Alain Resnais’s 1974 film classic on political and mental instability returns.
How will filmmakers of the future portray our ongoing period of national division? Film Forum’s revival of Alain Resnais’s Stavisky . . . (1974) gives a clue. This bio-pic (opening today) dramatizes the scandal surrounding Russian-born swindler Serge (Sacha) Alexandre Stavisky when his international financial schemes, exposed in 1933, brought chaos that destabilized France in the precarious years just before the Nazis came to power.
The Stavisky Affair’s national impact parallels our current cultural instability; Resnais shows this emotional volatility hidden within the protagonist’s personal deception about class. His swanky lifestyle (portrayed with cautious bravura by Jean-Paul Belmondo as a playboy always wearing a blood-red carnation in his lapel) is a cover for his social indifference — a rarely examined psychological aspect of political histories, no doubt inspired by Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Such class deception could determine the insight or partisanship that artists and historians apply to define or understand our own era.
Stavisky . . . is being shown as a part of a tribute to Jorge Semprún, the Spanish-born Communist and Socialist screenwriter who worked in France while exiled from the Franco regime. Semprún (twice Oscar-nominated) confirms the leftist influence that dominates film culture (a fact some conservative filmgoers are reluctant to admit). The multilayered inquiry of Semprún’s scripts — especially Costa-Gavras’s Z and especially his Communist show-trial classic The Confession (which I’ll address in an upcoming article) — show an intelligence beyond the facile, fatuous partisanship that is celebrated in such American films as Three Days of the Condor, Good Night and Good Luck, Spotlight, Truth, The Post, The Big Short, Selma, Lincoln, and Milk.
Most of the films listed above are already forgotten, which points to what distinguishes Stavisky . . . . Resnais and Semprún’s repeated flashbacks investigate forgotten political memory. Stavisky’s personal legend, as recalled by his stylish wife (Anny Duperay) and business associates (including Charles Boyer as the right-wing Baron Raoul), is the basis of the film’s wide-ranging story.
It’s important to note that the title “Stavisky . . .” contains an ellipsis, which gives viewers a clue that Resnais and Semprún are exploring more than the man, the name, itself. The entire film, with its emphasis on luxe and the high-class privileges that Stavisky pursues, is composed of events, assorted memories, and testimonies before a government hearing — all in a montage of events and legend. The ever-shifting narrative centers on Stavisky’s personal identification — his split between citizenship and ethnicity. When play-acting as a theater impresario, he rehearses with an actress, a German Jewish refugee (Silvia Badesco), who says she despises “people who don’t know who they are.”
Stavisky’s slippery identity crisis is a canvas for Resnais’s conceptual treatment of cerebration and time. Semprún folds the identity questions into his politicized cinema of historical verification and analysis. Their art-and-politics partnership seeks to reveal the heart of the 1930s era as a cultural pageant now lost to nostalgia and political myth.
Stavisky . . . is a synecdoche for the enigmatic title figure and all that his name and memory connote. This includes a parallel framing story of Leon Trotsky’s seeking asylum in France and other instances of cultural and political history. Resnais and Semprún’s themes are pleasure, happiness, riches, death, and the past — as envisaged in the stylized recall of fancy-dressed individuals and the nation.
This bio-pic’s solemnity needs to be leavened by the elegance, beauty, and wit (and mastery) Resnais would achieve in his late masterworks, including Wild Grass, Private Fears in Public Places, and You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. Although Resnais’s stylization in Stavisky . . . may feel remote (Stephen Sondheim’s only film score is absent flavor or irony), it is saved by the fact that Resnais doesn’t judge. He lets Baron Raoul describe Stavisky as a “herald of Death,” summarizing the political revolution through “the dense and sluggish fluidity of death, which means that there are no dead, only the drowned.”
Could an American filmmaker recalling the Madoff scandal during the Obama regime deal so honestly, or imaginatively, with the changes wrought on American behavior and thinking? Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York only scratched the surface of our current political crisis of cognitive dissonance.