Plot Intro
It’s 1927. Silent film actor and heartthrob George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is at the height of his career. He meets an aspiring actress and dancer called Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) who starts to have a very successful career in the new form of movie-making- talkies. Valentin, however, doesn’t think talkies will take off and dismisses it as just a fad. When he turns out to be wrong, however, his career takes a horrendous nosedive, and then the Wall Street crash occurs in 1929…
I remember The Artist being released and it was certainly the surprise hit of 2011. It defeated, among others, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, and War Horse; Jean Dujardin became the first and, so far, only French actor to win Best Actor; and the film was heavily lauded at various other award ceremonies around the world. This is especially impressive for a Best Picture winner, as its the first 100% black and white film to win since 1960’s The Apartment, the first film made in 4:3 aspect ratio since 1953’s From Here to Eternity, and the first French-produced film to ever win (although there are a great deal of American actors taking part in it).
And it’s an absolute delight! It’s often credited as being the first silent film to win Best Picture since the first winner, Wings, in 1927. I would pedantically contest that because The Artist has a few lines of dialogue at the end, as well as a recorded soundtrack, neither of which Wings would have had. However, The Artist is a stunning tribute to a long-gone age of cinema. Right from the font and music during the opening credits, to the way in which the scenes cutaway to each other, to the hilarious styles of acting that we see in Valentin and Miller’s films. Director Michel Hazanavicius and his team of actors and editors have superbly captured the melodrama of the acting, the precariousness of the actors’ careers, and the thrill that moving pictures would create at such an early stage of filmmaking.
The story explores the transition from silent to talking movies with great innovation. Valentin represents the resistance to such a transition, as he’s probably aware that his career could suffer as a result. He has a nightmare in which the objects around him make sounds as he picks them up or knocks them over, but he is unable to make a sound with his voice. This seems to represent his fear that the world is moving on around him, but he remains trapped in a silent, invisible box. The film then ends with characters finally using their dialogue, representing the way in which they have moved forward with the times. Not only is this a film about cinema’s extremely rapid change from silent to sound (it pretty much went from one to the other within about 2 years), but the film itself transitions from silent to sound. I can’t help but love a bit of meta.
The film is also aided by Dujardin and Bejo who are an outstanding leading pair. Dujardin evokes the self-assurance and charisma of Clark Gable and Errol Flynn (he even looks a lot like Gable with that pencil moustache), while Bejo has the gutsiness of Clara Bow in Wings. The two bounce off each other brilliantly, making some of the final, more tragic scenes, all the more poignant. In particular, I couldn’t help but feel a lump in my throat when Peppy Miller goes to see Valentin after he survives a house fire, and discovers that the one film reel that he saved is a scene between the two of them when they first bonded. I also liked the fact that Peppy’s career is entirely of her own ambition and skill, rather than Valentin’s work, as well as the fact that the two don’t conventionally fall in love by the end (although this is heavily insinuated), but rather Peppy helps Valentin through friendship to get back onto his feet.
Quite frankly, the makers of this film deserved all the awards they could get. We are now conditioned to expect dialogue and sound effects to create a story, but The Artist proves that movement and music are really all you need. It steers well clear of pretension to create an involving, exciting piece of cinema, and stunning tribute to an age of Hollywood that will remain historic. Ok, it’s not going to suddenly bring back silent films, but it may well motivate you to watch some of the best from that era, and it’s a much better version of A Star is Born than, well, A Star is Born.
Highlight
The dog.
Lowlight
I have nothing- this film is perfect.
Mark
10/10
Here we bloody go! At last!
In my last review I was berating the fact that the Academy constantly draw out miserable pieces that are overlong and dwell on anything that’s at all depressing. There is a distinct lack of fun in this house and I have been getting quite bogged down by how I’m not really enjoying these last few decades of films overall.
But The Artist is a breath of fresh air. This is what cinema should be about - discovering, rediscovering, playing around, finding new (old) ways to tell stories, challenging the audience and the filmmakers to deliver something tremendous.
If you can’t tell - I love this.
What director Michel Hazanavicius does so magnificently, is he evokes the period, the acting style and the drama of the time with aplomb, while introducing a brand new audience to what proves to be a gripping style of storytelling that has been lost to us since the ‘30s.
Silent film acting is not - as one might idly imagine - dull. In fact it’s thrilling, full of over-the-top poses, actors working their socks off to convey everything to you with a minimum of title-cards. I’d say about 10% of the script is actually given to you by title-cards, you pick up the rest from lip-reading and body language. This is a physical art, and everyone delivers magnificently.
There is also a dog who deserved to be nominated for the Best Actor award and it’s a crime he didn’t get a nod (or pat).
Actors Dujardin and Bejo are brilliant, summing up the era of the time, showing their eagerness and creativity in finding jobs and wordlessly making you love them. A moment at the end of the film where Dujardin has a gun and Bejo is frantically driving towards him is utterly tense, and the use of the title-card to say ‘Bang!’ is a masterstroke - you don’t know what’s happened, if anyone’s dead, you just know there has been a bang. It’s something pretty much un-replicable in talkies.
I also loved the little nods to Singin’ in the Rain too which deals with the same period. Actor George Valentin’s last silent film is a Three Musketeers type thing which is exactly the same in Rain where they are forced to convert it into a talkie.
The audience are made to work - we have to piece things together, work out relationships and understand plot lines without having it entirely fed to us. It’s not tiring but it’s engaging - I felt more involved with this film than I have many of the later ones in this series. It’s all tied together with a fantastic score (that I believe has been played live against an entirely-silent version of the film at some concert events).
The saddest thing about this film is that it didn’t revive silent films. I’m hungry to watch our modern versions of them after this - I felt challenged and stimulated in a way that talkies just don’t cut it. By making me work things out and really get involved, I felt so much more intertwined with the plot and characters.
Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.
Highlight
The entire bloody thing. This burst of creativity puts so many other entrants on this list to shame.
Lowlight
Uggie the dog did not get nominated. However (hilariously) BAFTA responded to a call for him to receive an nomination for Best Actor with the following: ‘Regretfully we must advise that as he is not a human being, and as his unique motivation as an actor was sausages, Uggie is not qualified to compete for the BAFTA in this category.’ Bravo BAFTA, bravo.
Mark
A splendid, cinema-affirming 10/10
No comments:
Post a Comment