Film: Lift To The Scaffold
Release date: 26th March 2007
Certificate: PG
Running time: 88 mins
Director: Louis Malle
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Lino Ventura, Georges Poujouly, Yori Bertin
Genre: Crime/Drama/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: France
There is no such thing as a perfect crime, and even more so in films. That is more or less the theme of the back-and-white French thriller Lift To The Scaffold (aka Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, or Elevator To The Gallows as it is known in USA), shot in 1958. The volatile auteur Louis Malle pits a typically cursed by destiny Parisian couple against the unromantic mischiefs of an elevator. Luck, greediness and Miles Davis’s unflinching trumpet do the rest.
It is hard to describe a plot mainly based on a series of misunderstandings and coincidences. Suffice to say that two secret lovers, Florence Carala (Jean Moreau) and Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), conspire to assassinate the husband of the former, the cynical warmonger Simon Carala. Their plan is simple but ingenious.
Tavernier, a clean-cut veteran of the French Legion, makes his way through Carala’s office from the upper floor and kills him. He has not been seen by anybody. It would have been the perfect crime, had he not forgotten to remove the rope he used to enter the office. That proves to be a crucial mistake, as he gets trapped in the elevator exactly when the building is closed for the weekend. To add insult to injury, his car is being stolen by a vagabond couple hanging around.
That is only the beginning of a series of almost zany misunderstandings that bring Lift To The Scaffold at the crossroads between thriller and black comedy. To begin with, Florence believes that her lover escaped with another woman, as she spots an unknown girl on Tavernier’s cabrio. To make matters worse, the duo who have stolen Tavernier’s car spend the night with a German couple in a hotel in the suburbs of Paris. Failing to steal their car as well, they kill them with Tavernier’s gun! And that is not all…
The scenario itself is a masterpiece, even if its twists might seem to be a bit far-fetched towards the end of the film. Never the interplay between love and death has been interwoven in a more breathtaking web of coincidences, embroidered with black humour, social critique, anti-war cues and sexual innuendo. Particularly the love affair between Carala and Tavernier is a fine example of the short-lived amour fou that Godard would immortalise later in his films. Nevertheless, that is by no means the single feature of the movie that captures the cinephile’s heart.
First of all, Louis Malle had the chance to direct the French star Jean Moreau at the peak of her career, giving bourgeois arrogance a face to remember. Then, there is Malle’s camera itself, following the characters of the film as a secret observer that laughs at their predicaments and startles at their miscarriages. One can already detect there the skills of the dexterous cinematographer Henri Decaë, a later hero of the Nouvelle Vague. Not without a reason, this is the typical movie that makes the audience shout at the screen, as if the characters can hear and reconsider. Above all, Miles Davis’s trumpet solos, recorded especially for the film, capture its idiosyncratic mood with a grade of precision matched only by Bernard Herman’s scores for Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers.
The film plays wittily with the notion of time, but space does not elude it. It is a claustrophobic sense that dominates most shots, epitomised by the elevator and its role within the plot. Paris, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the grandiose metropolis of wide open avenues that French directors love to depict. On the contrary, it is a misanthropic city that traps and suffocates its denizens by making them face their own passions - most of all lust and greediness. Innocence, even for those who try to escape, is not an option. Thus, redemption can only come through another twist of luck, as nemesis castigating hubris in a Greek tragedy.
The combination of Miles Davis’ ironic music and Louis Malle’s brisk direction make this movie one of the few pieces of continental cinema that exploits cinematic rhythm up to its full extent. At the end of the day, Lift To The Scaffold stays separate from the bulk of mainstream thrillers for its originality and delicacy. Perhaps one may assume that this is the film that Alfred Hitchcock would have shot, had he been French. AK
No comments:
Post a Comment