On Renoir and the unwitting personalization of class politics.

1. H&I saw "La Marseillaise" last week, previously having been exposed only to (multiple viewings of both) the most famous ones, "Grand Illusion" and "Rules of the Game." Surprises: overtly -- even propagandistically -- patriotic, pro-revolutionary tone, and hokiness thereof; amount of time devoted to "ordinary people"; no blood until the end and then suddenly a fair bit; is that really what Swiss French sounds like?; Louis XVI the individual portrayed by far the most sympathetically. Not surprises: non-trivial amounts of time devoted to depiction and discussion of hunting and poaching; women come in three flavors: simple country girl (even in the city), devoted wholly to country or son, haughty soulless aristocrat (Marie Antoinette is not so different from the lady at the center of "Rules"); men fall hopelessly and causelessly in love instantly and/or dominatingly anyway; the only revolutionary who approaches having a character is depicted and repeatedly described as "a gentleman." Renoir doesn't much like aristocrats, but he can't see his way to attributing an inner life to anyone else. The scene of the maudlin aristos exiled in Prussia dreaming of restoration has more human-scaled emotion, more everyday detail, and quite possibly despite the cartoonish cliche of the pining post-revolutionary aristocrat more naturalistic dialogue than the whole rest of the film.

2. I sort of don't like "Rules of the Game" as much as everyone else (including h) does, but isn't Renoir wandering around in a bear suit desperately seeking someone to unzip it and let him out the most poignantly self-abasing director performance in film, basically? Andrew Bujalski, eat your heart out. (N.B. I'm not counting big directors acting in others' films, à la Lang in "Contempt" or von Stroheim in "Sunset Boulevard," just directors acting in their own films. Hitchcock as the before-and-after in a weight loss advertisement in a drifting newspaper during one of his thin periods in the '40s -- which is that from, "Foreign Correspondent?" or conceivably "Rope?" -- is rather good, too.)

3. Watched "Le Cercle Rouge" for the first time in, oh, more than eight years the other week, and was quite blown away at how much more I got out of it this time now that I was able to focus on things other than Alain Delon's hideous moustache. I'd like to say something about Melville too one of these days. Maybe even a tiny bit about his commonalities with Ozu! (Okay, mostly that they both practice the sort of monastic self-restraint that eventually displays themselves all the more vividly -- not that I consider them frauds for it as I do Saint Francis, since they never claimed to be effacing themselves for the greater glory of God! -- but also the surprising and touching love both have for America. Oh, I listened to an old radio interview with Melville on the Criterion DVD of "Bob" one time, and the man was a one-man imdb of Hollywood under the studio system -- plus anyone who lists great American directors of the '20s and '30s -- maybe he was talking '40s, too, can't remember -- and starts with Lubitsch, makes space for Clarence Brown and Sam Wood, but forgets about Capra -- is a lost soulmate to me.)

On generosity in story-telling, and the Lubitsch Touch.

H & I watched "Trouble in Paradise" again the other day -- h's second, and my perhaps dozenth or twentieth, viewing. Although I remember all the jokes and can recite them along with the characters still in between viewings I always forget what an uproariously funny movie it is. We were watching it in the theater -- my first time since I first saw it, in 2003; h's first time full stop -- and it does make a difference to have the other people there. In my case it makes me nervous, because I usually start laughing before anyone else and feel foolish. And it is always interesting to hear what gets the biggest laughs (not always what I laugh hardest at, naturally). But the general benefit of having other people there is that it lets you see things through their eyes a bit -- through your knowledge that their eyes are watching, anyhow. That is why watching a favorite film with a respected and admired acquaintance who hasn't seen it is so nerve-wracking: because watching the other person watch verges on overwhelming watching. But with a friendly or anonymous crowd, it lets you see things you might have missed. Sometimes it lets you see a scene or hear a line as new. -- Incidentally, this is one of the underrated pleasures of "MST3K," too -- not just that they notice more details because they have watched the movie six times, but that they remark on different details because different things really are salient to them, because a string of scenes in which people look at hands adds up to something for them in a way it never would have for me on my own. And now -- on occasion -- it points to something outside itself to my eyes, too. This is why people repeat catch phrases; they represent the hollowed-out version of our wonder at the fact of shared, and more miraculous yet -- transferred or transmitted, experience.

Lubitsch never lost this wonder. His films are full of the details people absorb from other people, or details that they share without knowing it made marvelous by our knowledge that they share it. That's the meaning of Lily and Mariette (Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis) separately waiting till a companion looks the other way to dunk a croissant into coffee. It's the meaning of the montages in which we see first Mariette and then Gaston (Herbert Marshall) responded to by an array of subordinates, and at least a part of the meaning of the (riotous) early scene in which the concierge mediatess between Italian-speaking police and English-only Filiba (Edward Everett Horton, whose absent-mindedly benevolent affect Lubitsch subverts both here and in "Trouble in Paradise"'s near-Siamese twin, "Design for Living"). There's a kind of trust offered the viewer here too: I'll show you their absurdities if you acknowledge how common they are; I'll show you their faults if you promise to forgive them. Even the smallest of characters are bathed in the director's gentleness and wonder and generosity: the butler (Robert Greig, recognizable nine years later as the butler in "The Lady Eve") whose mutters and eye-rolls summarize weeks of Mariette and Gaston's flirtation, the waiter who highlights how comical Gaston's grandiosity is by studiously taking down the order "moon ... in champagne ...," the maid whose single appearance is a five-second blushing "Maybe, M. Lavalle." They say it's because Lubitsch was an actor himself, and not so talented that he got beyond bit parts, that he made sure to distribute the fun a bit more widely than some others. Even the gondolier garbageman whose operatic solo opens the picture is Lubitsch telling us: look at us -- bringing beauty and grandiosity to the most ordinary, sordid tasks! Isn't it touching? But aren't we funny?

I've muddled it up by presenting two distinct kinds of generosity together. One, not so significant except for its link to the second, is formal: the generosity to let other people speak. Not just the camera, not just the script, and certainly not just the lead actors. (Lubitsch never has only one or two lead actors, either, that I can think of. Perhaps in "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," which I can't remember well beyond the pajama scene at the very beginning? Or "Cluny Brown," which I haven't seen at all?) I always think of this as Chekhovian, because of the way Chekhov uses different perspectives to show that what moves us most can be invisible to others (think of the cut away to the little boys sneaking cigarettes in -- "The Lady with the Dog," perhaps?, and the famous shrinking of the central incident of "The Kiss" in the recounting to others), but also to show how we can learn to find the poignancy in small things. (Time to mention again that I hope to write more about Ozu some time ... )

The second generosity is substantive, and it's Chekhovian too. It's a way of interpreting the formal generosity, really: as a sign that they too are human beings, they are parties to meaning and sorrow beyond ours -- and they are party to ours not because we are so special but because of their own humanity. The idea of "the Lubitsch touch" must go back more than seven decades now. Billy Wilder is known to have kept a sign on his desk reading: "how would Lubitsch have done it?" (A sort of prophetic parody of those "WWJD?" bracelets, I like to think. Wilder was no slouch at empathy himself; forget that he wrote "Ninotchka," and forget the exceptional sensitivity in the face of opacity that defines "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," and just remember that it is not a coincidence that one of his two best-known movies ends with the line: "Nobody's perfect!" Even a trifling light comedy like "Sabrina" includes the sublime moment when Audrey Hepburn is charmed by Humphrey Bogart's record of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," thinking it a sign of what she missed while away in Paris, rather than what she missed because she was not born yet when he went to college. What is that but an admission of the silliness of the storyline -- one intended to show how to take the story's silliness to the movie's advantage. "The Major and he Minor"'s nutty vista of dozens of teenaged schoolgirls at a dance with Veronica Lake haircuts is along the same lines: the absurdity of the plot can no longer be read as contemptible-pathetic, it has to be seen as touching-pathetic.) Anyway, critics have focussed on sophistication -- or, more crudely -- sex as the essence of the Lubitsch touch, but that's at best partly right. Part of the beauty of "Trouble in Paradise," and "Design for Living," too, comes from the acute awareness that sophistication without generosity and wit is worse than useless -- indeed, contemptible, if it allows us to think better of ourselves than we deserve; and that deChristianized sex is also a moral matter, not per se or because of special metaphysical properties of human genitalia but because of the special properties of human character; and that the proverb is wrong, that folly and forgiveness are both human, that we ought to expect both of the same people, that a fool who can forgive is still a fool, but wiser than one who can't forgive.