The Artist: Valentin's hubris or pure pragmatism?

Rating: 8/10 (11 January 2012)

This film's plot seems to follow a familiar tragic pattern of foolish pride leading eventually to recognition and redemption. The pride would have to do with Valentin's old-fashioned and, it would seem, aesthetically-based disdain for talkies, just as Peppy's scorn for the mugging that goes on in silent films derives from a more progressive take on the future of cinema.
But the protagonist is a kind of Anglo-French hybrid. Described in the trailer voice-over as the anglicised 'George Valentine', in the cast list he is the intermediate George Valentin, and this seems but a minor displacement from Georges Valentin, a completely French name. And of course he is played by one Jean Dujardin.
The only words he utters, in the final dance scene, are a heavily-accented 'With pleasure', and with such mangled pronunciation he evidently IS French, and at a potential disadvantage. Which leads one to ask the question: 'Did he despise the talkies, or did he fear that they would be the death of him, as soon as he opened his mouth?' Certainly actors like Emil Jannings and Heinrich George beat a hasty retreat from Hollywood at the time, and indeed were in no hurry to return there from Germany even during the rise of Nazism in the thirties. Nor had the time yet arrived when Maurice Chevalier's English accent would be deemed cute.
Hence Valentin's heroic efforts to turn back the clock with Tears of Love can be seen as a reasoned attempt to reassert the primacy of the one of the two genres in which, because of his palpable foreignness, he could continue to reign supreme.