My Rating : 8/10
Bresson's first venture as director was a medium-length comedy with nods to René Clair and Jean Vigo called ''Les affaires publiques''.
Bresson later admitted that he did have a fondness for it and it's failure prevented him from making other films.
Of all the lost films in cinema history's phantom filmography, the 'lostest', so to speak, at least ex aequo with the complete Greed, has always been Robert Bresson's Les Affaires publiques. All one knew was its title (which has turned out to be inaccurate), its date of registration (1934), its running time (approximately twenty minutes) and - most startlingly in view of the director's subsequent reputation - the fact that it was a comedy. Indeed, Bresson himself referred to it, with perhaps more than a soupçon of poker-faced malice, as 'like Buster Keaton, only much, much worse.'
Well, Les Affaires publiques has been found - a real achievement considering that the title on the can of film was Le Chancelier (The Chancellor) while that on the print itself was Beby inauguré (Beby Inaugurates). The can was chanced on by a group of film historians rummaging through the chaotically stacked archives of the Cinémathèque Française.
What, one asks, does a burlesque comedy by Robert Bresson actually look like? The answer: A circus with a plot; a piece of filmic doggerel; a cartoon with live actors - and like a cartoon activated exclusively by energy. For all that there is frankly nothing in Beby inauguré quite as memorable as the fact and the circumstances of its belated rediscovery, it is not just a curiosity, to be savoured solely for its rarity; and if scarcely the revelation that might have been hoped, it is very much better, funnier than Bresson's self-contradictory description had led one to fear.
As for the plot, if that is the correct word, it is indescribable, being nothing more than a sequence of gags centred on two adjacent republics, Crogandia and Miremia (shades of Duck Soup), a Miremian aviatrix whose monoplane crashes on Crogandian soil, the solemn inauguration of a statue by the frock-coated Crogandian Chancellor (Beby), and the no less solemn and no less snag-infested launching of a ship. Actually, despite glimmerings of Duck Soup, The Navigator (in the semi-choreographed animation of inanimate objects) and Million Dollar Legs (in the quaint surreality of the situation), Bresson's maybe insufficiently anarchic sense of humour comes closest to the human puppetry of Clair's Le Dernier Milliardaire. That said, there are, amid some stillborn bubbles of wit, a small cluster of absolute knockout jokes.
