Fires Within: The Chaste Sensuality of Director Louis Malle
The forty-five-year-old French filmmaker Louis Malle once made the fascinating suggestion that a director’s unrealized projects are as important as the films he has already shot, bringing about — as they do — the evolution of an oeuvre. And it is one of Malle’s as yet unrealized projects — a version of Robinson Crusoe — that gives a key to the personality of a director whose eclectic and often neglected body of work places him among the significant creators of modern French cinema.
Like Crusoe, Louis Malle’s original sin was that he didn’t want to go into his family’s business, and he ran away to sea. After a short spell in film school, Malle joined up as an assistant to Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1952, becoming, according to Cousteau, one of the most talented underwater cinematographers in the world, and collaborating with him as codirector on The Silent World (1956).
Malle’s first independent feature was Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud (1957) — released in English-speaking countries under the alternate titles Elevator to the Gallows and Frantic — an ironic film noir featuring a wonderful jazz score by Miles Davis, marvelous soft-focus cinematography by Henri Decaë, and starring Jeanne Moreau as a woman who arranges with her aging war-hero lover to murder her husband.
Next came The Lovers (1958) — again starring Jeanne Moreau, as an adulterous provincial wife whose first-night affair with a younger man in a moonlit garden (with intimations of then-shocking oral sex) and escape from a stultifying marriage is played off against the overintoxicated romanticism of its brilliantly chosen musical score, Brahms’ Sextet in B-flat Major — a score which ironically undercuts and teases the notion of romantic love itself. (These subtleties obviously washed right over the head of a judge in Cleveland who, in 1960, sentenced a distributor of the film to a short spell in jail.)
Zazie in the Metro (1960) was Malle’s dazzling, speedy, Mack Sennett-type adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s novel about a wide-eyed foul-mouthed eleven-year-old girl who comes to visit her drag-queen uncle in Paris. Filled with film parodies, sight gags, slapstick and black humor, and concluding with an episode of apocalyptic, fascistic violence in a cafe, Zazie foreshadowed Richard Lester’s later frenetic films, while it gave us the first of Malle’s many depictions of innocent but tough-minded children.
After the flaccid A Very Private Affair (1961) starring Brigitte Bardot, Malle made one of his greatest works — Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within — 1963). A spare, intense, black-and-white portrait of the last forty-eight hours of a dissolute, suicidal playboy, Malle’s film is based on a novel written in the Thirties by the French Fascist and collaborator Drieu de la Rochelle — a book which itself is based on the last two days of the surrealist poet Jacques Rigaut. (Both Rigaut and, eventually, Drieu committed suicide.)
After making Vive le Tour (1964) — a lively twenty-minute documentary about the exhausting Tour de France bicycle race — and Viva Maria (1965) — a light and inconsequential lampoon on action pictures starring Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot as showgirls caught in the middle of a Latin American revolution — Malle came up with another inspired work — Le Voleur (The Thief of Paris — 1966) starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as a wily, anarchistic, upper-class outlaw who steals from the rich while revealing the hypocrisies and corruption of bourgeois society.
During the past ten years, Malle has made a series of films on India (the seven-part Phantom India — 1967, and Calcutta — 1969) in which he himself acts as narrator, commenting as a befuddled and awed Westerner on a country he often can hardly fathom; Murmur of the Heart (1971), an exquisite story of the childhood of a young, upper-middle-class French boy (much like Malle himself) and of this boy’s seduction by his mother — all to the music of Charlie Parker; two documentaries made in 1973: Humain Trop Humain (Human, Too Human) — Malle’s most experimental film, which eschews all commentary, about the workers at a Citroën automobile assembly plant — and Place de la République, which features interviews with people on the street; Lacombe, Lucien (1974), perhaps Malle’s most popular film, about a seventeen-year-old peasant boy who becomes a Nazi collaborator; and Black Moon (1975), a quasi-fairy tale about a young woman, fleeing from a futuristic was, who visits a country house and its odd inhabitants.
Pretty Baby is Louis Malle’s first American movie. Written by Polly Platt and based loosely on AI Rose’s book Storyville, the film draws very loosely on the character of the famous bordello photographer E.J. Bellocq — whose physical bearing (short physique and enormous misshapen head) is hardly suggested by the film’s leading and handsome actor, Keith Carradine — and portrays his fictional affair with and marriage to a twelve-year-old daughter of a prostitute, raised in the brothels.
Set in 1917 New Orleans — with the music of Jelly Roll Morton and other composers of that period played by Bob Greene and the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra — Pretty Baby has been touted as a “naughty” movie. And its heroine, Brooke Shields — the beautiful twelve-year-old model who plays Violet — has become the object of an enormous amount of media attention, as if this child with a woman’s face were some kind of prepubescent Baby Doll. In fact, she gives an extraordinary — and extraordinarily chaste and controlled — performance. But for anyone who know Malle’s previous work, this will hardly come as a surprise.
As in all of his movies, Malle exhibits in Pretty Baby his characteristically detached, skeptical, lucid, moral — not moralistic — attitude toward life (“I want to be respectable,” says Violet’s mother, Hattie, excellently portrayed by Susan Sarandon, to which someone replies: “It’s those respectable people who are lying on top of you every night”) — an attitude that colors and unifies Malle’s variegated body of work.
He exemplifies and reveals this attitude by means of his and editor Suzanne Baron’s transparent, seemingly effortless and controlled, slowpaced editing; the radiant, postimpressionisticcolored cinematography of Sven Nykvist; and by the director’s own mastery in manipulating genre expectations. (The film, for example, opens with what sounds like a woman making love, but which turns out to be Violet’s mother giving birth in an upstairs room to the brother, while her daughter calmly observes the scene, goes downstairs to inform everybody of the news, and thereby introduces us to the cast of characters.)