A B&W sheen adorns Malle’s feature debut so crisply, cleanly and faintly, the film seems wrapped in silver gauze. Or maybe that’s the post-one-a.m. fairy dust settling in for the night at the corners of my eye sockets. Either way, this Elevator carried my sticky ass like a dream-cloud through 1.5 hours of gorgeous Gallic style and street smarts with enough patience to let me stay awake for it all. (Can’t say as much for my travelin’ companions…) At times out-Melvilling the dude himself, Malle’s proto-New Wave noir handles criminal logistics, ex.angst, menace, and rhythm all with equal, how you say, a-plomb.
After performing the perfect murder of sultry Florence’s husband, cool + collected killer Julien(1) hastily hustles back into his office hi-rise to undo a forehead-slappingly obvious and overlooked clue only to be trapped in the elevator on the way up. The torturous liftian purgatory of the corporate world, Julien’s impenetrable elevator suspends him between earthly freedom below and Catholic absolution—or at least concealment—above. It’s also a shitty alibi. When two sexy teens in love steal his running auto left on the street and take it on the lamb, convincing Moreau that Julien has fled with another dame as they whip by her in a coffee shop, you know this shit has to go bad. Malle cops James M. Cain riffing Shakespeare and by the end everyone incriminates everyone so hard Hope starts to look like a faded, rotting, Disney reel from the early 30s deemed too corny for the masses.
If icy French cigarette-kinda flicks aren’t normally your bag though, I should mention that Miles ‘diddy’ Davis does the soundtrack. Convinced?
1. That’s Jeanne Moreau, a cheeky Jean Wall, and Maurice Ronet respectively.
Where’d I See It?
MY ‘LIVING’ ROOM [chi-town]
INDIA MATRI BHUMI ROBERTO ROSSELLINI 1959
On the opposite end of the (hardly) color(ed) spectrum exists Rossellini’s recently (almost) restored, re-released, rediscovered, reappraised ‘masterwork’ India…, which looks about as crude as that eye crust I mentioned in the above spew. I got a glimpse of a screen capture on the internets that implies the film should be full-color (see! above!), if not quite of the Peter Maxian ‘quality.’ This recent overhaul of a purportedly tattered film however, is sticky as dog vomit and just as murky. Visually speaking, a good part of the really light stuff is completely washed out to shallow blanco and the rest is either dusty lavender or a couple shades of mustard. (Stone-ground for the curious.)
To sum plots, I heard it starts off with a really cheesy narrated travelogue bit summarizing something ‘r Other as the camera flies over Bombay. But I missed that part, somewhat on purpose, and jumped right into the (mostly) fiction. Mostly because it’s presented as documentary but I guess the director gave the actors lines and parts and scenes even though (I think) they were mostly living and doing in their normal environs. So here’s the line-up:
1. Young man works as an elephant handler. Picks up local hottie.
2. 30something dad slaves at an open pit moving rocks. Watches a corpse get incinerated. Speaks poeticism. Yells at wife in film’s funniest sequence.
3. Stubborn codger vs. ravenous tiger.
4. Cute monkey’s master dies. Said simian moves to city for a new scene.
There’s some really nice fluidity between the transitions of these four parts and all stories seem to contain some kind of cohesive logic (besides the obvious Man & Nature theme) but damned if I missed the narrative “morphing” that the Chi-town Reader’s Rosenbaum was flogging. There’s a beautiful kind of flow and pull going on though, that’s for sure.
Referring back to the previous debate, in the end, the film kind of seems like neither fic nor doc. It plays exactly like a film world, just like a good film should. Not so much documentation as hallucination then…due in no small part to the aid of a ferociously dirty soundtrack. Birdcalls smother drumbeats become dying baby cries hump monkey legs yelp thick fucking jungle noise all over the place. U C? And the theater (scusa, theatre) played it loud too. Damn surprised there weren’t any walkouts. I mean, the film is one of those enigmatic ones. And fuck, ‘not much happens.’
But it’s cool, because there are a million good scenes, like when all of the elephant handlers wash out all the pachyderms’ wrinkles or the vultures circle the dead man or the tiger prowls around looking like Shere Khan with a bone to pick. It shouldn’t all Be so magical, but somehow it Is.
The sound's thick and crunchy and that’s how it looks too. It doesn’t even matter that it’s in India or that it’s shot by a Frenchie. Could be, someone scraped the back of your lungs and performed a really cool puppet show behind the gooey screen? You wouldn’t know the difference.
If you happen to live in a ‘major’ city, this will likely come your way and you should probably catch it. Just so you know.
Where’d I See It?
CHOPIN THEATRE [chi-town]
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