I finally made some time to see The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius’s wonderful homage to silent era cinema. Hazanavicius had some recent success with a goofy reboot of the 1960s James Bond-knockoff OSS 117 trilogy, also starring Jean Dujardin, and his attention to immersive detail serves him well once again in a slightly more serious vein. I say “slightly” because, although the film is sickly sweet with sentimentality, it is overflowing with cheeky jabs at the conventions of a bygone era.
By turning an eye on Hollywood’s switch from silent to talking pictures, The Artist finds good company with true classics, such as Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard, and it has a contemporary brother in Martin Scorsese’s charming Hugo. This film’s trick is that it unfolds just as a 1920s silent film would, using intertitles to convey any important (or just funny) bits of dialogue, accompanied by a lilting, ever-present score. I’ll drop a tiny spoiler that there are a couple of moments that the film breaks from its silence, and this toying with the formula works to a jolting effect. There were a few gasps in the audience at one point, and I wondered how it might have been back in 1927 when the crowd heard Al Jolson speak from the screen for the first time.
Following the developing relationship and diverging career paths of silent has-been George Valentin (Dujardin) and rising ingenue Peppy Miller (Bérénice Belo) creates a smooth parallel arc to match the historical era. This was a time of great flux, where the dichotomy between the haves and have-nots - the quaintly outdated and the shiny newfangled - was never more evident.
The Artist loses some steam toward the middle as it moves toward the sappy finale, and I will dock a few points for its predicability, but in terms of artistic beauty, with its stunning black and white cinematography and deft utilization of music and mise-en-scene, it is a home run.
Right now The Artist is playing on a very limited number of screens in Michigan (I heard 2, to be exact). If/when it picks up its deserving Best Picture Oscar nomination it should catch a wider release, and if given the opportunity I hope people will take a chance to see it. It will definitely be worth your time, even if just for the scene-stealing Jack Russell terriers.
(One small bit of disappointment: it seems much less clever to rename myself Peppy Miller than it did two days ago, although I am considering the addition of a beauty mark or a pencil-thin mustache.)
2012-1-7 jmm #4
No comments:
Post a Comment