Bertrand Tavernier Films | Bertrand Tavernier Filmography | Bertrand Tavernier Biography | Bertrand Tavernier Career | Bertrand Tavernier Awards

It is significant that Bertrand Taverniere films have been paid little attention by the more important contemporary film critics/theorists: his work is resolutely ?realist,? and realism is under attack in critical quarters. Realism has frequently been a cover for the reproduction and reinforcement of dominant ideological assumptions, and to this extent that attack is salutary. Yet Taverniere cinema demonstrates effectively that the blanket rejection of realism rests on very unstable foundations. Realism has been seen as the bourgeoisie?s way of talking to itself. It does not necessarily follow that its only motive for talking to itself is the desire for reassurance; nor need we assume that the only position realist fiction constructs for the reader/viewer is one of helpless passivity (Taverniere films clearly postulate an alert audience ready to reflect and analyze critically).

Three of Taverniere films, Death Watch, Coup de torchon, and A Week?s Vacation, while they may not unambiguously answer the attacks on realism, strongly attest to the inadequacy of their formulation. For a start, the films? range of form, tone, and address provides a useful reminder of the potential for variety that the term ?classical realist text? tends to obliterate. To place beside the strictly realist A Week?s Vacation the futurist fantasy of Death Watch on the one hand and the scathing, all-encompassing caricatural satire and irony of Coup de torchon on the other is to illustrate not merely a range of subject-matter but a range of strategy. Each film constructs for the viewer a quite distinct relationship to the action and to the protagonist, analyzable in terms of varying degrees of identification and detachment which may also shift within each film. Nor should the description of A Week?s Vacation as ?strictly realist? be taken to suggest some kind of simulated cin?ma-v?rit?: the film?s stylistic poise and lucid articulation, its continual play between looking with the protagonist and looking at her, consistently encourage an analytical distance.

Through all his films, certainly, the bourgeoisie ?talks to itself,? but the voice that articulates is never reassuring, and bourgeois institutions and assumptions are everywhere rendered visible and opened to question. Revolutionary positions are allowed a voice and are listened to respectfully. This was clear from Taverniere first film, The Clockmaker, among the screen?s most intelligent uses of Simenon. Under Tavernier, the original project is effectively transformed by introducing the political issues that Simenon totally represses, and by changing the crime from a meaningless, quasi-existentialist acte gratuit to a gesture of radical protest. But Taverniere protagonists are always bourgeois: troubled, questioning, caught up in social institutions but not necessarily rendered impotent by them, capable of growth and awareness. The films, while basically committed to a well-left-of-center liberalism, are sufficiently open, intelligent, and disturbed to be readily accessible to more radical positions than they are actually willing to adopt.

Despite the difference in mode of address, the three films share common thematic concerns (most obviously, the fear of conformism and dehumanization, the impulse toward protest and revolt, the difficulties of effectively realizing such a protest in action). They also have in common a desire to engage, more or less explicitly, with interrelated social, political, and aesthetic issues. The caustic analysis of the imperialist mentality and the kind of personal rebellion it provokes (itself corrupt, brutalized, and ultimately futile) in Coup de torchon is the most obvious instance of direct political engagement. Death Watch, within its science fiction format, is fascinatingly involved with contemporary inquiries into the construction of narrative and the objectification of women. Its protagonist (Harvey Keitel) attempts to create a narrative around an unsuspecting woman (Romy Schneider) by means of the miniature television camera surgically implanted behind his eyes. The implicit feminist concern here becomes the structuring principle of A Week?s Vacation. Without explicitly raising feminist issues, the film?s theme is the focusing of a contemporary bourgeois female consciousness, the consciousness of an intelligent and sensitive woman whose identity is not defined by her relationship with men, who is actively engaged with social problems (she is a schoolteacher), and whose fears (of loneliness, old age, death) are consistently presented in relation to contemporary social realities rather than simplistically defined in terms of "the human condition."

In Taverniere films through the early 1990s, he has covered a wide variety of moods, styles and settings, with the most representative of these works linked by a common contemplative quality. His concerns are the passage of time and its effect on human relationships and the individual soul. In particular, he is interested in characters who are aged and ill, or have seen too much of the seamier aspects of human behavior. These latter works investigate how they come to terms with loved ones?especially their children.

A Sunday in the Country, set at the turn of the twentieth century, is the story of an elderly painter who resides in the country and is visited one Sunday by his reserved son and daughter-in-law, their three children, and his free-spirited daughter. The film is a pensive, poignant tale of old age and the choices people make in their lives. There is much drama and emotion in Life and Nothing But, a thoughtful war film which in fact takes place at a time when there is no fighting and bloodshed. Set after the conclusion of a war, the film concerns a soldier (Tavernier regular Philippe Noiret) who is assigned to chronicle his country?s war casualties. Meanwhile, a couple of women have set out in search of their lovers, who are missing in action.

In Round Midnight, Tavernier caringly recreates the community of black jazz artists in exile in France. The film is a character study of an aged, alcoholic tenor sax legend, a composite of Bud Powell and Lester Young (and played by Dexter Gordon, himself a jazz great). He settles in Paris in 1959 and plays nightly at a famed jazz club; at the core of the story is his friendship with a young, adoring Frenchman, a dedicated jazz fan. Finally, in Daddy Nostalgia, the filmmaker examines the complex alliance between a father (Dirk Bogarde) and daughter (Jane Birkin). He is seriously ill; she visits him for an extended stay and attempts to understand their relationship, and his life.

Interestingly, in Taverniere more recent films he has abandoned weighty themes for entertaining exercises in genre. The Daughter of D?Artagnan is a lightly likable comic swashbuckler, while L.627 is a gritty police thriller.

We should not celebrate the resurgence of ?bourgeois realism? in Taverniere films (and they do not stand alone) without qualification or misgivings. Certainly, one regrets the failure of contemporary cinema to substantially follow up the radical experimentation with narrative that characterized the most interesting European films of the 1960s and 1970s. Nonetheless, Taverniere work testifies to the continuing vitality and validity of a tradition many theorists have rejected as moribund.?ROBIN WOOD and ROB EDELMAN