The Black and White Sound of Silence

Rating: 7/10 (9 January 2012)

What's amazing to me – something I would never have guessed – is how positive the reception is for 'The Artist'. It isn't just a black and white film. It's also a silent film. Those are two of its achievements. A third one is there's nothing to tell this apart from any of the films from the dawn of the last Century. It is a perfect simulacrum of the films it aspires to imitate.
Truthfully, I wasn't blown away, just as I wasn't blown away by the other films I've seen from the 1920s ('Metropolis', 'Battleship Potemkin', 'Nosferatu'), the age into which 'The Artist' could easily camouflage itself. But I did enjoy myself and I did feel for the central character.
The story is this. George Valentin (no doubt a play on Rudolph Valentino, the real-life silent film star), played by Jean Dujardin, is Hollywood's ace actor. Audiences love him, though not quite as much as he loves himself. While promoting a film, Valentin falls for a fan, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo). He embraces her and they pose for photographs and she revels in the attention. She goes on to audition for a bit-part, wins it, and becomes a sensation – not an overnight one, but her name gradually appears higher up credit lists.
Valentin is shown what his studio believes is a breakthrough: 'talkies'. He laughs wryly when he hears the sound of words in film for the first time. He genuinely regards it as a gimmick. People come to the movies for him and nothing else, he says. Little does he realise that sound would signal the end of silence.
The manipulation of sound is the single most impressive aspect of 'The Artist'. After witnessing his first 'talkie', Valentin has a revelation. He has lived in a world where sound was redundant, and when he hears the world, it's loud. Director Michel Hazanavicius makes this point by not allowing us to hear Valentin's voice.
Hazanavicius is clever in another way. He uses visual metaphors to convey the points in the story. The one I loved comes when Miller has confirmed herself as star and Valentin a fading one. They meet on a stairwell in their studio. The camera pans back to a long shot, allowing the whole stairwell to fill the screen, making it look like a sort of dollhouse. Miller ascends the stairs, Valentin descends them; one goes up, one goes down; one rises, one falls.
Further in the story, Valentin's continued refusal to acknowledge sound causes him to fall out with the suits (led by John Goodman, who is very good as a mute considering he is famous for his voice), highlighting the message that stars have and will always be the studios' playthings. Valentin decides to use what pull he has left to become a director and a producer.
But he does so in vain. Talkies didn't only signal the end of silent films, they also heralded the demise of the old stars associated with them. New blood, crucially new young blood, would introduce the sound revolution. Valentin loses everything: his wife (a lovelorn Penelope Ann Miller), his fame, his bankability. As if that wasn't enough, the stock market crash swipes his wealth, too. All Valentin can do is drink and rue his situation. He becomes a living relic.
Miller provides succour to Valentin, not because she owes him her career, but because she sees a helpless soul who needs the touch of angel to be reborn. Miller offers a solution, which is delightfully ironic: the musical. Valentin regains all that he lost, but now stars in a genre which was itself a new movement in motion pictures. And so we have a wonderful riches to rags – and back to riches again – story.
I saw the film with what I perceived to be an audience with an average age of fifty. I mention that for a reason. The critics are going nuts for this because many of them will be old enough to remember watching nothing but B&W as children. Roger Ebert, the best-known – and I think best – film critic wrote lovingly and with erudition about B&W.
I'm of the view, however, that the question of a film's value isn't one concerning the head, but the heart. So I think Ebert's intellectualisation of the merits of B&W versus colour, although compelling, is redundant. It's a childhood thing. What your eyes laid upon for the very first time, what one grows up with, is the thing one will most love.
'The Artist' isn't the start (or re-start) of a silent or B&W renaissance. We've moved on from those styles. 'The people are never wrong' says John Goodman's character. 'The Artist' is like its lead character: nostalgic for a bygone age.
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