For the past two nights the cinetrix has been rolling around in some of the most acclaimed cinema of the 1960s. Last night I saw Blow-up in an impressive 35mm print, and tonight I watched the Criterion Collection DVD of Cléo de 5 à 7 projected.
So many convertibles! So many beautiful young women and hip, artistic young men! Such a preening overawareness of themselves as films in conversation with other films and genre and style conventions. It was great.
But really, I want to talk about three things: the pastoral, loft life, and--quelle surprise--music.
The protagonists of both films are shallow observers who have drifted through life untouched and unblemished. Thomas is an imperious fashion photographer excluding and including those around him by adjusting his f-stop; Cléo is a pop singer, a Gallic Novak manquée stalking through Paris, revelling in her to-be-looked-at-ness. People accommodate them and make allowances for their often childish behavior because of their talent. [The cinetrix knows just what that's like.]
Then life, real, unmitigated life steps in and shakes them up a bit. In both films, the catalyzing moment involves a freeing interlude in nature, which in London and Paris means a park. In Blow-up we see Thomas' white pants like a hare's tail against all that green as he leaps up the stairs and clicks his heels, not once, but twice. Cléo moves in the opposite direction, descending the stairs sultrily singing a vampy self-celebratory song. In some way these moments give us as viewers the characters very much unobserved and in their own skins in ways seldom seen in the other sequences.
Park life, freeing though it may be, has a sobering downside. Antonioni and Varda pin their respective characters to the greenery as though they were specimens with high-angle long shots. Thomas discovers that a murder has taken place during his first visit to the park and returns again that night to discover a corpse, its face bathed in a pale blue light. A cracking branch scares Thomas off, and when he returns again the next morning, hoping to photograph the proof of the crime, all that remains of the body is a faint hollow in the grass.
Cléo's idyll is contained to a single visit, and the body she uncovers there is her own, a body she will shortly learn may be one of decay, possibly stricken with cancer. Her discovery is aided by a conversation with a soldier, Antoine, on leave from the Algierian front. Ignorant of the lurking threat of death in Cléo, he greets and celebrates her as Flora, goddess of the summer. [Even the hospital in which she is to learn her fate is an extension of park life, surrounded by verdant gardens.]
Now let's move on to culture. Like so many movies I enjoy, Blow-up and Cléo house their leads in gloriously vast stretches of vaguely industrial square footage masquerading as apartments. You only ever see a corner of Thomas' bed in the many perambulations the film takes through his multitiered live-work space, and there is very little sense, save the ogee traced by the wooden propeller he buys, of Thomas's aesthetic. Cléo's space, on the other hand, is wide open. It's the picture of bourgeoise bohemianism. Only one very theatrical curtain obscures her wardrobe changes from the world; everything else is on display. The juxtaposition of the spare white industrial space with her overly fussy and ornate four-poster bed and vanity and her strangely childish swing gets at Cléo's struggles with and retreats into an infantilized, coddled existence. And then there're those kittens. Whatever jejeune qualities they might suggest about Cléo are undergirded by a faint feral wildness.
Enough Elle Decor kvelling, I promised you music. Blow-up delivers quite the one-two punch, an excellent jazz score by one Herbert Hancock as well as an on-screen performance by the Yardbirds that is the sine qua non of swinging London youth culture [which is to say not dissimilar to an overly serious indie rock show of today]. It's well known that standard practice in Italian cinema was dubbing sound in postproduction, even if, like Antonioni here, you're shooting in London, in English. That's what makes the choice to have the Yardbirds perfomance marred by a crackly loose wire between guitar and amp so intriguing. Is it meant to be some sort of Zizekian blot on the soundtrack, in the same way that the gun and the corpse emerge in Thomas' photographs from the park? Whatever the reason, this shitty sound mix [again, v. indie rock, in my experience] prompts guitar smashing and frenzied crowd baiting. The severed neck is then tossed into the crowd and caught by Thomas. He is chased by mods desperate to possess this holy relic. Once he shakes them, he drops it like trash in the street.
The big musical sequence in Cléo is informed more by traditional musical conventions, but it also very self-consciously manipulates our trained-up expectations as viewers. After previewing a slate of clichéd bad-girl pop songs, Cléo's composer [Michel Legrand] offers her a 180, a maudlin cri d'amour that packs a wallop, partially because, like Karen Carpenter, Corinne Marchand has a voice marked by a low sadness. The camera tracks slowly in left toward her as she sings, first reading the lyrics from a sheet, until its emotions capture her, centering her in the frame as the background drops away. She looks up, the camera turns and she with it, facing the viewer in direct address and singing, from the heart it seems, words she'd never before seen, words of decay and death and alienation [imposed here by the camera] that cause her eyes to well up and her cheeks to glisten with tears. A full orchestra [one assumes nondiegetic given her loft's decor] chimes in and everything. Have we actually gained access to her interiority through the music, or is this just another instance of melodrama? The song ends with an abrupt zoom out that resituates her in a reality in which she rejects the emotions of the song she just sang with such anguish.
Hell, I bought it. But then the cinetrix always was a sucker for the stylish fillips.
