البـــــوابـــة
La
nuit du carrefour
Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour
is a rough, gritty film noir, set, as its title suggests, in a seeming
perpetual night at a sleepy rural crossroads, a small settlement with
just three houses and a gas station. This way station is always bathed
in fog, isolated in the middle of the looming woods, where mysterious
figures skulk through the dark on strange errands. A man shows up dead
here, a jeweler, his body left in a stolen car in the garage of the
Dutch immigrant Andersen (Georges Koudria), who insists that he's
innocent. The French police suspect otherwise, but have nothing to prove
it, and so they send the wily inspector Maigret (Renoir's brother
Pierre) to investigate. Maigret is a great cinema detective in the
traditional mold, clever and intelligent, able to piece together the
facts from minimal evidence, observing every small detail and making
deductions in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. In trying to make sense of
this crime, he's confronted with no lack of suspects, but rather too
many: Andersen's seductive sister Else (Winna Winifried), a true femme
fatale; the gas station owner Oscar (Dignimont); Jojo (Michel Duran),
the gas station attendant who flirts with Oscar's wife when no one
(except the audience) is looking; the bourgeois Michonnet (Jean Gehret).
All these people act suspiciously, creeping around, dropping knowing
comments; they all seem to have some secret, to be willfully drawing
suspicion to themselves, wandering through the foggy nights with guns,
poisoning bottles of beer, smuggling contraband. Maigret seems to have
stumbled into a confluence of odd events and shady characters.
Renoir
builds this atmosphere brilliantly. His storytelling is extremely
elliptical, marked by diversions that give the editing an abrupt, choppy
rhythm (and it doesn't help that one reel of the film was lost
outright, though such accidents seem appropriate for a film that already
must have been especially loose and rough). When Andersen is first
brought in for questioning, Renoir cuts away periodically to a
curb-level shot of a local newsstand, capturing the passage of time
through the transition from early edition to afternoon edition to
evening edition to the evening paper getting swept away the next
morning. Later, he frequently cuts away to some seemingly random event,
some of the area's residents doing some inscrutable action, acting
strangely. The night, and the fog hanging low over the tree-lined dirt
roads, also serves as punctuation. At one point, in one of the most
surreal interjections, Else is seen lying in her room, lazily smoking a
cigarette, as a turtle crawls slowly along the bed next to her; it's
baffling but evocative. The missing reel can only explain so much; at
some point it becomes obvious that Renoir just doesn't seem especially
concerned with narrative clarity. It's seldom clear who's shooting at
whom until the obligatory parlor scene at the end, when the detective
explains the film's events with such coherence and detail that one
wonders how he managed to get all that out of this strange string of
events.
That's part of the fun, of course, and Pierre Renoir
plays the inspector with such charm and wit that his investigation,
elliptical and aimless as it is, is seldom anything but entertaining to
watch. Maigret always seems to have a little smirk on his lips, even
when they're wrapped around a pipe. He's ahead of everyone else, and he
knows it very well. Renoir lets the audience in on his deductions by
drawing attention to the relevant objects at precisely the moment that
Maigret notices them: a box of cigarettes that should be too expensive
for its owner to afford regularly, a spare tire that doesn't match the
truck that takes it. But the mystery isn't the point here. Instead, it's
Renoir's power of observation that's being showcased. He's as
interested in the details that reveal something about human behavior as
the ones that reveal something about the mystery. This milieu is
wonderfully detailed, with so much activity always going on in the
fringes. It's rare that Renoir puts some action in the foreground and
nothing else. The frame is always bustling, packed with nuances, like
the way that, when Maigret calls the police station, the workers at the
gas station go about their business all around him, while his boss at
the station is surrounded by cleaning people going about their
business behind him. Renoir's compositions are striking but somehow
don't seem staged. There's messiness and imprecision in the way that he
contrasts foreground and background, sometimes making the focus of the
shot something other than what one would expect. When Maigret meets Else
for the first time, the inspector and the Andersens are all in the
blurry, out-of-focus background of the shot, while in the foreground, in
crisp focus, a pile of furniture partially obscures the introduction.
Renoir has this feel for making what might be considered "wrong" seem
right: it feels real and unscripted, a casual introduction that will
soon acquire a more pointed, artificial feel as Else begins her
kittenish seduction of the inspector.
This is a film where setting and geography
are very important. The crossroads, this small locale with a limited set
of characters and places, is the site of most of the film's actions,
and the denouement depends on the movement of characters between the
area's three houses and the gas station. Earlier, the inspector's first
visit to the Andersens' home is marked by his methodical examination of
the drawing room, walking around the space as Else watches and describes
some of the objects he sees; he stops by a music box, a record player, a
box of cigarettes on the mantel, a tub of water in the next room.
Renoir's camera motion and editing give the sequence the feel of an arc,
tracing a curved line as the inspector circles the young woman, using
the room and its objects to gauge her.
Else, of course, turns out
to be crucial to the plot. She's a femme fatale in the classic sense, a
treacherous woman with a dark past, and she's characterized as using
sex to get her way. She tries it with the inspector, too, and nearly
succeeds, and Renoir's presentation of her makes her so irresistible
that it's not hard to see why: the light glistens off the buttons on her
shirt, making her arms sparkle, and her bare leg, with a high stocking,
is constantly creeping out into the open through the slit up the side
of her dress. In the true noir tradition, she's the cause of all the
problems for the men, trapping and corrupting men through her sexuality;
the denouement is cleverly ambiguous, too, about whether she's really
reformed in the end or not, as the inspector pushes her off in the right
direction but not before her sly smile and instinctively sexy posture
suggest that she's still got other ideas. It's typically sexist, to the
extent that the femme fatale archetype is always about the dangerousness
of female sexuality, but at the same time Else is such a compelling
example of the form that she makes such concerns moot. Despite her few
moments of weepy contrition, she enjoys being dangerous and
destructive, and we enjoy watching her.
What's most refreshing
about the film, though, is that Renoir approaches it all with such a
wryly comic sensibility. Not that he doesn't take the mystery seriously,
but that he's observing these noirish twists and turns with a slightly
detached sense of irony. This comedic perspective is apparent in
Maigret's slightly bumbling assistant Lucas (Georges Térof), who at one
point has an entirely mimed and very funny interplay with Else when he
believes that Andersen has poisoned a pot of tea; nothing is said, and
the moment isn't emphasized, but is instead allowed to play out entirely
in gestures in an offhand way. Later, a doctor (Max Dalban) shows up
and keeps repeating the same laconic phrase ("Where is the patient?")
over and over again to anyone who will listen, with the same drawling
and intrinsically funny voice, and encounters only brush-offs and
insults despite the fact that a man is badly wounded somewhere. Renoir
also delights in the sarcastic, standoffish Jojo, who radiates thuggish
charm and in free moments pinches the bottom of his boss' wife. These
people may all turn out to be criminals and murderers of various
stripes, but Renoir has some low-key affection for them too, mingled
with satirical mockery. This film is smart, silly, funny, and exciting
in roughly equal measures, using a mysterious murder and its aftermath
as a way of closely examining this societal microcosm, pulling apart the
seams to observe what's underneath.
لا يوجد حالياً أي تعليق