55th BFI London Film Festival: ‘The Artist’

The first 20 minutes of The Artist will leave you grinning with pure joy. Despite being almost devoid of dialogue, black and white, and 4:3 (no widescreen here), this is the film that got Cannes talking and saw its star bestowed with a Best Actor gong.

As our world sinks into a deep recession it’s ironic that a film set during the Great Depression should so capture the imagination. An irony, I’m sure, that isn’t lost on director Michel Hazanavicius, because this is a very knowing film. Its confidence is breathtaking, both in being able to sell its own existence (bravo the Weinsteins for backing it), and in its swaggering manipulation of our expectations.

We open with a telling shot of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) being electrocuted, screaming, “I won’t talk!”

Cut to a packed cinema in the late 1920s, the audience extravagantly dressed, all dickie bows and white gloves, laughing uproariously, silently. It feels alien, strange, to our modern senses. This is a silent film about silent films.

Valentin is a silent movie star who is the toast of Hollywood. He’s the consummate star—funny, gracious and irrepressibly positive. But as the 1920s progress and talkies come in, his career nosedives when he refuses to embrace the new technology. Could a chance encounter with rising star Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) be his way out of despair?

It’s not that The Artist is soundless. In fact the film makes impressive use of sound, and the absence of sound. There’s a memorable scene in which Valentin lifts a glass and sets it back, and it makes the first foley noise in the film. It takes both him and us by surprise, one of many such surprises throughout.

The Artist makes conscious use of our knowledge of the language of film and pokes fun at it. There are several scenes where the mise-en-scene is so over-the-top it forms a knowing wink-wink joke we’re all in on. There are some lovely and hilarious compositions in the style of silent movies we just don’t see in films any more, and the use of signage to suggest subtexts is reminiscent of Robert Altman’s The Player (itself a parody of Hollywood).

The performances are perfectly pitched, with Dujardin charting the decline of Valentin with subtlety. He’s also a master of physical comedy, with several brilliant scenes with a performing dog.

Bejo’s Miller is sweet and attractive—peppy you might say—and the chemistry between her and Valentin is palpable.

There’s also a magnificent turn from John Goodman as a tough but sweet hearted studio bigwig.

This lovingly detailed comedy drama is so exuberant in its celebration of classic Hollywood, so intelligent in its direction, that it’s a major contender for an Oscar. Watch it confound your expectations.

[etRating value=“ 5”]