Last Movie Watched

[David]

Le Carrosse d'or (1953)
(The Golden Coach)
dir. Jean Renoir

I spent the afternoon with Magnani & her troupe of actors in the New World. I first saw "Carrosse" (see my Top 10 Movies list) on campus in college. The print was in bad shape but I was under its spell from the beginning: the artifice is constructed -- literally & figuratively -- when the actors arrive at the inn & see a dusty old courtyard populated by livestock, but transform it into a "proper" stage. In this movie, propriety is actually a function of the needs & lineaments of art & of theater. At first, Magnani wants the golden coach to carry her out of the exhausting microcosm of the actors; money is hard to come by, & the lure of the gold necklace & coach is powerful to the artist. Camilla believes that she's beneath the courtiers not only in social rank but in interest; but what I think Renoir is saying is that these creators of theater, in their ability to construct artifice with such color & panache, are far more absorbing than their audience (who are stupid enough to turn their backs on the stage in order to applaud the bullfighter as he strolls in). (The movie is doubly ironic, because several of the performances of the actors playing the philistines -- some of the nobles as well as Magnani's mundane lover Philippe -- are monotonous & unsatisfactory.)

At the end, Camilla is confronted with the "truth" of her art: the gold & the lovers & the scramble for rank & favor are immaterial to the artist, diversions that prevent her from practicing her true calling, which is -- again ironically -- her only hope of happiness. Everybody knows Magnani is great in this movie. It's as if she had two or three different performances going on simultaneously, sometimes within the space of a few lines, as if the movement in her face had its own dialog going, playing themes on the actual dialog, the way the Vivaldi themes emphasize & variegate the action.