The French invented melodrama on the eve of their 1789 revolution to cope with the emotional demands of the rising bourgeoisie. Previously, the monarchy had maintained a firm grip on subject matter and style. Royal taste ran to imitation Greek tragedy with a focus on erotic passion, and even in the matter of comedy, exemplified by Moliere, an exacting regime of rhymed alexandrine couplets and impeccably logical absurdities. Never definitively overthrown, the classical aspiration to exquisite spiritual precision informs French culture to this day. You can observe it at work in the Roxie Theatre's weekend potpourri of French melodramas, The French Had a Name for It 2, opening Friday.
Unlike the Pacific Film Archive, which has archive built into its name, the Roxie prides itself on a street-urchin moxie that has seen it through 100+ years of continuous programming. Most recently, it has survived the toxic influx of Silicon refugees, which has otherwise eviscerated every cultural outpost around Valencia and 16th Streets. Vive la Roxie! Just don't expect archival-quality anything. The subtitles are iffy, the program notes slapdash, nobody knows how to speak or pronounce French let alone proofread it, or evinces the slightest notion where the French learned to construct complex critical narratives. At the Roxie, it's news the French even know how to act.
C'est la vie. If anything got the French through the Nazi occupation, it was their fundamentally pragmatic approach to existence. If they survived Hitler, they'll survive programmers Don Malcolm and Elliot Lavine. The middle-brow, macho duo are selling their dozen French classics as the cinematic version of a burlesque show. The actresses are "titillating, sexy, orgiastic," while the men are, well, you know, men. While not entirely surprising, this adolescent-boy approach to "naughty" Gallic culture is embarrassing in a town with its own Alliance Francaise, not to mention Consulate. Cool off, boys, take the thesaurus off the shelf, and sharpen your adjectives.
The term Noir, in its application to film, has been stretched past the breaking point. Never mind, it's marketable. When dealing with the French, however, a sense of aesthetic history would pay off big-time. Arguably, Racine (1639-99), the exemplar of classical French tragedy, wrote Noir. Moliere's Don Juan (1665) is Noir. Zola (1840-1902) certainly wrote Noir. France's favorite American writer, Edgar Allen Poe (1809-49), wrote Noir. Noir is trickle-down tragedy, coming back to poison the well of naively optimistic melodrama and its nauseatingly happy endings. When the French slapped the word Noir on a handful of U.S. films including Laura (1944), they were celebrating the injection of Old European despair into Hollywood product.
The dozen films in the Roxie's weekend festival chronologically begin with Henri-Georges Clouzot's masterpiece, Le Corbeau (1943), whose title is a nod to Poe. A small town is driven mad by a series of poison-pen letters, all handwritten in caps and obsessed with a bourgeois interloper, a doctor with a bad habit of saving women in the throes of difficult childbirth but losing the babies. Whence, the accusation of abortionist. Fastidious Pierre Fresnay's real crime is being irresistible to the ladies, attached or otherwise. Based on a real incident dating to 1917, Le Corbeau plays like an Agatha Christie wherein first one, then another character is on the hot seat.
Panique (1946), directed by Julien Duvivier and starring the great character actor Michel Simon, similarly accuses an entire Parisian quartier of scapegoating a bourgeois transplant whose only crime is aloofness. Simon's character falls hard for an ex-con (Viviane Romance) who did time for her man and is still erotically enslaved to that small-time sociopath. The film opens and closes with a busker singing "L'Amour, l'amour" with chilling irony.
A second film by prolific Noir novelist Georges Simenon, La Verite sur Bebe Donge (1952) vivisects the failed marriage of cold-blooded businessman Jean Gabin to spoiled, sentimental, self-righteous Danielle Darrieux as a series of flashbacks from Gabin's hospital death-bed. The final film, Le Septieme Jure (1962), is also the most recent. This variation on the theme of Camus' L'Etranger (1942) demonstrates how a conformist can kill a woman with impunity and even serve on the jury of the murder trial. Existence, as the Existentialists say, is what you make it.