À nous la liberté

I profess-- I never heard of this movie nor this director till I watched it tonight. As pointed out, the film has a socialist message-- mainly a scaffolding to hang some very clever physical humor on, though it manages to fit in a few astute (likewise hysterical) observations about modern industrial society. The male leads are absolutely charming and have great chemistry. The style of the film is something in itself. The soundtrack (one of the first original ones to be used in a film) is intertwined with the action on screen, and occasionally the actors sing along with it almost as if this were a musical...but not quite. There are moments of pantomime infused with talking scenes, almost as if the director was trying figure out how to work his style for making silent films into talkies. In total, it's a bit odd-- but it works! And it's unique. And far from dated-- it gave me quite a few belly-laughs.

I was lucky enough to see "A Nous La Liberte" along with it's sister film (in my mind, anyway) "Le Million" at an early age at the Museum of Modern Art. I have never gotten over them. They are both miracles of studio production with even many of the exteriors built in studio. Both films were designed by the great Lazare Meerson and evoke the magical Paris of the 20's. Both films make wonderful, inventive use of music and song, though neither one is exactly a Musical in the modern sense. "A Nous La Liberte" is also interesting for having been Chaplin's inspiration for much of "Modern Times."

Clair's À nous la liberté is a wonderful satire of modern mass production, magnificently shot, directed, decently acted and with impressive sets. The satirical content is stressed but not too on-your-face. The main reaction to the film is delight.

Some of the sequences were an obvious inspiration to Chaplin, whose masterpiece Modern Times resembles this film quite a lot both in the way it looks as well as thematically.

The picture and sound quality, at least in the version shown on Finnish TV, are superb which is surprising considering the age of the film.

The music is good and well used, except the songs which are slightly irritating. Still, this is a great and pleasing film with a very amusing scene in the end, taking place at the opening of a new factory.

It was striking watching this film shortly after having attended a very fine museum exhibit on American Precisionist painting, a style in vogue at the time this film was made. As in Precisionism, the imagery here is concerned with the industrialization of society. Every facet of social life, not just the work-place, but the school and the prison-system seems to director Rene Clair to have been turned into a factory. The film features some extremely clever editing making the connection between industrial production and the production of passive subjects of capitalism clear. The difference between Clair and the Precisionists is that most of the latter saw in industrialization a utopian promise. What few who didn't, such as George Ault , understood industrialization in apocalyptic terms. In either case, it represented for the Precisionists an absolute transformation of life from which there was no turning back. For the filmmaker's part, Clair clearly understood modernity in sinister terms, industrialization bringing about the mechanization of the subject, but his humanism made it impossible for him to see the modernist challenge to humanity as insurmountable. For Clair, human dignity could be salvaged just by forsaking the materialist temptations of capitalism for the simple pleasures of life. Exploiter and exploited could return to a loving, communal relationship by embracing poverty and freedom. Art historians have proposed that the utopianism of Precisionist art was abolished by the horrific realizations of WWII. That would, it seems to me, to apply equally to the humanist utopia of Clair's cinema.

This is a little gem of a film that doesn't date nearly as much as you would think, considering it come from the early thirties. The masterful hand of director Rene Clair overcomes an insubstantial plot and imbues the film with some fantastic visuals, humorous satire and some good clean knockabout fun. Two prisoners escape from custody and one reaches the top of the ladder while the other clings onto the bottom rung. Clair makes his feeling about capitalism clear by showing how the worker under the capitalist is as much a prisoner as the people locked in the jail. But any political overtones are not so much that they interrupt with the comic narrative and the film merrily continues with it's chases, bottom-kicking and all manner of good-natured silliness. Highly recommended.