It's a day in the life of the Cirque Medrano clown, Beby.
Jean-Pierre Melviille's first movie as director would seem to be a documentary short, showing the routine of a clown and his partner. It an odd choice for a director whose movies showed men under great stress, living by their own rough, confused and sometimes self-destructive codes of behavior. Yet it is in his actions that we see how the artist creates his art. It's composed of memories of other great clowns, and the set routines of his life off the stage. Together, in the hours before their show, Beby and his partner sit at a cafe and watch life go by them, arguing over how to distill the ordinary life before them into something for their audience: something grander, something more heartfelt, something funnier.
Is this not what Melville himself tried to do in his films? With his moral gangsters and would-be-moral flics, with his fantasy images of Manhattan and failed boxers, was he not doing the same?
The movie is shot wild, except when Beby is on stage. There's an uncredited narrator, a man in a trenchcoat and hat following the movie's subject: the stand-in for the creator of this film, trying to understand his subject by observing his actions. He thinks he understands Beby. Does he? Is the clown simply a distorted image of the director?
Jean-Pierre Melviille's first movie as director would seem to be a documentary short, showing the routine of a clown and his partner. It an odd choice for a director whose movies showed men under great stress, living by their own rough, confused and sometimes self-destructive codes of behavior. Yet it is in his actions that we see how the artist creates his art. It's composed of memories of other great clowns, and the set routines of his life off the stage. Together, in the hours before their show, Beby and his partner sit at a cafe and watch life go by them, arguing over how to distill the ordinary life before them into something for their audience: something grander, something more heartfelt, something funnier.
Is this not what Melville himself tried to do in his films? With his moral gangsters and would-be-moral flics, with his fantasy images of Manhattan and failed boxers, was he not doing the same?
The movie is shot wild, except when Beby is on stage. There's an uncredited narrator, a man in a trenchcoat and hat following the movie's subject: the stand-in for the creator of this film, trying to understand his subject by observing his actions. He thinks he understands Beby. Does he? Is the clown simply a distorted image of the director?