Boulevard
1960 Drama
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Credits
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Summary
To escape the tyranny of his step-mother, fifteen-year old Jojo runs
away from home and lives by himself in an attic room overlooking the
Place Pigalle. His two concerns are finding enough money to live
on and a growing interest in women - in particular, his neighbour
Jenny, who works as a striptease dancer in a nightclub. When a
boxer friend of his monopolises Jenny’s attention, Jojo looks elsewhere
for love, only to be disappointed a second time...Review
The contrast between the styles of the French New Wave and the old
guard of quality French filmmakers is brought into sharp relief when
one compares this 1960 film from Julien Duvivier with François
Truffaut’s contemporaneous Les 400 coups. Both films
star the young Jean-Pierre Léaud (who could be
described as the Marlon Brando of French cinema) playing a rebellious adolescent with a knack of getting
himself into trouble, and both are set in a renascent Paris that has
finally shaken off the yoke of post-war gloom and austerity.
Beyond that, the films could hardly be more different.The striking sense of spontaneity, realism and truth which Truffaut achieves in his film is all but lacking in Duvivier’s. Boulevard is made according to the old rules - polished performances, a conventional narrative and a cinematographic approach which had hardly changed since the 1930s. The film is technically well made, but in comparison with Truffaut’s, it is soulless, with hardly any of the charm and emotional impact of Les 400 coups. It doesn't help that most of the characters in the film are the most grotesque stereotypes, including a shrewish step-mother that looks like something Hans Christian Andersen created and a pair of Parisian artists who clearly never missed a day at the Quentin Crisp school of in-your-face campness. Immaculately coiffeured and tidily dressed, Jean-Pierre Léaud resembles a sanitised version of the Antoine Doinel character he played in Truffaut’s film. You can imagine the difficulties Duvivier must have had in trying to control Léaud and get him to deliver a "conventional" performance. The actor looks as if he has been hermetically sealed in a straitjacket for much of the film. It is no surprise that the bulk of his film work for the next decade or so would be for the New Wave directors whose innovative style matched perfectly his expressive, idiosyncratic approach to acting. Interestingly, the part of the boxer Dicky was originally offered to the virtually unknown young actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, but he declined and instead chose to work on Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle, a wise move as it turned out. Boulevard merely demonstrates how irrelevant the old guard filmmakers were becoming and how desperately French cinema needed a new direction. © James Travers 2008 Write a review for this film... |
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