(1957)

Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Ivan Petrovich, Lino Ventura; dir: Louis Malle

There are markers all over Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud of the peculiar position France found itself in postwar. They are abundant in the dialogue but, appropriately, also function at a deeper structural level (very French!).

None of which diminishes Ascenseur ’s enduring impact as a thriller. The plot twist is beautifully noir in its irony and yes, Hitchcockian, in the sense of ‘exchanging murders’, a la Strangers On A Train (1951). There are audible gasps from the audience as the narrative’s machinery is (literally) set in motion. The look of the film is also central to its thriller credentials, being sensuously nocturnal – you can feel the chill of night in every frame. Longtime noir cinematographer (and Jean-Pierre Melville veteran) Henri Decae portrays the city environments through an almost gauzey palette of greytones that heighten the urban romanticism of Ascenseur.

Post-Occupation consciousness [perhaps by 1957 this was so distant as to constitute a malaise?] is explicitly etched in references to French military adventurism in Algeria and Indochine (Vietnam to you) and the comparative merits of combat heroics versus munitions profiteering.

World War II’s hangover appears strongly in the character of a middle-aged German tourist. He gets in the sharpest dig, when he looks approvingly at the iced bottles of French champagne and observes, "I’m glad we didn’t drink it all during the war" (!).

The real key to unlocking the meaning behind Ascenseur is movement, or the lack thereof in some characters. Representing an adult generation of postwar Francais, off whom the military references resonate, Moreau’s Mme. Carala prowls aimlessly, pointlessly through the night as if sleepwalking in a sepulchral trance, while Ronet’s Tavernier (an in-joke, Bernard?) is simply trapped. She’s haunted, he’s immobilised.

By contrast the kids, futilely adopting American pop culture and romantic clichés, enjoy all the movement on offer, not to mention the quasi-cinematic existence which Ascenseur copiously essays. In the Chevy, shot from in-car on the expressway, it’s like they (and the audience) are seeing America in the cinema – it’s virtually like being at a drive-in!

In fact the mise-en-scene (the general cinematic environment of the film) is very American, especially the ‘modern’ motel, all cubes for housing cars and humans with plain, unarticulated walls and surfaces. At this central setting in the film the cinematic tropes continue, with the German (Petrovich) coming across more like a Batman (he even resembles Michael Caine’s character in Batman Begins [2005]). He’s strangely omniscient, wry and completely unafraid, but with an undertow of menace just below the surface. That his ride is the stylish but completely bonkers Mercedes gullwing coupe, whose doors open up like bat wings at key moments in the film, strengthens this dissonant perception. (This is a cultural context where it’s particularly interesting that the superhero manqué should be an ersatz Nazi… ).

Finally, amongst this kaleidoscope of referents there’s Romeo and Juliet as the young couple naïvely, ludicrously settle in to accept their ‘fate’, in a little Parisian apartment presaging Godard’s Breathless, a film which knew more than thing or two about romanticism. The key distinction is that Malle ridicules these young people; unlike Godard, he trivialises their banal self-absorption, rather than elevating and celebrating it.

The only real misstep in Ascenseur is its determination to reconcile all the plot strands, which it ends up over-reconciling. Underlining this, the preponderance of music (by Miles Davis, bien sur) in the first half shows that the mysteries of the first half are where this film’s soul is at. Its central ironies would have remain strengthened if Malle had left it at ‘swapped murders’, with their associated punishments: now that would have been Hitchcockian. Here no one wins, no matter what their generation.

- Roger Westcombe