|
Paris (Le Million) to New York (Christmas in July) and back to Paris, courtesy of Jacques Becker. A young married couple, he (Roger Pigaut) operates a printing press while she (Claire Mafféi) works the photo booth at a department store, where customers tend to smile at her rather than at the camera. "I don't want men ogling my wife. But they do have good taste." Domestic happiness on a tight budget, the coffee tastes like geraniums but there are soccer games and rowboat rides on Sundays. A lovely bit of quotidian aimlessness, the lecherous grocer (Noël Roquevert) and the subway clerk (Annette Poivre) and the aspiring boxer next door (Pierre Trabaud) weave in and out, then Duchamp's "loterie aveugle" appears and disappears. "Anyone bring in a wallet?" "A wallet? You believe in Santa Claus?" Becker sketches the working-class community with a zipping camera, jokes and emotions in a flow keenly sustained between screwball and neorealism, grace notes abound. The hero checks the newspaper for the lottery results but the pages have been snipped to line his shoes, he rushes to the tavern downstairs but everybody's busy with preparations for a wedding. A list of dream possessions is excitedly scrawled with lipstick on a mirror, then dolefully wiped off once the ticket is lost. (The piano fixer's plinking dirge at the claims office contrasts with the ebullience of a butcher collecting a jackpot of his own: "You know, a million these days...") Mangled tire and borrowed book, the mystery is worked out in the protagonist's unconscious after he's knocked out in a scuffle, windswept smiles motor down the road at the close. A firm basis for New Wavers, French (Une femme est une femme) as well as British (A Kind of Loving). With Gaston Modot, Jacques Meyran, François Joux, Gérard Oury, Charles Camus, and Émile Drain. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |