Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (45 page)

There is however Balthazar's bray. It is not a beautiful sound, but it is the sound a donkey can make, and when Balthazar brays it might sound to some like a harsh complaint, but to me it sounds like a beast who has been given one noise to make in the world, and gains some satisfaction by making it. It is important to note that Balthazar never brays on cue to react to specific events; that would turn him into a cartoon animal.

Although the donkey has no way of revealing its thoughts, that doesn't prevent us from supplying them-quite the contrary; we regard that white-spotted furry face and those big eyes, and we feel sympathy with every experience the donkey undergoes. That is Bresson's civilizing and even spiritual purpose in most of his films; we must go to the characters, instead of passively letting them come to us. In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience.

Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and they ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy. It is worth noting that both Ozu and Bresson use severe stylistic limitations to avoid coaching our emotions. Ozu in his sound films almost never moves his camera; every shot is framed and held, and frequently it begins before the characters enter the scene and continues after they leave.

Bresson's most intriguing limitation is to forbid his actors to act. He was known to shoot the same shot ten, twenty, even fifty times, until all "acting" was drained from it, and the actors were simply performing the physical actions and speaking the words. There was no room in his cinema for De Niro or Penn. It might seem that the result would be a movie filled with zombies, but quite the contrary: by simplifying performance to the action and the word without permitting inflection or style, Bresson achieves a kind of purity that makes his movies remarkably emotional. The actors portray lives without informing us how to feel about them; forced to decide for ourselves how to feel, forced to empathize, we often have stronger feelings than if the actors were feeling them for us.

Given this philosophy, a donkey becomes the perfect Bresson character. Balthazar makes no attempt to communicate its emotions to us, and it communicates its physical feelings only in universal terms: Covered with snow, it is cold. Its tail set afire, it is frightened. Eating its dinner, it is content. Overworked, it is exhausted. Returning home, it is relieved to find a familiar place. Although some humans are kind to it and others are cruel, the motives of humans are beyond its understanding, and it accepts what they do because it must.

Now here is the essential part. Bresson suggests that we are all Bal thazars. Despite our dreams, hopes, and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does. Because we can think and reason, we believe we can figure a way out, find a solution, get the answer. But intelligence gives us the ability to comprehend our fate without the power to control it. Still, Bresson does not leave us empty-handed. He offers us the suggestion of empathy. If we will extend ourselves to sympathize with how others feel, we can find the consolation of sharing human experience, instead of the loneliness of enduring it alone.

The final scene of Au Hasard Balthazar makes that argument in a beautiful way. The donkey is old and near death, and wanders into a herd of sheep-as, indeed, it began its life in such a herd. The other animals come and go, sometimes nuzzling up against it, taking little notice, accepting this fellow animal, sharing the meadow and the sunshine. Balthazar lies down and eventually dies, as the sheep continue about their business. He has at last found a place where the other creatures think as he does.

1967

(This was a review of the 1996 theatrical revival.)

ere now is Luis Bunuel's Belle detour, a movie from 1967, to teach us a lesson about what is erotic in the cinema. We will begin with Catherine Deneuve's face, as she listens to a taxi driver describe a famous Parisian brothel-a place where bored women might work for an afternoon or two every week, to earn some extra money. Her face is completely impassive. The camera holds on it. The taxi driver continues his description. We understand that the Deneuve character is mesmerized by what she hears, and that sooner or later she will be compelled to visit that brothel and have the experience of being a "belle de jour."

We already know something about the character, whose name is Severine. She is married to a rich, bland, young businessman (Jean Sorel). The marriage is comfortable but uneventful. An older friend (the saturnine Michel Piccoli) makes a bold attempt to seduce her, but she does not respond. "What interests me about you is your virtue," he says. Perhaps that is why she is not interested: she desires not a man who thinks she is virtuous, but one who thinks she is not.

Here she is in the street, approaching the luxurious apartment building where Madame Anais presides over the famous brothel. The camera focuses on her feet (Bunuel was famously obsessed with shoes). She pauses, turns away. Eventually she rings the bell and enters. Madame Anais (the elegant, realistic Genevieve Page) greets her, and asks her to wait for a time in her office. Again, Deneuve's face betrays no emotion. None at all. Eventually she learns the rules of the house, and after some thought, agrees to them. She is a belle de j our.

The film will contain no sweaty, steamy, athletic sex scenes. Hardly any nudity, and that discreet. What is sexual in this movie takes place entirely within the mind of Severine. We have to guess at her feelings. All she ever says explicitly is, "I cannot help myself." Much happens offscreen. The most famous scene in Belle deJour-indeed, one of the best-remembered scenes in movie history-is the one where a client presents her with an ornate little box. He shows her what is inside the box. During his hour with Severine, he wants to employ it. She shakes her head, no. What is in the box? We never find out.

Consider that scene. In all the years that have passed since I first saw Belle de Jour, I have always wondered what was in the box. Suppose the movie had been dumbed down by modern Hollywood. We would have seen what was in the box. And Severine would have shaken her head the same way, and we would have forgotten the scene in ten minutes.

What is erotic in Belle detour is suggested, implied, hinted at. We have to complete the link in our own imagination. When we watch the shower scene between Sharon Stone and Sylvester Stallone in The Specialist, or the "harassment" scene between Demi Moore and Michael Douglas in Disclosure, nothing is left to the imagination. We see every drop of sweat, we see glistening skin, hungry lips, grappling bodies. And we are outside. We are voyeurs, watching them up there on the screen, doing something we are not involved in. It is a technical demonstration.

But in Belle de Jour, we are invited into the secret world of Severine. We have to complete her thoughts, and in that process they become our thoughts. The movie understands the hypnotic intensity with which humans consider their own fantasies. When Severine enters a room where a client is waiting, her face doesn't reflect curiosity or fear or anticipationand least of all lust-because she is not regarding the room, she is regarding herself. What turns her on is not what she finds in the room, but that she is entering it.

Luis Buiiuel, one of a small handful of true masters of the cinema, had an insight into human nature that was cynical and detached; he looked with bemusement on his characters as they became the victims of their own lusts and greeds. He also had a sympathy with them, up to a point. He understands why Severine is drawn to the brothel, but he doesn't stop there, with her adventures in the afternoon. He pushes on, to a bizarre conclusion in which she finally gets what she really wants.

I will not reveal the ending. But observe, as it is unfolding, a gunfight in the street. Buiiuel does not linger over it; in fact, he films it in a perfunctory fashion, as if he was in a hurry to get it out of the way. The gun play is necessary in order to explain the next stage of the movie's plot. It has no other function. Today's directors, more fascinated by style than story, would have lingered over the gunfight-would have built it up into a big production number, to supply the film with an action climax that would have been entirely wrong. Not Bunuel.

OCTOBER 16, 1970

rancois Truffaut's The Wild Child is the story of a "wolf boy" who lived like an animal in the woods, and about the doctor who adopted him and tried to civilize him. The story is essentially true, drawn from an actual case in eighteenth-century France, and Truffaut tells it simply and movingly. It becomes his most thoughtful statement on his favorite subject: the way young people grow up, explore themselves, and attempt to function creatively in the world.

This process was the subj ect of Truffaut's first film, The 40o Blows, and he returned to the same autobiographical ground with his recent Stolen Kisses. Now, again using Jean-Pierre Leaud as the actor, he's at work on the third film in the trilogy. In this one, reportedly, the autobiographical character survives adolescence and enters bravely into manhood.

That is a happy ending forever out of the reach of the Wild Child, who has been so traumatically affected by his forest life that he can hardly comprehend the idea of language. There's even a question, at first, as to whether he can hear. He can, but makes little connection between the sounds of words and their meanings. The doctor makes slow progress, or none, for months at a time. Then perhaps there's a small breakthrough. He records it all in his journal, and Truffaut's spoken English narration from the j ournal carries most of the ideas in the film.

The Wild Child is about education at its most fundamental level, about education as the process by which society takes millions of literally savage infants every year, and gradually seduces them into sharing the conventions of everybody else. There's a question, of course, as to whether "civilization" is good for man, or if he'd be happier in a natural state.

That question is at the root of The Wild Child. Since the boy can never function "normally" in society, should he have been left in the woods? It's a question for us, in this uncertain age; but not for the doctor, who shares the rational optimism of Jefferson and never seriously questions the worth of his efforts. He believes in the nobility of man, and detests the idea of a human being scavenging for survival in the forest.