Monpti

 Monpti, released in English as Love from Paris, is an ingenious and brilliantly directed romantic comedy.  Shot in luminous Bavaria Studios Agfacolor, the movie is opulently beautiful, cleverly edited, and, as befits a movie set in Paris, lavishly "painterly."  This picture confirms my belief that the director, Helmut Kaeutner, was one of the most gifted and distinctive film-makers working in the era from World War Two to the mid-sixties. I've seen three of his pictures, Monpti, Der Grosse Freiheit nr. 8, and Schwarze Kies (Black Gravel) and all of these pictures are extremely interesting and engaging.  Kaeutner was, apparently, very versatile -- Monpti is a melancholy romantic comedy, Der Grosse Freiheit nr 8 is a sort of poetic musical featuring the iconic Hans Albers (made in 1943 under bombardment in Hamburg) and Schwarze Kies is a savage, politically incisive film noir.  Of these three pictures, Monpti is the least important, but it is still fantastically well-crafted and very moving; the picture is also stylish and brash, a vibrant combination of wacky, cartoonish comedy familiar to Americans from the films directed by Frank Tashlin mingled with sequences in the style of Douglas Sirk's literate, elegiac technicolor melodramas. Kaeutner was highly cultured, cosmopolitan, and, also, had characteristics in common with Max Ophuls (although Kaeutner's mise-en-scene is much less showy than the Austrian's gliding aerial camerawork) -- it's not every romantic comedy that closes with a quotation from George Santyana.  The German new wave directors, with the exception of Hans-Juergen Syberberg who cast Kaeutner, who was also an accomplished actor, in his film Karl May (1974), didn't admit to much affinity with Kaeutner who was certainly the most gifted German filmmaker working between 1940 and 1965, possibly because several of his most important works were made under the aegis of Joseph Goebbels during the Hitler period.  But this is unfair; Kaeutner didn't make propaganda and his later films show that he can compete quite comfortably with someone like Fassbinder when it comes to perverse eroticism, political satire and cynicism (see Black Gravel for proof of this proposition.)  

Montpi is a very slight film, almost without a plot, and, because of its slender premise, the movie seems a bit too long -- it's 96 minutes and, probably, should be about fifteen minutes shorter. Kaeutner's intrusive direction, with an exceeding porous fourth wall, also demands the viewer's attention -- there's more here than there initially seems to be in terms of narrative -- and, so, the movie is a bit exhausting.  Kaeutner is a stereotypical German director -- he has everything worked out in complex detail and makes everything fit together according to his predetermined blueprint for the film -- it's an instance of German engineering.  In the opening scene, a rather sinister-looking drunk (or possibly someone with cerebral palsy) knocks over a fruit stand -- oranges fall to the ground.  Later, the female protagonist, Anne-Claire, buys three oranges at another open air market.  At the end of the movie, the dying Anne-Claire asks her boyfriend, the titular Monpti (for mon petite) to bring to her hospital bed an orange.  When Monpti sees that her bed in the crowded hospital ward is empty, his fingers go numb and he drops the orange on the floor.  This gesture is both symbolic and indicative of the young man's character -- he's clumsy and always dropping things; after all, for 85 minutes or so of its length the movie is a comedy with slapstick elements.  The movie is visually ornate -- images impose a secondary order of meaning on the film; consider, for instance, an undercurrent of menace in the movie:  the picture begins with an aerial crane shot of a car crash; in some scenes, vehicles careen toward the characters in a menacing way; when Monpti accidentally breaks a glass window in a door, horrifying lance-shaped shards of glass hang in the frame; later, in a dream sequence, Monpti slams his girlfriend against a mirror (he's being threatened by a pimp with a switchblade) and, again, we see ghastly shards of glass framing the girl.  Monpti lives in a picturesque artist's garret with a deep airshaft opening into a little courtyard and terraces below -- on several occasions, the hero leans forcefully against the frail guardrails on his terrace (they are about two feet tall) and, even, leans back over the precipice.  At any point, the film's imagery suggests, the story can come off the rails and someone might be horribly injured.  The movie is also decorated by supporting characters who have symbolic portent -- there's an American cleaning lady, a Black woman named Zaza, who represents the temptations of the flesh -- she lurks around Monpti's picturesquely squalid apartment singing the Blues, while dressed in a skin-tight, somewhat reptilian dress (it doesn't seem to well suited for maid duties); she tries to seduce Monpti, although a bit unenthusiastically, and is sleeping with the concierge in the hotel building where the hero lives.(We get glimpses of other people's love lives in the hotel building; the movie is drenched in sex.)  When Zaza is singing, she's accompanied by apparently non-diegetic banjo strumming, but, in a witty camera movement, we see that, in fact, an African-American man is sitting on a balcony below Monpti's apartment playing the banjo -- the film is full of effects of this sort that comment in a witty way on the action or that just ornament the rather slender narrative line.

The plot, such as it is, involves a Hungarian 22-year old artist living in Paris.  The boy is not really a serious painter but rather seems to live by producing ribald cartoons featuring naked women.  (His work is like the cartoons that you used to see in upscale men's magazines.)  The young man (Horst Bucholz) is more or less nameless for most of the movie, that's why I'm calling him "Monpti" although late in film we learn that his name is Istvan Vaszary.  (The movie is based on a novel by Gabor von Vaszary originally written in Hungarian.)  One day, the boy meets a beautiful girl in the Luxembourg Gardens.  The girl (played by the 18-year old Romy Schneider) claims to be a heiress to a great fortune, someone who shouldn't be fraternizing with penniless Hungarian emigrants.  But the girl, Anne-Claire, is also a liar; nothing that she says is reliable and she constantly contradicts herself -- at first, she says she's 17, then, almost 20, and, then, claims to be 19.  The boy pursues her and, after some difficulties, they begin a love affair.  However, the girl refuses to have sex with the boy, although she continuously teases him with erotic suggestions.  Probably, she is simply afraid to lose her virginity but, in any event, the plot is constructed around the girl's sexual invitations and, then, her demurrers.  (There are some startlingly erotic scenes:  in one shot, Monpti is kissing her on a grey, monumental stairway leading down to the Seine and the wind blows in such away as to expose a great expanse of her thighs.  Monpti chivalrously brushes her dress back in place, although a moment later the wind has laid her bare again.  In the background, we see a group of expressionless tramps, homeless men leaning up against the balustrade above the river.  (Paris is shown as very dirty and full of beggars.)  Ultimately, Monpti learns that the girl is as penniless as he -- she is an orphan from Le Havre, both parents killed in the war. Anne Claire pushes Monpti away and, then, tries to seduce him.  She finds some green panties in his rooms and accuses him of having sex with other women -- the panties were accidentally fished off a clothesline when the hero was starving and trying to hook a box of condensed dry milk off an adjacent garret roof.  (Anne Claire thinks that the panties belong to Zaza who, in fact, admires them and, in one scene, pretends to try them on.)  After promising to pose nude for him, Anne Claire chickens out and this leads to a quarrel.  She runs away from his hotel, gets hit by a car, and, ultimately, dies.  (She dies a virgin, so says the doctor who has examined her and her death is for the best as the physician says morosely -- she will never be able to walk "or make love" the doctor says.)  The scenes in the hospital are spectacularly shot, a symphony of whites and greys and cream colors; an image showing Anne Claire's shrouded body on a gurney next to some flowers is astonishing --  it takes your breath away.  And, indeed, most of the movie is shot in subtle pastels that mimic the palette of the great French impressionists; many of these scenes take place in a sort of luminous mist-- this is a spectacularly beautiful movie.

Three other elements require mention.  I've revealed that poor Anne Claire is hit by a car.  But it's not just any car.  The vehicle is driven by rich, spoiled courtesan who is married to someone that we never see named Boulboule.  The courtesan has two boyfriends as well -- they are a second, pompous and arrogant Monpti with whom we see her consorting and, then, another man named Jacques.  These people are polyamorous.  In one scene, the rich Monpti, after bickering with the courtesan, seems to take refuge in the arms of Jacques.  Kaeuntner constructs the film to contrast the upscale and jaded or decadent love affair between the courtesan and the other Monpti with the innocent, if heavily sexualized, romance between Anne Claire and the Hungarian cartoonist.  Kaeuntner works this out with considerable aplomb and stylistic elegance -- he carefully devises a more flamboyant and garish color scheme for the decadent lovers.  Second, there is a remarkable sequence in which the Hungarian played by the German Horst Bucholz (later famous in America for his part in The Magnificent Seven) is speaking to Anne Claire in German; she replies in broken German and French.  Kaeutner, playing the part of the world-weary boulevardier who narrates the story, says that he doesn't want his viewers to have to read subtitles but rather needs them to listen to the actors speaking in their native language -- at this point, the characters all begin to speak German; it's remarkable, witty, and a fascinating approach to the problem of a foreign language in a movie.  Kaeutner's presence in the movie is the third point worth mentioning.  He narrates the story and, in fact, appears on screen in the opening shots in which he compares a terrible car accident to a fruit cart being upset -- to the onlookers, such as us, both calamities are equal and equally forgettable.  At the end of the movie, Kaeutner appears again, smoking a cigarette at a sidewalk cafe.  he pronounces the film's moral -- Santyana's aphorism that life is inescapably lyrical, that is both comically tragic and tragically comic -- then, he drops his cigarette, snubs it out with his shoe, and the movie is over.