O Relojoeiro

I'm a big fan of director Bertrand Tavernier. For me, he's the best French director of the past 30 years. This is one of his early works of the seventies and it had all the elements that makes the great personality of his films. Above all : a great sense of reality. Sometimes, his movies looks like they were improvised, but, in fact, it can't really be. This one is like an emotional crescendo. In the begening, we didn't really know what's going on and what kind of man Philippe Noiret is playing. In the middle, we had a great idea, but we don't know that the last minutes will be so full of intense emotions. The great Noiret and Tavernier will make several other movies together. This is one is among the best.

L'HORLOGER is faultless. Based on a Simenon novel, it is a measured take on crime, not from the usual point of view of the criminal or the detective, but the waiting father, who must come to terms with his own past and deceptions as a parent.

In avoiding melodrama, the film follows a determinedly unsensational, grey, flat, mundane route. Tavernier rejected the flashiness of the nouvelle vague, in favour of older traditions of French cinema, with emphasis on character, and milieu, meaningful camera movements, and a literate, complex screenplay, while also linking cinematic tradition to his narrative of fathers and sons.

His recreation of Lyons is novel after a decade of Paris overkill, and you can feel the post-1968 political tension, the alarming shift to the right, and the straying of decent men into violence. Phillipe Noiret, one of Europe's greatest actors, is quietly astounding. Everything about the film is as good as it should be. So why, if I may say so under IMDb guidelines, isn't it very interesting?

The Clockmaker is a technically well-crafted precision endeavor in direction, writing, and acting. Director Bertrand Tavernier fashions a subtle, conservative character study asserted into the framework of a crime story, a study of an aging, middle-class clockmaker with a downcast disposition, played, or rather inhabited, by Philippe Noiret. This commonplace man is stunned out of his sluggishness when he finds out that his only son has been arrested for murder.

What is poignant about this story, and what improves the usually dormant drama of a crime film, is that Noiret lives quietly, alone with his son, who is almost grown up. In other words, his son is his whole tranquil life. Yet, when a detective played by mulishly tenacious Jean Rochefort asks him for help with the case, Noiret grasps how little he knows about his son, and struggles with his feeling that he is unable to blame him.

The film opens on Noiret having a night out, when his friends crack wise on the elections, the leftists, a protest rally, and the death penalty. He has fun this night. The next day two policemen come to his shop and rummage around his adjoining apartment. They particularly search his son's room before taking him to the police station where Rochefort tells him his son is wanted for murder of a security guard at the place where his girlfriend was fired, and has not been apprehended. There was even an eyewitness.

Tavernier puts Noiret's character through a motley crew of odd dramatic angles aside from just the press, who are of course just interested in ratings, but also tangents to the main thread of the film like right-wing hooligans who vandalize his window and two girls who confirm how vile the murdered guard was to women. The skillful essence of the film is in the abstractness of it, giving us impressions of how much his relationship with his son means to him, and how bewildered he is that he has no idea what to do to help his son, such as in his transit back home from the precinct and can't stand without feeling ill and has to ask a passenger for his seat.

The film is not hard-hitting enough to be great, but it serves its locale with an authentic atmosphere. The story itself, no matter how well it poignantly portrays a world in miniature, is nevertheless very slight. On the whole, The Clockmaker is a dramatic exercise. As many other French films from the 1960s and '70s were, it is less about telling the story and more about technique. It doesn't compare to the boisterousness and self-consciousness of most of the New Wave films of that time, and in fact is a particularly subtle film. It is essentially a film that says of film-making, "Yes, less is more."

The star of this film is the city of Lyons, which looks absolutely magnificent. The problem with the film is that it rambles along until the son is finally captured and tried, and is reconciled with his father. The father doesn't seem to know what's going on at the start or how he feels about his son, before eventually deciding that he wants him to escape. But the film just seems to drift from one encounter to another, with the policeman, with his friend, with the press, with his son's girlfriend's workmates, with the woman who helped bring his son up. Perhaps the director is trying to show what it's like to be waiting for news in such a situation and the sense of not being able to do anything about it. Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort are both excellent in portraying sympathetic characters. The son and girlfriend are also portrayed as sympathetic - although we are never explicitly told why they committed the murder, their victim is shown to have been a nasty piece of work. The almost documentary style is in contrast to the cinematic style of other Simenon adaptations such as "Monsieur Hire" and "The Hatter's Ghost". No intrusive music as in "Monsieur Hire" for example.

Tavernier's treatment of Simenon takes us back to the veterans time,all those who made great adaptations just before the nouvelle vague and even during its heyday:"la mort de Belle" ,Edouard Molinaro's most perfect flick was made in 1963,at about the same time as François Truffault's "la peau douce",whose Simenon adaptation would be forgotten if it were not Truffault .

Molinaro's "la mort de Belle" and Henry Decoin's "les inconnus dans la maison"have a lot in common with "l'horloger de Saint-Paul;all these works deal with incommunicability,between people of the same family.For instance,in "les inconnus dans la maison" ,a fallen alcoholic lawyer does not care about his daughter anymore and one day very bad things happen;in "la mort de Belle" a high school teacher sees his life torn apart when he's a suspect when a young girl dies and even his wife who thinks she knows him well has her doubts .

Tavernier's first movie was not that much innovative -as works to come would be- as derivative.However ,it's a very commendable work,because of Philippe Noiret's sensational portrayal of a peaceful man ,who is confronted with tragedy when his son kills a b.... .Tavernier's science of pacing a movie already shines:the son only appears in the last quarter of the movie and during at least 15 minutes,the only words he says to dad are "bonjour papa" ;little by little,we feel that father and son stand together ,but they do not try to strike back ,to find alibis ,to avoid the punishment.In a grand gesture,Tavernier does not even film the trial!A terse comment lets us know about the sentence.The characters -the father ,the son and even the girlfriend (Christine Pascal)the b... raped - remain opaque,their motives remain obscure Liliane ,the son's lover has not a single line to say.We will never know why the son and the father were estranged -the scene with the boy's old nanny remains vague.During the last scenes looks matter more than words and when they start talking again,the son concludes: -and what a place(a noisy visiting room) for the first conversation in years!- "we can hear ourselves if we really want to!" Unlike Tavernier's follow-up "le juge et l'assassin" which was Tavernier's first perfect work,"l'horloger de Saint-Paul' does not avoid some post-68 clichés that were poisoning the French cinema of the seventies:the bedroom full of "revolutionary " posters,the bad cops-the conversation with detective Jean Rochefort in the train- ,the all-things -political which the hero fortunately refuse .

It's minor quibble.Considering all the important movies Tavernier would produce in the wake of 'l'horloger" ,it's almost even irrelevant.No other director has shown so many qualities in the last thirty years.