Les tricheurs

I blow hot and cold over Carné. He really can be a puzzle for me. I think perhaps his inspiration left him a little earlier than it did for other directors of his generation. Certainly a man who came to maturity in the Thirties with the Popular Front seems ill at ease in the France of the Fifties, with its rampant commercialism and heavy American influence. He is almost thirty years older than his young stars, and it shows. The party scenes go on much longer than they should, as if he were trying to buy time for the anemic scenario to work. Roland Lesaffre's character--he plays Pascale Petit's older brother--seems to exist only to reassure the director that his old-style ideas are still sound.

At two hours, this picture is far too long. Still, let me praise Pascale Petit for her game performance; she was a natural who should have challenged Brigitte Bardot for sexpot supremacy, but somehow lost her way. Andrea Parisy is excellent too as the girl who gets pregnant and wants Charrier to marry her and make her baby legitimate (yes, they still thought that way in the Fifties). Laurent Terzieff is the only French actor who could play an anarchist convincingly: he is great here as he rescues a cat from death, then remarks he can't stand cats. Jacques Charrier only reminds me how mediocre he was as an actor, with that constant little grin and those blank eyes.

First, I rated this movie 10/10. To me, it's simply one of the best I saw since I was born (I'm 23, but I saw numerous films). The story is cruel, but reality is, too, not ? It went deep into me and stirred my bowels. I saw it about 5 or 6 years ago and it still shakes me - and I still remember it !

Second, there is no 'national preference' (this expression is a direct translation from the French) for this movie. I mean it's not because it is a French movie that I put it so high : it has really caught me when I saw it. Furthermore, I don't know well Marcel Carne's filmography, so I don't know if it is or not his best movie, but I know it is not his most famous : Hotel du Nord, Quai des Brumes and Les Enfants du Paradis are the most famous.

Third, the movie's in B&W, but it deals with inter-temporal problems of youth (not acne) like love, friends and studies in a modern way. It could even be remade frame-by-frame with actual young actors, a Dolby(tm) sound and special effects (a car crash), it would still be a great film !

Problem : Maybe is it a film to be seen by young adults (from 16 to 25 years old) - and above, of course - for its message to be well understood... Did I say it was a great movie ?

It's generally an accepted fact that Marcel Carné's 1936-1946 movies are masterpieces and it's considered polite to say that the rest are mediocrities.This is an unfair opinion:at least ,two of the latter era are eminently watchable:"Thérèse Raquin" ,his best post-war work,and "les tricheurs" (the cheats).

There's a strange evolution from the Prevert golden hour to "les tricheurs":in "les enfants du paradis" "quai des brumes" or "le jour se lève",true love is thwarted by the villains. In "les tricheurs" true love does not exist anymore:we deal with a bunch of young people who believe in nothing;falling in love would be incongruous for this youth.The adults are not the villains at all:Mic's brother and mother are kind people ,but she is beyond their command.Very few grown-ups appear anyway.

During two hours,the characters do not stop playing around,dancing,listening to jazz records(a music which was not still part of the bourgeois culture),and heavily drinking .When two of them discover they care for each others ,it will be too late.

The cast is rather good ,Laurent Terzieff as an existentialist cynic and Andréa Parisy as a rich kid are the stand-outs.On the other hand,Pascale Petit and mainly Jacques Charrier(who married Brigitte Bardot the same year as "les tricheurs")do not possess the ambiguity their parts ask for.They are all smile,too sweet and to nice to be believable.

Oddly,"les tricheurs" was labeled "nouvelle vague"!When you know what the priests of this cinema school (the likes of Godard)thought of Carné ,it's really a good joke.But this disenchantment you feel throughout the whole movie is really disturbing.

François Truffaut, Young Jerk of the "Cahiers du cinema", main bastion of the coming so-called New Wave, made a big show of hating this film and even accused it of dragging French cinema into mediocrity. Translation: Truffaut, who was terminally repressed sexually, was already jealous of the way Carné could make a huge success of a story that pushed all the right buttons of its audience and actually involved it into something important with all the trappings and seduction of sensuality. In other words, where the general public and many critics saw a perceptive sociological analysis wrapped in a beautiful film, Truffaut saw "Girls on the Loose".

Carné, after all, had everything that would be severely lacking from the New Wave: intelligence, refinement, humour, a great talent as a storyteller, a great ear for dialogue, dazzling technical brilliance, the capacity to make his actors do what he wanted them to do, and a good dose of good taste. By comparison, Truffaut is a provincial bore with nothing to say.

A 50's tragic remake of "Pride and Prejudice", the French answer to "Rebel Without A Cause", an updated version of "Children of Paradise", "Les Tricheurs" tells a story of disaffected Parisian youth who have lost their way in an atmosphere of existentialism, sexual liberation and disrespect for traditional and religious values. Some (young) critics perceived Carné's take on the subject as the moralizing slant of an "older person", whereas I think what happened, quite to the contrary, is that Carné being gay and knowing a thing or two about repression, felt an untold sympathy for the young iconoclasts in his story. Furthermore, this being a French film, there is no mistaking that the rebellion in question is essentially sexual, something that still had to be decoded in American films like "Rebel Without a Cause" and "The Wild One".

Carné's young people are all supremely beautiful, graceful, elegant, spontaneous and intelligent. They are Gods and Goddesses. They drive the latest Vespas and the right cars. The cut of their suits, dresses and duffle-coats was a high point of the fashions of the last century. Their haircuts are still plastered on the wall of your local hairdresser. Their body shape, which they attained and maintained without effort, is still the modern Western ideal. They listen to the best jazz musicians. They know how to move, how to be sexy and how to make love – even though the pill hasn't yet been invented. They know how to negotiate different social classes and cultures. Unfortunately, they are defined by and live by the code of the gang and their own heartless rituals that exclude sentimentality and make a sin of romantic love. The only thing wrong with them is that their elders don't talk to them and vice-versa. The incidents depicted in this film got a lot of tongues wagging for a long time in France about the amorality and nihilism of youth while still making it a huge public and critical success.

This film is so stylish and gorgeous, I suspect the older viewers who watched it wished they could be like the people depicted in the film and quite a few young filmmakers or aspiring filmmakers like Truffaut developed a bad case of jaundice reflecting how they could never conceivably make a film as sexy or popular as this one, although they would be very good at eventually aiming for the nihilistic bits. On the other hand, given a certain clichéd aspect of the script (amorous misunderstanding leading to a medical emergency), one can only wonder at the horribly pious and puritanical mishmash Americans would have extracted from the same basic script if they had dared to tackle the subject.

Interestingly, the movie was filmed in the same basic locations as the American musical "Funny Face" a year earlier. Where Hollywood saw the picturesque aspects of the Rive Gauche and existentialism, Carné restituted its tragic and ironic dimension. Watch this trailer on YouTube: 19ZkKeoNjPo

The poet Carne disappears (didn´t he disappeared with Prévert?) and is followed by the judge Carne. The director wants to give his own vision of a youth that he doesn´t understand and he doesn´t want to. It´s a long way from the wonderful "Les enfants du paradis"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!