Kenya Star – Continuously Updating Kenya News

À Nous la Liberté [DVD]

Director : René Clair

Screenplay : René Clair

MPAA Rating : NR

Year of Release : 1931

Stars : Raymond Cordy (Louis), Henri Marchand (Emile), Paul Olivier (Paul Imaque), André Michaud (Foreman), Rolla France (Jeanne), Germaine Aussey (Maud), Léon Lorin (Deaf Old Man)

One of the great ironies of René Clair's À Nous la Liberté is that it is widely considered to be a groundbreaking movie in pioneering the use of sound, yet Clair had initially been one of the staunchest opponents to making the movies talk.

Yet, as Arthur Knight suggests in The Liveliest Art, "Perhaps the first director to appreciate fully the implications of sound was the Frenchman René Clair," a statement that is confirmed throughout À Nous la Liberté, a delightfully radical farce about freeing oneself from the controls of social and economic oppression (the title translates roughly to "Liberty for us"). Although it appears relatively primitive by today's multitrack, THX standards, Clair's use of carefully selected sound effects and his employment of jaunty musical numbers to supplement, not determine, the film's visual flow constituted a significant development in the then-controversial movement to marry once and for all sound and image.

It helps that À Nous la Liberté is a smart and funny social satire about modernization, a theme that would also be used to great effect by such comedic cinematic luminaries as Charlie Chaplin (whose Modern Times was spuriously accused of plagiarizing À Nous la Liberté by the film's production company) and Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle, Playtime). The first half of the 20th century saw an unprecedented rise in mechanization, which had its benefits in increased standards of living, comfort, and convenience. Yet, as many have pointed out, making the world mechanical and automating even the most basic activities has brought with it a price, as well, namely our humanity.

Clair found a perfectly distilled visual metaphor for the mechanization/dehumanization relation in the assembly line, that great marvel of Fordist invention that allowed for faster and cheaper production through repetition and standardization. The opening shot of À Nous la Liberté takes place in a prison, in which we see prisoners whiling away the hours putting together toy horses along a long, assembly-line-like table. When they eat, it is again at a long table, their hand movements from plate to mouth a synchronization that could only be choreographed by repetition day in and day out. And, when they get up to leave, it is in regimented fashion, one following after the other.

It is here that we meet the film's two protagonists, Louis (Raymond Cordy) and Emile (Henri Marchand), who stand out immediately because they have the audacity to wink at each other and show signs of life. Having hatched a scheme to escape prison, they are halfway out when the plan falls apart; Louis makes it over the wall to freedom while Emile, the smaller and sadder of the two, sacrifices himself and goes back to prison.

On the outside, Louis begins selling phonographs, quickly rising up to become the 1930s version of a media magnate (his character was, in fact, based on Charles Pathé, a French movie tycoon who got his start selling phonographs). Louis presides over a huge corporation that builds more and more factories to churn out more and more phonographs quicker and quicker (it is not surprising that Clair would focus on the production of phonographs, the initial technology for replaying recorded sound). Louis achieves this by employing in the factory the same regimented routines of life he suffered in the slammer, a none-too-subtle way of showing how both constitute a life behind bars.

Emile is later released from prison and lives happily as a vagrant, that is, until he finds himself in one of Louis' factories and comes face to face with his old prison buddy. At first, Louis tries to get rid of his old friend; but, after being with Emile, who is portrayed as the ultimate free spirit, his stuffy, legitimate-businessman exterior quickly melts. The rest of the movie follows a series of increasingly slapstick incidents involving Emile's desperate-hearted pursuit of a factory secretary, which results in a chaotic climax in which top-hated businessmen scurry around chasing money in the wind while Louis turns his factories over to the workers.

Throughout À Nous la Liberté, Clair structures his story along musical lines, giving his gags and slapstick situations a rhythm and flow. The delectable musical score by Georges Auric, who had previously scored Jean Cocteau's fantastical Blood of a Poet (1931), gives the movie an upbeat tone and helps it move through some of the more extreme transitions (Clair, already a master at visuals, adds to the flow with his use of match cuts and dissolves). The film is a musical in the sense that the characters sing at various times, often variations on the film's theme song, yet the songs and the music always feel fully integrated into the narrative, something that was rare among early "talkies" in which the allure of synchronized sound often drew filmmakers into visual laziness and narrative sloppiness.

In addition to being a trailblazer in the use of sound, René Clair is also considered to be one of the pioneers of modern comedy, particularly in French film. An Italian Straw Hat (1927), which is considered his silent masterpiece, already proved that he had an expert sense of timing, and in À Nous la Liberté he weds that to pressing issues facing the rapidly modernizing culture. Of course, the pairing of timely social issues with broad-based comedy was not exactly new, but Clair brought it to the level of art in the same way Charlie Chaplin did. The spare, modernist set designs in À Nous la Liberté and Clair's thoughtful compositions add to the film's overall sense of the simple (some might say naïve) joys found only in the freedom of making one's life one's own.

Copyright © 2002 James Kendrick