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Post-'68 France, "a most curious country" of befuddled fathers and obscured revolutionaries. The middle-aged watch-tinkerer (Philippe Noiret) gets his politics from TV news and "likes to be legal," won't even cross a red light on an empty street. The necessary shock arrives: His son (Sylvain Rougerie) is on the run after killing a factory security guard. Bertrand Tavernier handles the moment with control, self-effacement and muted compassion—the protagonist numbly rides the bus home after being told the news, the activist paraphernalia in the boy's room (scrawled on the wall is Céline's dictum about pastoral battlefields) goes unnoticed by the imploding father fumbling for a bed. Simenon in Lyon, the unseen gesture of protest that propels the Old Guard to reevaluate values vis-à-vis the law (police inspector Jean Rochefort), the media (journalist Clotilde Joano), and politics (left-leaning chum and Tavernier lookalike Jacques Denis). "Paint not the thing but the effect it produces," says Mallarmé. Meticulously and movingly, a portrait of radicals and reactionaries emerges, of parents talking about the mysteries of their children while buying fruit at the market, of people revealing themselves in the way they put on their coats or cut the meat in their plates. And, in Noiret's dignified-schlub slouch, of aging men still able to surprise themselves with a newfound engagement with the world. A conscious repudiation of novice pyrotechnics, a sober and shapely construction (the train hurtling through darkness in the first scene becomes the closing image of the locomotive pulling into the sunlit station) with an unnoticeably mobile camera. The flaming automobile carcass is next seen in Let Joy Reign Supreme, "executions will be televised during prime time" (Death Watch). With Christine Pascal, Yves Afonso, Julien Bertheau, Jacques Hilling, William Sabatier, and Andrée Tainsy.
--- Fernando F. Croce |