quicksand
by Douglas MesserliMichael Hazanavicius (writer and director) The Artist / 2011
Using his own money and directing himself, George attempts a comeback, a silent film that ends, quite ridiculously, with the hero being swallowed up in quicksand, just as his life has been swallowed up by the new medium in which Peppy is featured. Both films are scheduled to open the same night!
Peppy is one of the few members of the audience for George's disaster, while her own film is mobbed. Suddenly, as the fan magazines might put it, she is "everyone's favorite," while George's wife leaves him, demanding that he clear out of their house. The stock market crash leaves him reeling. Spiraling into alcoholism, he is forced even to pawn his tux. He fires is loyal driver-butler (James Cromwell) and puts his few possessions that remain up for auction, Peppy secretly buying them.
The rest of The Artist is an artful seesaw between the two, as time and again Peppy—a nearly unstoppable force—attempts to create a deeper relationship, George, out of stubborn pride and self-pity, pulling away, until he finally tries to burn down his apartment with himself in it. His amazing pet dog, Uggy, races to a nearby policeman, who pulls George to safety. Peppy, rushing to his side finds him lying in a hospital in a near coma, and takes him home to her new mansion. She even blackmails the studio head (John Goodman) into featuring George in a talking picture. But when George gets wind of good attempts and discovers her purchase of his mementos, he once again returns to his burned-out hovel, taking out a hidden gun with the intent of killing himself. When Peppy discovers his absence she calls out for her driver, Clifton (the former driver for George, whom she has hired), but when he does not appear, she impatiently takes over the wheel herself, despite the fact, as it quickly becomes apparent, that she cannot drive. The tension between the possibility that she will kill herself in an automobile crash and George's slow employment of his gun is an exciting near-end for this melodrama.
I don't think it will ruin the film to tell what anyone who understands this work as a comedy will have already figured out. She hits a tree, but safely arrives, and although an intertitle shouts "BANG," George does not shoot the gun.
It has all been great fun! But The Artist is not really about its clichéd plot but rather concerns silent and sound filmmaking. How does film mean? And how does film narrative get conveyed? It's not just that Hazanavicius's film is a valentine to silent film pictures; it is a kind of imaginary silent film that should/could have been made, had that era had all the technical abilities that we have today. And in that sense The Artist is a sort of wonderful fraud, a film that just like forged art works, looks like an original until you discover that the paint did not exist during the artist's life or that the canvas upon which the work has been painted was made years after the artist died.
Later, in a moment of utter drunkeness, George suddenly sees miniature versions of himself and fellow cast members, and is about to wipe them off the bar counter before he falls stone drunk to the floor, as if in destroying his visions of himself, he has himself died. When the dog soundlessly barks at the policeman, the officer at first seems impervious to his calls for help. Is the dog barking or pretending to bark? If a tree falls in the forest without a witness, does make noise?
These inherent cinematic conundrums and numerous others enrich this work and transform it from a mere exercise in recreating an older form into a questioning of that form and of film genre in general. By film's end the director has publicly investigated the role of the artist, director, editor, composer, and actor. And, in doing so, Hazanavicius has truly brought some of the past back to life, or, more correctly, stolen some of our present to bring back into the past.
Los Angeles, December 14, 2011
Reprinted from Nth Position (January 2012).
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