... (Review of The Artist)

Reviewing The Artist is a tricky thing. As a film geek, and someone who would quite like to make the jump to full-fledged film critic, this should be my favourite thing ever. It's a throwback to classic cinema, a silent film about silent films. It looks like a silent film, from the lighting used and the softness of the image, to the 1:33:1 aspect ratio used in that era. Even the soundtrack is uncanny, a constant orchestral accompaniment with no diegetic noises. Indeed, The Artist is very, very good. But I may end up further cementing myself into the amateur critic circle because I don't think it's the critical darling everyone else seems to think it is.

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At the premiere of his latest rousing romp of a motion picture, silent film star and media darling George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) bumps into a young woman who stumbles into him trying to get her purse. This is Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), an aspiring actress who later makes the front page with Valentin, and whose burdening friendship with him leads to her rising in the industry. Two years later, films with synchronised sound  ("talkies") are the new thing, and Miller is Hollywoodland's new gal about town. Valentin insists sound is just a fad, even sinking his finances into a new silent film he personally directs, but his pet project has the misfortune to open against Miller's, and the greater misfortune of opening during the stock market crash.

If all of this sounds familiar to you, then congratulations, because you too saw Singin' in the Rain. The Artist isn't trying to be anything new, though, so I can't judge it too harshly for that - it's an unashamedly nostalgic throwback to classic cinema, right down to the inclusion of music from Hitchcock's Vertigo (which some people weren't happy about). The whole "rise of the talkies" thing doesn't serve any purpose other than a plot device - we go from Valentin laughing at a sound test to his studio's boss (John Goodman) announcing the end of silent films in about ten minutes. Singin' spent time establishing the difficulties the new medium faced, and while this is an incongruous detail, consider how many people have raged against 3D. Audiences know a new paradigm shift doesn't happen so smoothly.

I should also mention the film does sag towards the end after Valentin goes bankrupt and hits the earth faster than a seagull made of brick and just spends slightly too long watching him mope about...but frankly, who cares? This is the only time the film really loses momentum and everything up to that is a blast to watch that certainly left me smiling. It admittedly takes a little while to adjust your parameters, but The Artist is a thoroughly charming flick. The two leads are instantly likeable - Dujardin as Valentin is cocky, charismatic and in possession of a million-watt smile that's simultaneously beaming and a kind of mask he uses to disguise his own sadness. 

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Both he and Bejo have wonderfully expressive faces and body language that's absolutely perfect for the film. In one scene, Valentine walks into a near-empty screening of his film, just as his character sinks into quicksand; the expressions on his and Miller's faces, a sort of quiet recognition and gentle sadness respectively, is downright heartbreaking. It's interesting in a metatextual sense how, in The Artist, pride is placed on being able to hear the actors, while today the inverse is true - performers are singled out for their physicality, the ability to convey emotion without saying a word. Drama students everywhere probably know what I mean by this, and a more recent example would be Andy Serkis winning praise for his role as simian revolutionary leader Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, whose speaking parts are limited to grunts and about four words in English (and quite rightly).

Director Michel Hazanavicius gets some clever use out of the silent film gimmick. On a technical level, the film is a French production with the two main actors being French, but with almost every other actor being American or British. It's a truly international element, and without spoken dialogue, these players can all interact without a language barrier. Diegetic sound - that is, sound effects, the ones that exist in the film's world rather than the score - is used occasionally, and it's always to great effect. Following his guffawing dismissal of sound as "just a fad", Valentin has a nightmare where everything emits sound but him; a bottle clanks down on the table, the wind blows, objects scatter across the floor, but Valentin can only scream in silent. Even the intertitles are used in a similar way, but saying anything about that would give too much away.

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So we have a great cast, great production values, great soundtrack that combines an upbeat orchestra with toe-tapping Cab Calloway-style jazz, great use of the format and possibly the most adorable dog ever used in motion picture history. Why, then, am I not swooning over this like every other critic in the world? Maybe it's because I haven't seen much of early cinema or early Hollywood, so the homage probably doesn't enamour me to that degree, but the shortcomings are obvious. The plot's thin and borrowed wholesale from other films; the characters are only just fleshed-out enough to be more than two-dimensional; and after a giddy and breathless first half, The Artist starts spinning its wheels and tries to come up with new ways to show how far Valentin has fallen. There's serious Oscar buzz surrounding this, with talks of a Best Picture nomination virtually unheard of for a non-American production (with the intertitles in English, The Artist doesn't qualify for Best Foreign Language Film), and I don't think it deserves it. All it's doing is homaging an old style of film, so why don't they give an Oscar to Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse? That's doing the same thing (although it doesn't play with the format the same way The Artist does, admittedly), only The Artist is homaging Hollywood melodrama, the "respectable" form of cinema.

Really, it's a dessert of a film. It's not particularly substantial, but it's light and delicious and gives you a needed burst of energy.

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Just go see it!