SEE THIS CLASSIC JACQUES BECKER FILM, IT'S AMAZING; IT'S FINALLY OUT ON VIDEO AND AMAZON HAS IT FOR SALE
Author: Aw-komon from Sherman Oaks, CA
1 November 2000
So it's finally out on video, huh? Let's hope for a DVD soon (highly unlikely, simply because hardly anyone has seen this film recently, in order to be knocked out by it, like I was, and create enough of a demand for a release).
I saw this thing, last year, with about 30 other people at the Egyptian in Hollywood as part of a Becker retrospective. It really is an amazing piece of work; it's a New-Wave film made some ten years before there was a New-Wave. Most of the film is shot in the streets and night-clubs of Paris with a realism and raw poetry that was non-existent in most French cinema of the time. In the late '40s and the '50s, Becker was a relatively popular filmmaker, and besides Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer and all the rest of the future New-Wave guys who idolized him, Polanski in Poland used to catch quite a few of his flicks (the only French filmmaker they got to see over there).
Daniel Gelin plays a young dude (much like Becker himself used to be) who wants to go with his pals to Africa on some kind of documentary film assignment. While he's trying to get the goods together to set this enterprise up, he and his friends and their girlfriends drive around town in a big convertible car that turns into a boat, party up a storm at Jazz clubs, and in general rebel against the establishment of the period. They all have a deep sense of solidarity and common purpose in their youth, a magical bond that's bound to disappear as the societal pressures, temporarily on hold, reassert themselves. Gelin, however, is single-minded and dedicated, determined not to let his friends cop-out on him; he knows that if he can keep everyone united, he might be able to work their particular non-conformist angle into a success.
"Rendezvous in July" captures the poetry of youth like very few films before or since. It is one of those amazing films that's a joy to watch from start to finish, it literally transports you to 1949 Paris and lets you hang-out with these young characters. Upon seeing it once, I immediately wanted to see it again many times, but the retrospective was a one-shot deal and there was no video on the market. Buy this film and watch it (Amazon has it for sale, IMDB should show a link for it) and you'll see what I'm talking about (your video store will probably not have a copy for rent), it's more than worth the few extra dollars you pay for it and the DVD is probably not going to come out for ages.
*
Another missing link between the patriarchs and the overrated new wave.But this one is unique:nothing had been done before ,and a lot of directors tried to imitate it later ,to no avail.
This movie cannot be taken out of context :it has to be considered at once. in its era and in Becker's work.
1949,just after the war,it's the rise of a new youth ,who is still enthusiast and who has almost nothing to do with the blasé characters of the 1960 generation (Claude Chabrol's "les cousins" ,particularly Jean-Claude Brialy's part).Daniel Gélin and Brigitte Auber epitomize this soif de vivre ,and their optimism -almost absent in the nouvelle vague works- is quite infectious :the audience sides with them from the first line.It's really a brand new world they want to build and it's not a matter of chance if Gelin gives up the father's company and looks for broader horizons:ethnography in Africa.Old Europa is a thing of the past.
Becker had made four movies,but now the first is forgotten and impossible to find.So "Goupi Mains Rouges" -one of his very best and which too many people overlook-,"falbalas" and "Antoine et Antoinette". The latter movie and its follow-up (this movie) have strong analogies:both describe the fulfillment of a dream,even if the first one takes place in a working-class milieu whereas "Rendez-vous" depicts a bourgeois -not meant pejoratively- youth.In "Antoine et Antoinette" ,the hero wins at the French national lottery,then lost his wallet in which...(it showed a René Clair influence ("le million" 1931),but it has stood the time much better than Clair's thirties works)
Filmed on location in the streets of Paris,it paved a reliable royal way for the nouvelle vague,but its charms are more pristine and more delightful than these of Godard and co.No smugness,no self-consciousness,and a strong screenplay -which will often lack in the works of the nouvelle vague young Turks-,and no contempt for the directors who came before (as the René Clair and Jean Grémillon ("le ciel est à vous" 1943)influences testify).The female star Brigitte Auber had another strong part in the marvelous but much less optimistic Duvivier's "sous le ciel de Paris" ,then worked with Hitchcock (in a minor film though:"to catch a thief" and then got lost in mediocrities.Another Brigitte had taken her place .
Optimism will continue in the follow-up "Edouard et Caroline" (1951) and "rue de l'estrapade" (1953)(both movies featuring Gélin too)but will finally come to an end with "touchez pas au grisbi"(1954) :maybe for the characters who are older (Gabin) it's too late.Becker's final masterwork "le trou" will be pessimism flesh on the bone, a terrifying death metaphor.
*
Author: writers_reign7 March 2007
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
If, as I'm sure I read somewhere, the word 'teenager' was coined in the mid 1950s then the boys and girls who epitomize joie de vivre in this minor masterpiece from 1949 are merely young people who are not yet in search of a label. It has been compared to the New Wavelet that would swirl round the ankles of older and better filmmakers in the late 1950s but primarily because Becker took his camera on to the streets of post-war Paris and focused it on young people who were rebelling in a modest way against the values of an older generation. But young people had always, at one stage in their development, rebelled against their parents and what they stood for and they'd taken a camera on to the streets of Manhattan two years earlier in The Naked City or, like the man said, there's nothing new under the sun.
To watch this film today - and in my case for the first time, thanks to my Norwegian benefactor - is to be struck by just how CLEAN as well as clean-cut these kids were; no tattoos, no scruffy sweat shirts and torn jeans, no rings through the nose, eyebrows or anywhere else and no tongue studs, definitely no H, Coke, Crack, Smack or Speed and YET with all these 'handicaps' they still HAD A BALL. Okay, not all of them were teenagers; Daniel Gelin, who held them all together was 28 and Brigitte Auber was 21, though Nicole Courcel weighed in at 19.
*
With the exception of Gelin most non-French viewers may well assume that these people came out of nowhere, shot this movie and disappeared without trace but not so; Pierre Trabaud, for example, dubbed Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront and was still acting four decades after this movie when he featured in Round Midnight; Nicole Courcel had already appeared (uncredited) in Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde and would go on to Gibier de potence and La Marie du Port whilst Brigitte Auber, who had also been in Les Amoureux sont seuls du monde would go on to Duvivier's Under Paris Skies, which IMDb refuses to accept in French.
This is a Hymn to Youth and a wonderful contrast to stuff like City Across The River, released the same year or Rebel Without A Cause; in all three teenagers are 'troubled' but in Becker's movie they handle it with much more maturity and zest for life as they drive around Paris - in an amphibious vehicle that was probably a remnant of World War II and resembles something known as a 'duck' that is as much at home on the Seine as on the boulevards - in between sessions in jazz clubs. A real gem and a joy to watch.
