Stavisky (1974) - film review

France, 1933.  Police inspector Bonny is conducting a private investigation into the activities of the influential businessman Serge Alexandre.  Bonny has already accumulated some damning evidence which proves that Alexandre is none other than the notorious Russian swindler Stavisky.  This is only one of Alexandre’s problems, however.  His business empire is beginning to crumble through lack of funds and his former friends are deserting him.  To escape ruin, Alexandre is forced to resort to increasingly desperate measures, such as issuing fake bonds and laundering funds destined for the impending Spanish civil war.   As Alexandre’s world collapses, there would seem to be only one way out...

Stavisky is among Alain Resnais’s most consistently underrated films, whereas it deserves to be considered one of his major achievements.  A compelling and seductively stylish period piece, it makes a very good case for exercising the imagination when it comes to interpreting historical events.   For decades, the circumstances surrounding the death of the Russian financier Alexandre Stavisky had been shrouded in mystery and many believed that his apparent suicide was in fact murder, perpetrated by those implicated in a Fascist conspiracy.  Resnais’s screenwriter Jorge Semprún certainly gives free reign to his imagination and even goes as far as to make a possible connection between the Stavisky affair and the eventual fate of the Soviet exile Leon Trosky.  Far from being a conventional biopic, Stavisky sets out to explore the personality of a supremely effective con man whilst positing the controversial view that he was a pawn in a much bigger game.  The film is set in 1933, a momentous year in the history of Europe.  As France teeters perilously on the brink of Fascism, a single event like the Stavisky affair could prove decisive in determining the country’s future.  No man is an island...

Interestingly, the film was instigated not by Resnais, but by the actor-producer Jean-Paul Belmondo, who envisaged playing a gentleman thief role (of the Arsène Lupin variety) to provide a change from his tough-guy action hero roles.  When impresario Gérard Lebovici suggested he should make a film about the high class swindler Alexandre Stavisky, Belmondo was immediately hooked and engaged the distinguished screenwriter Jorge Semprún to develop a script treatment.  It was Semprún who then roped in Resnais (his former collaborator on the film La Guerre est finie) to direct the film.  Resnais had not made a film for six years and was as enthused by the venture as Belmondo, although this partnership took many by surprise.  Resnais was considered a serious filmmaker, an auteur par excellence; Belmondo was by then a major star who was associated with showy big budget action films and populist comedies.  How could such a seemingly ill-matched pair work together to produce a film that was worth seeing?

Predictably, Stavisky was written off by the critics even before it had been released.  When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1974, it had a very poor reception, which was largely down to ill-feeling caused by Belmondo’s refusal to give one-to-one interviews to journalists.   With a French presidential election in the offing, the film came under attack for its perceived left-wing political slant and then Stavisky’s son Claude attempted to have the film banned on the grounds that it sullied the memory of his parents.  With so much adverse publicity, it was hardly surprising that the film should perform badly at the French box office - in fact it barely managed to attract a million spectators.  At the time, Stavisky was considered to be neither a Belmondo film nor an Alain Resnais film and so struggled to find an audience, although today it rates highly in the filmographies of both men.  The film performed far better on its international release, particularly in the United States where it proved to be a surprising hit.  Contrary to what is widely believed, Belmondo’s production company Cerito Films did manage to turn a profit on the film, but it was far from being an outright success.        

Not only is Stavisky instantly recognisable as an Alain Resnais film, it is in fact one of the director’s most complex and unsettling films, one that takes several viewings to realise just how profound and weird it is.  What is perhaps most striking is the obvious mismatch between the artificiality of the world that Resnais puts on the screen and the realism that leaps out from Jorge Semprún’s screenplay.  Stephen Sondheim’s subtly haunting score (the first the composer wrote for a film) provides a bridge between the two but it also serves to accentuate the film’s curious fairytale quality.  As if to drive home the point that history is a matter of interpretation rather than fact, Resnais adopts a subjective framework and shows us the world as it is experienced by the main protagonist, a glitzy Hollywood-style fantasy in which he is the star player.  This illusion is constantly challenged by Semprún’s dialogue and characterisation, which have a razor-sharp authenticity to them and lay into Resnais’s gilded fantasy world with an almost psychotic frenzy.

The most visually alluring of Resnais’s colour films, Stavisky has something of the eerie dreamlike quality of his previous (and even more unfathomable) masterpiece L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961).  As in that film, Resnais plays with our notion of time, using flashbacks and fast-forwards to fracture the linear narrative and convey a chilling sense of predestination out of the confusion he creates.  Alexandre Stavisky may think he is in control of his destiny, but as his past, present and future are brought into collision it becomes apparent that he is a mere fly trapped in the pages of history - his fate is sealed, as perhaps ours is, by events and powers beyond our comprehension, clockwork toys running down in a clockwork universe.  It is not only plausible but inevitable that Stavisky’s death was contrived for political ends, and equally plausible that his death should impact on the fate of Leon Trotsky.

Stavisky has the most prestigious cast list of any Alain Resnais film.  In addition to its high-profile star, the film brings together such talented performers as François Périer, Charles Boyer, Anny Duperey, Michel Lonsdale and Claude Rich, all of whom are excellent and run no risk of being out-staged by Belmondo.  (Boyer won the Best Actor award at Cannes for his performance in this film - that’s the same Cannes at which the film was pretty comprehensibly rubbished.)  In contrast to most of his films of this era, Belmondo tacitly refuses to play the limelight-hogging star and instead gives a far more restrained character performance, one that must surely rate as one of his best.  Belmondo’s Stavisky is a fascinating portrayal of a man who believes too much in his own greatness and ends up having to pay the price.  You might think that Alain Resnais and Jean-Paul Belmondo would make the unlikeliest of bedfellows but, by some happy providence, their combined talents gave us one of the most memorably enigmatic French films of the 1970s.  The moral: don’t automatically expect the worst when two worlds collide.

© James Travers 2011

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