The Clockmaker of St. Paul (1974) Directed by Bertrand Tavernier
The Clockmaker of St. Paul has been described as a thriller. If I put, say,
Z, North by Northwest; and
Purple Noon in my top echelon of thrillers,
The Clockmaker of St. Paul would land in the very bottom echelon of the category. Not because it isn't a good movie, but because it so desperately seems to want to take the thrill out of thriller. Michel (Philippe Noiret) , a clockmaker who now lives alone, whose wife first left him and then, two years later, left him a widower to boot, learns that his semi-estranged son is charged with committing a murder. This certainly shakes up the clockmaker's life, but you would hardly notice because he seems so stoic about existence in the first place. There is no mystery here to solve--his son readily confesses. Inspector Guilboud (Jean Rochefort), the detective pursuing the case, has come to enjoy Michel's company; he hands Michel an alibi for his son on a silver platter, a veritable gift. But, by this time, Michel only wants to join in solidarity with his son. The murder has the unintended consequence of facilitating a reconciliation between father and son. So what we have is a character study of the father that trumps the crime of the son. Michel is indeed guilty of what is as close as you can come to an existential sin: he has lived for too long an unexamined life, a flaw that pretty clearly predates his wife's departure, a flaw that could have possibly have been a reason for her leaving in the first place. A radical shift in his reality, thus, is just the shock he needs to rediscover his authenticity. He finally becomes both father and friend to his son, a son who is, for good or ill, already an authentic self..
It's a good little movie once I adjusted the stakes involved and started looking at the movie as about character rather than mystery. Part of the fun is watching two veteran French actors play off one another. Noiret seems to walk with a little raincloud hovering just over his head--his hangdog countenance suggests Christopher Robin's Eeyore. But he can show a very wide range of emotion on that often impassive face. And Rockefort is always fun with a perpetual hint of devilishness about him. Of the two he would be by far the more interesting dinner companion, but their rather civilized clash of personalities gives the movie some of the zest it needs to stay compelling.
Bertrand Tavernier is an underappreciated director, especially in North America. He is never mentioned in the same breath as the iconic directors of Europe--Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Bergman, Bunuel, Visconti, et al. And it is true his work is not as distinctive as the work of those directors. Yet he has about a dozen fine, well crafted movies to his credit including
Coup de Torchon; Sunday in the Country; Life and Nothing But; Round Midnight; and
Death Watch which everybody seems to like but me. He may suffer from the Howard Hawks/John Huston dilemma, that is, making good films in so many different genres that he never developed a definable signature style. Another thing these movies all have in common is that they are intelligent. He makes movies for adults with brains, not all directors do.
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