The Devil, Master of the Screenplay
We often hope that French films will give us the euphoria of a burst of speed. That they'll get their little world going and get us carried away. Hoping that, thanks to this unexpected sprint, we forget that their world is small and that they are inhabited by puppets. The "chase sequence" is the lost dream of French cinema, the broken link between the burlesque of the early days and the dead end of the Comédie-Française. René Clair, who came through burlesque and ended up at the Académie, had the misfortune of pulling it off once with Le Million (1931) — in the same miraculous way Bob Beamon broke the world long-jump record once and for all. Ever since, everyone has been running after that record, including René Clair.
Beauty and the Devil (1949) poses the following slightly absurd question: what if the well-known "crisis of the screenplay", far from having emerged just a few years ago, had begun right after the war? Born from the regret of no longer being able to tell stories the way they were told before, and from the dread of new stories from which nothing good was to be expected? From the fear of History and the scepticism about the post-atomic world? It's worth knowing that the character of the knight Henri-Faust (Gérard Philipe) was seen by the left-wing intelligentsia of the time as a kind of Joliot-Curie — the man who had opposed the military use of his research and who was about to be removed from his position as High Commissioner for Atomic Energy. The man who hadn't sold his soul to science-turned-Devil.
The crisis of the screenplay occurs when there is no more story, and only the screenplay is left, only the fatality of the screenplay. That's why the Devil is the ideal character for the "crisis of the screenplay" — because he is the very face of fatality. Since he knows everything about everyone, the Devil is the best possible screenwriter. And since he enjoys the spectacle of a manipulated humanity, he is also the best possible audience. He stands both upstream and downstream of the film, condemning the filmmaker to the refined academicism of the sceptic ("what's the point?"), and the spectator to the dreary contemplation of a show that has already been performed. All that's left is the elegance of despair: the fake euphoria of a chase sequence and a burst of speed.
Going fast to make us forget we're going nowhere is a programme like any other. A moralist's programme, one that the very idea of a "happy ending" fundamentally disgusts. In his own way, René Clair fights against the fatality of the screenplay, but despite Salacrou's help, he doesn't succeed. He doesn't succeed because by 1949, it's a bit late. Ten years earlier, the chase sequence in The Rules of the Game was sublime because it anticipated the war by a few months. The one in Beauty and the Devil is lacklustre because four years have already passed since the first atomic bombs.
All that's left is the lazy deployment of great actors. Let loose Gérard Philipe, and especially Michel Simon, on Léon Barsacq's sets to get that trembling of life — that acceleration produced by actors traversing a flimsy diorama of polished prints. The only real moments of cinema in Beauty and the Devil come from Michel Simon, because he alone plays, and outplays, all of Clair's plans (in both senses of the French word: plans and shots). Pure accelerations owed to a genius actor who commands every possible rhythm.
Forty years on, or nearly, what does this amount to on television? Two stressed actors in a frozen film. Common sense would, of course, dictate that we expect nothing more from the film than those two performances. But common sense would equally dictate that they be "extracted" from this bloodless film like set pieces of bravura. At the very limit: instead of occasionally interrupting Beauty and the Devil with adverts, it would be better to interrupt an hour and a half of adverts with a few great moments of Michel Simon. At the limit, of course.
There is, all the same, one true moment in Beauty and the Devil — a beautiful accelerated sequence that goes beyond the "crisis of the screenplay." Before a large mirror that serves as his "viewing screen," Mephisto-Simon shows Faust-Philipe what awaits him for the rest of his days. Silent and powerful, the virtual images of a screenplay already written and a film already made file past — a screenplay against which Faust finds the strength to rebel. What moves us then is less this last-minute triumph of free will than the aesthetic of the trailer — which is, deep down, René Clair's own aesthetic.
First published in Libération on 7 November 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des sacs à mains, Aléas Editeur, 1991.
