Le sedicenni

If I had to choose a movie which epitomizes the joie de vivre of the French youth ,just after the hard times of WW2, without a moment's hesitation ,I would go for Jacques Becker 's masterpiece .

Now these youngsters wage a war against a stilted society ( the fathers and mothers find it hard to realize that "their sons and daughters are beyond their command" )Their parents left them a row to hoe,and they do hoe it.

Not only this youth displays a rage to live ,but the actors are also a brand new generation:Daniel Gélin is the stand-out , bursting with vitality, enthusiasm and hoping against hope even when his mates want to let him down (the way the talks to him would convince the wimpishest of the wimps); Pierre Trabaud ,in spite of his hangdog look, makes no bones when it comes to steal meat from his dad butcher's store( to swap it for gas;reminiscence of the occupation days ,probably) );Maurice Ronet in his pre-"Plein Soleil " ("purple noon") days plays jazz on his trumpet every night for dancers bubbling with excitement.Jazz was then a rebellious music .

The precedent generation was dreaming of the island in the sun,this one does not dream : they want to make their dream come true : an expedition to study the pigmies 'life ; it's hard to find funds and ,although most of them come from the bourgeoisie , they cannot get any help from their family: they have to manage :hence their discouragement .

Only one thing bothers me : if the girls favor a stage actress career over the straight and narrow way of marriage , they are not even considered for the expedition and are relegated to wave them goodbye and to provide the love interest before they (the boys) are off to see the world;and however ,Madame Margaret Mead began her anthropological studies out in the field at 23!It was well before our story began .

Filmed on location in the streets of Paris , "rendez-vous de Juillet" ,one of Becker's masterpieces,is also perhaps the most optimistic work in a filmography which ,by large ,is not.

So it's finally out on video, huh? Let's hope for a DVD soon (highly unlikely, simply because hardly anyone has seen this film recently, in order to be knocked out by it, like I was, and create enough of a demand for a release).

I saw this thing, last year, with about 30 other people at the Egyptian in Hollywood as part of a Becker retrospective. It really is an amazing piece of work; it's a New-Wave film made some ten years before there was a New-Wave. Most of the film is shot in the streets and night-clubs of Paris with a realism and raw poetry that was non-existent in most French cinema of the time. In the late '40s and the '50s, Becker was a relatively popular filmmaker, and besides Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer and all the rest of the future New-Wave guys who idolized him, Polanski in Poland used to catch quite a few of his flicks (the only French filmmaker they got to see over there).

Daniel Gelin plays a young dude (much like Becker himself used to be) who wants to go with his pals to Africa on some kind of documentary film assignment. While he's trying to get the goods together to set this enterprise up, he and his friends and their girlfriends drive around town in a big convertible car that turns into a boat, party up a storm at Jazz clubs, and in general rebel against the establishment of the period. They all have a deep sense of solidarity and common purpose in their youth, a magical bond that's bound to disappear as the societal pressures, temporarily on hold, reassert themselves. Gelin, however, is single-minded and dedicated, determined not to let his friends cop-out on him; he knows that if he can keep everyone united, he might be able to work their particular non-conformist angle into a success.

"Rendezvous in July" captures the poetry of youth like very few films before or since. It is one of those amazing films that's a joy to watch from start to finish, it literally transports you to 1949 Paris and lets you hang-out with these young characters. Upon seeing it once, I immediately wanted to see it again many times, but the retrospective was a one-shot deal and there was no video on the market. Buy this film and watch it (Amazon has it for sale, IMDB should show a link for it) and you'll see what I'm talking about (your video store will probably not have a copy for rent), it's more than worth the few extra dollars you pay for it and the DVD is probably not going to come out for ages.

Another missing link between the patriarchs and the overrated new wave.But this one is unique:nothing had been done before ,and a lot of directors tried to imitate it later ,to no avail.

This movie cannot be taken out of context :it has to be considered at once. in its era and in Becker's work.

1949,just after the war,it's the rise of a new youth ,who is still enthusiast and who has almost nothing to do with the blasé characters of the 1960 generation (Claude Chabrol's "les cousins" ,particularly Jean-Claude Brialy's part).Daniel Gélin and Brigitte Auber epitomize this soif de vivre ,and their optimism -almost absent in the nouvelle vague works- is quite infectious :the audience sides with them from the first line.It's really a brand new world they want to build and it's not a matter of chance if Gelin gives up the father's company and looks for broader horizons:ethnography in Africa.Old Europa is a thing of the past.

Becker had made four movies,but now the first is forgotten and impossible to find.So "Goupi Mains Rouges" -one of his very best and which too many people overlook-,"falbalas" and "Antoine et Antoinette". The latter movie and its follow-up (this movie) have strong analogies:both describe the fulfillment of a dream,even if the first one takes place in a working-class milieu whereas "Rendez-vous" depicts a bourgeois -not meant pejoratively- youth.In "Antoine et Antoinette" ,the hero wins at the French national lottery,then lost his wallet in which...(it showed a René Clair influence ("le million" 1931),but it has stood the time much better than Clair's thirties works)

Filmed on location in the streets of Paris,it paved a reliable royal way for the nouvelle vague,but its charms are more pristine and more delightful than these of Godard and co.No smugness,no self-consciousness,and a strong screenplay -which will often lack in the works of the nouvelle vague young Turks-,and no contempt for the directors who came before (as the René Clair and Jean Grémillon ("le ciel est à vous" 1943)influences testify).The female star Brigitte Auber had another strong part in the marvelous but much less optimistic Duvivier's "sous le ciel de Paris" ,then worked with Hitchcock (in a minor film though:"to catch a thief" and then got lost in mediocrities.Another Brigitte had taken her place .

Optimism will continue in the follow-up "Edouard et Caroline" (1951) and "rue de l'estrapade" (1953)(both movies featuring Gélin too)but will finally come to an end with "touchez pas au grisbi"(1954) :maybe for the characters who are older (Gabin) it's too late.Becker's final masterwork "le trou" will be pessimism flesh on the bone, a terrifying death metaphor.