Cinema
Spleens
By ISABEL QUIGLY
Candide ('X' certificate) and Le Million ('U' certificate). (Paris-Pullman.) Now that satire (counter- reformation being what it is) has become something of a suspect, if not actually dirty, word, the fact that a film lays about it with energy and venom is no longer a guarantee of its being greeted with rapture. Norbert Carbonnaux's Candide has already been shown at the National Film Theatre in a programme of satirical films but in fact belongs in the company of demolition-works like Mocky's Snobs or the Boultings' I'm All Right Jack, films in which spleen (at varying degrees of intensity—blistering in Mocky, liverish in the Boultings, and in Carbonnaux oddly pettish, a kitten's scratch at the face of Hiroshima) is the mover: not swva indignatio, divine dis- content, anger as 'one of the sinews of the soul,' or any of the other salutary and productive formS , of fury. And distaste as a moral napalm that, annihilates everything, and above all without a moral standpoint of its own, is self-defeating and in the long run artistically impotent. Candide in twentieth-century dress may have far more eloquent examples than Voltaire had of the enormities of man and nature, but if man is devalued absolutely there is no satirical currency left at all. You may dedicate the film to the dead of Hiroshima but if you like them no better than the other horrible humans shown then why regret their fate?
In any case Carbonnaux has taken Voltaire far too literally, and in satirising Pangloss as a lunatic optimist, believing in spite of all the evidence that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, he is knocking an attitude that, even before Dachau, let alone since, was.. already stone dead and buried. The adventures of an innocent about the world in the savagery of the past few decades offer, of course, so much material for anger and disgust that comedy may ., seem the only answer; but not this sort of com- edy, all mildly funny nastiness about everyone and almost Punch-like jokes about the universe. You can't, after all, just hit out at life in general: without a central conviction of some sort it turns into a pillow fight, with weapons and targets so equally matched and so generalised they lose all their power of hitting 'or being hit. Candide is beautifully acted, and here lies its main merit : Jean-Pierre Cassel, a perfect choice with his rather equivocal sweetness, is Candide; Pierre Brasseur, whirling between chfiteau and concen- tration camp, or between Nazi and Communist propaganda, brings his best extremist panache to
Pangloss, and Michel Simon, in what looks an advanced stage of psychic decomposition, says
volumes about la gloire with the twitch of am, eyebrow. But it is Carbonnaux who limits them., by being, on a theme that demands the extremes of rage and irony, rather cross.
Rene Clair's Le Million in the same pro- gramme makes it an occasion, a thirty-two-year- old musical comedy that comes up with such freshness, vigour and subtlety that it is at once joyful and saddening because (respectively) a reminder of past glories and a measure of the extent of Clair's later decline.
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