Laughing Out Loud Page 12
Fellini's films abound in images that consciously evoke commedia dell'arte, his love of circuses and circus people, his fascination with faces and body types of all sizes and conditions, male and female, and a strong attraction to American silent film comedy, especially Chaplin, Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. To watch 81, or La Strada or even his later films such as City of Women or Orchestra Rehearsal is to see how, as an Italian filmmaker, he could absorb and recast foreign comic traditions in his own unique vision.
Giuseppe Tornatore's Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso (1988), from his own script, succeeds in a similar vein. As in Dante and Boccaccio, amore is the cornerstone of the narrative of a young boy, Salvatore, growing up without a father in a small Sicilian town after World War II. And as suggested by the whole tradition of Italian comedy, love appears in many forms: our young protagonist falls in love with cinema, with the old projectionist, Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), who becomes something of a father/grandfather figure, and with a young woman his age, and he is in turn surrounded by his widowed mother's love all his life. While the film embraces many stories, high and low, including some very funny scenes of movie audiences enjoying one another as much as the films on the screen, the ending is bittersweet. The film is structured with a contemporary frame, as our young boy has become a middle-aged businessman and husband who returns to his hometown for the funeral of the old projectionist.
We end with the protagonist discovering a special reel of film the old man left him. All of the censored "kissing" scenes the Church had ordered cut from the films are on one reel. Tears and laughter mix as the main character relives his whole life and his life in films, as we see one kiss after another, Hollywood and Italian, French and British. "Paradiso," the name of the cinema, suggests not only a bygone age of movie palaces-and in the end the cinema is pulled down to build a parking lot-but an echo of Dante's Divine Comedy, or simply a spiritual level to these loves reel and real.
Gabriele Salvatore's Oscar-winning Mediterraneo (1991) ends with a similar nostalgic, distancing scene, as several old friends who had been isolated on a Greek island during World War II return and prepare a simple meal together, talking about the past. This bond of friendship that closes what unfolded as an anarchistic ensemble romance during the body of the film caps an otherwise joyous and hi larious but also sweet mosaic of comic stories. More so than even Cinema Paradiso, in fact, Salvatore's film appears as a clear relative to Boccaccio's brand of comedy and humor laced with seriousness.
Italy gave us the Renaissance. And in comedic terms we as writers can learn from the Italian tradition how to mix farce and fantasy, pure emotion and sexuality, all wrapped up in the embrace of Love. This goes even for Italian films more clearly labeled as dramas, such as Michael Radford's very moving The Postman (Il Postino, 1994), starring the late Massimo Troisi and Philippe Noiret in yet another Oscar winner.
Finally, among the multitude of fine Italian comedies, I would recommend the now unfortunately neglected films of Lina Wertmuller. Swept Away ... by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1975) and Love and Anarchy (1973) both star the affable Giancarlo Giannini in works of imaginative energy and comic vision.
The Czech Republic
Wry Humor and Pathos, from Closely Watched Trains to Kolya
The Czech people have long used humor and wry laughter as a form of national as well as personal survival. Deep in Central Europe, they have often been invaded by the larger countries that surround them, from the Germans to the Russians. In fact, if you ask most Czechs what is the novel that best sums up the Czech character, most would point to The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, a very funny antiwar tale of a simple "holy fool" who is drafted into the Austro- Hungarian army during World War I and almost single-handedly incapacitates the whole war machine by his bumbling inability to fight, march or kill.
The Czech cinema has proved particularly adept at mixing wry humor and pathos in simple tales about antiheroes like Svejk who "win" not through plan and design but through happenstance and, finally, a good heart. Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains, based on the novel of the same name by Bohumil Hrabal, won the 1966 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Milos, a young and innocent fellow, begins his first job as a railroad employee at a small train station in the countryside during the German occupation. We have an early comic foreshadowing of his fate when he tells us in voiceover that his grandfather was a magician-hypnotist who died trying to hypnotize an army tank that was bearing down on him. The humor grows not out of slapstick or car crashes or giant schemes gone wrong, but rather from the careful attention to detail in the small world of a rural train station as a double plot unfolds: our protagonist tries to learn his job while a war is going on, and a wise-guy playboy who also works at the station takes it upon himself to help Milos lose his virginity.
The ending is a double climax, so to speak, as Milos makes love with an older and very sexually experienced resistance freedom fighter and then becomes an accidental anti-Nazi hero as he drops a bomb on a German munitions train passing by. The ending evokes both tears and laughter simultaneously, for he is such a bumbling klutz that he falls onto the train along with the bomb. In a long shot we see the train blow up, and we know that Milos is dead as well: a hero and a fool in one simple action.
This so-called "Czech touch" has reached Hollywood in the hands of Milos Forman, who walked off with Oscars for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), turning Ken Kesey's anarchistic satirical comedy of the i96os into a more universal work through what I would call Czech micro-comic details. Forman's early Czech films, including Loves of a Blonde (1965), Black Peter (1964) and Firemen's Ball (1967), are definitely worth watching as well for his ability to wring maximum laughter out of the simplest of situations. Take the premise of Firemen's Ball, for instance: a small fire station is having its annual ball. This is ensemble anarchistic comedy, for the firemen as a group are as bumbling as Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops but given the personality and humanity that the Czech touch manages so well. The firemen's new attraction for the ball about to take place is a beauty contest, an event that not only brings out all the inadequacies of the members but leads to the fire station catching fire-and the firemen are too drunk and ill-prepared to put it out. The closing shot is of the freezing firemen and their guests standing in the snow, looking at the rubble of what used to be their station. It is a fine testimony to the power of satire and comedy that the film was banned in Czechoslovakia for years since everyone (rightly!) took the film as a spoof on Communist officials.
It says much for the universality of Czech humor that Milos Forman went on to become one of Hollywood's most esteemed directors, applying the Czech touch not just in Cuckoo's Nest, an anarchistic ensemble comedy if there ever was one, but in Ragtime (1981), among others, with James Cagney's last performance and a fine Randy Newman score, and the Oscar-winning Amadeus (1984), which uses anarchistic humor bright and dark to bring Peter Shaffer's play and screenplay to full potential on the screen. It is helpful to understand that part of Forman's success has been a sharply tuned sense of humor and comedy which he has developed from his national background.
Jan Sverak's Kolya, based on a script by the director's actor-writer father, Zdenek Sverak, won the 1997 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. As a comedy that embodies the Czech touch for humor and pathos, it's worth watching on a number of levels. But one immediate reason to study it with pleasure is because it has done very respectably at the box office. In one week in April of 1997, for instance, it was simultaneously playing in twenty-two Los Angeles cinemas and twenty-six New York City area theaters. My point, for American writers particularly, is that I'm not discussing "overseas" comedies just for the sake of being different. Rather, this chapter can be a valuable expansion of comic horizons for English-speaking writers, for it suggests that comedies with subtitles and cultures quite different from our own can find enthusiastic audiences around the world.
That said, let's look briefly at Kolya. Again, I emphasize simplicity. Th
is is primarily a two-character film: a womanizing fiftysomething bachelor cellist hard up for cash enters a green card marriage with a Russian woman and soon discovers she has taken off and left him with her five-year-old son, Kolya. Act One ends as the two of them are alone together, the most mismatched pair imaginable. They don't even speak each other's language.
What propels Act Two, of course, is how these opposites comically attract. Each conflict and confrontation actually becomes a means by which Louka, the Czech cellist (played with wonderful verve by the screenwriter, Zdenek Sverak), and Kolya (Andrej Chalimon) come closer together. Once more, no fancy sets, no special effects, no cast of thousands. Simply attention to comic detail, witty but realistic dialogue and fine acting. Humor and pathos abound as Louka becomes a father and Kolya begins to feel he belongs. We laugh as Louka attempts to carry out a seduction in his Prague apartment while Kolya is around, but near the end of Act Two many cry through their laughter as Kolya shows he misses his mother by using the flexible shower nozzle as a telephone, sitting in the tub and carrying out an imaginary conversation with her in Russian.
In many ways this cross-cultural story would be enough for a modest comedy. But Kolya offers a much richer texture and series of implications, given that the two cultures are Russian and Czech just before the fall of communist regimes in 1989. The film works fine without the audience knowing Czech history. But for those who do have even a little background, the film is even more impressive. The Russians were deeply resented and hated in Czechoslovakia, for in 1968 the Russian army was sent in to squash what was called the Prague Spring, a time of amazing artistic and political liberalism when the Czech people felt they were creating a new form of "socialism with a human face."
Kolya thus pushes the envelope of Central European comedy by making Kolya, the Russian boy, the cutest kid around and by suggesting a happy family formed by these two seemingly opposite cultures who come to love and understand one another for who they are. Such a theme and story could easily fall prey to sentimentality. But Jan Sverak as director and his father as actor-scriptwriter have managed that delicate balance that only the best comic writers and filmmakers can achieve.
The conclusion ties the personal and social stories together. Communism falls, and both Kolya and the Russian troops must depart. Thus the kind of mixed ending we often find in European films. But does this qualify as a comedy if Kolya is gone? In fact it does, for we have several triumphs. On the larger level, the Czech people are now free to live their own lives. But on Louka's part, he is ready to do what he has never done before: commit to his old girlfriend, Klara, who, though still married to another man, is now pregnant with Louka's child. And there is more: Louka has been banned from the symphony orchestra for years for political reasons never explained, but he is now reinstated and playing with his old comrades once more.
And Kolya? He is returning with his mother to Germany, her new home and Kolya's too. The closing image is the same as the first, but now we understand it: the clouds floating by are seen from a plane, and the voice is that of Kolya humming a tune he has learned from Louka. Though they are apart, this "father and son" have embraced each other, forever.
France
Warm Romantic Farce, from Renoir to Tati and Truffaut
Take note: Hollywood in the past dozen years has discovered there is quite a pile of money in remaking French comedies. French filmmakers, producers and comedians are not thrilled with this fact, but a fact it remains. Edouard Molinaro's La Cage aux Folles (1978) was for years the highest-grossing French film ever, a memorable stage farce turned into a film about a gay couple trying to act straight for the sake of a son returning home with his fiancee. As remade in Hollywood by Mike Nichols with an Elaine May script, The Birdcage made beaucoup more millions, with Robin Williams, Gene Hackman and Nathan Lane breathing Englishlanguage laughter into this farce. Similarly, Coline Serreau's Three Men and a Cradle (1985), whose popular plot concept is captured in the title, went on to be an even bigger moneymaker in English in Leonard Nimoy's remake, Three Men and a Baby (1987), with Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson. My point to you as a comic writer is not to rush into the local art cinema to figure out which French comedy to rip off, for Hollywood will continue to do so with predictable results. But I do wish to suggest the strength of the long French comic tradition and the need for a writer of comedy to be familiar with it.
Chaplin, for instance, always said his primary mentor in screen comedy was the French silent comedian Max Linder, who worked in France and the States from 1909 till his death in 1925 (Thomson, 27). Thus France has contributed to screen comedy at least as far back as American comics began making ten-minute comedies.
Since sound films became the norm in the early 193os, however, a major trend in French comedy has been warm romantic farce. First, we mention jean Renoir (the son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir), who is im portant to film history as a champion of "poetic realism," a blending of lyricism with a realistic approach to photography and acting. Renoir's best-known work is Rules of the Game (1939), which combines farce, tenderness and satire on the eve of World War II as Renoir, playing a major part in the cast as well, sharply etches a portrait of the decaying upper classes of France endlessly playing "games" in a country estate. At one point an aristocrat yells out to his butler, "Stop the farce!" The butler replies, "Which one?" Renoir's approach includes a strong hint of a long theatrical tradition of comedy and satire stretching back to Moliere and on through the bedroom farces of Pierre Marivaux and Pierre de Beaumarchais, as well as deep focus and camera movement that emphasizes the reality of the moment, the scene, the characters.
Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) is Renoir and French romantic farce at their very best. Starring the wonderful French character actor Michel Simon, Renoir's affable social satire traces the story of a French tramp, Boudu (Simon), who is saved from drowning by a middle-class book dealer who feels he is doing a good deed by also offering Boudu a room in his home. Boudu, on the other hand, is not only not grateful ("what right did you have to save my life?") but proceeds to cause complete chaos in the book dealer's home, proving to be both a bull in a china shop and a carnivalesque seducer of the wife and the maid.
The comic writing lesson is clear: use a simple story (a literal fish-out-ofwater set-up), mixing social classes, and adding a satire of middle-class values without becoming preachy or overdone, wrapping all in a joyous sense of healthy physical and emotional pleasure.
Renoir also handles the balance of sex and emotion well. Boudu is a rogue tramp but he is totally unpretentious, unlike the bourgeois society he has fallen into. His seductions are, in fact, no seductions at all. The wife and maid are willing partners who enjoy his humor, stories, energy, joy of life. Let's not call this love, but what they share is open and honest affection, and Renoir and Simon bring this to glorious life on the screen.
The ending could not be more perfect. Renoir closes the circle with a boating scene on a river that looks very much like a cinematic version of one of his father's Impressionist paintings. But Boudu's boat overturns. As the family is caught up in the confusion of saving themselves, Boudu floats happily downriver and thus out of their lives. He picks up a jacket from a scarecrow in a nearby field and, like Chaplin's tramp, goes down the road of life again. Being Boudu, however, he is not the unhappy outsider; rather, he is quite clearly thrilled to be on his own once more. Yes, Chaplin was influenced by French farce, and here the wink and influence come full circle as Renoir and Boudu echo Chaplin. Note also that Boudu can be seen as referencing an earlier happy French production that borrows from Chaplin: Rene Clair's A Nous, la Liberte! (For Us, Liberty!, 1931).
Jacques Tati stands alone among modern comic filmmakers as someone who successfully mastered the art of silent American comedy, especially Buster Keaton, in post-World War II cinema. There is much to be learned about the power of physical comedy from watching Tati's Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958) and Play Time
(1967). Tati was, in terms of my introduction to this study, an exploded mime! As a comic actor/performer, he wrote, produced and directed himself in his comedies, developing the bumbling but affable Mr. Hulot, a tall angular fellow, part holy fool, part scarecrow, part gentleman, part outsider to the goings-on of everyday life, much in the Chaplin tramp mode.
Tati is an anarchist, not a romantic, but an anarchist with a warm heart and gentle laughter rather than belly laughs and guffaws. Like a good mime, he can make any event from playing tennis (Mr. Hulot's Holiday) to walking into a modern office, restaurant, airport or hotel (Play Time) seem fascinating, drawn out and ridiculous. As Kristin Thomson and David Bordwell note, "Tati blurs the boundary between performance and the comedy of everyday life" (511).
Francois Truffaut's comic touch is very much in the same tradition. There is a warmth and wry acceptance of the joys and shortcomings of male-female relationships in which, as in Shakespeare and the American screwball tradition, the men usually seem more foolish and hopelessly romantic, while the women appear more rooted to reality and more able to cope with life's frustrations. Add to this Truffaut's status as one of the most important members of the so-called French New Wave and you have a filmmaker who is able to gain a lot of laughs out of jokes built around references either to previous films or to film language itself. In Shoot the Piano Player (1960), a criminal swears to another character, "If I am telling a lie, may my dear old mother drop dead," and we cut to an insert shot of an old woman clutching her heart, standing up, and keeling over.