The Artist disappointed me a little, I’ll be frank. No doubt it’s brilliant - a silent film in an era which is dominated by sound & sound effects, a black & white film in the era of high-definition, yet entertaining perhaps more than most of the other films of its times. Jean Dujardin is such a good silent actor that he could’ve ruled the silent era had he born then. His movements, actions, expressions have no need of anything more than the visual. And a ‘peppy’ Berenice Bejo whose body-language suits the frame rate the film is shot at (22 fps) to suit the old, pacy, silent films. Yet it deviates from what we expect from the title - the story of an “Artist” during a renaissance transition of his art. It generalizes it to some extent but not to a broad level of the silent actors of that era; like Norma Desmond shouts in Sunset Boulevard (1950), “they smashed the idols, the Fairbankses, the Gilberts, the Valentinos!”In 1927, George Valentine (Jean Dujardin) - name seems inspired from the legendary silent film star
Rudolph Valentino - is at the peak of his career. He’s the most loved film star and he revels in it at every
possible moment. One of the opening sequences, where after his film is over, he acknowledges the
crowd & tries to sideline his co-actress to hog all the limelight, seems almost taken out from the similar
one in Gene Kelly’s masterpiece musical Singin’ In The Rain (1952); also about the silent to talkies
transition. Valentine is basking in his glory, but his marriage is an abortion that he’s not much bothered
about. A young extra, Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) bumps into him at a premiere but makes it to next
day’s headlines as the mysterious girl who dared to kiss Valentine, who’s pleasantly taken aback &
develops a special chemistry with her in the following days.
With the advent of talkies, the studio boss Al Zimmer (John Goodman) prepares for the transition to
talking pictures but Valentine ridicules him. The studio ends the silent film production, leaving Valentine
on his own. While the talkies explode to popularity, Valentine tries to rejuvenate silent films by making
one himself. As he fails, Peppy Miller rises big in the talkies (with the beauty spot Valentine gave her).
The Great depression strikes, Valentine is broke, is abandoned by his wife and lives the life of a
depressed, self-destructing bankrupt. As he declines, Peppy befriends him in his troubled time.
Hazanivicius cleverly incorporates the audience’s acknowledgement that it’s a silent film & plays with
ambient sound, during the sequence of Valentine’s nightmare (thus making it not a 100% silent film).
But that’s hardly the point. It should be looked upon at as a film like any other & the ‘silent’ factor
should be overlooked. What it delivers is one silent film actor’s story, fight of his ego against a young
starlet. That era saw the decline of many but there were many others who adapted to the transition. In
The Artist, Valentine is depressed about his fall, but it’s hardly about the fall of silent films. When he
comes to know that Peppy bought his auctioned belongings, it’s his man’s ego that’s hurt. There isn’t
anything about his sublimated perception of his own art & the way an artist goes about it in the world.
It’s all about him, George Valentine the star; not about George Valentine the ‘silent’ film star.
Both, Sunset Boulevard & Singin’ In The Rain seem to be inspirations - egomaniacal stars falling for lesser
popular persons. Even in Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond is very proud & her world is revolving more
strongly around herself than is George Valentine’s. But there is expression of empathy for the whole
era, not just for her; “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” That ‘we’ is vital. Even when his film
collection is blazing with fire, one might wonder why Valentine saves the only film-reel of his & Peppy’s
scene and not any of his glorious films, since at that point of time in the film, she has upset him by
scoffing about the silent film actors. It turns more to the personal story of George Valentine than the
story of ‘the artist’. So, even though Hazanivicius sets up a superb decline of an artist caught in the
transition, it doesn’t expands to the whole despair of the silent era or the whole “transition of cinema”.
The first film with a 4:3 aspect ratio to win an Oscar since 1955’s Marty, Guillaume Schiffman has
cinematographed it almost like a silent film. Hazanivicius has seamed the sequences in a masterful way
and especially the climax where he introduces sound again when Valentine’s about to commit suicide.
Jean Dujardin not only looks like Gene Kelly, but delivered expressions & comic-timing as good as him.
Berenice surely was peppy but not convincing enough. Technically the film is very neat an attempt to
reinvent silent films, especially for a generation that needs to recognize the greatness that were
Rudolph Valentine, D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton and many more. And as I reiterate that the norms can
be set to not look at it from the standpoint of a ‘silent’ film, The Artist is still a brilliant film in its own
right.
7.5/10
by Aniruddha Patankar
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