The Artist
A Film By Michel
Hazanavicius
France
The
opening scene of The Artist, a
mainstream delight shot in a very classical matter, is one of the film’s many
in-jokes, as we see a handsome man being electrocuted in a chair. “Talk” scream
the men torturing him. Well, they don’t scream it—a title card tells us that’s
what they are shouting as their mouths open but we here only the chimes and
whistles of Ludovic Bource’s score. Soon enough, the film cuts out to a
full-house theater watching the silent flick, but the illusion doesn’t stop,
when the audience screams, the only sound is violins, and when the applause
comes at the end, we hear only the joy of silence.
The Artist is an homage to the good ol’
era of silent filmmaking made in the style: black and white, 4:3 aspect ratio,
title cards for dialogue, and (save for two smartly used sequences) only music
to take us through the narrative. It is of course also an extremely self-aware
film, following two movie stars at transitional periods of their lives in the
heyday of Hollywood. The director behind this project, however, is a Frenchman
named Michel Hazanavicius, and the two stars, Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo,
are French as well. But just because they don’t come from the US of A doesn’t
mean they can’t appreciate the day when words meant nothing and gestures and
expressions were at the heart of Hollywood.
