Last Friday I finally got around to watching 1958's Ascenseur pour l'echafuad (Elevator to the Gallows). I first heard of the movie thirty years ago through the film score by Miles Davis. I had purchased the soundtrack on CD in a bargain bin in 1991 not even knowing the music was recorded for a movie.
Louis Malle's film is rightfully considered a classic. Beautifully filmed, evocative and troubling. The Miles Davis score is inspired. Jeanne Moreau's dazed walk through the nighttime Paris streets is iconic.
*** spoilers follow ***
Some critics didn't like the central conceit of Maurice Ronet being trapped in an elevator. It seems like an absurd scenario but I think that's the point. The machinations of illicit love affairs can lead to absurdity. All the misunderstandings and tragedies in the film come about because of a stupid and trivial every day accident. This is true of much of life.
How did Moreau not get hit by a car in her famous wandering scene? How did they film that? Much more impressive than CGI. The danger and desperation felt real as a result.
Fascinating and powerful choice to never have the lovers of the movie in a scene together. You see them talking passionately on the phone at the very beginning of the film. Then they have no contact for the duration. You never see them together until the dark room processing of the damning photos that sentence them both to prison. Not only does this build tension throughout the movie but it adds a jarring poignancy to see them happy together in a time now long gone...and in still shots. The superficiality of still photos still resonate when we see that falsity in our social media profiles. Those smiles captured in an instant hide the great turmoil that can actually be swirling in one's life.
It's also refreshing, if that's the correct word, to see that there are dumb young people in every society. We tend to think of Parisians as sophisticated and refined. Intellectual teens debating Sartre and Marx in sidewalk cafes. But there are also dumb teens in Paris who act on nothing but sheer impulse. The young shop girl and greaser hood then over dramatize their plight, as the young tend to do, by unsuccessfully taking their lives to a record playing on the turntable as if they are some kind of modern Romeo and Juliet. In reality they are just poor dumb kids doing stupid things that have no point.
Any movie that still has me thinking about it days later is worth another look. Most movies pass in and out of the transom of my mind these days. Elevator to the Gallows (and last week La Dolce Vita) have really got me thinking. And that's a good thing.
