In one of Jean-Luc Godard’s last interviews, three years before his death by assisted suicide, the acerbic auteur revised the conventional understanding of the French New Wave by removing one major member, Claude Chabrol, whom he accused of being a sellout, and replacing him with a less well known director, Jacques Rozier, who was, he claimed, “the Nouvelle Vague all alone.” Many French accounts of the New Wave, while rightly retaining Chabrol, concur with Godard’s opinion of Rozier and accord him a preeminent place in the movement and in their national cinema in general. Contrarily, two of the three standard English-language studies of the New Wave relegate him to a single footnote, and the third has only half a dozen cursory mentions of his debut feature, Adieu Philippine (1962), which it finally dismisses as “meandering.”
Last year’s retrospective of Rozier’s five features and assorted shorts, some previously unavailable outside France and most in new restorations—all of which are now streaming on the Criterion Channel—offered an opportunity to appraise his achievement. Was Rozier the revelatory and crucial missing link of the French New Wave, a genius shamefully ignored by North American critics and film distributors, as some commentators insisted, or did he deserve the obscurity he has long endured in our provincial film culture? Given his erratic career, punctuated by long hiatuses and abounding in uncompleted, delayed, and jinxed projects—his filmography teems with the abject terms inachevé and non tourné (unfinished and unmade)—the final verdict remains inconclusive. The vaunting acclaim the retrospective elicited seems largely unwarranted, though in several brilliant sequences scattered throughout his work, the unruly Rozier achieved an impulsive kind of mastery.
Godard’s advocacy for Rozier extended over more than six decades, from the time he launched the neophyte’s career with a review that proclaimed his second short film, Blue Jeans (1958), “the freshest, childishly pure, youthful and pleasing film of our bland and terribly serious times” and called it “as fresh, young, and handsome as those twenty-year-olds Rimbaud spoke about,” referring, one assumes, to the poem “The Sisters of Charity.” (Godard also repeatedly paid homage to Rozier in his later films, including an extensive clip from Blue Jeans in his final feature film, The Image Book, 2018.) Set at the seaside, as most of Rozier’s later films would be, Blue Jeans features two feckless young men who cruise the Croisette in Cannes on Vespas, hunting for a pair of girls to take to the beach and, more urgently, to have sex with, because “in the age of the atom bomb,” nothing matters but momentary pleasure.
Blue Jeans may have struck Godard as guileless and charming at the time, and it works hard to maintain its larky tone, but the pickup artists’ attempts at flirtation now look like harassment as they pursue various women with obnoxious resolve. (They are especially disappointed that the mauve shirt worn by one of them fails to act as an amatory magnet.) In the film’s finale, the boys shrug off their sexual frustration by playing pinball, the requisite pastime of subsequent New Wave cinema. Rozier’s method of casting his leads established a cardinal element of his improvisatory approach: the use of nonprofessional actors chosen “off the street” or through newspaper advertisements for their authenticity, a strategy he imported from Italian neorealist films and to which he adhered even when he was eventually offered major stars.
After the immense success of Godard’s Breathless (1960), the film’s producer, Georges de Beauregard, asked him which emerging auteurs he should fund next and was urged to support both Jacques Demy, who hoped to make Lola (1961), and Rozier’s Adieu Philippine. In the first of many disagreements, Rozier rebuffed Beauregard’s suggestion that he cast Jean-Paul Belmondo, still under contract after Breathless, in the lead role of a young television technician awaiting his draft notice for the Algerian War. (Adieu intended to bait French censors with its initial text, “1960 sixth year of the war in Algeria.”) Rozier chose instead to continue “under the sign of Italian Neorealism” by hiring young people with no acting experience—the film’s credits boast that the three lead performers appear “for the first time on the screen”—for their look, comportment, and life experiences, with an emphasis on veracity. “I like things to happen and evolve on the screen,” he said, and his scripts were more sketch than blueprint, open to accident and improvisation, and revised on the fly according to his actors’ natures, desires, and availability. (More than once he was forced to quickly rewrite when one of them suddenly departed from a shoot.)
Rozier worked in television throughout his career, on everything from pop fashion shows to portraits of Jeanne Moreau and the baritone Gérard Souzay, and he employed his early experience in the medium to create the protagonist of Adieu, Michel, a young “cableman” assigned to ensure that television cameras move unimpeded by the cables that snake across the studio floor. At an air show early in the film, Michel asks one of the two teenage women he is romancing to inspect the life line on his palm, a portent of his possible death in the Algerian conflict. Fired after he blunders into a live transmission on national television, Michel lights out for Corsica, one of Rozier’s inevitable marine settings, followed by the two women, but their Club Med vacation is cut short when his draft call finally arrives. “Michel’s not the marching type,” one of his girlfriends observes, and the farewell that concludes Adieu, consisting of protracted documentary shots of his boat leaving for Marseilles, shadows the ending with a sense of imminent mortality.
Inspired by Breathless, Rozier made a feature so intently New Wave–ish in its technique—the incorporation of documentary, the use of direct sound and handheld camera, street shooting with curious passersby gawking into the camera, jump cuts, soft image wipes, staccato editing, and abrupt fade-outs—and in its tone, a Rimbaudian exaltation of youth, that it appears to be both archetype and parody of the movement. Originally conceived as what Rozier called a “frivolous” musical comedy whose title, Kiss Us Tonight, evoked the popular cinema of the 1930s that he admired and wished to emulate, Adieu Philippine caused him what he later described as “black panic, major stress, a little like piloting a Boeing.”
Adieu frustrated and then infuriated the formerly generous Beauregard, who insisted that Rozier adhere to their contract, which required that the film be no longer than two hours—the director wanted half an hour more—and summoned the veteran auteur Jean-Pierre Melville, whom Rozier suspected of being jealous of young filmmakers, to suggest cuts. After its release was delayed by problems with the soundtrack, Beauregard more or less abandoned Adieu, telling everyone it was “worthless,” and was astonished when critics and directors such as Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut joined Godard in judging it a masterpiece.
As it turned out, Beauregard had justifiable concerns about the length and waywardness of Adieu. Rozier’s freewheeling approach produced the thrilling sequence in which the two women stroll through Paris in a series of interlaced long shots and the allusive one in which a conscript returned from the Algerian War joins Michel’s family for lunch and quietly avoids any discussion of his military experience. But too frequently it resulted in longueurs and lapses, as in the plotline involving the corrupt film director Pachala, who stiffs Michel and the women on their wages before decamping to Corsica to shoot a photo-roman. The trio pursues the cartoonish Pachala to absurd lengths before Rozier, baffled or distracted, simply drops the character.
The critic Roger Greenspun praised Adieu Philippine in The New York Times as “surely one of the loveliest of all New Wave films” when it was belatedly released in North America a decade after it was made, and he professed to have seen it on at least six occasions, “mostly [for] personal pleasure.” Having endured the film’s countless sequences of teenage bickering and its wearying digressions half as many times as the forbearing Greenspun, I can best express my reaction with the phrase that echoes throughout Adieu: “J’en ai marre!” (I’ve had enough!).
Rozier next made three of his best films—best because they are brief and disciplined. The shorts Le Parti des choses: Bardot et Godard and Paparazzi were both shot in 1963 on the set of Godard’s Contempt, to which he was granted full access by his idol and champion. Claiming that Brigitte Bardot is “the most photographed woman in the world,” the latter film, an ambivalent portrait of the shutterbugs who lurk “under the blazing sun and among the thorns” on the rocky slopes of Capri to capture shots of her splayed naked on the roof of the Casa Malaparte or playing with a tiny dog, features a virtuosic rapid-fire montage of more than eighty magazine covers of Bardot that lasts close to a minute.
Rozier was then commissioned to make one of the first documentaries in the important television series Cinéastes de notre temps and, again revealing his fondness for films of the 1930s, chose for his subject the short-lived and ill-fated anarchist auteur Jean Vigo, revered by the directors of the New Wave. Tautly edited in what has been called a “choral montage” and unbearably poignant, Rozier’s portrait of the sickly Vigo, whose entire filmography runs to less than three hours and whose two masterpieces, Zero for Conduct (1933) and L’Atalante (1934), were, respectively, banned by French censors and butchered by the film’s studio, was not included in the Lincoln Center retrospective but is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Vigo’s influence is readily apparent in Rozier’s first short film, Rentrée des classes (1956), which looks back to Zero for Conduct in its celebration of juvenile rebellion against academic authority, and the legacy of L’Atalante, set on a canal barge plying the Seine, is discernible in Rozier’s maritime excursions in Near Orouët (1971) and The Castaways of Turtle Island (1976). Rozier later claimed that when he set out to make the documentary, Vigo’s work was limited to cine-club screenings even in his home country, but the television broadcast of Jean Vigo revived his renown.
Rozier shared many affinities with his fellow director Jean Eustache,* including a fondness for French popular culture of yesteryear, admiration for the talky Provençal comedies of Marcel Pagnol—whom they both idealized—and a taste for the similarly loquacious cinema of Sacha Guitry. They also shared an outsider status with the Cahiers du cinéma clique and an immense talent for self-sabotage, which may account for the many abandoned projects in Rozier’s career, including a film about a Mexican bandit, a thriller about a model kidnapped in Sardinia, and Nono Nénesse (1976), a hideously misconceived burlesque recounting the antics of three babies, played by adult men in infantile attire cavorting in gargantuan sets that make them look tiny. (The Criterion Channel offers the extant thirty-eight minutes of that blessedly unfinished film.)
Each director made his longest film after the upheavals of May 1968—Rozier’s Near Orouët and Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973)—both shot on grainy 16mm and dealing with the romantic entanglements of a ménage à trois. There the similarities end. Whore delivers a caustic account of post-’68 disillusionment and despair filmed in the garrets and cafés of Paris, while Orouët sets its affable comedy of amorous misunderstanding in a coastal villa, where the recent turmoil is evoked only as a post-revolt desire to hang out and have fun. Eustache aims for philosophical magnitude, Rozier for quotidian pleasure. (Orouët is punctuated by intertitles documenting the date and time of its daily events.)
No film can surpass Rohmer’s sublime The Green Ray (1986) as a record of the French obsession with summer vacations—choosing the right destination, the most sympa companions, the ideal accommodation—but Near Orouët proves to be a worthy precursor. As in all of Rozier’s first four features, it begins in Paris and then embarks on a journey to the sea. An office manager, overhearing the vacation plans of a clerk he is smitten with, contrives to coincidentally turn up in the seaside village in the Vendée where the young woman shares a villa with two friends. After attempting to insinuate his way into their turreted abode, he is forced to camp out in the yard, where the trio wakens him on his first morning with a blast of drum and trumpet before collapsing his tent on his head and ensnaring him in shrimp nets, the first of many such humiliations. When a sporty hunk later appears on the beach, complete with sailboat, the already vexed atmosphere flares with jealousy and suspicion.
The opening hour of Orouët is largely a female buddy film depicting the women’s first days at the villa, during which Rozier’s casual way with incident and duration quickly turns tiresome. Building his film on the nature of his actors as if it were a documentary, he dedicates several prolix sequences to the trio’s howling amusement at things unfunny—a grandmother’s pair of clogs, a sticky meal of pastries, a shrimping expedition. Rozier also resorts to that stalest trope of faux-joyous cinema, kite flying, and, battening on to a sport he evidently relishes, extends two sequences of sailing long past the point of interest.
Just when the exuberance threatens to become exhausting, the film shifts register. Set in mid-September, Orouët conjures an aura of off-season desuetude. The girlfriends frequent a waffle stand run by an unhappy woman that is about to go out of business; visit a casino to discover it has long been defunct, its lopsided sign pointing to the sky; and stroll an empty, windblown beach. The increasingly morose tone prepares for the film’s coda, in which the vacationers return disconsolate to their everyday lives.
The summit of Rozier’s cinema, Near Orouët confirms his gift for choosing nonprofessional actors. He cajoled a bland schoolteacher, Bernard Menez, into taking the role of the manager, imperious in his office but pitiable outside. With a lanky body made for mishap and a look of alarmed bafflement, Menez would have befitted Jacques Tati’s abstract universe. As the lovelorn intruder, he expertly manages the transition from desolate masochism to impotent rage after he is rejected as both boyfriend and chef. (The hilarious sequence in which he tipsily prepares an elaborate eel stew while quaffing Gros Plant reflects Rozier’s own penchant for preparing seafood dishes and selecting the ideal wine to accompany them.) Like Eustache, Rozier often aggravated off-set situations to secure results onscreen. Aware that Menez was fed up with the mockery and indignities he suffered from the three actresses, Rozier manipulated his resentment to provoke his character’s shocking explosion of pottery-shattering fury before he decamps to Paris and resumes his lordly position at the office.
When Rozier finally welcomed professional actors into his cinema, his taste skewed surprisingly commercial. For The Castaways of Turtle Island, he hired Pierre Richard, a popular comic actor, to play a renegade travel agent whose name, Jean-Arthur Bonaventure, contains a typical New Wave joke. French critics discern a reference to Rimbaud in his first names, but more likely it is an homage to that ur-actress of screwball comedy, Jean Arthur, from Rozier’s favorite period of Hollywood cinema. In any case the character’s surname could not be more ironic, given that he co-invents a travel package that offers the worst adventure imaginable: a Robinson Crusoe tour for 5,000 francs, “nothing included,” that strands vacationers on an uninhabited Caribbean island to fend for themselves, long before Survivor.
Castaways probably had its inception in one of Rozier’s failed projects, Winch (1970–1971), in which a Mediterranean cruise goes disastrously awry. (Jeanne Moreau suggested Gérard Depardieu to play the skipper, after Rozier had settled on an introverted Canadian.) Rozier’s funniest film, Castaways sporadically recalls Tati’s droll appraisal of modern life, especially when Bonaventure becomes transfixed by a chandelier at a business luncheon, the scene’s eccentric humor amplified by the precise editing.
After a decade-long hiatus during which he made documentaries and advertisements for television, Rozier resumed his filmmaking career with Maine-Océan Express (1986), produced by the esteemed art house stalwart Paulo Branco, who was more attuned to his methods than any of his other funders. Branco joked that Rozier wanted to control every aspect of the production, a tendency the director frequently admitted to. Maine-Océan Express reveals the humanist influence of Jean Renoir, for whom Rozier once worked as an assistant and whose A Day in the Country (1946) he counted as one of his three “desert island movies.” Linguistic misunderstanding prevails in this anarchic ensemble comedy in which a French lawyer, a Brazilian nightclub dancer, two railway conductors, a Mexican impresario, and a volatile sailor assemble at a seaside port. Their various flights of maritime patois, bureaucratic jargon, and legal rhetoric create a clamorous counterpoint to the film’s copious music making. (Every Rozier film feels like it longs to be a musical.) Rozier may have intended the multinational group to represent a workers’ utopia, recalling Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), but if so, it is an idyll haunted by duplicity and violence.
The reward for the film’s meager charms and escalating cacophony comes at the very end, in a long voyage from the coast back toward the city that reverses the usual Rozierian itinerary. One of the hapless conductors (played by Menez), who thinks he might be the next Maurice Chevalier, is desperate to get ashore as he travels in a relay of boats confronting ever shallower water. When he finally makes landfall, fluent tracking shots chart his scurrying along the beach. The image eventually dissolves into abstraction, the milky light of early winter morning sorting the horizontal bands of water, sand, and sky into a bleached triptych—a painterly composition unlike anything else in Rozier’s work.
When one of the funders from FR3 television disdained the finished film and, echoing Georges de Beauregard on his first feature, insisted on the contractual length of two hours, Rozier threatened to delete an entire reel rather than submit a final edit and jokingly left to chance whether it would be the third or the fourth. After Maine-Océan Express concluded, Branco predicted that it would be another decade before the director’s next film would appear. Fifteen years later Rozier’s final work, Fifi Martingale (2001), confounded all expectations by taking place in Paris, in the stultifying confines of a theater and a casino, with nary a whiff of ocean air, though the director could not stay away from water; the casino is next to a suburban lake. Ostensibly a satire inspired by Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis (1945), about a playwright who suddenly decides to revise his successful boulevard comedy, thereby throwing the production into chaos—was Rozier mocking his own impromptu methods?—Fifi initially ran into financial trouble because the government funders required “a true scenario” rather than the usual Rozier sketch.
In Jacques Rozier: Le Funambule, a collection of laudatory essays Cahiers du cinéma produced in 2001 to coincide with a Rozier retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, one critic characterizes the twee Fifi as “Dantean, ferocious, savage,” while another claims that “infinitely deceptive and moving, Fifi is to Rozier what Le Diable, probablement is to Bresson: an inexorable extinguishing of light.” To compare Bresson’s bleak masterpiece about ecocide, drug addiction, and loss of faith to Rozier’s flaccid farce seems perverse in the extreme. Dubbed le funambule—the tightrope walker—in admiration of his risk-taking career, Rozier finally looked down in his last high-wire act and fell.
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