Dujardin and Bejo are the cat's meow in The Artist.
**** (out of five stars) The Artist. Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius.
According to certain critics, it’s been all downhill for movies after the advent of sound, circa 1930. There’s some merit to the argument: in the silent era, without recourse to spoken dialog, filmmakers were obliged to be inventive in telling stories. And indeed, virtually all the visual tropes we now take for granted in movies—montage, close-ups, continuity, cross-cutting, dissolves, location shooting, even color—were pioneered and thoroughly explored before sound.
But when actors began to speak, all too many movies became little more than canned theatre—actors trapped on soundstages, yakking. To see the difference, compare a classic from the golden age of silents, like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, with even a very good Hollywood talkie of the next decade, such as Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door (1937). Door had a crackling good script, but in terms of visual interest, there’s just no comparison—the silent film is light-years ahead, despite being ten years older. Here, as in many instances of technological advancement, something was lost in the exchange.
French director Michael Hazanavicius’ The Artist evokes this loss vividly, touchingly, and irresistibly. As you may recall, Hazanavicius and his stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo last made an impression with their scrupulously perfect James Bond parody, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006). That film didn’t just goof or pastiche on an already oft-spoofed genre—it tunneled to its Cold War roots and channeled its very essence, right down to the look and feel of the film stock, and the way Connery/Dujardin wore his Saville Row suits.
The Artist is more ambitious, resurrecting the entire pre-sound epoch in stunning detail, from the rich black and white cinematography to the lush, over-wrought musical cues. But its triumph is not just technical. Even more impressively, it recreates what was most emotionally satisfying about the era too—the drama on a human scale, the post-Victorian sentimentality, the way a star’s smile—in this case, Dujardin’s winning, cocksure grin—can light up a scene as brightly as an arc-lamp.
The script by Hazanavicius concerns George Valentin (Dujardin), an Errol Flynn-type silent movie star who is flying so high he almost casually makes a star out of Peppy Miller (Bejo), a chorus girl he takes a shine upon. Trouble is, Valentin is too set in his ways to make the jump to talking pictures. His career crashes just as Peppy becomes the face of the new era onscreen. Even worse, Valentin is too proud to notice that Peppy is in love with him, or to accept her offers to help him out of his tailspin.
Though the story is almost as generic as the film’s plain vanilla title, Hazanavicius more than makes up for it with his obsessively crafted execution. To someone of his turn of mind, his kind of Gallic rationality, a film about a silent film star—naturellement—must be silent too—which The Artist, in fact, is (with a few key exceptions). But before you punt at the prospect, rest assured the lack of spoken dialog is not missed here because it’s barely noticeable. What the critics have merely argued, Hazanavicius demonstrates—most of the talking in movies is dispensable.
Where OSS 117 was hit or miss in the humor department, this time Hazanavicius hardly ever puts a foot wrong. There’s nothing extraneous in The Artist, nothing that doesn’t pay off handsomely in the end. Best of all, Dujardin and Bejo are terrific together—the onscreen chemistry hinted at in OSS is fully realized here, and as appealing as each is alone, they are even better as a pair. This may be the most poignant evocation of all: at a time when actors increasingly find themselves emoting in front of green screens, or opposite not other actors but guys in motion capture suits, this kind of simple, can't-be-faked human chemistry is another aspect of “old” cinema at risk in the digital revolution.
If there a misjudgment anywhere in this film, it’s in one key detail in the soundtrack. At the climax in the story, when Valentin is about to hit rock bottom, Hazanavicius makes use of a key passage in Bernard Hermann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—a movie very much from the sound era. Of course, it is a ravishing piece, well-chosen for the moment. But for film buffs—a key audience for this film—it’s a musical cue that’s as recognizable as, say, that two-note string signature from Jaws. For however brief a moment, it dragged this fan boy out of the movie’s spell.
But only for a moment.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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