Nouvelle vague Stars 5: Stéphane Audran

Stéphane Audran and Bernadette Lafont in Les bonnes femmes

There was a period in the early 1970s when I was so struck by Claude Chabrol’s Le boucher (1970) that I sought out all his other films. I’m sure, however, that a major part of my intense interest in these films was simply in watching Stéphane Audran on the big screen. In those days, repertory cinema in London made it possible to catch up with art films from the 1960s so there was often a Chabrol film, with his then wife Audran, showing somewhere.

I’m not sure if a career mainly working for one director qualifies Stephane Audran as a ’star’ of la nouvelle vague, but she was certainly the star of Chabrol’s films. Her career began with small roles in two mainstream features in 1957/8 when she was in her mid twenties. This was followed by a small role in Eric Rohmer’s first feature before her first (small) role for Chabrol in Les cousins in 1958. In 1960 she is one of the four shopgirls in Les bonnes femmes, but for the next few Chabrol films she has only minor roles with the exception of the little seen L’oeil du malin (1962) in which she is one of the three leads. Her rise to stardom comes with Les biches (The does) in 1968 – in which she plays one of a pair of bisexual women who become involved with Jean-Louis Trintignant. She had married Chabrol in 1964 and for the next few years, the couple had a golden period producing well-received bourgeois crime thriller/melodramas.

Claude Chabrol was easily the most prolific director of his generation. Between 1958 and 1970 he made 22 films (4 of which were ’segments’ in portmanteau films). It’s hardly surprising that Audran didn’t have too much time for work with other directors. Chabrol also tended to make the same kinds of films – mostly related to his great interest in Hitchcock’s work. Stéphane Audran became his ‘cool blonde’. I need to go back and watch some of the classic films from the late 1960s and early 70s again, but my memory is that Stéphane Audran could manage to create a tension between an elegant and aloof cool sophistication and hints of vulnerability. I did watch Le boucher again a few years ago and it stood up very well. (In the book on Chabrol by Robin Wood and Michael Walker, Walker points out that where most mainstream critics praised the film highly, Cahiers du cinéma turned against Chabrol for the first time.)

Here is the trailer for the elusive L’oeil du malin – could a UK or US distributor find this and put it out on DVD please?

. . . and as Ginette in Les bonnes femmes.

Nouvelle vague Stars 4: Bernadette Lafont

Gérard Blain and Bernadette Lafont in Les Mistons

I thought I’d cast around for a more unusual choice and I remembered Bernadette Lafont (b. 1938) who could claim to be the first star of La nouvelle vague as the young woman whose dancer’s legs flashing beneath her billowing skirts as she cycles by fascinate the young boys in Truffaut’s short, Les Mistons (1957). The film was set in her home town of Nimes and her co-star was Gérard Blain, who also went on to star in films by Chabrol and Godard.

In 1958 she appeared with Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy in Chabrol’s Le beau serge in 1958 and then again in a smaller role alongside Jean-Paul Belmondo in A double tour  for Chabrol in 1959.

The Chabrol film that I remember and which is one of my favourite nouvelle vague films, is Les bonnes femmes (1960) in which she is one of the shopgirls referred to in the title. Le godelureaux (1961) is a rare Chabrol in which she starred opposite Jean-Claud Brialy. After this she seems to have had many smaller roles in a range of films including titles directed by Louis Malle and Jacques Rivette. Later lead roles came in Nelly Kaplan’s feminist comedy,La fiancée du pirate (1969) and Truffaut’s Une belle femme comme moi (1972) and then the lead opposite Jean-Pierre Léaud in Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain (1974).

Bernadette Lafont with Jean-Claude Brialy

Bernadette Lafont is still working and I realise that I saw her only a few years ago in the romantic comedy I Do (Prête-moi ta main, 2006). She has nearly 170 credits on IMDB. Not conventionally beautiful, but very definitely physically attractive, Bernadette Lafont has clearly been well suited to comedy and this has perhaps been her greatest strength. As the list of credits above suggests, she worked with many New Wave directors and starred with the leading men of the movement. She seems to me very ‘French’ (and no, I don’t really know what that means, it’s just an instinctive feeling!). This YouTube clip shows her being interviewed for a promo on Les Bonnes Femmes.

Here’s the trailer for the very wonderful La fiancée du pirate:

Nouvelle vague Stars 3: Jeanne Moreau

Jean-Claude Brialy and Jeanne Moreau in The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Jeanne Moreau (b. 1928) is slightly more problematic to categorise as a star of la nouvelle vague. She was, and still is, a major international star, who began in films nearly a decade before the New Wave was established. She also had an important stage career in the 1950s. She was also 30 by the time she appeared in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold, 1958), the Louis Malle film often argued to herald the New Wave to come. Nothing wrong with being 30, of course, but she wasn’t the ‘young star’ of the later films.

If we do want to include Jeanne Moreau in this collection, I would argue for three factors. First would be her work with Louis Malle, with Les amants (1959) and Viva Maria (1965) plus a smaller part in Le feu follet (1963). (She also had (very) brief cameos in other New Wave films.)

As Catherine in Jules et Jim (1961), Jeanne Moreau became one of the iconic figures of the classic period of the French New Wave, although since this was a period film she was separated from Belmondo, Brialy and Léaud as ‘young French characters in contemporary Paris’. She would appear later as ‘the bride who wore black’ in Truffaut’s film of that name in 1968.

Her third claim to New Wave status is the extraordinary range of films that she made in the 1960s, both for French directors on the outer wings of the movement (e.g. Jacques Demy, for whom she starred in La baie des anges (1965)) and directors abroad influenced by the New Wave or already established as auteurs:  La Notte (1961) for Antonioni, Eve (1962) for Jo Losey, Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) for Bunuel and the two films for Tony Richardson (a Truffaut disciple?) in Mademoiselle (1966) and The Sailor From Gibraltar (1967).

Moreau was a different kind of star. I never thought of her as youthful or vivacious like Anna Karina, but she was very sexy in a more cerebral way and had great depth as an actor. This clip from  Ascenseur pour l’échafaud shows her image off to perfection. That’s Miles Davis on the soundtrack and the kind of nighttime location shooting in Paris that New Wave directors prized. Moreau could be in an American film noir, but she seems a much more complex character – older, wiser, more fragile and yet more dangerous – than any American femme fatale.

Here is a tribute montage of stills, several from films mentioned in our nouvelle vague pages. Enjoy!

And finally, Jeanne Moreau as a platinum blonde in La baie des anges – I’ve not watched this through as it’s the end of the movie, which I hope one day to find.

Nouvelle vague Stars 2: Jean-Claude Brialy

 

Jean-Claude Brialy with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Une femme est une femme

Jean-Claude Brialy (1933-2007) was the smooth, debonair and charming star of numerous films in la nouvelle vague. He was born to an Army colonel in Algeria and showed an early interest in drama. Following drama school and his national military service he set out on a film career, getting a small part in Renoir’s Elena et les hommes as early as 1956. In the same year he appeared in a short made by Jacques Rivette. 

But it was in 1958 with Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge that Brialy established himself as one of the faces of la nouvelle vague. He followed it with Chabrol’s next film Les Cousins in 1959 and then appeared as the lead in Godard’s short, Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick (1959). He had walk-on uncredited parts in films by Louis Malle, Truffaut, Rivette and Varda as well as another short by Godard (L’histoire d’eau (1961)). My favourite performance was in Godard’s brilliant and enjoyable Une femme est une femme (1961) and in the same year he made it three in a row for Chabrol with the little seen Les godelureaux.

In 1968 he finally took a lead role in Truffaut’s Hitchcock tribute La mariée était en noir and eve took the lead in a Flaubert adaptation by Alexandre Astruc, L’éducation sentimentale (1962). (It was Astruc who supplied Truffaut with the concept of the ‘camera-stylo‘ which was one of the feature of la politique des auteurs.) In 1970, Brialy made it a full house of the celebrated Cahiers auteurs with the lead in Eric Rohmer’s Le genou de Claire. In this film, Brialy, the arch smooth seducer of the 1960s is a 35 year-old inveigled into a flirtation which ends up with an obsession with a young girl’s beautiful knee – a fitting symbol perhaps for the passing of la nouvelle vague. (I remember that I enjoyed the film at the time.)

Jean-Claude Brialy has over  180 credits on IMDB – a list that includes a great many interesting films. His persona perhaps doesn’t spring to mind when we think of la nouvelle vague now, but he was surely terrifically important in making many of the films popular, providing a glamorous, but slightly subversive character providing a contrast to the rougher charms of a Belmondo.

I’ve no idea where this comes from, but it shows the chemistry between Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy:

This is absolutely wonderful and gives a very good idea of what a young Brialy brought to a sexy young French Cinema in 1960. It’s the trailer from Le gigolo (1960). The older woman is the beautiful Alida Valli (from The Third Man) and the film was directed by Jacques Deray, best known outside of France for Borsalino (1970) with Belmondo and Alain Delon. This was his first film, which qualifies him as a ‘New Wave’ director. Don’t you want to see the movie?

Nouvelle vague Stars 1: Jean-Pierre Léaud

Born 1944, Jean-Pierre Léaud was already 14 when he was cast by François Truffaut as his 12 year-old alter ego, Antoine Doinel in Les quatre cents coups (see the remarkable audition sequence on YouTube).

After his success in this film, Léaud would go on to play Antoine Doinel in four more films over a period of twenty years. The first of these, Antoine et Collette (1962) sees an 18 year-old in his first job and with his first girl-friend. This film is still within the New Wave period. The next two, Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968) and Domicile conjugale (Bed & Board, 1970) see Antoine as a young man discharged from military service and attempting to build a relationship with Christine (Claude Jade). Finally, Antoine reappears as a thirty-something character in L’amour en fuite (Love on the run, 1979) which includes several flashbacks to the earlier films (a device first used in Antoine et Collette).

Not surprisingly, many audiences have responded to the close connection between Truffaut and Léaud. Physically, their build and facial features are quite similar and Léaud played further roles in Truffaut films. In Anne and Muriel (Les deux anglaises et le continent, 1971) the character may represent Truffaut at that stage in his career. In La nuit américaine (Day for Night, 1973), Léaud is a young actor named Alphonse (the name of Antoine’s son in the Doinel films) working on a film being made by a director played by Truffaut himself.

Léaud’s relationship with Truffaut would alone make him an important figure, but he has another claim to fame in terms of the films he made with Jean-Luc Godard. Although these came after the classic New Wave period, several commentators have seen them as characters/performances which in some way comment on the New Wave – and, of course, it is difficult to ‘date’ the New Wave in Godardian terms since he carried on refreshing his approach to cinema (where Truffaut, Chabrol and Rohmer perhaps moved towards a more conventional mode of filmmaking by the late 1960s). Léaud took the lead role in Masculin-Feminin (1966) after uncredited cameos in Alphaville and Pierrot le fou in 1965. He then followed up with further lead roles in Made in USA (1966) and Le Chinoise (1967) before a higher profile cameo in Weekend (1967). In fact he spent most of his time in the 1960s with either Truffaut or Godard and can be argued to be the only actor to work consistently with both directors.

Léaud and Truffaut in La nuit americaine

Léaud has continued to work consistently in French film and television on both ‘popular’ and more art/avant garde productions. In his time he has worked with other New Wave directors (e.g. Jacques Rivette on the Out 1 films, 1971 and 1974, Agnes Varda on Jane b. by Agnes V. 1988 and Jean Eustache on La maman et la putain in 1973). He also worked for various auteurs both outside France, including Bertolucci on Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Aki Kaurismäki on I Hired a Contract Killer in 1990, and for younger directors such as Catherine Breillat in 36 Fillette (1988) and Olivier Assayas on Irma Vepp (1996).

One of the most interesting recent developments is to see the possible parallels between the way Shane Meadows has used Thomas Turgoose as his alter ego in much the same way as Truffaut used Leaud. (See the entries on the blog around Somers Town.)

I confess that I personally have mixed feelings about Jean-Pierre Léaud. Probably, I can’t separate him from Truffaut, so I find the adolescent attractive, the young man earnest and the older figure slightly disturbing. But that’s my problem. The actor has definitely been influential. What does anyone else think.

Here’s an interesting detailed critical piece on him: 

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/8/lightness.html