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Life and Nothing But
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The
title is from a poem by Paul Eluard: “Love and nothing but/Life and nothing
but”.
Yet
what this couplet might mean accompanying a film by Blake Edwards or François
Truffaut is mighty different to what it means for Bertrand Tavernier. His
passionate humanism, his extraordinary life-drive, is furiously inclusive –
forever refusing to think love or life outside of their complex social and
historical enfoldings.
Light
years ahead of the schematic convocations of the personal-and-political we find
in Philip Kaufman, Stephen Frears, Costa-Gavras or Andrzej Wajda, Tavernier’s
films really do explore what it means and how it feels to “live historically”
(as Godard-Gorin’s Tout va bien [1972] once put it). To an interviewer’s musing, “You either get films that are
about social problems or that are political films or you get films that are
about, say, old age or death”, the director interjected: “But I mean how can
you separate that?” And Tavernier’s greatness seems to lie in the fact that,
from the outset, he never can, and is never even tempted to, separate that.
Political
humanist: this is only one of the multitudes, the surprising and difficult
conjunctions, that Tavernier contains. Simultaneously, he is another rare
beast: a critical realist. Robin Wood
is right to see Tavernier as “revalidating” that “complex Realist tradition
exemplified by Renoir and Rossellini”, because his naturalism – painstaking,
minutely authentic, mainly classical in its proportions – has no truck
whatsoever with the mystifications and palliative veneer of spectacle we so
regularly attribute to the bad bogey of screen realism.
Tavernier
weaves a world – rich, extraordinary and multiple – in order to compare and
contrast all its various parades, positions, evasions, refuges, ironies
acknowledged and unacknowledgeable; to create a perspective, to tell a story in the most profound and
motivated sense.
Life and Nothing But presents an
especially beautiful paradox to the cinephile viewer, one that leads straight
to the heart of Tavernier’s singular œuvre. For it’s a modern-day John Ford
film – Ford, that is, as loved, embellished, hallucinated and recreated by a
fan. Naturally, Ford’s films were never quite like this; but what is it exactly
in Fort Apache (1948) or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) that
inspires such an intensely vital and politicised dramatisation of the world?
Quite
simply, it is the possibility of a hero who is ageing, a little compromised in
his work, and disturbed by the tremblings of romance – but, at the same time,
feverishly, tenaciously ethical in his dealings with the world around
him. To slowly take in the pained, impossible trajectory of Philippe Noiret as
Dellaplane as he struggles to identify and list the dead of World War I against
the inhuman, opportunistic machinations of the State, is to realise how rare
and precious such truly ethical drama is in cinema.
Not
since Jean Renoir, indeed, have love and life mattered so much as urgent
political principles. Life and Nothing But is masterpiece; it is also a
film that demands of each viewer the highest and most radical response that
one’s heart and mind can muster.
MORE Tavernier: My Journey Through French Cinema © Adrian Martin December 1990 |
