À nous la liberté (1931)

À nous la liberté (1931) - #160

So you've seen the movie cliche about the two buddies who meet up when they're down on their luck, then fate separates them to go their own way. One of them prospers and leaves his old wretchedness behind, while the other continues scrapping and stumbling along until, years later, they coincidentally reunite and the prosperous one has to make a tough decision whether to stick by his old pal or act as if they never met before.

Or maybe you saw the one about workers toiling on an assembly line that, as it speeds up, causes the process to fall out of control as the pieces pile up and the limbs flail wildly in a futile effort to keep pace with the progress of industry?

Or maybe it's just the comic riff that shows the high and mighty of society shedding their inhibitions and clawing at each other like savages when a briefcase full of money spills its contents into a dignified gathering?

If any of that sounds familiar, you should watch À nous la liberté this film so that you can say you saw where it all began. Well, I don't know for a fact that those gags had never made their way into the movies before 1931, but I do know that the film company behind this project thought they had a strong enough leg to stand on that they filed (an ultimately bogus) lawsuit against Charlie Chaplin for stealing their ideas when he made "Modern Times"... a legal maneuver that, to his credit, director René Clair had nothing to do with.

René Clair... yes, this is the third (and presumably final) movie of his that Criterion chose to include in their collection. After this, I think Clair started moving squarely toward the cinematic mainstream as a purveyor of pleasant, general interest romantic musical comedies. Or at any rate, he became less of an innovator and perhaps lost some of that subversive flair that saves his films from becoming insufferably lightweight. Each of the three Clair DVDs I've reviewed here (the other two being Under the Roofs of Paris and Le Million) contain, in their respective liner notes, a brief comment about how "out of favor" René Clair fell with the art house crowd in the middle years of the 20th century, when respect for his technical innovations and early incorporation of Surrealist concepts became taken for granted and critical resentment over his later, more commercial middle-class entertainments clouded the perceptions of his contemporaries. Well I was alive for a significant part of that time, but as for me, I never really had any kind of a formed opinion about René Clair either way, so I can approach him with freshness and objectivity.

Back when I was more earnestly reading about Surrealism, I do remember learning about some of the early films created within that movement. The most famous, of course, are still the two Bunuel films, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or. Another one that I never had a chance to see but remembered the name of was made by Clair: Entr'acte. Back then, I thought that was a cool name for a movie (even though now I learn that it basically just means "intermission"), and the other guys who helped Clair make it, Francis Picabia and Erik Satie, had pretty cool names too. It wasn't until I looked it up on YouTube awhile ago that I actually got to see it, and now, with this À nous la liberté DVD, I can watch it in nice, sharp definition. And it is indeed... cool. We get to see some pretty crazy, random stuff... a cannon rolling itself along another one of those Parisian rooftops with a couple of silly Frenchmen jumping up 'n down in 1920's style slo-mo... the cannon blasting a shell directly into the camera causing the audience to flinch in their seats if not outright scream in terror... a ballerina showing off her moves while filmed from below through a glass floor (but don't worry, she's wearing baggy old pantaloons so nothing too scandalous or inappropriate is revealed!)... a funeral procession again filmed in slo-mo and quite funny as it features all these old fuddy-duddies in their top hats and tails leaping along quite vigorously as they follow the hearse on foot... the hearse breaks free and starts rolling along the road led only by gravity and the careening course somehow morphs into a ride on an old-fashioned Coney Island style wooden roller coaster... well you can watch it for yourself on YouTube now, and as an advocate for old-school surrealism, I am happy to provide you that link.

But what about our main feature? Oh, I think it's a perfectly lovely film, quite worthy of its inclusion in the Criterion library. It offers its fair share of delights - the parallelism of life in prison and life in the factory, some charming French popular ballads, a little slapstick, a little romance, a comical showdown between the good guys and the gangsters in which no one gets hurt but some money gets burned, some pointed but essentially genteel ribbing of the bosses and a romantically happy ending that extols the virtues of a hobo's life, one free of entanglements, obligations and worries, at least in the whimsical, tidy universe presented to us by the wonderful imagination of Rene Clair. The whole thing starts and finishes on an essentially sentimental note, but there is a wily anarchistic heart beating at the center of this concoction that cuts well enough through the sugary sap.

Here's to Liberty for Us!