Jean-Luc Godard making his appearance during the party sequence
Éric Rohmer on the Rue de la
Huchette during the making of the film
short La Sonate à Kreutzer, 1956
THE SIGN OF LEO (Le signe du lion) B+
France (103 mi) 1959
d: Éric Rohmer
Maintaining his secrecy throughout his life, Rohmer was
either born in Tulle (southwestern France) under the name Jean-Marie Maurice
Schérer or born in Nancy (northeastern France) under the name Maurice Henri
Joseph Schérer. The truth remains a
mystery. His first feature was made in
1959 for Claude Chabrol’s new production company AJYM, though the film was
recut and restored in 1962 when Chabrol was forced to sell the company and
Rohmer disowned the recut version. In
1962 Rohmer and his longtime producer Barbet Schroeder co-founded the
production company Les films du losange which produced all of
Rohmer's work except his final three features.
A lone film, not part of his Comedies
And Proverbs or Moral Tales, it
has continually slipped under the radar of Rohmer retrospectives, along with half
a dozen rare short films from the 50’s ranging in length from 10 to 50 minutes that
never screened outside of France. Rohmer
was already over 40 by the completion of this film, at least ten years older
than any of the other critics who went on to become filmmakers in the Cahiers du Cinéma group, Truffaut,
Godard, Chabrol, and Rivette, and his first film failed to have the explosive
impact of his contemporaries, where The
400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), LES COUSINS (1959), and BREATHLESS
(1960) were very much in the style of early French New Wave, becoming a major
disappointment for Rohmer who returned to his work at Cahiers and continued making 16 mm shorts while having to wait another
decade before making another feature. Unavailable
on DVD (though available on Region 2, Eric
Rohmer - The Early Works) and one of the hardest Rohmer films to see, viewers
will have to search out film schools and art house theaters for a screening of
this film.
Rohmer is considered the most literary and conservative-minded
of the Cahiers group, whose
low-budget films were rigorously prepared and shot, but in contrast to the
early films of his contemporaries, where every frame announces it intends to
change the course of cinema, this has none of the jarring New Wave techniques, yet
it aptly belongs with those films by bringing the camera out into the streets, making
bold use of urban locales as the aesthetic architecture of the film, where shooting
locations become an expression of the character’s interior world. While it’s a very poised and austere morality
tale, taking an absurdist view of life where fate can be uncommonly cruel and
without mercy, the heavily despairing overall mood is a sobering cinematic
experience. Rohmer is accused of focusing
his attention on the banality of life, characterized by overly chatty,
dialogue-driven films, often featuring educated, yet highly materialistic
characters, including intellectuals and artists, who are constantly talking
about themselves, placing themselves at the center of their existence, yet
happiness, and the security of emotional attachments, remain elusive. Rohmer has used no music in his films after
this one and has always been an interior storyteller, confining himself to conventional,
neatly contained, bourgeois worlds where racial diversity, for instance, simply
doesn’t exist, and characters quickly grow alienated from the world around
them, often displaced from God and unable to find meaning in their
existence. What is perhaps most unique
about Rohmer is not so much his heralded literacy, but his undeniable success
in finding cinematic images for common, everyday and ordinary moments that
would otherwise seem so uncinematic. While
characters usually discuss these moral concepts at length, known for his
characteristic literary and philosophical classicism, not in this film, a more
gloomy effort where themes of disillusionment are instead wordlessly introduced
through visual internalization. Supposedly
a favorite of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, where his film FOX AND HIS FRIENDS
(1975) could be described as a variation on a similar theme, unrelentingly
pessimistic, where a down and out carnival worker (Fassbinder as Fox) wins the
lottery and suddenly has friends mooching off him left and right, all contending
to be friends, which Fox desperately wants to believe, until they’ve stolen
everything he has, leaving him utterly penniless and alone.
Rohmer’s film has an unusual lead, Indiana-born Jess Hahn, a
U.S. Marine who served in France during the war and became a French citizen
afterwards, playing Pierre, whose heft and strong man appearance could easily
pass as a gangster in a Jean-Pierre Melville film, a French-speaking American
musician living a bohemian existence in Paris who is surrounded by well-to-do
friends, who at the outset is informed his fabulously wealthy aunt has died,
where he assumes right away he’s rich beyond his dreams, even sharing the
inheritance with his cousin, inviting everyone he knows over to his flat for a
celebratory party, borrowing money and running up huge debts, as accumulating
bills are suddenly the least of his worries, where in typical Chabrol style
(each of his earliest films feature an elaborate party sequence), he features
an exuberant, but entirely naturalistic, bohemian party scene with an abundance
of food and free flowing wine, where none other than Jean-Luc Godard in dark
glasses, taking a break from shooting BREATHLESS (1960), shows up playing his
favorite passage on the phonograph player over and over again. In the morning he’s served an eviction
notice, also news that his cousin inherited everything, so he’s quickly booted
to the street, the first sign of his precipitous fall from grace. At first, he maintains his friendships and
easy connections, but they soon lose touch when’s he’s thrown out of every last
known address, where angry hotel landlady Stéphane Audran (lead actress and former
spouse of Chabrol) insists upon reporting him to the police (her brother is a
policeman), so all hotels refuse to accept him.
As a result, Pierre spends his time endlessly walking around the Parisian
neighborhoods, becoming something of a love letter to the bohemian quarters, selling
his books to a mystery lover street vendor, none other than Jean-Pierre
Melville, spending his final few pennies on bread, where eventually he’s forced
to sleep on the street, where a dissonant and psychologically shatteringly
Louis Sageur violin piece plays throughout (a rarity in a Rohmer film), whose exasperating
repetitiveness may prove irksome for some.
The jovial tone of the film shifts to neo realism and becomes
a long, drawn out and near wordless encounter with the streets of Paris in the
50’s, capturing the mood and atmosphere of the steamy hot month of August,
using the available natural light of summer, shot by pre-war cinematographer
Nicolas Hayer, where despite the New Wave’s love of the streets in Truffaut’s The
400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), Godard’s BREATHLESS, Chabrol’s Les
Bonnes Femmes (both 1960), Rivette’s PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), or even
Eustache’s The
Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), no other film is as graphically
detailed in such carefully observed documentary style, where the city becomes
the dominant force of the film, literally teeming with life from the cars on
the street, strolling pedestrians, patrons sitting in outdoor café’s, to the
narrow confines of hawking street vendors, like a street bazaar, and on into
the heavily populated city parks, where the idle can sit uninterrupted for
hours on benches, or even sleep at night, literally a time capsule conveying
the sights and sounds, something along the lines of George Orwell’s autobiographical
first book, Down and Out in Paris and
London, which details prolonged periods of hunger, taking odd jobs to avoid
destitution, and living among the working poor.
Similarly, Rohmer’s film is a bleak portrait of despair, where without
friends or money or food, Pierre’s life is spiraling into a physical and
spiritual decline, where his existentialist journey of endlessly walking the
streets also becomes a picturesque cinematic travelogue not only of the photogenic
bridges extended across the Seine River with people sitting along the river banks,
but Paris is also viewed as a cumbersome city, often loud and dirty and hot,
especially when seen through the eyes of the impoverished, where an air of
gloom hangs over the city, especially alone at night, lonely and painful
moments conveyed through the emptiness of a series of night shots.
The is not the familiar New Wave setting of Paris with
pretty girls, fast cars, or gunfights, but is a nightmarish, cruel, and
indifferent city where the protagonist is not seen hanging around the street
café’s, but along the lower riverbanks of the Seine, where the city is seen as
an urban inferno, frustrating, and utterly forbidding. The city itself stands for the doomed
protagonist’s deteriorating state of mind, where the customary welcoming
attraction of the City of Lights, where Paris is considered the romance capital
of the world, sweet and inviting, instead turns into a heartlessly dark city
where he finds himself abjectively alone.
Pierre is continually portrayed as a human ghost walking among the
living, watching intimate couples kissing or overhearing bits and pieces of
conversations, until it appears he is beyond hope, that he has lost all
connection to humankind. For whatever
reason, the man is never seen looking for work, though he does work up a musical
act performed in front of tourists in the street café’s under the wing of
another street tramp (Jean Le Poulain) he meets on the banks of the Seine, a
loud street peddler who ingratiates himself to American tourists and the
wealthy, asking for donations, as he often makes a spectacle of himself, which
Pierre hates and finds humiliating, though there are moments of humor, such as
this stream of overheard conversation, “Is that beggar playing Bartok?” “No, he’s just out of tune.” “Well, it’s modern at any rate.” Co-written by Paul Gégauff (who wrote the
dialogue), ironically this was the only time that Rohmer did not write the
dialogue to one of his movies.
Interspersed throughout Pierre’s wanderings are glimpses of his former
friends, a newspaper photographer continually sent out of the country on work
assignment, or friends discussing his disappearance, where now even if they saw
him, due to his haggard appearance, they wouldn’t recognize him. But what Rohmer’s really suggesting is that
money determines your identity and social status, that without it you’re
invisible and may as well not even exist to the rest of the country. The director then rethinks that thought and
offers a less fatalistic view, one apparently more in tune with chance and the
possibilities of the cosmos, more akin with the finale of his later work, Le
Rayon Vert (Summer) (1986). THE SIGN
OF LEO is the only Rohmer film to exhibit any hint of lower class
consciousness, where the tragic hero descends into dire poverty and
homelessness, but nonetheless continues to wear a suit, like most all of
Rohmer’s male characters, spending the rest of his career exclusively probing
the interior consciousness of the middle class.
