Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
D: Louis Malle. P: Jean Thuillier. W: Roger Nimier,
Louis Malle, Noël Calaf (novel). Ph: Henri Decaë. M: Miles Davis. St: Jeane
Moreau (Florence Carala), Maurice Ronet (Julien Tavernier), Georges Poujouly
(Louis), Yori Bertin (Véronique), Jean Wall (Simon Carala)
Malle’s feature debut is a Gitanes swirl of moods,
styles and inflections – poetic realism, film noir, suspense thriller – and an
important precursor of the nouvelle vague.
Lovers Florence and Julien plot to murder her husband,
a wealthy arms dealer, and make it look like suicide. As conspirators, however,
they are upstaged by fate, which traps Julien in a lift after the killing. Two
young tearaways seize the chance to steal his car, an escapade that leads to a
second, unrelated murder for which Julien, a military veteran, will be held
accountable. Florence, scouring their haunts in search of her beau, must prove
his innocence of one crime while concealing their mutual guilt of another.
Adapted from a novel with a glaring resemblance to Double Indemnity, and with a brutally
ironic denouement à la The Postman Always Rings Twice, the film
has a strong sense of doomed romanticism, somewhat at the expense of watertight
plotting and logic. For Malle, just 26 at the time, it was a tribute to two of
his film-making heroes: Bresson, stylistically, and Hitchcock, for suspense. But
it is more considered than it may sound, to its director’s own surprise: “I was
not aware… that I was doing something personal. I saw it almost like an
exercise,” he said.[1]
From the opening shots – tight close-ups of Florence and
Julien, declaring their love and plotting murder at opposite ends of a telephone
line – Malle establishes isolation and the fear of separation as primary concerns.
Julien spends the bulk of the film confined in an elevator; Florence is a
picture of alienation as she searches for him in sundry nightspots – Moreau exuding
weary fatalism in her character’s mistaken conviction that Julien has left her
for another woman. (The lovers never meet on screen – Malle and Nimier felt it
would be “more romantic” that way.) And Louis and Véronique, the teenage car
thieves who kill a middle-aged German couple after a contretemps, fear being
parted more than punishment if they are caught. “We’ll only be together on the
front pages,” says Véronique, for whom a (botched) suicide pact seems
preferable.
Malle also wanted to show a different Paris on film, a
shadow city that had begun to emerge in the crime films of Becker and Melville.
Modern architecture is complemented by modal jazz, while Henri Decaë used fast
film stock that gave a grainy, documentary-like texture to the location shots.
He put the camera in a pram to track Moreau along the Champs-Elysees, her
features lit only by the glare from café and shop windows. Malle was not one for
movements, but it is difficult to view the film today without seeing its
influence on the nouvelle vague.
Underlining the sense of a society – and a national cinema
– in transition is the positioning of Louis and Véronique as representatives of
a new generation. Louis is a typical blouson
noir, a leather-jacketed rebel venting frustration at his lack of
opportunities and contempt for the older generation, pointing to colonial
misadventures as evidence of a collective moral malaise. Not that Malle finds
much to praise in his young characters. Véronique aspires to the pampered, middle-class
existence she imagines of Julien and Florence, and meekly follows her beau on
his impulsive and aimless crime spree. If they are intended to offset the
principals, it is fitting that the youngsters are undone by the same means as
Julien and Florence – incriminating photographic evidence – and that most human
and mundane of flaws: forgetfulness.
At times the plot runs on a cocktail of contrivance and
illogicality. It is still daylight when Julien scales the building from his
office up to Simon’s, a huge risk in the execution of a ‘perfect crime’; and when
he realises he has left the rope hanging in full view, he leaves his car
running while he returns to retrieve it, practically inviting thievery. The young
couple’s bizarre encounter with the Germans feels similarly manufactured.
But it is the marriage of mood and technique that makes
the film so memorable. The mechanics of suspense are smoothly oiled: cuts from
Julien holding a gun on Simon to Julien’s secretary sharpening pencils, then
back to the scene of the crime, have a bracingly discordant effect; the claustrophobic
elevator scenes play mostly in silence. Mostly it is the existential shading of
noir material that lingers: when Julien finally escapes from the building the
next morning and sees his wanted notice in a newspaper, the camera retreats
slowly as police cars pull up opposite, one form of entrapment exchanged for
another. The signature scenes, however, remain Florence’s forlorn perambulations
– Moreau’s face a mask of loneliness, Davis’s trumpet the sound of urban despair. Kevin Grant
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