the death of romance
by
Douglas Messerli
Noël
Calef, Louis Malle and Roger Nimier (writers), Louis Malle (director), Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator
to the Gallows) / 1958
It’s clear, moreover, as Malle has explained,
that this part of the film is grounded in his two favorite directors, Alfred
Hitchcock and Robert Bresson. As Malle himself notes in an interview with
Philip French:
The irony is, I was really
split between my tremendous
admiration for Bresson and the
temptation to make a
Hitchcock-like film. So
there’s something about Elevator
that goes from one to the
other.
These elements of the film gradually
take it out of its film noir genre,
and begin to push the movie in another direction that seems closer to the
French New Wave. Moreover, the second, younger couple, who steals the
murderer’s car and temporarily takes on the identities of Mr. and Mrs. Tavernier before, finally, murdering
a German couple in an outlying motel, reminds one of something right out of
Godard. But, of course, Godard had not yet made Breathless or Band of
Outsiders in 1957, when Malle was filming. Here, just as in Breathless everything seems gratuitous
and unexpected. Like Belmondo and Seberg the young man, Louis (Georges
Poujouly) and juvenile florist’s assistant, Véronique (Yori Bertin) seem wild
and unhinged, moving without premeditation from one crime to another until,
pretending a romantic ending, they determine to take their own lives—and yet
even fail at that.
On the other hand, symbolically, the murder
of the Benckers makes all the sense in the world, for, in shooting them, Louis
is killing off the past.
This second film within the film,
accordingly, seems more like a Nouvelle
Vague movie than many of the films of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol,
and Rivette after it. Malle, as he himself explains, did not like joining
groups, and he was never a reviewer for or associated with the French film
magazine, Cahiers du cinema, home to
most of the group’s filmmakers. Moreover, few of his other films, except
perhaps for Zazie dans le Métro, represent
such an abandonment of logic (although one could surely point to his earlier
student movie Crazéologie of 1954,
based on the French Absurdist theater). And even Malle’s younger brother
Vincent admits Malle was, in many ways, connected to the New Wave.
In Elevator
to the Gallows, however, it seems more apparent, over time, that the two
elements of this film are purposely in conflict with each other. If the
murderous lovers kill to allow themselves a new future, the second pair of
murderers are trying, as I note above, to destroy the past. Yet we all know
that fate will not permit the older couple to relive their lives, and as the
film ends, both realize that, as Florence says, they will be given “no more
ageing,”
Throughout the film, as critics such as Terrence Rafferty (and even Malle himself) have noted, the director goes out of his way to show a city that, if not futuristic, is at least modern—unlike most of the real Paris we all know and love. The moderne motel was so different from anything Paris had to offer that Malle and his crew had to travel to Normandy to film those scenes. Clearly in this 24 year-old director’s vision, the new inevitably wins out over the old, unpredictability over the predictable film tropes; mightn’t one even add, perhaps, Bresson wins out over Hitchcock?
Los Angeles,
August 21, 2016
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