A few days ago our living room TV shorted out and, with Valarie gone to bed, I decided to watch a DVD on my laptop. The choice was Bob Le Flambeur, a 1950s French noir by perhaps my all-time favorite filmmaker: Jean-Pierre Melville.
A forerunner of the French New Wave filmmakers, Melville was inspired by American crime movies of the 1930s and 40s: noirs, gangster pictures. His movies take place in France, usually the Parisian underground, during the 1950s and 60s. But the characters still don the fedoras and trench coats of classic noir characters, intermingling with scantily clad femme fatales.
To me Melville's best films came from the late 1960s, particularly the two great masterpieces he made with Alain Delon (the brooding but charismatic French actor nearly handsome enough to make me give up my heterosexuality): 1967's Le Samourai and 1970's Le Cercle Rouge. But his 1956 film Bob Le Flambeur is a delight as well, a heist film with a Gallic sense of poignant despair starring Roger Duchesne as an aging gambler-robber seeking one last job before he rides his Cadillac convertible into the sunset. But the surrounding din of cops, thugs and a young girl of course compromise that film.
When I sat down in the recliner for a late-night viewing, laptop on my lap and headphones plugged in, it turned out that my cheap computer couldn't read the DVD signal quick enough to keep up with the film's intended pace. The sound was unbearably choppy and the action was too slow, at maybe 80 percent speed.
At first I planned to turn off the movie, distracted by the frustrating notion that my laptop DVD player didn't work anymore. (We'd also unsuccessfully tried to watch I'm Alan Partridge earlier that night.) But instead I quickly got sucked into watching the movie without sound and at its reduced speed. The subtitles of dialog allowed me to still follow what was being said, and the slowness made incidental shots--walking in or out of a room, a car driving by, Bob's long drag on a cigarette as he contemplates his mortality--resonate much more strongly.
I only watched about 35 minutes of movie time, but that translated into almost an hour of watching the modified version. In the few days since, the movie has been branded on my consciousness more than most of what I watch. This experiment certainly wouldn't work with any old movie, of course. Most of them I want to go by more quickly, not less, although back when I was reviewing lots of bad box office fare for Willamette Week, I surely would have preferred some have muted sound.
Even so, I find myself now wanting to watch other pictures with great cinematography and atmosphere--mise en scene, to the French--like Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love or Claire Denis' Beau Travail--on that same crappy Compaq laptop, the surprise engine of revelation.
Just wanted to say, I read this and enjoyed it and maybe envy you a little bit. Serendipity's a sweet little thing.
Posted by: MMM | August 19, 2009 at 11:06 PM