Peter Bradshaw
The director was a prolific and legendary figure, making films in a dizzying range of genres from crime to sci-fi, satire to jazz
A tutelary deity of French cinema ... Bertrand
Tavernier. Photograph: Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images
If any film-maker was a living, breathing,
flesh-and-blood icon of French cinema, it was Bertrand Tavernier, the
legendary, prolific director and a proud son of Lyon – which was itself
arguably the historical epicentre of cinema, as the city where Auguste and
Louis Lumière set up business. In 2017, I went to the Lumière festival in that
city, and was briefly introduced to him there. Tavernier’s presence was
indispensable: I have a photograph of a raucous dinner hosted by Thierry
Frémaux with Benicio del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, and Tavernier is an impish,
grinning figure to be glimpsed in the mirror, loved by everyone there, a sprightly
tutelary deity.
Bertrand Tavernier, veteran French director of Round Midnight, dies
aged 79
His movies ranged from satire to period drama, social realism,
jazz, hardboiled crime, sci-fi and fierce anatomies of the French experience of
the second world war. He started as a movie-mad youth after the war,
working as a publicist and assistant director, branching out into screenwriting
and then into directing itself. But his body of work was not just an embrace of
the New Wave but also a continuation from it, and perhaps also a reconciliation
with the more stately cinéma du papa which the young turks had rejected.
Specifically, Tavernier worked with two screenwriters, Jean Aurenche and Pierre
Bost, who had actually been singled out for attack by François Truffaut in his
essay Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema Français, for being at the heart of the
cinema’s decline in France.
Tavernier made his debut with The Watchmaker of St Paul in 1974, a movie based on a novel by Georges Simenon, that eternally invaluable source of material and inspiration for all French film-makers. And it starred an actor who was to become a repertory player for Tavernier in the years to come, and himself an iconic figure for French cinema: Philippe Noiret. Noiret plays a law-abiding watchmaker: calm, precise, respectable and as reliable as the machinery he makes and repairs with such care. He is told one day that his son has committed a murder and gone on the run – an unthinkable event. And so he has to join the police in searching for this young man that he realises he does not know at all. The movie was a great introduction to Tavernier’s tough, confident approach to character, to cop procedural and to the agony of moral choices.
His Death Watch of 1980 is one of the cult sci-fi movies of the
late 20th century – and, fascinatingly, one of the great Glasgow movies,
perhaps the greatest. Romy Schneider, in her final role, is a woman
with a terminal illness, talked into taking part in a 24/7 reality TV show that
will show her decline. But she backs out and goes on the run with a man (played
by Harvey Keitel) who is secretly working for the TV production, with cameras
secretly implanted into his eyes, transmitting her most intimate, painful
moments to a TV audience. As a satire of reality TV and mass media generally,
Tavernier’s film couldn’t be more bold, though it unfolds at a high-minded,
ruminative pace – comparable to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, perhaps, in its refusal of
the melodrama that Hollywood would deploy with such a subject.
Coup de Torchon from 1981, based on Jim
Thompson’s pulp novel Pop. 1280, was another fiercely intelligent excursion
into crime, transplanting the action from the American south to colonial French
West Africa in the 1930s. Noiret plays an administrator – a cop figure – who
cleans up the town by executing the presumed villains in cold blood, including
the husband of his mistress, played by Isabelle Huppert, who had been in
Tavernier’s earlier film The Judge and the Assassin, and here refined her cool,
sexy and almost flippant persona under Tavernier’s directorial guidance.
In the mid-80s Tavernier made the film that,
rightly or wrongly, is probably most readily associated with him: A Sunday in
the Country, a beautifully rendered period piece set at the beginning of the
last century, which Tavernier co-wrote with his former wife, Colo (who died
last June). An elderly artist, played by Louis Ducreux, has his household run
for him with efficiency and care. One sunny day he is visited by his grownup
children, but makes it clear that he favours his vivacious daughter (Sabine
Azéma) to the irritation of the duller son. It is a film about a painter which
is itself “painterly” – that overused and suspect adjective. But Tavernier made
the effect work for him and created something heartbreakingly bittersweet.
Tavernier’s other hugely admired film of that
period is Round Midnight (1986), a gorgeous and heartfelt love letter to bebop
and jazz. It is a smokily atmospheric, almost non-narrative movie starring the
saxophonist Dexter Gordon as a fictional American musician in Paris (loosely
based on Bud Powell) who is taken up by a French fan. The movie is perhaps
influenced a little by Scorsese (who has a cameo as a club owner) with its
switches to home-movie Super 8 and black-and-white.
Of his later films, two stand out for me. One
is It All Starts Today, a tough social realist drama from 1999 about a school
headmaster who is fighting to protect his pupils and their families. Everywhere
there is crime and vandalism. There is a great scene where a cop comes to
inspect evidence of a burglary, sympathetically listens to the principal’s tale
of woe and then impassively smashes a window from the outside with his police
baton – because he realises that there is insufficient evidence for a break-in
and this act will allow the school to claim money on the insurance.
In some ways, however, my favourite of his
film is Laissez-Passer, or Safe Conduct, from 2002, which is about the French
film industry during the second world war, and their collaborationist survival
that was to be a painful memory in French cinema’s collective unconscious for
decades to come. (It is still arguably unresolved.) The movie is about two
film-makers, played by Denis Podalydès and Jacques Gamblin, in Paris in the
early 40s. One refuses to have anything to do with an industry being run by Nazi
Germany and so lives in poverty; the other swallows his pride, accepts the work
but also works for the resistance, helping them with information that he would
not otherwise have. Which of the two is morally superior? The collaborationists
have a “laissez-passer” that allows them freedom of movement, but it is a badge
of shame. Laissez-Passer is a film to compare with Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les
Enfants, but confronts French culture and French history even more directly.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/mar/25/a-flesh-and-blood-lion-of-french-cinema-bertrand-tavernier
