As a film buff, I had seen director Jean-Louis Comolli's fiction features "La Cecila" and "Red Shadow", both interesting efforts, but his documentary on the great Georges Delerue falls short. Comolli tries for something different, but it is the interviewees who succeed in imparting information, not the documentarian and his odd notions of how to structure a film.
Perhaps for rights reasons, or maybe just a stylistic boner, surprisingly little film footage is used here, notably a repeated scene from "Women in Love" and some "Two English Girls" and "Shoot the Piano Player" takes. Instead, Comolli keeps showing still photographs being flipped through by someone's hand (his own maybe?) as a primitive and useless way of representing the movies, especially when we are considering their soundtrack music.
More successful, though perhaps misguided, is his emphasis on the film editor as the key witness to Delerue's career. Sure, film editing is a key element of filmmaking and the editor contributes to the marrying of shots toward final goal of sound + image = feature film, but a variety of sources would have been preferable. For Truffaut, instead of his editors, maybe a scholar like Annette Insdorf who has analyzed Francois's work over the years could have thrown some light on Delerue's contribution.
Three directors do provide that insight, notably Ken Russell whose thoughts on the cinema are not only intelligent but worthy of scrutiny by the overbearing critics who were so keen on dismissing his works, one by one, as they were released during his '60s and '70s heyday. The famous Alan Bates/Oliver Reed wrestling scene in "Women in Love" provides Ken with fodder to explain how important Delerue was to heightening the work, and also how the director has final say on which music will be used and where. Similarly, Oliver Stone's discussion of Delerue and "Salvador" is terrific. A forgotten (outside of France) filmmaker Henri Colpi, also is a significant voice.
I was as devoted a fan to Delerue's films as these heavyweights, and miss the chance here to engage more obscure but important works. My favorite of his scores was for Jack Clayton's "Our Mother's House", a classic that has never gotten its due, and perhaps a longer, more thorough documentary could have hit the high points of dozens of other worthwhile titles. Bertolucci is still alive and working, so why not (back in 1994 when this was shot) have him discuss "The Conformist", a key film in both his and Georges' careers?
