Mikhail Trofimenkov about “The Artist” by Michel Hazanavicius

"The Artist" by Michel Hazanavicius is a comedy about the tragedy of a silent film star. The cognitive dissonance hidden in this definition makes you want to dot the i’s. Wait, wait: is this actor good, talented? Or untalented? Perhaps this is a comedy about the tragedy of rise and fall - a respected Hollywood genre - of an over-confident monomaniac?

All these questions can be thrown into the trash. The talent or mediocrity of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) does not matter at all. He is an artist, and that says it all. A moving shadow, a puppet, a darling. Mustache like Clark Gable. A squint like Douglas Fairbanks. A forehead like John Gilbert's. And how he wears a tuxedo! And he fences! And how does one drown in an Amazon swamp? However, to drown like that and wear a tuxedo like that, you also need talent.

Valentin is everyone and no one: all the “silent” stars who were unable or did not want to adapt to the talking picture, and none of them in particular. Just an Artist. One of the cogs of the factory, the only difference from the Ford factories is that it is a dream factory.

Everyone knows: the main feature of "The Artist" is that it is a black-and-white and silent - or rather, almost silent - film. Hazanavicius, the director of films about the idiot agent N 117, can least of all be suspected of aestheticism a la Aki Kaurismäki, who directed Juha (1996). “Yuha” is mute, like heroes unable to express their feelings in words, black and white, like their lives. There are no such existential problems in “The Artist,” but Hazanavicius’s genuine love for cinema goes over the edge.

Ostensibly limiting himself in expressive means, Hazanavicius demonstrates how many extra words, extra sounds, extra colors cluttered the screen. Take, for example, the forgotten and abandoned, but fail-safe technique used in “The Artist”: informing the viewer about plot collisions that are significant for the development of the plot, but take too much time if they are played out and explained. Cheap and cheerful: information is presented through newspaper headlines replacing each other on the screen.

In principle, the main hero, who carries the film’s philosophy in a concentrated form, is not even Valentin, but Uggi, his fox. Here is a desperate actor setting fire to his apartment in a fit of masochistic madness. The films had already burned, and he himself was about to suffocate in the smoke. Ugga, a variation of the story of a rescue dog popular in the early days of cinema, rushes to the guard on the corner and performs a pantomime in front of him, so eloquent that the cop immediately rushes to the rescue of the dying man.

Uggs can't talk? And it is not necessary. Everything is clear. Let the foolish aunt be touched: “Oh, if only he could talk.” Valentin also “can’t speak.” And in the very first episode they demand from him, passing an electric current through his ears: “Speak! Speak!” - the hero of the action movie "Adventures in Russia" is tortured in the basements of the Cheka. The producers who throw Valentin into the trash heap with the advent of the sound era are no better than cinematic executioners. The invasion of sound into Valentin’s habitually silent world, when a feather falls to the ground with the roar of an aerial bomb, is torture worse than electric shock.

Ugg boots are a key character in another, symbolic and most relevant sense. Fox Valentena is just like Tintin, the nimble reporter from Hergé's comics. Tintin, like Valentin, made his first voyage to the Land of the Soviets, where he was also tortured by bloody security officers. In 1927, when the film begins, Tintin had just been painted, but this is absolutely not important. The important thing is that when Hazanavicius took on The Artist, everyone already knew that Steven Spielberg was working on The Adventures of Tintin. And the most important thing about this is that Spielberg is making a film in 3D for the first time. Hazanavicius threw down the gauntlet to Spielberg himself.

"The Artist" is a counter-revolutionary film in a good way. He, of course, is not talking about - although he is talking about this too - that cinema should be black and white and silent. It is about the fact that the pursuit of technical innovations, children's tinkering with gadgets - all this is empty. The sound that ruins Valentin's career and fate is a metaphor for current computer techniques that reduce the actor to the status of an animated character.

A sensitive viewer always knows that a happy ending is a white lie, that everything will be bad and even worse, and the directors simply pity and console him. So it is here: it is clear that Valentin took his own life. The episode in which the drunken star sees his distorted reflection in a glass table is a paraphrase of the producer's suicide in George Cukor's film "What's Hollywood Worth?" (1932). But even if you believe in a happy ending, it is still not clear-cut. Valentin finds himself in sound cinema, but does not capitulate, does not take the sin of chatter on his soul. He will talk, but only with his feet. The tap dance he does with his newfound love, Pippi Miller (Bérénice Bejo), is secret but rebellious.

If The Artist wins an Oscar, the rulers of the computer universe, of course, will not be ashamed and will not go into a black-and-white monastery, taking a vow of silence. But perhaps they will see, as Khazanavicius saw, the mystical meaning of the requirement posted in the off-screen space of cinema halls: “Keep quiet!”

The Russian premiere of the film is on February 12 at the Barvikha Luxury Village concert hall.
In theaters from February 16

Victory of black and white silence