L'horloger de Saint-Paul

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?

Bernard Tavernier once confessed that the greatest influence in his life had been the work of directors Akira Kurosawa and Michael Powell. This might explain his direction of the film based in the novel by Georges Simenon's.

It shows a Tavernier more concerned with the character study of M. Descombes, as he goes through the horror of understanding what had caused his son to commit the crime of which he is been accused of perpetrating. In doing so, M. Tavernier embraces the "old French cinema", as he shuns away the New Wave methods of story telling.

One can see clearly what's going on in Descombes' mind, at all time. His son has grown up and is not a child anymore. We see this father come home and encounters newspaper reporters and he goes into his son's room and lays down in the bed that perhaps the younger man has not slept in for quite some time. We watch as Descombs descends into hell because he can't comprehend what has triggered his son into doing what seems repugnant to him and his dignity.

Pilippe Noiret was born to play Descombes. This actor with such subtlety, underplays the clockmaker, and the father. What comes to the surface is the inner turmoil that Descombes is experiencing. This is another example of how good an actor M. Noiret is because with an economy of gestures he builds the character. Jean Rochefort, as the inspector, is also good. M. Rochefort is another actor that always surprises.

This movie is a psychological portrait of a man at the crossroads of despair. Only at the end, father and son seem reconciled with one another. The city of Lyons has been photographed lovingly in this film.

This is a Tavernier for discriminating tastes.

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.

This film is a brilliant portrayal of a man caught between his private memories of a fugitive son and the political interpretations of his son's actions. There is a constant interplay between Michel Descombes's private existence, individualized profession (as an artisan, he is necessarily the opposite of a mass producer), and the public spectacle that his son has become. It is truly a fascinating commentary on subversion and freedom, wonderfully played by Noiret and other greats, that provides incredible emotional depth.

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.