Who Likes Maurice Cloche?

Another text from Recrudescence.

Who Likes Maurice Cloche?

Nothing is more embarrassing than the way certain films go about winning their case in appeal, against all decency, as if time would inevitably end up being on their side. Nothing stranger than their obstinacy in always "eyeing us up" — Thursday evening, for example.

— What are you doing there, all alone on Channel 5?

— I'm plugging a hole, said the film with feigned nonchalance. But I am worth much more than that. I'm entirely built around the actor Fernandel and my name is Rooster Heart. I'm forty-two years old.

— Are you an auteur film? I tossed out, to mask my ignorance.

— If I tell you who made me, protested the film, you'll zap me right away. Nobody likes Maurice Cloche.

— Indeed, I said, cooled down, the Clochian oeuvre seems able to justify by itself the old rallying cry: "To the lions, the Christians!" The unbearable Monsieur Vincent dates from 1947, and you, you're from the vintage of '46.

— I won't plead the cause of Cloche, said the film with good sense. I'll just point out that his body of work alternates between edifying and madcap films. I'm part of the madcap ones.

— Prove it, if you are a film.

— Here goes. I tell the story of Tulipe Barbaroux, a typography worker, in love with the boss's daughter, who decides to die when the latter wants to marry her off to a rich stutterer. You have to picture Fernandel in a grey smock with his lock of hair, singing on the staircase: "I have a heart that goes tick-tock."

— Sure, I said. But I also imagine Cloche's style in this working-class operetta, and I'm terrified.

— That's precisely why I veer off suddenly and I switch to dark humour. Tulipe decides to kill himself but keeps botching it. He prints his own funeral notice, gets smartly dressed, swallows a tube of sleeping pills, between flowers and wreaths, and wakes up with this fine phrase: "What is this caress? Is it you Saint Peter?"

— I can see Fernandel playing all that with quite a punch, I admit...

— Needless to say, the film went on, that he carries me entirely. Because, when it comes to the mise en scene, Cloche is lugubrious. Just imagine — to seem more eccentric, he multiplied tilted shots and unusual angles that make me tip over — yes — tip over into a fantastical dimension. For, having regained consciousness, Tulipe meets a mad scientist, called Pugilas. And Pugilas discovers that Tulipe possesses a "monstrous hypertrophy of the auricles and ventricles", in short too much heart, and decides to graft in place of his heart an animal's heart: a rooster's heart. The operation succeeds.

— Clearly, I murmured, it's rather unusual.

— I won't even mention (the film was growing excited) the wake-up scene where Tulipe in pyjamas clucks with a rooster accent "When the sun appears at the window."

— Say nothing to me.

— Well, this rooster's heart changes him completely. From a timid guy, he becomes a real Don Juan. You see crowds of women running after him, like in Buster Keaton's Seven Chances.

— Please, remain polite.

— So much so that he must flee and Pugilas sends him to Venice. On the train, Tulipe meets the boss's daughter and her stuttering husband. She throws herself at him, the husband surprises them and challenges him to a duel. Then the film tips over into Lubitschian entertainment.

— Another comparison like that and I'll zap you, I threatened.

— Lubitsch revisited by Cloche, if you like. There's a masked ball with Jacques Hélian's great orchestra, a rendez-vous with a princess on the stroke of midnight, and Tulipe disguised as Harlequin...

— And, naturally, I said ironically, the film tips over again.

— How do you know?

— Go on, tell me the ending.

— Obviously (the film was darkening), the screenwriters had ventured so far into the far-fetched and the tonal rupture that they were obliged to use an old trick.

— Say nothing to me, I can guess. It was all just a dream. Tulipe Barbaroux wakes up and they bring him only good news: he won at the races and becomes a business partner to his boss, and gets to marry the daughter (she had broken off with the rich stutterer); Tulipe Barbaroux wakes up another man, a bold rooster, blessed with fortune. Is that it?

— So what? What harm is there in that? pleaded the film, suddenly pitiful and aged. It was 1946, we were coming out of the war, you had to have a good time.

— And what if, clever one, we interpreted this screenplay as a metaphor about the sleep of France, about its dreamed and fake rooster-like heroism, about its cowardliness...

— That would be harsh, admitted the film.

That's how I watched Rooster Heart by Maurice Cloche. It was bad.

First published in Libération on November 19th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.