Viva la libertad

This is a little gem of a film that doesn't date nearly as much as you would think, considering it come from the early thirties. The masterful hand of director Rene Clair overcomes an insubstantial plot and imbues the film with some fantastic visuals, humorous satire and some good clean knockabout fun. Two prisoners escape from custody and one reaches the top of the ladder while the other clings onto the bottom rung. Clair makes his feeling about capitalism clear by showing how the worker under the capitalist is as much a prisoner as the people locked in the jail. But any political overtones are not so much that they interrupt with the comic narrative and the film merrily continues with it's chases, bottom-kicking and all manner of good-natured silliness. Highly recommended.

I profess-- I never heard of this movie nor this director till I watched it tonight. As pointed out, the film has a socialist message-- mainly a scaffolding to hang some very clever physical humor on, though it manages to fit in a few astute (likewise hysterical) observations about modern industrial society. The male leads are absolutely charming and have great chemistry. The style of the film is something in itself. The soundtrack (one of the first original ones to be used in a film) is intertwined with the action on screen, and occasionally the actors sing along with it almost as if this were a musical...but not quite. There are moments of pantomime infused with talking scenes, almost as if the director was trying figure out how to work his style for making silent films into talkies. In total, it's a bit odd-- but it works! And it's unique. And far from dated-- it gave me quite a few belly-laughs.

Emile and Louis are two jailed friends who dream of freedom and plan to escape. Louis is successful and becomes a phonograph factory tycoon, after Emile finally breaks out he seeks work at Louis' factory. Tho initially the harshness of industrialisation keeps them poles apart, they both come to realise that friendship and being honest to oneself is far more rewarding than love or any sort of financial gain.

À nous la liberté {orginaly titled Liberté chérie} is a truly biting musical satire written and directed by the considerably talented René Clair. Filmed without a script, with Clair giving his actors free licence to improvise, the picture focuses on the dehumanisation of workers at an industrial plant. Shifting as it does from prison to this monstrosity place of work, the viewer is forced to wonder just exactly which is the prison of the picture? For workers trundle in to work, punching in to a clock and sitting at a conveyor belt for hours on end, they are merely robots for this corporate machine, life is indeed desperately dull.

Clair pulls no punches in portraying everyone who doesn't work on the shop floor as greedy capitalist schemers, one sequence literally see the elite grasping for Francs strewn by the mounting storm. This wind of change also releases Emile and Louis from their respective constraints, and it's thru this change that we the viewer are rewarded with a truly uplifting ending that closes the film magnificently. The picture was a flop on its initial release, managing to offend parties from various corners of the globe, but now in this day and age the film has come to be hailed as something of a French masterpiece, coming some five years before Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times {Clair's camp even wanted to sue Chaplin for plagiarism, but Clair actually took it as a compliment}, this clearly is the template movie for industrial indictment. At times devilishly funny, at others poignantly sad, À nous la liberté is a cinematic gem that all serious film lovers should digest at least once. 9/10

It was striking watching this film shortly after having attended a very fine museum exhibit on American Precisionist painting, a style in vogue at the time this film was made. As in Precisionism, the imagery here is concerned with the industrialization of society. Every facet of social life, not just the work-place, but the school and the prison-system seems to director Rene Clair to have been turned into a factory. The film features some extremely clever editing making the connection between industrial production and the production of passive subjects of capitalism clear. The difference between Clair and the Precisionists is that most of the latter saw in industrialization a utopian promise. What few who didn't, such as George Ault , understood industrialization in apocalyptic terms. In either case, it represented for the Precisionists an absolute transformation of life from which there was no turning back. For the filmmaker's part, Clair clearly understood modernity in sinister terms, industrialization bringing about the mechanization of the subject, but his humanism made it impossible for him to see the modernist challenge to humanity as insurmountable. For Clair, human dignity could be salvaged just by forsaking the materialist temptations of capitalism for the simple pleasures of life. Exploiter and exploited could return to a loving, communal relationship by embracing poverty and freedom. Art historians have proposed that the utopianism of Precisionist art was abolished by the horrific realizations of WWII. That would, it seems to me, to apply equally to the humanist utopia of Clair's cinema.

Rene Clair's first film was the bizarre surrealist short ENTR'ACTE, which had music (and a cameo) by composer Erik Satie. Also showing up briefly in that film were two of Satie's young protégés, Darius Milhaud and George Auric.

When Clair made the talkie A NOUS LA LIBERTE, he hired Auric to do a completely original score, which was not common at the time, and a lot of the scenes were shot to recordings of the Auric music. This was only Auric's 2nd film (after Cocteau's BLOOD OF A POET) but he already shows the mastery that would lead to well over a hundred further scores.

Clair and his Oscar-nominated designer fill the screen with wonderful art deco visuals, and there's a sympathetic cast cemented by the two central characters, Louis and Emile. There are some wonderful physical comedy bits in the film (mostly in the factory), as well as the social satire which I didn't find particularly heavy-handed (although that adjective has been used by others). The fine balance of music, visuals, and comedy makes this a winner.