Louder than words.

Rating: 8/10 (9 August 2014)

A one-off sheer delight for anyone with a love and appreciation of cinematic history and good old-fashioned clean entertainment. Set-up as a tribute to the days of the silent movies, it does so cleverly, lovingly and imaginatively.
Beautifully shot in monochrome with many scenes worthy of pause, it's superbly edited using old-style dissolves for the transitions. The plot happily evokes so any vintage Hollywood classics, most obviously "Singin' In The Rain" and "A Star Is Born" but there are references to "Sunset Boulevard", "The Lost Weekend", "Lassie", "Swing Time", "Citizen Kane" and probably many others too. The score also is sympathetic to the action, drawing in themes from classic soundtrack, most notably Hitchcock's composer Bernard Herrmann but there's much more to the film than just playing "spot the origin".
Some of the scenes are just so cleverly staged and written, like Valentin and Peppy's meeting on the stairs with a cast of extras in constant motion around them, the irony of a silent-film star who can't speak to his wife, Valentin's nightmare in sound, I could go on and on.
I really liked the two French lead actors, previously unknown to me. Juan Dujardin as the male lead, George Valentin, an action-hero matinée idol with the athleticism of Douglas Fairbanks Sr, the stubbornness against the talkies of auteurs Chaplin and Keating with a smile as wide as Gene Kelly. With his ever-faithful mutt at his side, his fall from grace is precipitated by his failing marriage then exacerbated by his ostrich-like dismissal of the arrival of the talkies before he is ruined by the stock-market crash the same year. Too proud to accept help from anyone, especially the young female protégé whose career he launches, he falls down a long way before finding redemption at the very end.
Berenice Bejo as Peppy is a delight as the new "It-Girl", who makes the most of her lucky break but never forgets the man who gave her it. I personally could have done without the presence in the background of familiar faces John Goodman as the cigar-chomping producer and James Cromwell as Valentin's faithful butler which isn't however to denigrate their performances in any way.
Thoroughly deserving of all its awards, sure it helps if you're a Golden Age Hollywood fan but as a refreshing balm to latter-day Hollywood's predilection for loud super-hero, car- chasing so-called blockbusters, "The Artist" really is a veritable oasis in the desert.