The Clockmaker

The lonely, simple life of Michel Descombes (Philippe Noiret), a clockmaker who lost his wife years ago, changes when hears that his grown-up son murdered a man and is on the run with his girlfriend. Michel is shocked and questions his upbringing, while a nice police inspector (Jean Rochefort) shows much sympathy for him.

Tavernier's shining debut and co-operation with New Wave veterans Aurenche and Bost brings a novel by Simenon on screen. It's a work of old-fashioned concision that the mechanic of the title would have been more than proud of. It is more a psychological study than a crime drama, because there is next to no outer plot. The happenings are taking place in the head of Michel, the father, masterly played by Philippe Noiret, who suddenly gets confronted with the serious actions of his son. He becomes aware of how little he knows about him, although they used to be together all the time. The focus is less on the murderer nor on the victim, but more on what the catastrophe means for the father of the committer, in a powerful work of authenticity.

The star of this film is the city of Lyons, which looks absolutely magnificent. The problem with the film is that it rambles along until the son is finally captured and tried, and is reconciled with his father. The father doesn't seem to know what's going on at the start or how he feels about his son, before eventually deciding that he wants him to escape. But the film just seems to drift from one encounter to another, with the policeman, with his friend, with the press, with his son's girlfriend's workmates, with the woman who helped bring his son up. Perhaps the director is trying to show what it's like to be waiting for news in such a situation and the sense of not being able to do anything about it. Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort are both excellent in portraying sympathetic characters. The son and girlfriend are also portrayed as sympathetic - although we are never explicitly told why they committed the murder, their victim is shown to have been a nasty piece of work. The almost documentary style is in contrast to the cinematic style of other Simenon adaptations such as "Monsieur Hire" and "The Hatter's Ghost". No intrusive music as in "Monsieur Hire" for example.

"The Clockmaker" is a minor classic... so great, in fact, that nobody seems to know what to do with it. Why? Perhaps it doesn't fit neatly enough into the crime genre. The first shots are provocative: A child looks out from a train at a burning car. As the opening titles hit the screen, the music crescendoes. We know something bad has just happened; we brace ourselves for the violence to come. The cinematography here has the hard-hitting feel of exposé cinema (e.g., Costa-Gavras' `Z'.) As if leaving its promise unfulfilled, however, this is the film's most dramatic moment. The only violence, as it were, has occurred before the action director Bertrand Tavernier shows us. Much like its principal characters, we are left to contemplate what happened and WHY it took place.

The story is simple enough. Monsieur Decombes, a clockmaker, is interrupted at work by the local police. They inform him that his abandoned car was found by the side of the road, left there by Bernard, his son. Would he accompany them to go see it? Under this pretext, they bring him to the station, where he meets a mysteriously evasive Inspector Guilboud. They return to the vehicle together. Only then does the inspector confront him with the awful truth: Bernard and his girlfriend have killed a man. Decombes is shocked. How could his boy have done it? Throughout the rest of the film, he struggles to understand this hideous crime and his relationship with Bernard, ultimately left with more questions than answers.

Mainstream moviegoers find "The Clockmaker" boring and anticlimactic. They're used to seeing crime flicks with action and plot twists. Here, they know the identity of the murderer from the start, they never see a dead body or an exciting arrest, and 90% of the focus is on the criminal's father. What they're left with is an hour and a half of wayward wanderings... of "character development." What could be more pedestrian? One almost gets the sense that this was the very reason that Tavernier chose to bring Georges Simenon's book to the screen: It's structure is a full inversion of what audiences are used to. This is a point that deserves to be revisited later, as it has a great deal to do with the deeper meanings of this work.

While it won the Prix Louis Delluc, `The Clockmaker' has never been taken seriously by arthouse snobs either. They call its direction `heavy-handed.' They note the over-the-top performances of Philippe Noiret and Jacques Denis (not to mention Yves Afonso. runner-up to Alain Delon in the "too-cool-for-words" competition.) Oddly, they call it `commercial'... a conventional social melodrama. And while it isn't Hollywood melodrama of the Douglas Sirk or Nicholas Ray varieties, there is some validity in this assertion. The definition of `melodrama' describes the film well: `A composition. intended to exhibit a picture of human life, or to depict a series of grave or humorous actions of more than ordinary interest, tending toward some striking result.' And the point of the film is all-too-obvious: Love isn't clockwork.

I've heard `The Clockmaker' compared to many films, including those of the French New Wave that preceded it. Is there any similarity, though, between Tavernier's work and such melodramas as. say. Godard's `Vivre sa vie' or Truffaut's `The Soft Skin'? There isn't. Some have suggested that the film was the model for `The Sweet Hereafter', in that both deal with isolation and the loss of children. Yet, where Egoyan's film is politically neutral to the point of nihilism, `The Clockmaker' outlines a specific set of social conditions that made murder an inevitability. The factory watchman is the avatar for all social-climbing capitalists. abusing his authority toward lecherous ends. Liliane, Bernard's girlfriend, is the powerless victim. Whether or not Bernard pulled the trigger is immaterial. In effect, society has handed him the gun, cocked and loaded.

Personally, I find the film more similar to the work of the New German Cinema. particularly Fassbinder's `Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven.' Both films begin just after murders have been committed. Both films spotlight those who are left behind to deal with loved ones' unspeakable acts. Both films give us radicals and reactionaries, each determined to use the protagonists' woes to political advantage. Ultimately, `The Clockmaker' is the more profound work of the two. It is a true `slice of life' and not the stagy drama that `Mütter Küsters' is. Starting from a conservative stance in its opening scene, in which Decombes and his friends discuss the merits of capital punishment, it turns out to be a liberal piece. Its point, as I see it, is not merely that 'violence begets violence.' True love, in Tavernier's paradigm, comes not from hearing but from listening. not from validation but from understanding. not from making things run like clockwork but from accepting the bumps in the road as part of the journey.

Tavernier's treatment of Simenon takes us back to the veterans time,all those who made great adaptations just before the nouvelle vague and even during its heyday:"la mort de Belle" ,Edouard Molinaro's most perfect flick was made in 1963,at about the same time as François Truffault's "la peau douce",whose Simenon adaptation would be forgotten if it were not Truffault .

Molinaro's "la mort de Belle" and Henry Decoin's "les inconnus dans la maison"have a lot in common with "l'horloger de Saint-Paul;all these works deal with incommunicability,between people of the same family.For instance,in "les inconnus dans la maison" ,a fallen alcoholic lawyer does not care about his daughter anymore and one day very bad things happen;in "la mort de Belle" a high school teacher sees his life torn apart when he's a suspect when a young girl dies and even his wife who thinks she knows him well has her doubts .

Tavernier's first movie was not that much innovative -as works to come would be- as derivative.However ,it's a very commendable work,because of Philippe Noiret's sensational portrayal of a peaceful man ,who is confronted with tragedy when his son kills a b.... .Tavernier's science of pacing a movie already shines:the son only appears in the last quarter of the movie and during at least 15 minutes,the only words he says to dad are "bonjour papa" ;little by little,we feel that father and son stand together ,but they do not try to strike back ,to find alibis ,to avoid the punishment.In a grand gesture,Tavernier does not even film the trial!A terse comment lets us know about the sentence.The characters -the father ,the son and even the girlfriend (Christine Pascal)the b... raped - remain opaque,their motives remain obscure Liliane ,the son's lover has not a single line to say.We will never know why the son and the father were estranged -the scene with the boy's old nanny remains vague.During the last scenes looks matter more than words and when they start talking again,the son concludes: -and what a place(a noisy visiting room) for the first conversation in years!- "we can hear ourselves if we really want to!" Unlike Tavernier's follow-up "le juge et l'assassin" which was Tavernier's first perfect work,"l'horloger de Saint-Paul' does not avoid some post-68 clichés that were poisoning the French cinema of the seventies:the bedroom full of "revolutionary " posters,the bad cops-the conversation with detective Jean Rochefort in the train- ,the all-things -political which the hero fortunately refuse .

It's minor quibble.Considering all the important movies Tavernier would produce in the wake of 'l'horloger" ,it's almost even irrelevant.No other director has shown so many qualities in the last thirty years.

The Clockmaker is a technically well-crafted precision endeavor in direction, writing, and acting. Director Bertrand Tavernier fashions a subtle, conservative character study asserted into the framework of a crime story, a study of an aging, middle-class clockmaker with a downcast disposition, played, or rather inhabited, by Philippe Noiret. This commonplace man is stunned out of his sluggishness when he finds out that his only son has been arrested for murder.

What is poignant about this story, and what improves the usually dormant drama of a crime film, is that Noiret lives quietly, alone with his son, who is almost grown up. In other words, his son is his whole tranquil life. Yet, when a detective played by mulishly tenacious Jean Rochefort asks him for help with the case, Noiret grasps how little he knows about his son, and struggles with his feeling that he is unable to blame him.

The film opens on Noiret having a night out, when his friends crack wise on the elections, the leftists, a protest rally, and the death penalty. He has fun this night. The next day two policemen come to his shop and rummage around his adjoining apartment. They particularly search his son's room before taking him to the police station where Rochefort tells him his son is wanted for murder of a security guard at the place where his girlfriend was fired, and has not been apprehended. There was even an eyewitness.

Tavernier puts Noiret's character through a motley crew of odd dramatic angles aside from just the press, who are of course just interested in ratings, but also tangents to the main thread of the film like right-wing hooligans who vandalize his window and two girls who confirm how vile the murdered guard was to women. The skillful essence of the film is in the abstractness of it, giving us impressions of how much his relationship with his son means to him, and how bewildered he is that he has no idea what to do to help his son, such as in his transit back home from the precinct and can't stand without feeling ill and has to ask a passenger for his seat.

The film is not hard-hitting enough to be great, but it serves its locale with an authentic atmosphere. The story itself, no matter how well it poignantly portrays a world in miniature, is nevertheless very slight. On the whole, The Clockmaker is a dramatic exercise. As many other French films from the 1960s and '70s were, it is less about telling the story and more about technique. It doesn't compare to the boisterousness and self-consciousness of most of the New Wave films of that time, and in fact is a particularly subtle film. It is essentially a film that says of film-making, "Yes, less is more."