Bartleby (1976)
Directed by Maurice Ronet

Film Review

Maurice Ronet may have devoted the bulk of his career to acting - he is best known for his intensely introspective portrayals in Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958) and Le Feu follet (1963) - but he also dabbled in writing and directing from time to time.  His most successful effort as a director is his inspired adaptation of Herman Melville's short story Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, skilfully transposed from New York in the mid-19th century to Paris in the 1970s.  Prior to this, Ronet had directed a lightweight comedy, Le Voleur de Tibidabo (1964), and a documentary short, Vers l'île des dragons (1974), neither of which can hold a candle to his second remarkable feature.  Bartleby was made for the French television Antenne 2 and first broadcast in 1976.  It was subsequently given a theatrical release in 1978.

Although stylistically the two films could hardly be more different, Le Feu follet and Bartleby have a surprising amount in common.  Both are bleak studies in depression that revolve around a solitary outsider who is incapable of accepting help from others and ultimately finds escape through suicide.  A similar stifling mood of melancholia imbues each of the films, although Bartleby feels more like an absurdist comedy (of the Harold Pinter variety) than a straight drama.  The central character's apparent lack of identity allows us to see into the souls of the people around him and witness even more profound tragedies inside them.  The bailiff who takes pity on Bartleby and goes out of his way to help him, jeopardising his own state of mind along the way, becomes the conduit by which his unhappy employee expresses his inconsolable antipathy for living.

Maurice Ronet not only contributed to the film's excellent screenplay, he also directs it with the flair of a confident and humane filmmaker.  The deceptive simplicity of the mise-en-scène allows the quiet drama to develop slowly so that we have time to form a close attachment with the most active character in the story, the conflicted bailiff, played to perfection by Michel Lonsdale.  Maxence Mailfort's Bartleby has a haunting presence in the film, but it is Lonsdale's 'good Samaritan' bailiff who engages with our emotions, his own tormenting solitude and sense of failure ultimately eclipsing that of the man he tries to save.  Lonsdale is an absurdist playwrights's dream and his harrowing tragicomic portrayal in Bartleby is without doubt one of his career highpoints.  After this, Maurice Ronet directed one or two other pieces for French television and might have gone on to earn considerable distinction as a film auteur, had he not died well before his time in 1983.

Film Synopsis

With a backlog of paperwork accumulating around him, a Parisian bailiff is relieved when someone turns up in his office in response to his job advertisement.  The someone is a quiet, unassuming man named Bartleby who attends to his monotonous duties with diligence and without complaint.  Bartleby shows no interest in his employer and his other colleagues, and ventures no information about himself.  The newcomer's reticence soon creates a bad aura in the office and his refusal to take orders from his boss creates discontent among his colleagues.  Things come to a head when Bartleby tells the bailiff that he will no longer do any work for him.  His employer has no choice but to dismiss him, but getting rid of Bartleby proves to be a lot harder than he imagined...