The Avon Theatre in Stamford, CT is beginning to rival NYC’s Film Forum in perhaps not the volume of reissued films, but certainly in the quality of those they screen. Not that it should be a contest. It’s great they’re both showing classics.
Tonight’s Classic French Double Feature (two films for the price of one ticket!) was Fire and Ice and Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid (NEW 35mm prints). Both films are about the difficult task of making a relationship work and both end up with at least one dead body. Love kills, as we all know.
Fire and Ice tells the story of a not-too-happily married couple, Clément (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (played by the lovely Romy Schneider). Clément is a real hothead who doesn’t like his wife looking at other men. He’s also involved in an underground political movement and when Anne discovers a bazooka in their closet, it only adds to the marital tension.
Clément gets set up by a member of his political group, and has to go to South America to kill the fellow (seems a bit extreme, if you ask me). Anne pleads with him not to go, and his best friend Paul (Henri Serre) tells Clément he can't hide out in his cottage because he thinks all of Clément’s political business with the killings and bazookas is quite ridiculous and wrong.
The film is really intriguing because it moves through so many different genres. It goes from domestic drama to political thriller to love story to love triangle to revenge western (even though its set in Paris). And when the film is done with the political thriller part, for example, it just drops it. Director Alain Cavalier doesn’t try to blend these genres, he just moves on to the next one. This technique could be very distracting (see Hancock - or don’t), but it is such a deliberate strategy here that it really works. Mr. Cavalier knows what he’s doing and he does it quite well.
As the film heads to its grim, inevitable conclusion, you wonder at once why they don’t make movies like this anymore, and at the same time when the last gentlemanly gun duel took place (apparently it was after 1962).
Mississippi Mermaid, I will tell you right off the bat, contains no mermaids. I was sitting at the edge of my seat the whole time, waiting for a mermaid to appear and none ever came. Which is fine, but here in America when we call a movie Monkey Trouble, you’re going to get some monkeys. I’m just saying.
