comedy in (e)motion
by
Douglas Messerli
Jean-Claude
Carrière and Pierre Étaix (screenplay), Pierre Étaix (director) YoYo / 1965
One
of the greatest of French clown actors-directors, Pierre Étaix, along with the
wonderful Jacques Tati, are probably why the French so took to the American
clown Jerry Lewis. I still don’t quite comprehend their misunderstanding in
this; the French clowns are quite brilliant and intellectual in their gags and
pratfalls, while Lewis is corny and kitsch; but that is perhaps just a problem
of translation. What they saw on the screen reminded them, clearly, of the
French models—of which there were several others. Of course Chaplin and Keaton
were popular with the French as well, but that was long before Étaix’s and
Tati’s time.
I love Étaix, even more that Tati, but
that’s just my personal opinion, and I know many a critic who would clearly
disagree. In the US, in
part because of rights problems which for decades kept his films from being
distributed in the US and, back in France, which allowed his films to
deteriorate in storage, his films were never quite appreciated. Recently,
several of these works have finally been restored and, after even more delays,
released on Criterion DVDs and Blue-Rays, thank heaven. Yo Yo was a particular favorite of Lewis’, and of Étaix himself.
When Yo
Yo originally appeared in American theaters for a brief period in 1967, two
years after its French premiere, the contrarian Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote:
Mr. Etaix is marvelously
talented. He is a master of
subtle mimicry, and he plays
all sorts of charming
little incidents with great
sensitivity and wit. ... But
that's the trouble with his
picture. It's too casual,
fragmented and loose. It's
as though Mr. Etaix were
writing his script as he goes
along, tossing in scenes
he remembers from somebody
else's film, letting
himself do something (he
also plays several minor
roles without taking credit
for them) more to display
his virtuosity than to
develop a story and character.
But
then, he probably wouldn’t have liked the very popular French film, Michael
Hazanavicius’s The Artist either, a
movie that owes a great deal of its style and charm to Yo Yo.
The impossible large cadre of helpers
certainly open every door for this richest of rich boys, drive him slowly
around his lawns in order to walk his beloved dog, serve him up anything he
might desire, and even help him to play with a model ship on the lake beside
his chateau, but nothing can remove his ennui except an occasional look at the
picture he keeps in the drawer of his desk of a woman he has once loved and his
pocketed yoyo, which, strangely enough he barely maneuver.
He loses the girl—and newly discovered
son—again, only to be saved this time by the Great Depression, which forces him
out of the chateau and into a sound movie, where he, quite literally, hitches
up with his lover’s van, and with his son, a young clown (Philippe Dionnet) and
his ever happy and always-singing wife (Luce Klein), they take to the local
town squares to perform.
Even on the road, young YoYo is
home-schooled by his wife—despite his father’s attempts to slip him the answers
through card tricks and other sneaky devices. The only time they even seem to
encounter any real conflict is when, having arrived in a small town square,
they discover posters for another famous film circus act: Anthony Quinn and
Giulietta Masina from
Fellini’s La Strada!
But all children, even including the cute
Yo Yo, grow up, and World War II, into which he is inducted, breaks up the happy family, as
the elder Yo Yo and his wife are forced to go their own way, traveling around
the world to perform, while their son goes off to War.
Even though he (now Étaix also playing
the son) is now famous as a circus clown, he necessarily serves out his military
time, returning to the circus as a kind of hero. The circus, however, no longer
fulfills him, and, as the inheritor of the now collapsing abandoned castle, he
is determined to build it up again, slowly, piece by piece, into the grandeur
he has experienced as a child.
With the rise of TV and other new
entertainment forms (including film), the circus has clearly lost its audience;
and in the next scene we see the rather scruffy YoYo playing a fiddle on the
streets for a few coins. When he attempts to approach a restaurant customer for
a few coins, the man ignores him, the Étaix character attempting a more
spirited version of his mother’s famous song (composed by Jean Paillaud),
which, nonetheless, gets him nowhere; when he rises to leave the restaurant, we
realize that the wealthy-seeming diner, is himself carrying a violin, perhaps
playing in a orchestra for just a little bit more money.
Yet, suddenly—paralleling all of this
movie’s incredible shifts—we realize that YoYo has been simply filming the
scene, and is now a movie star. Soon after, we realize that he now a movie
executive, and we see the remarkable progress he has made in completely
transforming his father’s chateau into its former glory.
Celebrating the reopening of the palace,
Yo Yo invites the elite of Paris, all reprobates who seem more desperate for
attention and sex than anything else. Yet all the while, we sense he is seeking
the arrival of his mother and father, to show them what he has accomplished.
When they suddenly show up, along with his former, would-be girlfriend, Isolina
(Claudine Auger), they refuse even to leave the van in which they’ve arrived.
They are happy and know who they
are,
while the now wealthy son will obviously have to suffer his father’s former
fate. His former elephant friend saves the day, charging into the party and
rescuing the now ready to be released Yo Yo II, who rides his back, once again,
to safety.
Yes, there are many, many gags—even a
satire on the notion of writing them, wherein the supposed gag writer, who,
after admitting he has been unable to come up with any new gags, becomes the
subject of a long gag where he continues to drop all of his collection of them—but
if this isn’t a quite coherent and intelligently comic statement about wealth,
loss, love, family, and comedy then I’ve simply seen some other movie than the
critics of its day saw.
And I have to agree with Jerry
Lewis—perhaps for the first time in my life—that Yo Yo is a comic masterpiece.
Los Angeles,
December 10, 2016
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