Arts

• The discreet charm of French

Clancy Sigal

The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul (Academy Two) Small Change (EMI International, Bloomsbury) Le Gang (Curzon)

Three new French films this week, and one's shoulders involuntarily hunch up against the expected deluge of glossy selfsatisfaction that lately has marred even the better imports. Gratifyingly, one of them, while skating on very thin ice, does not fall through. The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul (AA certificate) unfolds very slowly, seeming almost to grow in front of one's eyes, and at the end I felt that I had participated in something decent and good.

Updated from a Simenon novel, and directed by Bertrand . Tavernier, an excritic, the story is set in the provincial city of Lyons today. Philippe Noiret, a flatfooted amiable bear of a man who looks like an even more hung-over Humphrey Lyttelton, owns a small watch repair shop in a quiet side street. Since his wife left him years ago he has by himself raised his teenage son, Bernard, in the flat upstairs. One day the police call to say that Bernard has murdered a notorious right-wing bully. The boy, eventually captured with his girl (fiend, won't talk to his father; he offers no explanation other than, 'I killed him because he was filth . It was a sort of wedding present.' Which tells the father, who slowly realises how estranged he had become from his son, everything and nothing. At the trial Noiret, pressured from all sides (by Bertrand's cynical lawyer trying to build a case, the sobsister newspapers, even the police) to plead some form of mitigation, stonily refuses. He may not understand Bernard. But, Noiret proclaims in open court, 'I stand by my son in total solidarity'.

There is a final scene which, like much of Tavernier's picture, dips into sentimentality without drowning in it. Father and son face each other through a double wire screen in the prison visiting room. As usual, there's nothing much to say. Noiret tries, by telling an apparently pointless tale, about how during the war he punched an officer and then worried about it all through the Occupation. In his bumbling unimaginative way he wants his son to see that he too once cut loose from authority without waiting to count the cost. Shyly, father and son stare across a gulf of years that has slightly, just slightly, narrowed.

The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul is the best Simenon I have seen on the screen. Quietly, but with gathering force, it invokes the enclosed rhythm of a fair-sized provincial city — the satisfactions of opening your shop

in the morning, of meeting your pals in a familiar café. France may be going to the dogs, but French life — the food (constantly being eaten in the picture), the silly TV, the slightly formal, slightly suspicious attitudes of neighbours — ' rolls on like a great unchanging river. Character builds unobtrusively; late at night, on the way home from the café with his best friend, Noiret stops to wait for a traffic light to change despite a totally deserted street, and apologises because he is so law-abiding. He is a conventional man, conservative (like most Frenchmen) in his habits, but with reserves of Popular Front passion that lie slumbering deep in his incurious, stolid character.

Because the director and his scriptwriters (the venerable Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost) have so understandingly filled in the background — true to life and, in spirit, to Simenon — the relationship that springs up between the father and the police inspector investigating the murder seems completely credible. 'Kids are impossible these days,' the cop gently tells Noiret. Is he manipulating the father to find the son, or is he genuine? Noiret and the inspector are good but limited men whose capacity to feel has suddenly been stretched further than either ever expected. Interestingly, both come down on the side of the boy.

The reason is that both men, formed by the second world war and the Occupation, sense (if in different ways) the overpowering conservatism of present-day France. Why did the boy kill? One never finds out. Though the victim was a fascist thug, the son (and the father) strongly resist attempts to politicise the case. And Noiret also supports his son's refusal to plead 'crime passionel' which might lighten his sentence. The closest to an explanation is a comment dropped by Noiret's copain as they stare at the river just after hearing Bernard get twenty years. 'We're suffocating in this city,' the friend says. And because the moral landscape of Lyons has

been painted in so naturally — 'France has fifty million inhabitants and twenty million informers,' the inspector once remarks — it seems to point to a kind of explanation.

Like Chabrol last week in Une Partie de Plaisir, though from a less distanced angle, Tavernier seems to imply that the comfortable certitudes also breed a potentiallY ungovernable violence. In this case, a teenager has killed in response to the 'violence' of middle-class provincial life whose pain only the sensitised and deranged young can feel. It is a risky thesis. Fassbinder in Wild Games and Schlondorff in The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum took off from a similar viewpoint, but those German films were so contemptuous of 'bourgeois' society that decency itself got trampled in the filfll makers' murderous fury.

However, Tavernier actually likes the society he is worried about, if only because it manages to produce people like the characters so sympathetically portrayed by Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort as the inspector. But he is anxious about the possibility that the sheer weight of traditional conservatism, instead of fortifying the consensus, may drag it down. One of the many discreet virtues in this calm, unemphatic film is its gradual exposure of the submerged depths of political feeling in middle-of-the-road France.

Sentimentality, gooey and 'humanistic', drips from every frame of Small Change (A certificate). It, too, is on the side of the angels, the pre-pubescent schoolchildren (especially boys) of Thiers. This is Truffaut at his most engaging, and also at his worst.

After a while one gags at the unrelenting charm of his gaily Gallic tykes who exist, Truffaut insists, in a state of grace much longer than most adults will concede. Fair enough. But have French kids no anarchy, meanness, spite and cruelty at all? Small Change is nicest when it gently guys its own premise. A baby falls from a high ledge and instead of showing us its splattered remains on the pavement, Truffaut's camera follows it bouncing back unharmed to safety. 'Ore' gory fait bourn!' smiles the young mother, and all's well in Truffaut's only intermittently affecting fantasy of super" innocents. Hard to believe this came from the same disciplined hand as Quatre Cent Coups and L'Enfant Sauvage . Le Gang (AA certificate) is chilciish French sentimentality gone quite mad. `The, Front-Wheel Drive Gang', made up 01 Resistance herOes, collaborators and petty' ordinary thieves, freely burgles post-War France because les flies are too busy purging their ranks of Petainists. Alain Delon, ing Belmondo as Delon playing Bogart,,I5 scream as 'The Nut', the gang leader, 111 frizzy black wig and phallic cigar. SomehoW, I don't think he's meant to be that funnYLe, Gang is an unconscious parody of Frenc"a gangster movies of the Dassin-Melville ers n s which themselves were half-aware satif? on an original form not without its leg pU It's like watching an Italian spaghetti wes

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