Louis Malle Films | Louis Malle Filmography | Louis Malle Biography | Louis Malle Career | Louis Malle Awards

In the scramble for space and fame that became the nouvelle vague, Louis Malle began with more hard experience than Godard, Truffaut, or Chabrol, and he showed in Ascenseur pour l'chafaud that his instincts for themes and collaborators were faultless. Henri Deca?'s low-light photography and Malle's use of Jeanne Moreau established him as emblematic of the new French cinema. But the Cahiers trio with their publicist background made artistic hay while Malle persisted in a more intimate voyage of discovery with his lovely star. As the cresting new wave battered at the restrictions of conventional narrative technique, Malle created a personal style, sexual and emotional, which was to sustain him while flashier colleagues failed. Of the new wave survivors, he is the most old-fashioned, the most erotic, and, arguably, the most widely successful.

Re-viewing reveals Ascenseur as clumsy and improbable, a failure redeemed only by the Moreau and Maurice Ronet performances. A flair for coaxing the unexpected from his stars had often saved Malle from the consequences of too reverent respect for production values, a penchant for burnished low-lit interiors being his most galling stylistic weakness. But playing Bardot against type in Vie priv?e as a parody of the harried star, and using Moreau as one of a pair of comic Western trollops (in Viva Maria) provided an indication of the irony that was to make his name.

Thereafter Malle became a gleeful chronicler of the polymorphously perverse. Moreau's hand falling eloquently open on the sheet in Les Amants as she accepts the joy of cunnilingus is precisely echoed in her genuflection to fellate a yoked George Hamilton in Viva Maria. Incest in Souffle au coeur, child prostitution in Pretty Baby, and, in particular, the erotic and sadomasochistic overtones of Nazism in Lacombe, Lucien found in Malle a skillful, committed, and sensual celebrant.

Malle's Indian documentaries of 1969 belong more to the literature of the mid-life crisis than to film history. Black Moon likewise explores an arid emotional couloir. Malle returned to his richest sources with the U.S.-based films of the late 1970s and after. Pretty Baby, Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre, and Alamo Bay delight in overturning the stones under which closed communities seethe in moist darkness. The ostensible source material of the first, Bellocq's New Orleans brothel photographs, receives short shrift in favour of a lingering interest in the pre-pubescent Brooke Shields. Atlantic City relishes the delights of post-climactic potency, giving Burt Lancaster one of his richest roles as the fading ex-strong-arm man, dubbed ?Numb Nuts? by his derisive colleagues. He seizes a last chance for sexual passion and effective action as the friend and protector of Susan Sarandon's character, an ambitious nightclub croupier.

My Dinner with Andre focuses with equal originality on the social eroticism of urban intellectuals. A globe-trotting theatrical voluptuary reviews his thespian conquests to the grudging admiration of his stay-at-home colleague. An account of theatrical high-jinks in a Polish wood with Jerzy Grotowski and friends becomes in Andre Gregory's fruity re-telling, and with Malle's lingering attention, something very like an orgy. Again, production values intrude on, even dominate the action; mirrors, table settings, the intrusive old waiter, and even the food itself provide a rich, decorated background that adds considerably to the sense of occasion. Malle sends his audiences out of the cinema conscious of having taken part in an event as filling as a five-course meal.

Given this general richness, it may be by contrast that certain of Malle's quieter, less vivid works shine. Zazie dans le M?tro, his fevered version of Queneau's farce, marked his first break with the stable pattern of the new wave. Compared with Godard's Une Femme est une femme, it shows Malle as the more skillful of the two at remaking the genre film. The terse Le Feu follet, a vehicle for Maurice Ronet adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited, showed Malle moving toward what had become by then the standard ?new? French film, characterized by the work of the so-called ?Left Bank? group of Resnais, Varda, Rivette, and Rohmer. But again Malle found in the character a plump, opulent self-regard that turned Le Feu follet, despite its black and white cinematography and solemn style, into a celebration of self-pity, with Ronet at one point caressing the gun with which he proposes to put an end to his life. Like the relish with which Belmondo's gentleman thief in Le Voleur savours the objects he steals, Malle's love of physicality, of weight and color and texture, seems so deeply rooted as to be almost religious. (And Malle did, after all, work as assistant to Bresson on Un Condamn? ? mort s'est ?chapp?.)

The latter stages of Malle's career included one well-publicized fiasco and two very different but equally brilliant films. The former is Damage, a boring adaptation of Josephine Hart's best-seller, crammed with boring sex footage of Jeremy Irons (as a British politician) and Juliette Binoche (as his son's girlfriend, with whom he commences an affair). The film is of note only for the hubbub created when Malle was forced to edit footage to earn the film an R (rather than NC-17) rating, and for Miranda Richardson's brief but riveting presence as Irons' rejected wife.

Au revoir les enfants, on the other hand, is as fine a film as Malle ever has made. It is set at that point in time, if such a moment can be measured, in which childhood inevitably and irrevocably ends. The film is a heartbreaking autobiographical drama that tells the story of Julien Quentin, a universal 11-year-old?a spirited prankster who attends a rural Catholic boarding school in Occupied France. Julien senses something unusual about a new classmate, a sweet-faced, bushy-haired, exceptionally intelligent boy called Jean Bonnet. Jean really is a Jew, in hiding at Julien's school. And Julien is oblivious to what Jean knows all to well: In Occupied France, it's highly dangerous?and nearly always fatal?to be Jewish. The film, ultimately, is a story of heroes and villains, of those who will risk their all to shelter the needy and those who will collaborate with the enemy to fill their pockets or gain a false sense of power. Malle slowly, carefully introduces you to his characters, so the resulting impact of the unfolding events is that much more profound. One example of Malle's mastery: Julien and Jean become lost in a forest, and are come upon by German soldiers. Jean's sense of all-encompassing terror, revealed in a split second as he panics and runs, is explicitly real. Additionally, there is a sequence in which the students come together for some entertainment and laugh at Chaplin cavorting in The Immigrant. Here, Malle communicates how film can be a true universal language, how the genius of an artist such as Chaplin is timeless. In its overall setting and view of life and loyalty in Occupied France, Au revoir les enfants is related thematically to Lacombe, Lucien. Julien's feelings for his mother, as personified by his sniffing for her scent after reading one of her letters, mirrors the intense mother-son relationship in Murmur of the Heart.

Vanya on 42nd Street, which reunites Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, the entire cast of My Dinner with Andre, is as stunningly original as the earlier film. The setting is a crumbling theater in midtown Manhattan that once was home to the Ziegfeld Follies. The film opens with actors converging on the theater, where they will rehearse a stage production of an adaptation by David Mamet of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Gregory is the director, while Shawn plays the title role. As the rehearsal proceeds, Vanya on 42nd Street becomes at once a highly cinematic example of filmed theater and an intimate look at the illusion that is the theater.

Sensual and perverse, Malle is an unlikely artist to have sprung from the reconstructed film-buffs of the nouvelle vague. It is with his early mentors?Bresson, Cousteau, Tati?that he seems, artistically and spiritually, to belong, rather than with Melville, spiritual hero of the Cahiers group, and there is a strong flavour of essentially French autobiographical soul searching in his Au revoir les enfants and Milou en mai. If Truffaut turned into the Ren? Clair of the new French cinema, Malle may yet become its Max Ophuls.?JOHN BAXTER and ROB EDELMAN