Quote:
Originally Posted by theosh
Tavernier is a director that I have still yet to explore, but am eager to. Whilst I keep reading that his best works are not included in this set, would you still say that this set would be a good representation of Tavernier's talents as a director, especially for a newbie looking to dip his toe into his filmography?
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While it is missing some key titles from the French and German sets (which don't offer English subtitles on the missing titles) it's still a pretty good set with some significant titles.
Coup de Torchon is widely regarded as one of his best,
It All Starts Today is very good and I'm particularly fond of these three:
Bertrand Tavernier’s superb L.627 bears scant resemblance to the description its UK DVD distributors put out –
‘This gritty police drama shows us the underbelly of the Parisian drug trade. Lulu is a tough streetwise narcotics cop who, like a Frank Serpico or a Dirty Harry Callahan, doesn't play by the rules or kowtow to his weak and/or corrupt superiors. Lulu thrives in this violent world, where sheer guts can overcome his squad's deficiencies of money and equipment.’ In reality, it’s much more down to earth and compelling look at the day to day realities of fighting a never-ending war, spending more time on the mundane realities of police work and its limitations. These cops aren't Dirty Harry, they're underfunded and unappreciated and never bring down any big guys. When a long-time surveillance fails, it's because of the most petty reason imaginable. When there's finally some violence it's just over a petty offence rather than a major crime. They fill in forms in a crappy prefab office, wrestle with budget cuts, play practical jokes and make no difference whatever – all of which is surprisingly gripping.
At times some of the characters threaten to stray into cop movie clichés, such as Didier Bezace’s relationship with a prostitute and casual informer, and there's a subplot with wedding videos that the film could do without, but other than that there’s little to find fault with. Tavernier’s direction is at once convincingly observational while remaining unobtrusively cinematic and he’s assembled an equally convincing ensemble cast, including Philippe Torreton, who would go on to play leading roles in Tavernier’s
Capitaine Conan and
It All Starts Today. It’s not a short movie – it’s not far off the two-and-a-half hour mark – and as befits its subject matter it never reaches a grand climax but leaves its characters no better than when we found them, but you won’t feel you’ve wasted the time you spend with them.
The French DVD boasted an impressive array of extras - audio commentary by Bertrand Tavernier, Michel Alexandre and Charlotte Kady, 3 deleted scenes, behind the scenes footage, stills gallery and theatrical trailer – but while the feature had English subtitles, none of the extras did. Optimum’s UK DVD offers a different but very decent selection of its own: a different English-language commentary and lengthy on-camera interview with Tavernier and the trailer, and offers a very respectable subtitled widescreen transfer of the film itself.
Bertrand Tavernier’s second film as director, the lavish but almost completely forgotten
Que la Fete Commence… aka
Let Joy Reign Supreme, is much more successful than its obscurity would imply, as you might expect from a film that begins with a priest threatening field mice with excommunication on the cliffs of Breton, and constantly manages to marry the absurd with the humane against a vividly realized historical backdrop in a remarkable feat of cinematic juggling. Set during the controversial regency of the much-despised Philippe d’Orleans, who managed to antagonise both the aristocracy with his plans for land and tax reform and the peasants with his failure to improve their increasingly miserable lot, there’s poison in its pen, but there’s also real humanity too: Tavernier and co-writer Jean Aurenche are as interested in the people as politics, and most are treated as all too recognisably flawed rather than cartoonish stereotypes. The dialogue is at once witty and revealing, both on a historical and human level, conjuring up a wide-reaching portrait of an almost comically dangerous moment in history that takes in all strata of society but with an understanding of human nature constantly running through it that elevates it beyond the usual costume drama where costume and décor overwhelm everything.
As the enlightened libertine whose attempt to rule a corrupt kingdom is at odds with his debauched nature, Philippe Noiret gives one of his very best performances, avoiding the temptation to slip into ham or caricature in favor of a remarkably controlled and quietly affecting portrait of world-weary wisdom and self-awareness. His grief over the death of his favorite daughter is all too believable, his reaction all-too recognizably human as he buries himself in work because
“I still can’t feel it, so I’m working while I still can.” Even Jean Rochefort’s Abbé Dubois, who tries to blow up impoverished Breton noble Jean-Pierre Marielle’s farcical plot for independence into a major conspiracy to secure a vacant archbishop’s post despite being neither a Catholic nor able to remember how to say Mass, somehow avoids becoming a cartoon, their bitterly comic relationship tinged with real sadness. Like Marielle’s doomed revolutionary (a near-master class in comic timing), they are as much victims of history as of their own ambitions.
Filmed with real panache and remarkable assurance (including many early examples of the long tracking shots Tavernier is so fond of), it constantly undercuts the picture-book image of the period. The Court of Versailles is so rat-infested that no-one thinks anything of nobles picking up a dead rodent or of police constables walking around with buckets for aristos to piss in, while the streets are filled with royal pressgangs forcing indigents and tramps into marriage before sending them to populate France’s colonies in Louisiana and Mississippi that are the backbone of the fragile economy even if most nobles can’t tell the difference between America and Africa. Michel Blanc, Christian Clavier, Thierry Lhermitte and Gerard Jugnot turn up in bit parts en route, though intriguingly Michael Powell’s scenes hit the cutting room floor.
It’s a film with wit and scope and real humanity: if Patrice Leconte's
Ridicule is a light lunch, this is a profoundly delightful full magnificent banquet of a movie.
Laissez-Passer aka
Safe Conduct is at times almost like
Day For Night Goes to War – richly ironic considering Francois Truffaut famously attacked the ‘Tradition of Quality’ in French cinema that screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost represented since both are characters in Bertrand Tavernier’s lengthy but entertaining wartime comic drama that defends that very tradition of cinematic craftsmanship and professionalism. Indeed, the film is based on anecdotes that Aurenche (Denis Podalydès), who wrote several of Tavernier’s early successes such as
The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul and
Coup de Torchon/Clean Slate, and director Jean-Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) told about their wartime experiences at German-owned producers Continental Films during the Occupation.
The best-funded but most despised film company in France during the war, many of its employees would later find their careers handicapped by association (particularly Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose critique of informers
Le Corbeau was widely criticized as a slur on French dignity), yet among its numbers could be found resistance workers and even Jews protected by the German management who prided themselves on making the best films. While Continental was few French filmmakers first choice, Tavernier shows how many would slyly insert subversive messages into the films while juggling with increasingly absurd practical limitations – not only did they have to limit the length of shots because they could only get short ends of film to use or deal with constant power cuts but often didn’t even have enough wood to build the sets because the studio sold their allocation for coffins for the Eastern Front. The company even rented out office space to the Gestapo to earn a few extra Francs.
Rather than opt for a relentlessly grim view of the Occupation, Tavernier instead focuses on the absurdity of the situation. Much of the strength of the film comes from the way it shows how people adapted their everyday life to an increasingly askew way of life, where bad actors get bit parts in exchange for black market food, extras eat fake stage food because they are so hungry and you can come home one day to find an anti-aircraft gun has suddenly appeared on your apartment roof and keeps on waking the baby. Even the great and the good of French cinema fall in and out of favor in these times just as easily as the obscure: the writer of
La Grande Illusion, let out of jail during the day to rewrite a script on the set, writes food into every scene because he’s been starved in solitary confinement for two months, while Jean-Devaivre’s interrogation by British officers during a surreal and unplanned trip to England suddenly warms up when the subject of Maigret and Harry Baur (himself tortured to death by the Gestapo) comes up in the conversation. Yet it’s not unaware that events often took a darker turn, as an early air-raid threatening a children’s ward, a collaborator interrupting a dinner party to beat up a tramp in the street below and one striking moment singling out an extra in a forgotten movie on television powerfully bring home.
Fans of classic French cinema will have a field day with the many references – particularly
Douce, Le Corbeau, Au Bonheur des Dames and
La Main du Diable as well as figures like Maurice Tourneur, Claude-Autant-Lara, Michel Simon and Charles Spaak - but they’re not essential to enjoying the film. As always with Tavernier, people come first. Tavernier is a director who genuinely seems to like his characters, even (and sometimes especially) the flawed ones, and his habit of providing reasons for doing what they do made this film in particular an easy target for some who saw it as excusing wartime collaboration. Yet the film shows the issue as at once both more mundane and complex than a simple issue of them and us, with even the communist resistance who urge members to infiltrate Continental later turning on them as policy changes. But in their very different ways the two main characters
do resist, and each in a manner appropriate to their character. The writer Aurenche resists through the language of his scripts, while the assistant director Devaivre resists with practical actions, in a way representing how it was possible to covertly resist with thoughts as well as deeds.
It’s slightly problematic at times that the two main characters never really meet, with Aurenche increasingly sidelined as the film concentrates on Jean-Devaivre’s attempts to juggle his resistance activities with his work as an assistant director, but it’s a problem you notice more after the film than during it. Chances are you’ll be enjoying yourself too much watching it.
Sadly but par for the course SC aren't porting over many of the extras from the DVD releases - ie L.627 doesnt have either his French or English commentaries or his 41-minute English interview, Montpensier and Laissez-Passer lose the Tavernier interviews (and Tavernier was always worth listening to when he talked movies) - but there's still a good selection that are on the discs.
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Tavernier: The Essential Collection (StudioCanal) - April 18th 2022
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