Les Diaboliques (1955) - Henri-Georges Clouzot

One of the major films of the notable frenchman Clouzot, famous filmmaker who got, at least for a moment, to compete with the titan Alfed Hitchcock as master of suspense; it is a story whose literary origin even managed to snatch Hitch by a narrow margin. Adapts the filmmaker to the big screen one of the successful novels of the french writer-duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, singular adaptation of the dark experiences of an individual, owner of a school and husband of the director of the place, but at the same time he has one of the professors of the same as a lover; the despotic individual constantly insults the females, reaching the extent of them arranging the death of the subject, the film being also the story of the psychological tribulations of women, because in turn events of different nature will happen. The film has abundant background, such as the fact that it includes the filmmaker's wife, the Brazilian-born actress Véra Clouzot, and the fiery star Simone Signoret, having a certain controversy the relationship of both actresses in the filming, in addition to certain differences, natural by the way, between the literary and the cinematographic version of this shady story. Considered the summit of the french director, this is undoubtedly a good example of why he is considered one of the masters of suspense cinema, a great movie.

         

In an elementary school, we see Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse), owner of the educational center, in which the director is Christina Delassalle (Véra Clouzot), his wife. In the institution is also Nicole Horner (Signoret), teacher, and lover of Michel, love triangle that everyone knows, in addition to the constant abuse and humiliations to what man exposes both women. Lover and wife soon conspire, wish to liquidate the man, end their martyrdom, go to a secluded environment to finish finalizing details of the murder, Christina tells her husband she wants the divorce, doubt in her actions, but Nicole ends up making her angry. When Michel goes to the room where she is staying, he is deceived by his wife, and drinks a sedative liquid, loses consciousness; appears soon Nicole, immediately, takes Michel to the bathtub, where she drowns him. They put the corpse in a large basket and transport it secretly to the school, they deposit it in the muddy pool of the institution. The night passes, the next day the remorse is taking its toll on the director, Nicole tries to reassure her, the children play around the pool, and to everyone's surprise, nothing is found at the bottom of the pool. Fear grows, they do not find the body, the commissioner Alfred Fichet (Charles Vanel) leads an investigation that yields more than surprising results.

As stated earlier, in this film, Clouzot gives evidence of why he is considered one of the masters of suspense, of course, not comparable to the versatile major expert of the subject, the british Hitch, but it is remarkable how he weaves his suspense the french, in various sequences attests to his expertise. We have for example the sequence in which Christina is about to give the sedative to her husband, plague of tension the director those instants, she hesitates, but a few blows will end up convincing her of her nefarious enterprise. Other details where the tension reaches high levels, they transporting the corpse in the basket, the cover is about to fall and ruin their malignant concern, or the moments after the murder, the next morning, when the keys of the teacher fall on the water of the pool. Those are instants where the tension is tenfolded, always with diegetic sounds as an exclusive sound accompaniment. The tension will be fed by uncertainty, which will encompass everything, it will be the root of the growing dementia, where is the corpse, the fatal intrigue that drives to the madness both the spectator and the perpetrators of the bizarre crime. After shooting his also egregious The Wages of Fear (1953), Clouzot makes evident he knows how to engender the suspense, but also how to maintain it, how to increase it in climactic moments, that suspense that grows in the viewer in the same proportion as in both females, because it is no longer murder, as one would think a priori, which causes terror; it is what continues, the uncertainty of not knowing what has happened, where is the corpse in an unlikely situation, with disquieting and disturbing paranormal dyes. An invaluable resource for the generation of that sharp tension, are the diegetic sounds, the only auditory accompaniment at times, ingeniously inserted sounds, the water that runs from a tap, only that breaks the tense instants in which she is about to do her part, to dope the despotic individual, her husband. The drip of that same pipe, is also the only thing that breaks the sharp silence, reinforcing the oppression, the tension of those instants prior to the crime, which tighten the tormented psychology of the criminals. Bell sounds, tinkling, sounds unconnected with the action and also help to make that environment increasingly tense, and of course, the sounds of the typewriter at the end, there are even shots of a sweaty Christina, raising more nervousness.

The film is successful from the staging, with that effective creation of a dry atmosphere, an oppressive environment, which originates, and at the same time is reinforced with that superb work of photography, work and grace by Armand Thirard, supported by the sober composition, austere but compact, of his images, austerity that combines perfectly with black and white to generate that feeling of secrecy, cloister and tension. There are powerful contrasts, powerful chiaroscuros, unexpected chiaroscuros, some natural, others artificial, generated, in a game of light and shadows that apart from morbid beauty, enhances the isolation of the sordid school. The shadows invade a good part of the screen in many moments, spilling out in different forms, becoming characters at times, great success and mastery in that resource, raising the visual value of the film twice, bringing it closer to the black cinema, the North American film noir, at the same time that lukewarm to the german expressionism and all the gloomy power of this film current. The construction of the lugubrious atmosphere of the film reaches the point that these shadows are manifested starting from minor elements, clocks, vases, project their shade over the cloisters, and in that memorable final sequence, the shadows are, literally and more than ever, one more character. Additionally we have the water, and the rot that is generated from it, the water in the bathtub, the water that decomposes the body of Michel, the water in the pool where the body is deposited, the water stored in some sequences, such as when a vehicle arrives at school at the beginning of the film, an omnipresent element in the film and that is part of that wet dementia that is taking over women. Morbidly we have on more than one occasion images of the corpse, images of the individual dead, the present death in a sordid way, and in a way that then must have been much more shocking. On the other hand, and always within the photography of the film, there is a good deal of illumination of the characters, in the sequence of the infant who claims to have seen paranormally the missing director, the infant is shown with notorious and excessive illumination, while the rest is embodied with regular lighting. In the midst of all that darkness, there seems to be no logical way out of the mystery of the whereabouts of the body, there are images and circumstances that validate a disturbing supernatural possibility -even we have a final crack, the student who has had a vision again-, and the growing madness is breaking the women, until finding final climax.

There is certainly a film that has all the condiments to be a Hitchcock film, according to the legend that Clouzot, with the influence of his wife, went ahead for a matter of hours to the english master to obtain the rights to this novel. We have the details of a murder that happens and about which all the intrigues and speculations will be woven, also the subsequent investigation, the police work that will narrow the possibilities, and of course, the most important, the style to generate suspense, in which the spectator discovers the ominous details of the assassination along with the protagonists, it is not surprising in fact that the good Hitch had fixed his attention and intention in adapting the work of the famous french couple Boileau-Narcejac, and when not succeeding in this case, Hitchcock made up for it with Vertigo (1958), another successful work of the binomial. Naturally there are differences between literary text and film, for example, in the results of the crime, they are successful in the book, they fail in the film, besides the lesbian link they have in the book, something hidden in the film, but not absent. Thus, there is severe ambiguity among the females, isolated in a room together, plotting their plan, a closeness between the protagonists that leaves room for suspicion, not fully addressed, something that in part was probably eluded because of the film censorship of the time. They have opposite characters, the fervid and determined Nicole, opposed to the fragile and indecisive Christina, even the illuminations of both differ, dark the first, illuminated the second, something that, some assert, was to further distinguish the natures of both women, others argue -like the protagonist Paul Meurisse- that it was to praise the figure of his wife the director, overshadowed by the hot and fiery Simone Signoret. The opposite of feminine characters is even reinforced by the interpretations of them, the looks, the fervid eyes of the Signoret, always contrasted with the weakness of the Clouzot, the tessituras in their acting records reinforce that opposition. The final sequence is exemplary, seven minutes of a sequence that is perfect epitome of the observed, the power of the shadow is maximized, the paroxysm is reached in the shady, darker than ever passage, the black and white that yields to the gloom, the camera that moves with precision, briefly runs with little movement the environment to show enough and not distract attention in the least of what matters, the outcome. The film, it is true, depends a lot on its end, something good and bad, as also famous films have done it, the mentioned Vertigo, Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and respecting the wishes of the director, no revealing details have been disclosed in this article. The first viewing is infinitely more powerful than the later ones, of course, but it is maintained the suspense of a film in which the psychological torments are the biggest, the suspense, the psychological tension that grows by leaps and bounds among women, the suspicions, the conminations, accusations, injunctions. In an attempt to enhance the performances of his actresses, it is said that Clouzot made eating his wife genuinely rotten fish in a sequence, and that made women bear true weight, and a morbid irony is completed, Vera would die of an attack on the heart, like her character. With many inducements, the film is at the top of the production of Clouzot, the director despised by the new wave, but who showed in many ways a more modern style than those detractors.

Death in the Garden (1956) - Luis Buñuel

Buñuel would continue his development as a filmmaker, and being the particular year of the release of this film, 1956, a cyclical year in his career, a great change was beginning to get shaped in the director, a change that had begun with Thus is the aurora, shortly before released. Continuing with his personal tradition, the Spanish genius adapted a literary work to the cinema, by José-André Lacour, adapted to the script by his famous collaborator, Luis Alcoriza, and with his own participation also in the process, a remarkable tandem very often repeated, usually with success. In the film Buñuel is merging some of his old topics and obsessions, with some new artistic and thematic affiliations, undoubtedly is maturing to reach his fullness in European lands, in later films. The story portrayed shows a group of individuals, living in an undetermined place, where diamonds abound, where an adventurer arrives, finding an environment of rebellion among the diamond workers and military who evict them; in the violent collision between the groups, the adventurer, a priest, an old man and his daughter, as well as a prostitute, will undertake desperate flight through the jungle. Buñuel follows the line of films like Robinson Crusoe (1954), but above of all the aforementioned film, he is already exploring new ways, and sees that the path of European film coproductions is already an inevitable and indefectible way.

                   

In an undetermined country, area of diamonds lands, a group of villagers, diamond-diggers, are informed that they will be evicted by military forces, try to protest, but they are repressed. In there, lives Castin (Charles Vanel), with his deaf-mute daughter Maria (Michèle Girardon), then arrives the stranger Shark (Georges Marchal); in the midst of the turbulent environment, Father Lizardi (Michel Piccoli) tries to persuade everyone not to rebel. Shark meets Djin (Simone Signoret), attractive prostitute who gives him to the military, who accuse him of a robbery. But Shark manages to escape the dungeon, the military kill many of the villagers, Castin is accused of exhorting the people to revolt, he hides in Djin's house and proposes marriage, and she accepts, with the old man's money in mind. They embark on the run, Shark, Djin, Lizardi, Castin and his daughter, also aided by Chenko (Tito Junco). The merciless jungle punishes them, while the soldiers are always following their trail, Djin, and then Castin will get losing strength, since scarces food and rains copiously. Shark then finds food and even jewelry, it seems that salvation has come, they must build a raft and cross a lake. But Castin suddenly falls prey to dementia as they plot to flee, and while Shark and the prostitute fall in love, while others fight for the many jewels found, he takes a rifle and kills Djin and Lizardi. Shark afterwards wipes him out and finally leaves with Maria.

In this film, Buñuel articulates the narrative structure in well differentiated parts, the first, with the supposedly civilized world, but in which at the same time violence and bullets reign; the second in which the jungle will take care of arising the most desperate side of the unfortunate, until they lose their calm, sanity, and eventually even life; and then lucidly returns, but at the same time, and hand in hand with that lucidity in some cases, their ambitions and malice, find salvage, food, and even superfluous well-being, jewels. But with the jewels it returns to them much of the evil in their humanity, an antagonism that seems to be an echo of the caressed in Robinson Crusoe, the return to the most basic of man, the questioning of the most elementary principles of civilization (although it does not get to the extreme of the solitude and total isolation of the aristocratic English adventurer, whose journey to the interior was much deeper). In one of the films where the filmmaker most vigorously portrays one of his affiliations, the political interest and to some extent with revolutionary guidelines, from the beginning of the film, promptly and immediately portrays a crude confrontation, a class confrontation that will become violent. The exploiters, in the form of the oppressive government, the military, against the exploited, the humble and hardworking diamond workers, who see their way of life, their modus vivendi and only source of income, abruptly cut off. Thus, one of the first things we see is violence, the violent shock of the beginning, the military repressing the workers, a clear variety of the traditional class clash, and the figure that immediately shows, after that confrontation, is allegorically a board of Chess. In the aspect of staging, some frames, some shots, although not in abundance, leave evidence of maturity, of the technical mastery that has been acquired by the director, already hardened, and who was already entering to full-color films; but, in the general analysis, this is a film in which surrealism shines by its absence (the only moment this is broken, is when a photo appears, car sounds flow, cars and lights, improbable picture that fades as the focus of the photo moves away), a linear, flat film, in which Buñuel rather explores other topics that draw his attention powerfully. The director recovers in that sense one of the themes that would permeate his guidelines in more than one film those years, the unbelievable created hell that human beings face, in space and situations that become minimal. Now, as in Robinson, there is a slow and gradual ruin and degradation, faced with an extreme situation, a voracious jungle that opens its threatening jaws, the subjects are prey to despair, old Castin being the most useless, the most defenseless.

In future there would be no going back, the new topic certainly fascinated Buñuel, probably started with the aforementioned Robinson, continued with That is the Dawn, and then would take this to its pinnacle, and in different variations, with The Exterminating Angel (1962). Being Buñuel a filmmaker with the temperament and obsessions he has, the entomologist is again notticed, that finds solace in what he shapes, with humans confronting unbelievable circumstances, bordering on the absurd and unreal, with the director leaning like an entomologist, curious and scientific, analyzing his test subjects, as if it was an experiment (being fair, for the filmmaker certainly it was). There was also another great change, Buñuel used after a long time, from his exile in Aztec lands, European actors, French actors after decades of separation, and although the filmmaker talks about the tortuous work with Simone Signoret and her diva poses, he tightened ties with Michel Piccoli, to whom great friendship would unite him. Although the film differs from other works more a la Buñuel, there are noticed anyway his obsession topics, like the never missing death, sempiternal threat in the form of the merciless jungle, although it is finally human dementia that ends with half of the group, it is Castin who is deranged and liquidates everybody; there is the relative newness now, the new obsession, a group of individuals, who over one or another circumstance, more or less realistic, with greater or lesser verisimilitude, are immersed in dementia situations, that will take their humanity to the limit, breaking every convention of life in a civilized world. The circumstances, from one case to another, from one film to another, will vary, and Buñuel now has the tact of separating from having to frame his story in a certain geographical space, he simply slides us that it is a South American country, which shares borders with Brazil. An always inescapable Buñuelian matter, religion of course, is not absent, another of the capital subjects in the filmography of the genius of Talanda, begins to prefigure variations that in later films would deal with much greater detail and freedom. This is based on Father Lizardi, an ambiguous figure, diametrically opposed to priests previously seen in Buñuel, as the father of He (1953), and to a certain extent hinted at the irreverent priest of The River and Death (1954), both so conventional -to put it in a way-, compared to what we could now call an indefinite priest, ambiguous in his attitude, always taking responsibility for others ("I answer for him", or "I take responsibility", we will hear him say), that unconsciously forms part of the oppressive side, which is overcome by circumstances, is already announcing what will be the father in Nazarín (1959).

Father Lizardi, from his first appearance, from his first words, is clearly outlining what character he is about, he wants to quell the revolt, "who kills iron, he dies iron," he says quietly but determinedly. The priest is a key character, who transits in a certain way, from one side to another, in that sense his evolution makes him one of the most interesting characters: although at the beginning he urged Castin to surrender and end with the killings and violence, afterwards collaborates to hide him, does not betray him, helps to hide him from the militia. He renounces his faith, symbolically pulls out the leaves of the bible to light the fire, has sacrificed his faith for the material, for survival, the flesh has prevailed over faith, is certainly the most attractive character, in which Buñuel seems to have poured the most of his curiosity and interest. Deliriously tells an anecdote about hard-boiled eggs, without anyone paying the least attention, an unrelated anecdote with what is lived, and, in my opinion, very probably an anecdote intimately linked to Buñuel himself; in the end significantly tells Shark that his opinion about him has changed. Shark is a kind of heretic, does not believe in God, does not kneel before the image of Christ in a chapel, but until, by force, with a rifle blow on his legs, they make him. And it is complemented at the end, when the boat arrives, saying "it's funny, 60 men had to die for God to save us" (Castin also adds something to this, when he is already a prey of the dementia, he is about to kill everyone, saying "the righteousness of God shall speak"). As always, in his characters, the filmmaker overturns human traits, the innocence of the mute girl, the restrained behavior of the prostitute, the naive old man, and that indecipherable priest, all make up what could be considered the totality of human nuances to the eyes of Buñuel. In the violent ending, after all the lived -and survived- Djin and Lizardi are killed by Castin, the strongest and weakest finally are the survivors, Shark and Maria, her innocence is what saves her, and in regard to that duality of the survivors, Buñuel affirms not knowing why that pair was the one that resisted in the end, "the nature does not act according to the human laws: it is blind", he says to us. The film unfolded at a momentous time in Buñuel, who was already well established in Mexico, who had achieved fame, notoriety and recognition, both public and critical, but to whom the doors of the Mexican film scene began to close. The great change was already beginning, the co-productions with Europe were a more than affordable way, it was becoming the only way forward, and the European producers began to look with longing on the young and promising Spanish filmmaker, who, more than a promise, was then already a reality, sensing that his great explosion was coming soon; it was the right time, the turning point in his career had come. Atypical and conjunctural, very Buñuel but at the same time different from his most traditional exercises, worthy and indispensable for the scholars of his work, a feature not of his better known, and recognized, but necessary for the global understanding of his oeuvre.