THE ARTIST

As the reputation of The Artist began to grow with a Palme d’Or nomination and win and an Oscar sweep began to look more and more like a reality (it finally won five of the ten awards for which it was nominated, including three of the big ones, Best Actor, Best Picture, and Best Director), the inevitable voices of dissent, almost as if outraged that a silent movie had a fair shot in 2011, built a specious argument for the film’s demise. If The Artist had been made in the era it emulates, they asked, would it have been cheered on and remembered today beyond airings on TCM’s Silent Sundays?

            The answer is no, as a matter of fact, but the question is also misguided. It wouldn’t have been applauded so heartily because an introspective picture like The Artist would have gone against the self-celebration of early Hollywood. The hard road and broken dreams behind the glamour of Broadway was explored in early musicals like The Broadway Melody and 42^nd Street, but the film capital didn’t have the nerve to peek behind its own curtain until well into the postwar years.

            The story of George Valentin, a once glamorous matinee idol with a pencil moustache and a surname that suggest a tribute to Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino played by Michael Dujardin, and his career tumble after the coming of sound would have been out of favor at a time when Hollywood was tooting its own horn.

            But asking such a question in the first place also demonstrates a lack of understanding of The Artist as a work of art because it not only would not have been made in the 20s but could not have since it is not a silent but filmed mostly as a silent. The silence is more than just a stylistic decision, but also a narrative tool. Valentin enjoys his stardom in silents and when sound is introduced he blocks it out by surrounding himself in the only world he knows, one in which sound is an intrusion much like it was in the opening scenes of City Lights. In Chaplin’s film the noise was ridiculous, here it’s ominous. Indeed, the first time sound is heard in The Artist is in nothing short of a nightmare sequence in which Valentin can no longer ignore the sounds of the world around him. They become increasingly torturous until the sound of a feather landing booms the soundtrack.

            The Artist fuses the themes of Sunset Boulevard and Singin’ in the Rain but with inverted perspective. There is a pride to George Valentin that was also found in Norma Desmond and his fear of speaking before an audience is what doomed the career of Lena Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain when talking pictures took over. His voice will not catch on, he fears. It’s a legitimate fear for anyone who observed the career of Clara Bow, whose career dipped after sound revealed her to be incontrovertibly Brooklynesque. Singin’ in the Rain mocked Lena Lamont (Jean Hagen) for her delusions but The Artist makes a case for taking pity on actors like her and George Valentin.

            “They never needed to hear me speak,” Valentin tells his studio boss (John Goodman). There is a hint of paint in his face and who could blame him? His fans loved his swashbucklers and he can’t accept that those same fans will abandon him for the sake of sound.

Valentin knows his appeal was a visual one and he now feels unarmed walking into the new world of talkies. His solution: Keep making silent films without the studio’s help. This was becoming hard to do by 1929 when talkies and silents were running side by side. Virtually no one attempted it after Hollywood gave sound an affirmative embrace with such all-star revues as Paramount on Parade, The Hollywood Revue of ’29, and The Show of Shows, extravagant musicals existing solely as a celebration of the new technology. Chaplin alone persisted and succeeded, though even he eventually opened his mouth first in gibberish for Modern Times and finally for dictum in The Great Dictator.  Most other silent stars threw in the towel and those that couldn’t change with the times disappeared.

The tragedy of George Valentin is one such case, though his story has more ups and down than the norm. The Artist sees him come full circle. It opens in 1927, the year The Jazz Singer pushed the movies to talk, though sound pictures seem a remote threat to Valentin then at the height of his fame. By 1929 talkies became trouble and by 1930 his career is over. But by 1932, when the film closes, he finds a new place for his talents with the help of Peppy Miller, the young lady he helped when she was a down–on-her-luck hopeful.

About Valentin’s fall Dujardin observed, “At first he doesn’t ask himself a lot of questions. He’s sure of himself but he’s not arrogant, he is confident in the charm that he assumes without difficulty, he’s showy, always acting. It’s as if he was only an image, a face on a poster and then, little by little, step by step, this confidence, this lightness starts cracking and he’s going to go down until he reaches the bottom. Luckily, there’s an angle watching over him.”

Peppy (played by the fabulous Argentinean actress Bérénice Bejo) fares better. Valentin discovers her in the meet cute fashion early romantics (not the least of which were Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch) were so fond of when she stumbles into one of his public appearances and makes headlines. She becomes the studio’s new star and her popularity grows even during the rise of talkies. She has the spunk of Debbie Reynolds’s Kathy Selden from Singin’ in the Rain, she mocks the screen mugging of silent stars but is remorseful of her words when she realizes she offended Valentin. She takes pity on him after his fall from stardom and tries to lift his spirits. Their relationship is an interesting one, negating all conventions of movie romance. She is initially infatuated with the married Valentin (in a delightful scene she sneaks into his dressing room and fantasizes about being swept into his arms) and it’s doubtful she ever stops loving him, but their rocky partnership is built primarily on appreciation.

Much of The Artist is told in silence but not as a silent picture. Much like The Jazz Singer, which was mostly silent with the exception of a few musical numbers and words, The Artist boasts one lavish musical montage, “Pennies from Heaven” creating a sort of tribute to early musicals much like the “Beautiful Girls” number in Singin’ in the Rain.

To appreciate how well The Artist emulates the production style of the era it tells of one need only look at another recent attempt. The Good German was a WWII thriller filmed with the shades and camera angles of 40s cinema, but it couldn’t use the technique as more than a gimmick. The Artist feels like a movie filmed anywhere between 1927 and 32, but treats its look and silence as functional to the narrative.

“I didn’t want this project to be perceived as a whim, or a gimmick, so I started looking for a story that could fit into this format,” said director Michel Hazanavicius. “My starting point, linked with a desire to work once more with Jean and Bérénice, was: a silent movie actor who doesn’t want to har anything about the talkies. I circled around this character but as soon as I got the idea of this young starlet and the crossed destinies, everything fell into place and made sense, even the themes-pride, fame, vanity, an old-fashion vision of love, very pure, that also held with the form.”

Lighting and shading are the hardest things for the few modern filmmakers who dare attempt recreate not so much an era but a production of that era. On an artistic level, the most astonishing thing about The Artist is how close each shot comes to recreating the look of early pictures. Particularly amazing is a scene in which a starlet recites a passage from Romeo & Juliet on a sound stage, her golden hair fading in the glowy hues they create. It looks so natural, so true to old celluloid, that the painstaking process is hard to guess. Cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman shot in color, finding contemporary black and white stock too “sharp”, as he explained, and then monochromed the footage frame by frame to a look of perfection.

Many of the tropes are also familiar. Jack, the terrier that remains Valentin’s faithful companion throughout, is the spiritual descendant of The Thin Man’s Asta and countless other cute canine sidekicks from the innocent days of cinema from Toto to Our Gang’s Pansy. But this little fellow steals the show on his own four legs. Elsewhere, the tropes are recognized as such within the narrative, not surprising for a movie about the development of movies. The silent picture Valentin stubbornly produces and finances on his own after the studio shuts down making silents is a jungle adventure in the grand tradition of the early 30s spectacles like Trader Horn and Red Dust which, ironically, were hailed as groundbreakers in the early days of sound.

It was also in those early years that cinema was testing itself, performing optical tricks with camera and see how far they would go. In an age when the endless capability of CGI has left very few precious surprises there’s something magical about seeing some of the primitive camera tricks of yesteryear. Valentin’s angry conversation with his own shadow has an inexplicable charm (maybe due to its very simplicity) and Valentin’s boozy hallucinations, miniatures of the characters in the film he made, bring back sumptuous memories of Tod Browning’s The Devil-Doll.

Hazanavicius went to great lengths to recreate the Hollywood of the past, visiting old studios and digging through the vaults. His meticulous research can be seen in anywhere from the smallest detail to the restoration of “land” at the end of the iconic Hollywood sign.

“I needed to conduct all this research,” he said. “To feed the story, the context, the characters-in The Artist there are echoes of Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and distant echoes of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert’s story.”

 But his most impressive feat was his use of actual names and logos for a sense of realism to contrast the stylized production values. Variety magazine makes a number of key appearances as does an ad for Coca-Cola. His only invention is the studio itself, the fictional Kinograph Studio.

The passionate commitment of this previously low-profile director certainly helped the Oscar wins, but it’s not what elevated Hazanavicius to the rank of artist. No, that was his gift for gentility and sympathy. Valentin’s ego makes him an easy target for mockery, but Hazanavicius treats his fading career as Greek tragedy. Particularly revealing is the forlorn auction scene in which Valentin watches his prized possessions sell away. Prominent among them is an oversized lithograph of Valentin at the height of his fame. Watching it being carried away would be a moment of reckoning in another film, but Hazanavicius shifts the focus to Valentin and what the loss of that painting means to him.

On the same level, a lesser director would have written Peppy off as a flimsy product of the new wave who takes over her predecessors with little regard or humility. But she never forgets who her benefactors were and now offers her own helping hand.

Having found the appreciation he had lost in his native land, Woody Allen pled for the United States and France to patch up their differences after the dispute over the Iraq War. If the movies are to come to the rescue, The Artist took the lead by joining creative minds on both sides of the Atlantic and producing a wonderful movie. Almost as if to salute this collaboration, The Artist did well at Cannes, opening slowly in American theaters, but then took Oscar night by storm and the French cheered.

“It’s more than a victory, it’s a triumph,” said chief operating officer of Film France Franck Priot. “It means we are supporting movies whose quality is recognized around the world.”

“The moment is historic, ladies and gentlemen,” wrote Olivier Bonnard in Le Nouvel Observateur. “The last time a French film took the best-picture Oscar was…never.”

            There is much to be said for The Artist as a bold and glorious cinematic expression. It’s the work of a gifted craftsman with a unique attention to detail, but its real accomplishments are all in the heart. It’s a love story without being a romance, at least not in the traditional sense. The love is for art itself and sharing this brings Peppy and George closer together. It’s tender and moving without being obvious. It’s a wonderful movie with a happy heart. It was the golden surprise of 2011 and the packaging alone was amazing.