neatly tied together like Great Expectations, as to complain of the film Shoot the Piano Player that it isn’t neatly tied together like The Bicycle Thief. Dwight Macdonald wrote that Shoot the Piano Player deliberately mixed up “three genres which are usually kept apart; crime melodrama, romance, and slapstick comedy.” And, he says, “I thought the mixture didn’t jell, but it was an exhilarating try.” What I think is exhilarating in Shoot the Piano Player is that it doesn’t “jell” and that the different elements keep us in a state of suspension — we react far more than we do to works that “jell.” Incidentally, it’s not completely accurate to say that these genres are usually kept apart: although slapstick rarely enters the mixture except in a far-out film like Beat the Devil or Lovers and Thieves or the new The Manchurian Candidate, there are numerous examples of crime melodrama–romance–comedy among well-known American films — particularly of the forties — for example The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not. (Not all of Truffaut’s models are cheap B pictures.)

  Perhaps one of the problems that American critics and audiences may have with Shoot the Piano Player is a peculiarly American element in it — the romantic treatment of the man who walks alone. For decades our films were full of these gangsters, outcasts, detectives, cynics; Bogart epitomized them all — all the men who had been hurt by a woman or betrayed by their friends and who no longer trusted anybody. And although I think most of us enjoyed this romantic treatment of the man beyond the law, we rejected it intellectually. It was part of hack moviemaking — we might love it but it wasn’t really intellectually respectable. And now here it is, inspired by our movies, and coming back to us via France. The heroine of Shoot the Piano Player says of the hero, “Even when he’s with somebody, he walks alone.” But this French hero carries his isolation much farther than the earlier American hero: when his girl is having a fight on his behalf and he is impelled to intervene, he says to himself, “You’re out of it. Let them fight it out.” He is brought into it; but where the American hero, once impelled to move, is a changed man and, redeemed by love or patriotism or a sense of fair play, he would take the initiative, save his girl, and conquer everything, this French hero simply moves into the situation when he must, when he can no longer stay out of it, and takes the consequences. He finds that the contact with people is once again defeating. He really doesn’t believe in anything; the American hero only pretended he didn’t.

  Breathless was about active, thoughtless young people; Shoot the Piano Player is about a passive, melancholic character who is acted upon. Yet the world that surrounds the principal figures in these two movies is similar: the clowns in one are police, in the other gangsters, but this hardly matters. What we react to in both is the world of absurdities that is so much like our own world in which people suddenly and unexpectedly turn into clowns. But at the center is the sentimentalist — Belmondo in Breathless, Aznavour here — and I think there can be no doubt that both Godard and Truffaut love their heroes.

  There are incidentally a number of little in-group jokes included in the film; a few of these are of sufficiently general interest to be worth mentioning, and, according to Andrew Sarris, they have been verified by Truffaut. The piano player is given the name of Saroyan as a tribute to William Saroyan, particularly for his volume of stories The Man on the Flying Trapeze, and also because Charles Aznavour, like Saroyan, is Armenian (and, I would surmise, for the playful irony of giving a life-evading hero the name of one of the most rambunctious of life-embracing writers). One of the hero’s brothers in the film is named Chico, as a tribute to the Marx Brothers. And the impresario in the film, the major villain of the work, is called Lars Schmeel, as a disapproving gesture toward someone Truffaut does not admire — the impresario Lars Schmidt, known to us simply as Ingrid Bergman’s current husband, but apparently known to others — and disliked by Truffaut — for his theatrical activities in Paris.

  If a more pretentious vocabulary or a philosophic explanation will help: the piano player is intensely human and sympathetic, a character who empathizes with others, and with whom we, as audience, empathize; but he does not want to accept the responsibilities of his humanity — he asks only to be left alone. And because he refuses voluntary involvement, he is at the mercy of accidental forces. He is, finally, man trying to preserve his little bit of humanity in a chaotic world — it is not merely a world he never made but a world he would much rather forget about. But schizophrenia cannot be willed and so long as he is sane, he is only partly successful: crazy accidents happen — and sometimes he must deal with them. That is to say, no matter how far he retreats from life, he is not completely safe. And Truffaut himself is so completely engaged in life that he pleads for the piano player’s right to be left alone, to live in his withdrawn state, to be out of it. Truffaut’s plea is, of course, “Don’t shoot the piano player.”

  Jules and Jim

  When the Legion of Decency condemned Jules and Jim, the statement read: the story has been developed “in a context alien to Christian and traditional natural morality.” It certainly has. The Legion
went on to say: “If the director has a definite moral viewpoint to express, it is so obscure that the visual amorality and immorality of the film are predominant and consequently pose a serious problem for a mass medium of entertainment.” It would be possible to make a fraudulent case for the film’s morality by pointing out that the adulterous individuals suffer and die, but this is so specious and so irrelevant to the meanings and qualities of the work that surely the Legion, expert in these matters, would recognize that it was casuistry. The Legion isn’t wrong about the visual amorality either, and yet, Jules and Jim is not only one of the most beautiful films ever made, and the greatest motion picture of recent years, it is also, viewed as a work of art, exquisitely and impeccably moral. Truffaut does not have “a definite moral viewpoint to express” and he does not use the screen for messages or special pleading or to sell sex for money; he uses the film medium to express his love and knowledge of life as completely as he can.

  The film is adapted from Henri-Pierre Roché’s autobiographical novel, written when he was seventy-four, with some additional material from his even later work, Deux Anglaises et le Continent. If some of us have heard of Roché, it’s probably just the scrap of information that he was the man who introduced Gertrude Stein to Picasso — but this scrap shouldn’t be discarded, because both Stein and Picasso are relevant to the characters and period of Jules and Jim. Roché is now dead, but the model for Catherine, the Jeanne Moreau role, is a German literary woman who is still alive; it was she who translated Lolita into German. Truffaut has indicated, also, that some of the material which he improvised on location was suggested by Apollinaire’s letters to Madeleine — a girl whom he had met for a half-hour on a train.

  The film begins in Paris before the First World War. Jules the Austrian (Oskar Werner) and Jim the Frenchman (Henri Serre) are Mutt and Jeff, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, devoted friends, contentedly arguing about life and letters. Catherine enters their lives, and Jules and Jim try to have both the calm of their friendship and the excitement of her imperious, magical presence. She marries Jules who can’t hold her, and in despair he encourages Jim’s interest in her — “That way she’ll still be ours.” But Catherine can’t subjugate Jim: he is too independent to be dominated by her whims. Not completely captivated, Jim fails to believe in her love when she most desperately offers it. She kills herself and him.

  The music, the camera and editing movement, the rhythm of the film carry us along without pauses for reflection. Truffaut doesn’t linger; nothing is held too long, nothing is overstated or even stated. Perhaps that’s why others besides the Legion of Decency have complained: Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic says that Jules and Jim “loses sight of purposes . . . It is a confusion of the sheer happiness of being in the studio . . . with the reason for being there.” Truffaut, the most youthfully alive and abundant of all the major film directors, needs a reason for making movies about as much as Picasso needs a reason for picking up a brush or a lump of clay. And of what film maker could a reference to a studio be less apt? He works everywhere and with anything at hand. Kauffmann says of Jules and Jim, “There is a lot less here than meets the eye,” and Dwight Macdonald, who considers Kauffmann his only peer, is reassured: “one doesn’t want to be the only square,” he writes. If it gives him comfort to know there are two of them . . .

  What is the film about? It’s a celebration of life in a great historical period, a period of ferment and extraordinary achievement in painting and music and literature. Together Jules and Jim have a peaceful friendship (and Jim has a quiet love affair with Gilberte) but when Jules and Jim are with Catherine they feel alive. Anything may happen — she’s the catalyst, the troublemaker, the source of despair as well as the source of joy. She is the enchantress who makes art out of life.

  At the end, Jules, who has always given in to everything in order to keep Catherine, experiences relief at her death, although he has always delighted in the splendor she conferred on his existence. (Don’t we all experience this sort of relief when we say goodbye to a particularly brilliant houseguest?) The dullness in Jules, the bourgeois under the Bohemian, the passivity is made clear from the outset: it is why the girls don’t fall in love with him. At the end, the excitements and the humiliations are over. He will have peace, and after a lifetime with Catherine he has earned it.

  Catherine is, of course, a little crazy, but that’s not too surprising. Pioneers can easily become fanatics, maniacs. And Catherine is part of a new breed — the independent, intellectual modern woman, so determined to live as freely as a man that while claiming equality she uses every feminine wile to gain extra advantages, to demonstrate her superiority, and to increase her power position. She is the emerging twentieth-century woman satirized by Strindberg, who also adored her; she is the woman with rights and responsibilities who entered Western literature after the turn of the century and has almost always been seen by the male authors as demanding the rights but refusing the responsibilities. This is the traditional male view of the feminist, and the film’s view is not different. Don’t we now hear complaints that Negroes are so sensitive about their rights that you can’t treat them casually and equally as you would anybody else, you can’t disagree on a job or question their judgment, you have to defer to their sensitivities and treat them as if they were super-whites — always in the right? So it is with Catherine.

  Catherine, in her way, compensates for the homage she demands. She has, despite her need to intrude and to dominate, the gift for life. She holds nothing in reserve; she lives out her desires; when she can’t control the situation, she destroys it. Catherine may be wrong-headed, as those who aspire to be free spirits often are (and they make this wrongness more visible than pliable, amiable people do), but she is devoid of hypocrisy and she doesn’t lie. In one of the most upsetting and odd little scenes in the film she takes out a bottle which she says is “vitriol for lying eyes” — and Jim doesn’t react any more than if it were aspirin. Catherine the free spirit has the insanity of many free spirits — she believes that she knows truth from lies, right from wrong. Her absolutism is fascinating, but it is also rather clearly morally insane. She punishes Jim because he has not broken with Gilberte, though she has not broken with Jules. Only the relationships she sets and dominates are right. Catherine suffers from the fatal ambivalence of the “free and equal” woman toward sex: she can leave men, but if they leave her, she is as abandoned and desolate, as destroyed and helpless as any clinging vine (perhaps more destroyed — she cannot even ask for sympathy). Jules and Jim is about the impossibility of freedom, as it is about the many losses of innocence.

  All these elements are elliptical in the film — you catch them out of the corner of your eye and mind. So much happens in the span of an hour and three quarters that even if you don’t take more than a fraction of the possible meanings from the material, you still get far more than if you examined almost any other current film, frame by frame, under a microscope. Jules and Jim is as full of character and wit and radiance as Marienbad is empty, and the performance by Jeanne Moreau is so vivid that the bored, alienated wife of La Notte is a faded monochrome. In Jules and Jim alienation is just one aspect of her character and we see how Catherine got there: she becomes alienated when she can’t get her own way, when she is blocked. It is not a universal condition as in La Notte (neither Jules nor Jim shares in it): it is her developing insanity as she is cut off from what she wants and no longer takes pleasure in life.

  Jules and Jim are portraits of artists as young men, but they are the kind of artists who grow up into something else — they become specialists in some field, or journalists; and the dedication to art of their youth becomes the civilizing influence in their lives. The war blasts the images of Bohemian life; both Jules and Jim are changed, but not Catherine. She is the unreconstructed Bohemian who does not settle down. She needed more strength, more will than they to live the artist’s life — and this determination is the uncivilizing factor. Bohemianism has ma
de her, underneath all the graces, a moral barbarian: freedom has come to mean whatever she says it is. And when she loses what she believes to be freedom — when she can no longer dictate the terms on which Jim will live — she is lost, isolated. She no longer makes art out of life: she makes life hell.

  She chooses death, and she calls on Jules to observe her choice, the last demonstration of her power over life and death, because Jules by a lifetime of yielding his own freedom to her has become, to her, a witness. He can only observe grand gestures; he cannot make them. In the last moment in the car, when self-destruction is completely determined, she smiles the smile of the statue: this was the mystery that drew them to her — the smile that looks so easy and natural but which is self-contained and impenetrable.

  Jules and Jim ends after the burning of the books in Germany, the end of an epoch, as Truffaut has said, for intellectual Bohemians like Jules and Jim. The film is, in a way, a tribute to the books that were burned; I can’t think of another movie so full of books, and of references to books and of writing and translating books. Books were the blood of these characters: they took their ideas of life from books, and writing books was their idea of living.

  Jules and Jim is, among other things, the best movie ever made about what I guess most of us think of as the Scott Fitzgerald period (though it begins much earlier). Catherine jumping into the waters of the Seine to demonstrate her supremacy over Jules and Jim, who are discussing the weaknesses of women, is not unlike Zelda jumping over that balustrade. This film treatment of the period is a work of lyric poetry and a fable of the world as playground, a work of art as complex and suggestive in its way as the paintings and poetry and novels and music of the period that it is based on. It is a tribute to the school of Paris when art and Paris were synonymous; filmically it is a new school of Paris — and the new school of Paris is cinema. You go to movies, you talk movies, and you make movies. The young French painters don’t compare with the Americans, and French literature is in a fancy trance, but oh, how the young French artists can make movies!