"New Wave" vs. "Daddy's Movie" There are many decent ways to make French films. Po - Italian, like Jean Renoir. Po is Viennese, like Ophuls. New York, like Jean-Pierre Melville. Jacques Becker was and still is French. Jean-Luc Godard.
Antoine and Antoinette, a young married couple, are Parisians. But of the postcard signs of the French capital, there is only the Eiffel Tower. Actually from the vertical panorama of the tower from the top to the basement, where the printer Antoine works, the film begins. Neorealism reigns in neighboring Italy and the film may initially seem like a French clone. Close apartments, back stairs, shabby entrances. Neighbors, ready to literally climb through the window to witness their participation in your life, here everything is in plain sight, there is no separation between private and public life. Here everyone is ready to smile at you (Monsieur, smile not at me, but at the camera!) and even the grocer, who increasingly pushes Antoine away from Antoinette, the character is unpleasant, but not negative. It's 47 years old, the occupation is behind us, and nobody remembers it in Becker's movie. That's just Antoine dreams of a motorcycle with a stroller (it's such Germans triumphantly entered occupied Paris) and out of habit listens to a homemade radio. A grocer who made a fortune under the Germans and a printer who may have printed leaflets with calls to fight for a free France under the occupiers are rivals.
When Antoinette’s lottery ticket turns out to be a winner, the neorealistic comedy will give way to “moral history.” The ticket will certainly be lost, but Becker is in no hurry to squeeze out comic situations like Gaidai in Sportlotto-82. He is more interested in people than situations. In ten years, director Becker will find a worthy successor in the person of Eric Romer.
The rivalry between the printer Antoine and the grocer Roland will not end in a comic fist fight. As a result, Antoine, having been hit on the head, will remember everything. And the neighbors, initially acting as spectators, will throw the near-winning Grocer down the stairs. What is not the metaphor of the “new wave” that dropped the “daddykino movie”?
8 out of 10