The Artist review

 

Believe the hype, Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist is both utterly gorgeous and a perfect antidote to the winter blues

You can pin it on baby Jesus or mistletoe-bothering Pagans if you like, but we all know the real function of Christmas (in this hemisphere at least) is to distract us from the otherwise inevitable onslaught of depression provoked by long nights, short days, and weather so bleak we’re forced to seek solace in Iceland prawn rings and Morecambe and Wise.

This year though, a different kind of midwinter candle has arrived to light our way: Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. It’s a film so joyous, so cheering, and so well-crafted that its end-of-December release date makes perfect sense. Here in time to buoy our spirits in the cold winter months and shepherd cinema audiences through to the New Year, The Artist does everything Christmas advertises itself as doing without making us fatter or poorer. It is both a tonic and a marvel.

The Artist reunites French director Michel Hazanavicius with actor Jean Dujardin, the lead in his OSS 117 period spy comedies. Hazanavicius’ wife, the enormously charismatic Bérénice Bejo, stars alongside Dujardin, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Missi Pyle, Beth Grant, and the sparkiest on-screen canine since Eddie in Frasier, Uggie the dog.

Set in 1927, The Artist tells the story of George Valentin [Dujardin], a hugely popular silent film star whose career is side lined by the advent of the talkies. Whilst Valentin’s star falls, that of fresh faced Peppy Miller [Bejo], an actress given a leg-up in her journey to success by Valentin, rises.

Thematically, The Artist is a comedy drama about romantic love, male pride, and the vagaries of fame staged against a technically masterful homage to silent cinema. Almost entirely without dialogue but with a gorgeous and descriptive score by another habitual Hazanavicius collaborator, Ludovic Bource, the film handles sound and silence so cleverly its wordlessness never feels like a gimmick.

We’re introduced to Valentin at the top of his game, the hero in a series of action capers set across Europe, as adept at stealing the limelight from his co-stars as he is at courting his public. After a chance encounter with unknown would-be actress Miller, the couple’s stories are woven together as Valentin attempts unsuccessfully to withstand the arrival of sound on film, while Miller makes her name in the talkies.

While The Artist’s plot elements are familiar – a plucky parvenu, a star down on his luck, the inexorable march of progress, a love story, a rescue – it stages them with such charm and knowing humour that the resulting film is one of pure, escapist enjoyment.

In terms of comedy, Hazanavicius uses enough irony alongside the prat falling to keep modern audiences interested without turning The Artist into a coolly detached - or worse, a twee - parody of silent cinema.

The film isn’t oblivious to its extraordinary position as a modern black and white silent film, and cleverly illustrates the threat sound represents to Valentin in a self-referentially modern nightmarish scene. It pokes gentle fun at its muteness a number of times, at one point using intertitles to show Valentin’s wife uttering the ominous words “we have to talk” and berating her husband for his unwillingness to speak.

The lead performances are joyfully good, and the love story between Dujardin and Bejo both convincing and full of old-fashioned glamour. The cleverly choreographed scene in which the pair fall in love over a series of takes is so elegantly played and directed it’s difficult for the audience not to be as utterly undone by the pair as they are by one another.

Silent film buffs aside, many of us won’t have experienced this kind of artistry outside of the beautiful storytelling seen in the speechless intros to Pixar’s Up and Wall-E. Its technical rarity is reason enough to seek it out, but that’s far from The Artist’s only attraction.

A delightful way to spend 100 minutes, and an effective antidote to winter's chill, The Artist is an old-fashioned cinematic treat. Indulge yourself.