the coat makes the man
by Douglas Messerli
René
Clair (screenplay, based on a play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemand, and
director) Le Million / 1931
In short, to make logical sense of the
antic events of the plot would be senseless. Clair’s work demands that the
viewer, as in the later Marx Brothers’ work, let go of all reason and sit back
and laugh at the insanity portrayed. With nearly everyone on the chase for the
coat and its lottery ticket, characters come and go, in and out of rooms, with
the swiftness of subway turnstile. Women seduce men, men seduce women; ballet
dancers prance into operas that contain no dances, gangsters join singers upon
the stage (as in Porter’s Kiss Me Kate),
and taxi cab drivers join up with butchers, grocers, bartenders, and renters to
get their part of “le million” the lottery ticket offers its rightful owner. If
Tulip is a criminal, he is also the philandering hero’s savior, producing the
missing lottery ticket when it appears all is lost, an act that sends everyone
into a long line of absurdly merry dancing. Whether, after paying off all those
he owes, Bouflette will have any money left to live on is questionable. Does it
matter? Everybody wins in this trifle of a film, which proves that the coat
makes the man!
For all of its light merriment, however,
Clair’s frothy confection, in the end, seems fairly empty. Money is at the
center of everything, and even though the picture’s end returns the central
character to his “true” lover, shows up the self-inflated tenor and his
gargantuan soprano as snobbish fools, and permits everyone to escape the
clutches of the power-hungry police, variations of greed still seems to be at
the heart of this phantasmagoric fable. And this Beatrice spends more time
leading her Dante astray than into the sublime. As the two interlopers who
begin this movie look down into the frenzied cast of characters twining through
the rooms below, the audience also can only feel a bit like the outsiders
observing the fun that will result, surely, in one grand hangover.
Los Angeles, March 15, 2014
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