Welcome to my column, Colour Me (Dis)Interested (Ha! Isn't it clever?), where I celebrate black-and-white films that are made in the colour era. As we're celebrating all things Oscar this week here at I'm With Geek, I thought I'd look at the 2012 Best Picture winner, The Artist, which also garnered four other Oscar gongs.
“We didn't need dialogs, we had faces” said the narcissistic Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, referring to the Silent Era, when she used to be big … before the 'pictures got small'.
I was awestruck by Dujardin's performance. To those who didn't grew up with French TV programmes (it's niche, I know), he's one of the most popular and talented comedians of his generation. Dujardin created the character of Brice de Nice, a blonde surfer whose specialty was to 'diss people', but it was so funny it never sounded mean-spirited. He was a member of a cult comic-troop (who made sketches à la SNL) but even back then, he had a little something that made him special: a voice, a smile, a charisma in both TV and movies, in both dramatic and comedic register. There was no doubt in France that the guy who was famous for his impressions of Robert De Niro and the camel (and even De Niro doing the camel) was promised a brilliant career.
Look closely at Jean Dujardin's face, it's almost as though he were drawn with 'classic' features: the finely traced moustache which builds a Fairbanks-like charisma like the strength from Samson's hair, the dazzling smile making him look like the lost son of Gene Kelly, and a certain macho toughness reminding of a young Sean Connery. Dujardin's face is a gift from cinematic Gods, and The Artist finally lets it glide, earning him the Cannes Festival Award and an Oscar for Best Actor. He doesn't just play an actor from the Silent Era, he embodies the Era with the same level of demented craziness as Norma Desmond, in a brighter and more light-hearted side.
And this is the strength of the film: it isn't a tribute in the literary meaning of the word. It has its moments where it tricks us into the use of sounds or dialogs, but never fails to distract us from the core of the story: the romance. Very quickly, we forget about spotting the hints, the references to silent classics: chase scenes, over-the-top comical gesticulations, slapstick jokes etc. This mindset would disappoint those who expect a film with the same material as Mel Brook's Silent Movie, which was clearly a tribute.
The Artist is a silent movie, featuring a beautiful romance between George and Peppy, who got her break with an idea from George, something that would make her different from the other actresses: a beauty spot above the upper lip. A clever credit-billing montage depicts her consequent ascension to stardom until she finally dethrones George and makes a has-been out of him.
Both Dujardin and Bejo are indeed powerful in an Oscar-worthy level and at that moment, I can't continue without mentioning the third character of the film, George's dog. The relationship between George and the dog provides a sort of Chaplinesque feel to the movie, a mix of tenderness and poignancy, so natural and convincing that it created waves for an best performance by an animal to be created by The Academy.
I applaud Hazanivicius for not having reduced The Artist to a flashy spectacle with no substance, with the word 'homage' as the director's convenient alibi, and make a touching romance about two people who met each other at a pivotal time in the history of film-making, each representing a side of cinema, the old-school silent generation: Chaplin, Keaton, Pickford and the exuberant talkers: Grant, Hepburn, Davis … And I'm glad he found the true note to reconcile between these two universes at the end … didn't I tell you Dujardin was the lost son of Gene Kelly?
The Artist plays like a missing link between Singin' in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard and it's indeed one of the best films of 2011, with the absence of words as an endearing 'beauty spot'.