To take on the volatile life and oeuvre of Jean-Pierre Mocky is to risk falling into his endless maze of rabbit holes with little or no chance of ever escaping. It is not for the faint of heart.
For much of his career, he was the type of extremist who was amused and galvanized by the derision that often surrounded him. He would outlast all of his critics and late in his life became a beloved avatar of France’s aesthetic intransigence. A 680-page book chronicling his kaleidoscopic, chaos-driven career appeared within a few months of his passing in 2019 (at the age of either 86 or 90: it was just one more imponderable discrepancy in a life that seemingly thrived upon them).
Here at MIDCENTURY MADNESS, we’re constrained by time boundaries—our niche is astonishingly vast in spite of our rough 1935-1970 bandwidth. Thus we set aside the long arc of Mocky’s ongoing contretemps with a world that he quite often considered absurd. What we will do here, by screening two of his earliest works at the Roxie on Sunday, June 19th, is show that this unique, combative perspective can be found in his work from the very start.
My personal theory is that when Mocky was removed at the last moment from the director’s chair for HEAD AGAINST THE WALL/LES TETES CONTRE LES MURS (he continued in his role as the son of a monstrous psychologist who has him committed against his will), he conjured up an allegory about those folk who walk away from their commitments. That idea was transposed into the swinging Paris of the late 50s, where seduction and cynicism went hand in hand.
For THE CHASERS/LES DRAGUEURS, Mocky borrowed the actor he’d just seen embody a more high-class variation of the “love them and leave them” character in Marcel Carné’s LES TRICHEURS (1958)—Jacques Charrier, whose smooth good looks made him a credible romantic lead, but whose undercurrent of existential unease revealed itself at crucial moments. Carné emphasized the remorse Charrier’s character carried with him; Mocky pulls him down several rungs in France’s class structure to focus on the anarchy and mechanical randomness within his seduction ritual.
What adds humanity and contrast to this whirlwind tale of attraction/repulsion is the character played by Charles Aznavour, demonstrating the low-key skill that would prompt François Truffaut to cast him as the lead character in TIREZ SUR LA PIANISTE/SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER the following year. As Charrier shows Aznavour the “ropes of seduction,” a counter-movement within the character interaction starts to take place: whose approach to the mysteries of love and attraction will prevail? (Naturally, you’ll have to see the film to find out.)
THE BIG SCARE/LA GRANDE FROUSSE was Mocky’s sixth film, and it opened up a kind of back-channel into surrealism that had not previously manifested itself in his work. Working with two actors skilled in the extremes of comedy (Bourvil, trying valiantly to underplay until he gives into the mayhem surrounding him; Francis Blanche, mugging as if his life depended on it), Mocky takes a post-surrealist horror tale (written by Belgian eccentric Jean Ray, recently rediscovered by the literary crate-diggers of what we might call “mannerist modernism”) and spins it into a frantic but atmospheric crime comedy that is overrun by a legion of crackpot characters whose exaggerated performances would make Preston Sturges chortle with envy.
What is truly intriguing is how the story transitions from what might seem to be simply crime comedy into something else entirely, somehow managing to be dark and antic all at once. Bourvil’s inspector gets more than he bargains for when he tracks the forger-murderer Micky le Benedictin to a small village in the south of France. There he finds an entire village under the spell of a lingering, unspoken dread (Ray’s novel was entitled The City of Unspeakable Fear) for a “beast” that may only be a mass delusion.
The interaction of the characters in LA GRANDE FROUSSE is rather a lot like what would be the case if you were playing a pinball game with 5-6 pinballs in play simultaneously. But as it careens along, the rush of actors into the fray, and the indelible visuals by legendary cinematographer Eugen Shufftan (known most for his work on Carné’s PORT OF SHADOWS, but also behind the camera for HEAD AGAINST THE WALL—the film taken out of Mocky’s hands) simply keep the strange atmosphere intact, as if you’ve fallen into an alien world ruled by passion and appetite instead of reason.
You will laugh, you will look bug-eyed at the screen, you will shake your head (but not your fist…) as you witness this liminal space of lunacy. Mocky would prattle on with variations of this indecipherable formula for another half-century, and there is much else that’s worthy to see from those efforts—but here is a place where one can begin to grapple with a feverish mind making up (several dozen times over!) for having been unjustly cast aside. The side of creativity that springs from the “I’ll show you” impulse was clearly superabundant in Jean-Pierre Mocky, and LA GRANDE FROUSSE is testament to his willingness to take us all to the brink of madness for the sake of a sight gag. As he once exclaimed in response to a detractor: “It’s better to be a laughing devil than a dead saint whose statue is only target practice for pigeons.”