|
Sparkling carnival ride and encircling mechanism of fate, Fritz Lang's carousel. The interlude between Germany and Hollywood is condensed swiftly into the introductory glimpse of Charles Boyer, bushy-topped and striped-shirted, presiding over the merry-go-round like a tuneful Stanley Kowalski. "An artist at heart," "un voyou," a blithe sinner suddenly seized by the love of the wispy maid (Madeleine Ozeray) as the world spins around them. A home scarcely means domestication, Liliom tilts arcade games for change while remaining a pawn of the larger gears at play, bureaucracy's parched rubber stamp takes its time. "Absolument incorrigible," still he's elated by parental pride and clouded by parental responsibility—the landlady's knife filched for a foolish crime is also the scoundrel's way out, he plunges it into his heart while elsewhere his pregnant wife feels something. (A blackboard lecture can halt a robbery in You and Me, here not even Antonin Artaud with a cart full of blades is heeded: "Trop tard. Dommage.") Molnár through a monocle darkly, a deep fountain of inspiration for Cocteau and Carné. A moment of silence at the fairground, a disembodied camera for the ascending spirit to contemplate his own sprawled cadaver, the commissariat in the sky. Celestial whimsy out of Clair, and yet there's no sequence more tormenting than the hero having to watch himself smack his beloved on a projection screen, slowed down to a freeze-frame. (Brooks remembers it in Defending Your Life, though not before Lang brings it down to earth in Fury.) "Management is never at fault," one steps with a shrug into the purgatory furnace. A Matter of Life and Death, It's a Wonderful Life, Enter the Void... Slap and tear and love and shame blur in the redemptive coda, just the enigma for a moralist's aching Heaven. With Florelle, Marcel Barencey, Pierre Alcover, and Henri Richard. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |