It’s a Francophile summer in New York, with a major Claire Denis rediscovery and a Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective already in the books and an Agnès Varda-centric series under way, but the most important French movie event taking place here is Film at Lincoln Center’s retrospective of all the features and some of the shorts by Jacques Rozier, who died last year, at the age of ninety-six. Of the truly original filmmakers of the modern era, Rozier is perhaps the least-known, and though his films are strikingly influential in the French art-house scene, they’re rarely shown here. They’re not even released on U.S home video or streaming services, so the current retrospective (running August 16th through the 22nd) is truly essential viewing.
Even the basic outline of Rozier’s career indicates that he’s a filmmaker apart. He made only five features—the first, in 1962, and the last, in 2001. The first four are classics, justly hailed as masterworks, but the fifth has yet to be released, even in France. The peculiar shape of Rozier’s œuvre results from his distinctive way of working, which created outlandish obstacles in the shooting of his films. There’s no biography, but the 2001 volume “Jacques Rozier: Le Funambule” (“Jacques Rozier: the Tightrope Walker”), edited by Emmanuel Burdeau, offers an extensive interview with Rozier and an oral history from his collaborators, who tell some amazing stories. This recollection, from the producer Humbert Balsan, gives a sense of Rozier’s methods:
Rozier mostly didn’t write traditional scripts; he came up with stories and let the actors improvise, or else, for the most part, wrote their dialogue at the last minute. The characters were built on the actors, not vice versa. He took a long time to find his performers, who were often nonprofessionals; and even professionals tend to look different in a Rozier movie, thanks to his drive for freedom and his attraction to demanding circumstances. Improvising directorially in response to his actors’ improvisations, Rozier would shoot vast amounts of footage, which he assembled into elaborate scenes that scrutinize the peculiar intricacies of daily life. His method yields a cinema in its own image. All his films are about digression and impulsive action, sudden and drastic changes of plan; they all involve travel, with its attendant combination of complication and opportunity. The result of the organized chaos of a Rozier shoot is the overwhelming sense of life itself as an improvisation.
Rozier, born in 1926, was a movie enthusiast from childhood on. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, having been to film school, he landed a job with French television as an assistant on live drama broadcasts, but he’d always wanted to make movies. He got his start in cinema with a pair of short films, the second of which, “Blue Jeans” (1958), received commercial distribution and won critical acclaim—including from Jean-Luc Godard. The two men became friends, and Godard recommended Rozier to his producer, Georges de Beauregard, who backed Rozier’s first feature, “Adieu Philippine” (1962). The film is a turbulently adventuresome romantic and comedic drama filled with music and dance and, at the same time, a crucial work of political cinema—one of the few French movies, at a time of stringent censorship, that dares to confront the 1954-62 Algerian War.
Pretty much every movie synopsis is, in effect, “to make a long story short.” But, with Rozier, digression is so central to the achievement that even an accurate précis can render a film nearly unrecognizable. “Adieu Philippine,” set in 1960, follows a young man, Michel, who works as an assistant on live TV broadcasts, and who has been called up to do his military service—in, as the film makes clear, the Algerian War. He still has two months before reporting for duty, and at the studio, he meets two women of about eighteen, Juliette and Liliane; he and the pair flirt, date, and get a job together on a shady producer’s low-budget TV commercial. When Michel is suspended from his job for an infraction, he heads off to a Club Med resort in Corsica. The two women follow him there and inform him that the shady producer is also on the island, leading to an extended road trip that also yields quietly triangulated romantic conflict. Technical issues and a resulting dispute with Beauregard delayed the film’s release until 1963, and, though hailed by many in movie-world circles, it was a commercial failure.
That year, Rozier made a pair of documentaries about Godard’s filming of “Contempt”; the following year, he shot a sequence for Godard’s “A Married Woman.” He also directed television shows—notably, a poignant oral-history documentary, from 1964, about the great, short-lived filmmaker Jean Vigo. Rozier made his second feature, “Near Orouët,” shot in 1969, and it, too, is a summer-vacation movie. Gilbert, a manager at a small Paris business, has organized a sort of office-wide team-building vacation, at a Club Med, but when one of the employees, a woman for whom he has feelings, instead heads with two female friends to a house on the western coast of France, Gilbert shows up there, too. This peculiar household attracts the attention of an athletic young boatsman, and the resulting chemistry, of attractions and aversions, leads to more romantic conflict. The film, originally commissioned for television, was shot on 16-mm. film, but few theatres could project this nonprofessional format, which prevented the movie from getting a normal commercial release. But, though it was shown in only a handful of Paris art houses, it was a critical success. (Its lead actor, Bernard Menez, a math and science teacher who’d never been in a movie before, quickly made a career, following up with a role in François Truffaut’s “Day for Night.”)
Rozier got to work with acclaimed professional actors on his next feature, “The Castaways of Turtle Island” (1976), another story of white-collar types on a spree. Two middle managers in a travel agency conceive of a plan for a back-to-nature, Robinson Crusoe-like vacation package, with vacationers fending for themselves on a desert island for a fixed period of time. About a dozen hardy customers sign up, but, even before they reach the island, the journey proves so arduous that they prepare to rebel against the two leaders. The casting had a comical effect on the story: the actors playing the managers, Pierre Richard and Maurice Risch, left the production owing to prior commitments, and so Rozier rewrote the script twice to turn their successive sudden absences into plotlines: the brother of one of the managers, played by the comedian Jacques Villeret, shows up and, despite not having managerial experience, explains that he’s taking the job. Rozier’s improvised solution doesn’t just bring comedy; it sets up a dramatic contrast between the self-possessed folly of by-the-book professionals and the empathetic decency of a planless amateur.
Rozier’s next feature, “Maine-Océan Express” (1986), was his shaggiest-dog story yet. He began work on the project in 1980 but wasn’t ready to film it for another four years. He started with an idea about a musician, but he was also fascinated by an old train line heading to France’s Atlantic coast, and, realizing that he’d never seen a movie about train conductors, he decided to make one. As Rozier cast the film, one actor recommended another, and he multiplied the story lines to accommodate their personalities and talents. The film opens with a Brazilian dancer who speaks no French boarding a train in Paris headed to a small coastal town. When two conductors find a problem with her ticket, a Parisian lawyer who speaks Portuguese helps her out, and the two women become fast friends. In the seaside town, the lawyer meets her client, a rowdy fisherman, and brings the dancer along; the train conductors follow the trio to an island and a fivesome forms, joined then by the dancer’s impresario, who, after a wild night of samba in a provincial banquet hall, thinks he’s found a new star in one of the conductors. The man in question is played by Menez, who, in the decade and a half since he got his start in “Near Orouët,” had become an accomplished professional. He channels something of the tone of Jack Lemmon as he joins in with the dancer and steals her spotlight, gleefully chanting, “I am, I am the King, the King of Samba!”
As wild as “Maine-Océan Express” is, it actually feels like Rozier’s most comprehensively composed work, thanks not only to the sheer vividness of the personalities onscreen but also to his sense of framing, rhythm, tempo, and tone. Rozier had eight weeks in which to film this craziness, and, when he was done, he decided to extend the final scene. This sudden inspiration produced one of the greatest endings in French cinema—a solitary man’s journey from sea to shore to town and from one life path to another, carrying the secret experiential treasures of his mad adventures with him.
After the movie was done, its producer, Paulo Branco, having experienced Rozier’s incremental methods firsthand, predicted that he wouldn’t make a film for another ten years. He was wrong; it took fifteen before Rozier was able to complete his next and last film, “Fifi Martingale.” Because it’s never had a proper release, despite special screenings at festivals here and there, I hadn’t seen it until a few days ago. It strikes me as a classic “late film”—a stripping away of settled habits and familiar guideposts in the interest of an exaggeration of themes and an intensification of ideas. It’s centered on a Paris theatre, where a playwright whose play is in the midst of a successful run decides to rewrite it in order to respond to his critics. What follows is chaos: one actor gets injured en route to the theatre and, when he’s replaced (by the building’s concierge), tries to avenge himself. An elderly stage-door Johnny shows up to court an actress; she joins him on an extended side trip to a casino, and, after he displays astounding feats of memory, he gets cast in the play, too, with hectic results.
Rozier’s greatness, and the influence that he has exerted in French cinema, is more than a matter of the looseness of his work, the freedom of his actors, the meandering wonder of his stories. He’s a prime reference for a younger generation of French filmmakers because the cinematic ideal that he embodies is also an idea about life. All of Rozier’s movies are filled with ordinary people who, with furious vitality, make extraordinary things happen; conversely, Rozier is passionately alert to the extraordinary energy and inventiveness that suffuses ordinary daily life. His comedy doesn’t counteract his characters’ pathos but emphasizes it: their striving for happiness brings trouble; they try to expand their purview but encounter a current pulling them back to the norm. Yet the very heart of this normalcy is its eccentricity, its overleaping of life’s hurdles: amateurs face professional-grade complications, which they confront with more or less style, with spontaneous grace or clumsy struggle. The artifice of their exertion gives rise to a constant ambient loopiness that’s the sane version of insanity.
The tenderness and chaotic joy of Rozier’s films have given rise to a misconception in which he appears as the inverse of the New Wave’s more overtly intellectual filmmakers, such as Godard and Éric Rohmer. Unlike them, Rozier made New Wave films about characters who would never have seen a New Wave film. But philosophical cinema doesn’t require an effort to appear philosophical, and doesn’t require intellectual characters citing academic texts; rather, it comes from a filmmaker’s point of view, on the world and on cinema itself. Despite their free-spirited whimsy, Rozier’s films are ultimately existential works, pondering the very basis of everyday life: How does anyone do anything? How does anyone move from living an unconsidered life to a considered one? How does a person, recognizing the dead weight of unexamined routine and the need to take action, actually make change happen? In short, how does one live a normal life in a way that—whether plans work out or not—renders it a little more wondrous?
The filmmaker whose approach is closest to Rozier’s is Agnès Varda; her work is similarly rooted in documentary and similarly shaped by decisions taken freely in the course of filming. But the differences are equally significant. For Varda, who started as a photographer, the way a thing looked (which is to say, the way she saw it and depicted it) defined its essence. Rozier’s sensibility was less visual than auditory or musical; he generally chose takes, whether on the set or in the editing room, not by watching performances or viewing footage but by listening to the audio track and picking the version with the best dialogue—and for him, what something is, what’s essential about it, led to his sense of how it should look. Varda was more interested in the what, Rozier in the how; his existential idea was dynamic. He was an intensely process-oriented filmmaker, whose interest in process wasn’t abstract: for Rozier, the stepwise preparation of an elaborate dinner (as in a long scene, involving eel stew, in “Near Orouët”) is a fundamental aspect of social life, a vital spark for the complex and troubled relationships that give the movie its ardent energy.