‘I, of course, was privileged,’ Quentin Crisp once told me, ‘as was my generation. For we saw silent films with silent eyes.’ Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, almost impossibly, lets us know what that lost, lush, molten miracle was like.
It brings it off with considerable courage. Imagine going to, say, Miramax with this pitch. ‘It’s a silent film about the coming of sound, with elements of Singin’ In The Rain, A Star Is Born, The Lost Weekend, The Kid, City Lights, The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, The Count Of Monte Christo, Limelight, Broadway Melody 1935, Blue Angel, Sunset Boulevarde and The Last Command; and it has a lush, hundred-piece orchestra playing at all times for no more than a hundred and ten minutes and this cute little dog who saves the hero when he’s burning himself to death in a flaming tangle of his movies. The stars are two unknowns, and he’s got big bright snaggly teeth, but they tap-dance together very well.’
‘Tap-dance, in a silent film?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Get out of here.’
Nonetheless, it works in a way that, for me, brings back the threepenny cinema I used to run in my father’s garage, with Charlie Chaplin and Donald Duck films in 8mm weaving the kind of participative magic that small children watching Punch and Judy undergo. You give so much to the experience, and it gives you more back.
It’s a kind of willed dreaming, or, as Ralph Richardson once defined acting, ‘dreaming to order’: qualitatively different to sound-and-colour-and-3D cinema, which is piggy-backing on another’s reality; this is dreaming you do alone. This is what Crisp meant by ‘silent eyes’. You are hooked in, you are part of the show, like one hypnotised.
So: George Valentin’s career as an adored action-comedy and romantic-comedy star is going well: his big bright crooked smile and lively moustache, his athleticism, self-mockery, flirtatious autographs and limelight-hogging (he upstages his female co-star thrice in the first two minutes) seem forgiveable foibles while the going is good. But then sound comes. He dismisses it, refuses to be part of it (the reason we do not know till right at the end), spends a fortune (like Chaplin) writing, directing, producing and starring in his own jungle film, whose ‘artistic’ ending (he sinks in quicksand and is not saved) loses him a fortune, and he loses mansion, wife and self-regard, and goes on the skids. And …
Whoa, let’s go back a bit. In a crush of dizzied fans one opening night he encounters on the red carpet Peppy Miller, a lively, bashful girl who mugs for the cameras with him, and she turns up the next day to audition for a walk-on, or rather dance-on, role in his new smooth spy movie. She is in his arms for take after take, all aborted because they keep breaking up in giggles, and love grows. But … he has brittle blonde childless wife who hates him and blackens his teeth in his newspaper photographs and he does not play around. And sound comes. And wanting no part in it, he leaves the studio just as she joins it, and quickly, in the talkies, becomes a lively, smiling, goofy, tap-dancing star.And when he is on the skids, she tries to help him, and he resents her help, and … but I shouldn’t spoil it for you.
MORE TO COME
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I don’t know why they made this film, just to show off what they could do technically, or out of love, there was no need to do it, the story is cliched and trite, as homage it is impressive but these days who cares?
But boy am I glad they made it, I went with a closed mind and despite my reservations this film simply won me over.
Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo are excellent. I’m a straight guy but I could imagine giving it up for Dujardin, talk about screen presence.
As is the case with most screen dogs, he probably had a trailer all his own and a line of bitches lining up outside, and he provided more supporting actor cred to Dujardin in this appearance, than Bruce Ward gave to Adam West in the entire Batman series.
As a dialogue writer Bob, you should be shaking in your boots, if this takes off you could be out of a job.