DVR Diary: AS LONG AS YOU'VE GOT YOUR HEALTH (Tant qu'on a la sante, 1961-71)

Pierre Etaix's third feature hardly counts as one. It's a collection of short subjects, though for a comedian working in the classic slapstick tradition there's nothing wrong with that. Despite the prestige of feature films, it might be argued that the short subject remains the perfect form for slapstick. Chaplin and Keaton's features may be better films than their shorts, but are they funnier? Whatever your answer, suffice it to say that, especially given how little market there was for shorts by the Sixties, Etaix was within his artistic rights to throw together an anthology. This one is actually twice-thrown, Etaix having rearranged things between the initial release in 1966 and a 1971 re-release. Added for that version was Etaix's first short, the shelved 1961 effort Insomnia. He should have kept it on the shelf. It can barely be called a one-joke movie. Basically, Pierre (in color) keeps himself awake reading a vampire novel, visualizing the story in classic black and white. The vampire bits are at least competent pastiche, and Etaix has the interesting idea that a vampire, when destroyed, turns back into a bat before decomposing into dust. But there was nothing funny about the vampire scenes, not even when Etaix feebly attempts to joke them up. The most he can do is have Pierre's clumsiness alter our perspective on the story. Having put the book down, he picks it up and starts reading it upside down. So we see the story upside down until Pierre realizes his error. At another point, the camera starts trembling because Pierre's reading has frightened him. That's about it, apart from a closing gag that should not come as a surprise.

The second episode will remind you of those Warner Bros. cartoons that are just collections of sight gags about people at the movies, without really improving on them. It gets better when we learn that French movie audiences were subjected to commercials between acts on the program. Somehow Pierre finds himself trapped on screen in an apartment with a family out of the commercials, all of them fanatically talking up their wonderful new consumer products, from invisible glasses to a vaguely menacing all-purpose spray. The nightmarish aspect of Pierre's predicament gives this bit a satiric edge, and you can empathize with him when, as he finally escapes, he tosses a hand grenade into the apartment. The third episode give the anthology its name; its subject is the relentlessness of modern urban life, paradoxically illustrated by traffic jams but more dramatically demonstrated by apparently unmotivated tides of people overwhelming everything in their path. Etaix seems to have been inspired by the rampaging army of brides in Keaton's Seven Chances, but manages to give his swarm scenes a distinctive flair -- Invasion of the Body Snatchers may have been another influence.

The film in its current form concludes with the episode most thoroughly and successfully in the classical slapstick tradition. Pierre is a bumbling hunter whose blunders put a pair of bourgeois picnickers on an unintended collision course with a slow-burning groundskeeper. You can see murder simmering in the man's beady eyes as he blames the picnickers for every mishap actually caused by Pierre. Etaix gets maximum laughs out of such mundane things as fence posts and a man's shoe stuck in the mud or adrift in a stream. While this episode is the most retro in spirit it also takes advantage of modern film techniques to give old jokes a fresh look. One of the film's best shots is one of the bourgeois husband hopping on one foot and chasing his floating shoe, shot from the stream with the show bobbing in the foreground. Inevitably, Tant qu'on a la sante is a mixed bag. You'll want to throw some bits away, but the best are good enough to make the whole more worth seeing than the sum of its parts.

DVR Diary: YOYO (1965)

While most of Pierre Etaix's films had to wait until 2010 to escape from litigation entanglements, his second feature got a sneak showing at the 2007 Cannes film festival. The lawyers promptly pounced, but you can't help wondering, now that we all can see Yoyo, whether it had been let loose long enough to influence the making of The Artist. The two film's aren't too similar -- Yoyo is only silent for its first act, set in the silent era, and its main subject is the steady rise of a clown rather than the fall and rise of a romantic leading man. But seeing any neo-silent black and white film from France will probably remind you of The Artist, favorably or not. Both films are movie-history pieces, but Yoyo is more expansive, attempting a comic history of pop culture over 40 years, from 1925 to the film's present day. And as the title shows, it isn't entirely uninterested in rise and fall dynamics, but the rise and fall of a yo-yo isn't quite as melodramatic as the hero's ordeal in The Artist, and neither is Etaix's film.

Etaix takes on a double role -- not counting other little bits like a brief turn as Hitler -- as a father and son. The father is an immensely wealthy twit of the sort that Buster Keaton sometimes played, though the mustachioed, top-hatted Etaix is presumably more evocative of France's own Max Linder. Etaix the director has great fun filming at the character's massive chateau, and you sometimes expect the film to turn into a comedy version of Last Year at Marienbad. He has an eye for epic pettiness as the wealthy man takes his little dog for a walk. He rides in a limousine as it circles the courtyard, the poor animal trotting behind on a leash. He wallows indifferently in decadence as a dozen women dance the Charleston for him and wait on him hand and foot. But he's a romantic at heart. I can already identify an archetypal Etaix image of the hero seated at a writing table, mooning over a picture of his beloved. We get that here as we did when Etaix was infatuated with the singer in The Suitor, and in his short subject Rupture, which is all about the hero's disastrous attempts to write a love letter. We also get another Etaix signature in the early part of the picture: the cartoonish sound effects of squeaky shoes and squeaky doors also heard in Suitor. This gimmickry is doubly annoying because, first, it's just annoying, but also because he seems invariably to just give it up after a while. You begin to suspect that Etaix has a hard time holding a thought over an entire feature, but Yoyo proves more structurally sound than that.

The girl in the picture is an equestrienne, the star of a circus summoned to the chateau for a command performance for an audience of one. While our hero watches the show, a child clown wanders through the building. The equestrienne eventually tells our hero that this is his son, named Yoyo after the man's favorite toy. With the Depression descending over France -- we see Etaix stepping carefully down a street as stockbrokers prepare to jump from the windows above -- our hero decides to run away and join the circus. The little family becomes its own one-truck circus touring Europe. It's a pretty competitive environment -- they have to skip one town because Zampano and Gelsomina from La Strada have already been booked there -- to perform at 8 1/2 o'clock! But little Yoyo thrives in these circumstances and rises to become a star clown in a big-time circus as an adult, after a stint as a prisoner of war. Indeed, he has become Pierre Etaix, and the film becomes his story from here.

The film's yo-yo structure asserts itself as the young clown becomes freshly interested in his birthright, the chateau. He funnels all his earnings into rehabbing the place, which his father had left to decay. His rise threatens to be thwarted by the rise of television, but this is just one of Etaix's tricks playing on false expectations on first impressions. He shows a pompous figure on a tiny TV screen bloviating on how TV will transform entertainment forever. We then see a shabby Yoyo reduced to playing his violin in the street, hoping to entertain a diner into giving him money. Forget about it; that guy's a musician himself and too strict a judge of music to reward our humbled hero. But then a director calls cut and it turns out that Yoyo is filming a TV special, another triumph. At last he's ready to show off the restored chateau to high society, but at that moment he's visited by his on-off girlfriend, an acrobat, and by his parents in their old circus wagon. Etaix has given us some dazzling images in this picture, but he refuses to give us a double-exposure; the father is represented by the camera shaking its head no when Yoyo invites him to return to his old home. Indeed, at the very moment when Yoyo is poised to become his father, socially speaking, he hears the call of the circus once more....

Cinematographer Jean Boffety joins co-writer Jean-Claude Carriere on the Etaix team with this picture and helps make Yoyo a ravishingly monochrome movie. If the film has any major weakness it's that the bookend chateau scenes are so spectacular that the middle section becomes relatively forgettable. It seems more clear as we go along that Etaix lacks the satiric clarity of his mentor Jacques Tati, but makes a worthy rival in pictorial imagination. Yoyo is a charmingly good-natured film that might not be ranked among the great comedies but is certainly worth seeing just for the visual experience. Here Etaix starts to live up to the retroactive hype.

DVR Diary: THE SUITOR (Le Soupirant, 1962)

For film buffs, Pierre Etaix has the glamour of a buried treasure. A protege of Jacques Tati, Etaix made four comedy features in the 1960s and won an Academy Award for one of his short subjects. He then gave up movies, with brief exceptions up to the present day, and the few films he'd made were tied up in legal tangles until 2010. Last year his canon was re-premiered in New York, and the Criterion Collection releases them on DVD and Blu-Ray next week. Turner Classic Movies got the jump on Criterion and gave the Etaix films their American television premieres on Tuesday, April 16. Along with the glamour of buried treasure there was the promise of a lost slapstick master in the classic tradition, so naturally I DVR'ed those suckers and took my first look this weekend.

Le Soupirant is a very traditional slapstick picture compared to Tati's anti-modernist satires. Etaix is the title character, a sheltered, unworldly young man with an interest in science whose parents urge him to go out and find himself a woman. He dutifully prepares himself, practicing his romantic moves with various pieces of furniture and plants while ignoring the comely but humble foreign lass who lives with the family as an au pair. But he's a classic bumbler and blunderer, and while his mishaps and mistakes are often well-staged, there's really little that seems innovative or special about them. If Etaix has any artistic signature, based on this first feature and the two early shorts I've seen, it's an occasional reliance on loud, annoying sound effects to underscore Pierre's awkwardness. He isn't consistent about this, for which you'll be grateful after a few minutes of it.

The film doesn't hit its stride until Pierre picks up more than he can handle in an aggressive, alcoholic female whom he has to take home in a state of collapse. In pure physical comedy terms Etaix can't improve on the ways Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton handled similar situations in The Strong Man and Spite Marriage, respectively, but he gets some mileage out of Pierre's repeated embarrassment at encountering people while trying to transport the unconscious woman to her apartment. Later, on an outing in the country, he spends most of his time trying to hide from her. Back at her place, however, he falls in love with Stella, a TV singer, instantly abandoning his undressing host. Now the movie strikes a modern note as Pierre becomes an obsessed fan, buying up every poster or postcard and every copy of a newspaper with her face on it, and bringing home stand-up displays from the theaters where she performs. His determination to meet Stella inspires him to infiltrate the backstage of some variety show she's headlining. None of his business in this sequence is really as memorable as the somewhat distasteful payoff of the Stella storyline. Skip the next paragraph to avoid a spoiler

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Pierre finally makes it to Stella's dressing room and has one more attendant to get through before entering the presence. This final obstacle proves cooperative, but as soon as this full-grown young man addresses Stella as "Mom," she loses all allure for our hero. Strangely, she gets up to greet him but Etaix doesn't give us a good look at her face, which we've seen in close-up when Pierre saw her on TV. It's as if Etaix wanted either to show her age but couldn't give the actress a proper make-up job, or to show that Pierre doesn't want to look at her now that he knows her age. It's an odd climax that doesn't necessarily reflect well on the auteur or his character.

 

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Soupirant is pleasant but really no more than that, but it's Etaix's first try at a feature film. I'm hoping the other three will live up to the hype. A circus clown before and after his film work, Etaix here shows obvious potential as a physical film comic, both as a performer and a director. The restored cinematography, including extensive Paris location work, looks nice, while the music by Jean Paillaud is Sixties lush, somewhere between Chaplin and Riz Ortolani. So far Etaix is not quite a hidden master but I'm still willing to give the other films a try as long as I'm not paying for the DVDs. Stay tuned for more this week.