Original Title: Tant qu’on a la santé
Year: 1966
Country: France
Language: French
Genre: Comedy
Director: Pierre Étaix
Screenwriters: Pierre Étaix, Jean-Claude Carrière
Music: René Giner, Luce Klein, Jean Paillaud
Cinematography: Jean Boffety
Editors: Henri Lanoë, Raymond Lewin, Roger Salesse, Andrée Werlin, Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte
Cast:
Pierre Étaix
Sabine Sun
Véra Valmont
Denis Péronne
Alain Janey
Simone Fonder
Lydia Binaghi
Robert Blome
Emile Coryn
Dario Meschi
Bernard Dimey
Laurence Gallimard
Rating: 6.8/10
Original Title: Le grand amour
Year: 1969
Country: France
Language: French
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Director: Pierre Étaix
Screenwriters: Pierre Étaix, Jean-Claude Carrière
Music: Claude Stieremans
Cinematography: Jean Boffety
Editor: Henri Lanoë
Cast:
Pierre Étaix
Annie Fratellini,Nicole Calfan,Ketty France,Louis Maïss,Jacqueline Rouillard,Billy Bourbon,Claude Massot,Jean-Pierre Ella
Rating: 7.7/10
The works of Pierre Étaix (1928-2016) – a French comédien, professional clown, filmmaker and moonlighting actor, who has a distinctive resemblance to Buster Keaton, both in appearance and in métier – are unavailable from 1970 to 2009 due to a legal issue with a distribution company. The truth is, Étaix’s flirtation with the Seventh Art are largely confined in the 1960s, during which he directed 4 feature films and a few shorts (all co-written by him and Jean-Claude Carrière), which are all restored to their pristine states and inducted to the Criterion collections.
AS LONG AS YOU’VE GOT YOUR HEALTH is his third feature, an anthology of four shorts. INSOMNIE (“Insomnia”) is a fetching, two-fold vampire story, crosscutting between amusing close-ups in a bedroom and a Gothic tale confected in silent-era texture, topped off with a winning twist. LE CINÉMATOGRAPHE (“the Cinema”) mixes slapstick with an innocuous satire on advertisement and commodification, it is a laugh a minute, only the minutes are not long enough.
The third short is the titular TANT QU’ON A LA SANTÉ, an anarchic burlesque of “the restlessness” that infests a modern city. It is no rest for the wicked, a whirlpool of people swarming on the street is a force majeure (here an ingeniously spliced montage does a miraculous job of dissembling an automobile). Putting on a smiley face and then stuck in the traffic, guess how long a soot-faced smile can last? Indeed, for a chain-smoking, black-eyed doctor, who looks sicker than his patients, what he prescribes for his patients is simply to relax, a luxury himself cannot afford. Also through sheer comedy of errors, a hapless pharmacist becomes the worse for wear after unwittingly intaking the medicine of his next table neighbor, personal boundary is sorely missed in a French bistro.
The fourth short, NOUS N’IRONS PLUS AU BOIS (“We Will Not Go to the Woods”), a cartoonish, sepia-hued sketch about the disharmony between city dwellers and hayseeds, is unfortunately a dud, playing up knockabout situations but its charm begins to pall quickly.
Frankly speaking, an omnibus format can rarely reflect a filmmaker’s true color, thus THE GREAT LOVE, Étaix’s final narrative feature film, clearly has a more cogent say in that. It has a similar premise to Pietro Germi’s DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE (1961). A middle-aged man grows tired of his wife, and is taken by a nubile hot thing. But Étaix seems to be endowed with too decent a heart to implement murder for his infatuation (that thought is only a passing fancy), and the film is an endearing tale of a decent man’s eventual overcoming of his temptation without succumbing to carnality, quite a rara avis for the adultery genre.
Playing Pierre, an industrialist who marries for comfort rather than affection, Étaix exudes a particularly humble and courteous affinity that is more Jacques Tati (for whom he once worked on MON ONCLE, 1958) than his coeval Jerry Lewis, who casts him in the unreleased film THE DAY THE CROWN CRIED (1972). Étaix’s amicable sophistication is immensely appealing because there is not an iota of the usually concomitant conceit, pretension or contempt in it. In a way, Pierre is the exemplar of a gentleman, who, against his best judgement, cottons to his new secretary Agnès (a svelte Calfan) and buffooneries ensue.
Étaix’s gags are funny, well-intentioned and mostly civil (the escalation of a canard, an amatory confession to the wrong secretary, the age gap that extinguishes Pierre’s craze) and as a director, his antics are delightful. The magic realism imagineering of scudding beds as a visual gag of a man’s marital situation is a well-conceptualized wheeze, and the literal halving of community properties also has its droll, tangy irony. Possessing charisma, humor, novelty and finesse, Étaix proves to be the whole package of a screen conjuror, the evanescence of his career is a woeful loss for audience.
At the end, when it seems that Florence (a demure Fratellini, who is also a circus artist and would become Étaix’s wife in real life. Together they would open a circus school after Étaix’s filmmaking prospects are stunted), Pierre’s wife, might also have some passing fancy of her own, that really ticks him off. THE GREAT LOVE rounds off with their comical bickering that may suggest its title’s signification, the “irrational” element is actually the “greatest” part of love!
referential entries: Jacques Tati’s MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY (1953, 8.4/10); Buster Keaton’s SEVEN CHANCES (1925, 7.9/10); Pietro Germi’s DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE (1961, 7.9/10).
Cinema Omnivore 