Humanizing The Vacuum

Although the formal evening wear look rented from a costume shop and scenes aren’t so much photographed as stumbled upon, Metropolitan is a minor masterpiece. Rare is the movie that attempts a tone and style and achieves it. James Wolcott:

The poignance of the film–akin to the poignance of Barry Levinson’s Diner–is our understanding that this is the last time the gang will be together before the diaspora of adulthood, and that they are already nostalgic for what they haven’t quite left behind. A cloud of reminiscence hangs over the characters as they’re starting to miss something that hasn’t yet gone.

Fewer movies better evoke the vague melancholy and tonic anticipation of that interregnum of being home between semesters, suspended between graduation and grownup-hood, that unhurried pause at the station-stop before the next stage of your life begins; a melancholy that suits the Christmas season, where the holiday lights and decorations accent the darkness of winter deep backgrounding everything. Christmas always seems slightly elegiac. The streets are cold, it’s hard to get a cab, and your jacket isn’t warm enough–Metropolitan captures that chill discomfort and how the conversations that string between two people walking from one bleak stretch of the block to the corner are part of the invisible wiring of the city, the connective tissue through which memories, memoirs, novels, and, yes, movies are eventually made.

I haven’t read a review of True Grit — or read a dialogue as considered and intelligent in a while — that approaches what Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard realize in Slant Magazine‘s ongoing The Conversations series (what an impressive transformation Slant has made in recent years too). They eschew facile comparisons between the Coens and Henry Hathaway’s 1969 movie; by the end of the piece I felt as if Bellamy and Howard had rubbed both films together in fascinating ways.

Without Charles Boyer, Pepe Le Pew wouldn’t have existed. Neither would Tom The Cat’s renditions of velvet-voiced French urbanity. What distinguished Boyer from other romantic smoothies is the sense in which courtship becomes an extension of a private performance: self-amused and ironic. This is a man, I think, who could never have been bored (by which I mean the men he played; Boyer killed himself in 1978). But he’s no solipsist: his commitment to Irene Dunne, Ingrid Bergman, Danielle Darrieux, and countless others is uncontested. Once the seduction is over, however, he’s likely to retire early to his study to read Racine.

I’m inspired by my viewing of Mayerling, which got a decent Essential Art House release last year after two decades of terrible, popping transfers. As the roué who also happens to be the Archduke of Austria and hence heir to the throne, Boyer isn’t as interesting as he’d later be; he’s merely laying the cornerstone of his legend. What registers is his talent for self-restraint within the confines of a character; his Archduke has reserves of strength that sustain him when his stuffy royal parents don’t allow him to court Baroness Marie Vetsera (Danielle Darrieux). Very far from a great film, but a decent potboiler with moments of intensity. However much I believed Boyer and Darrieux, I found his relations with his majordomo Loscheck (Andre Dubosc) more convincing, foreshadowing the treatment  of the silent understanding between Louis Jourdan and his butler in Letters From an Unknown Woman, Max Ophuls’ mid forties tearjerker.

Two other Boyer films to check out:

Cluny Brown (1946): In this bizarre, wonderful film, never released on DVD, Boyer plays a WWII-era refugee who befriends a plumber’s niece (Jennifer Jones) after she’s hired as a maid by the family of the young man (Peter Lawford) infatuated with Boyer’s non-existent ideals. Credit for the film’s tone goes to Ernst Lubitsch, who in his last film creates the equivalent of a verse drama: reality is slightly off-kilter, and every character speaks with an eloquence no one ever possessed. Closer to Wodehouse than drama, to be honest*. Boyer is required to speak in long, absurd monologues that strain his command of English, but he pulls it off with considerable finesse. As the smiling, daft airhead with a great deal of sense, Jones demonstrates comic chops she would only flex one more time, in John Huston’s Beat the Devil (if she’d made more comedies we might remember her as a treasure).

Earrings of Madame De… (1953): Boyer perfected. In his greatest role, Boyer wrings more irony from a grin than any actor not named Setsuko Hara. As the French general linked by the chain of damage caused by a set of earrings handed off several times between him, his wife (Darrieux again), and her Italian diplomat lover (Vittorio de Sica), he’s the only one aware of the deliciousness and slow horror of the roundelay in which he’s trapped — and how it will end.

*Martin Amis on Wodehouse: “It is a world devoid of all the baser energies. The greatest terrors its denizens face are mild social embarrassment, the pecuniary delinquencies of friends, the occasional unrequited crush, and the prospect of being bullied by an aunt into marrying a bossy cousin.”