The Honesty of Reality

Jean-Paul Belmondo at Cannes Film Festival, 1964/Getty

When I heard of the death of Jean-Paul Belmondo today, the French actor who became an icon of the French New Wave scene, I felt the loss keenly. Every time I watched a Quentin Tarantino gangster on screen delivering a clever line of dialogue in the nineties, I would think back to the Belmondo I discovered in childhood, typified in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film classic, A Bout de Souffle. The man who played the type of meta, self-aware gangster that is endemic in pop culture today thanks in part to QT.

Move aside the Vega brothers; Belmondo felt more real to me than real. I could find Belmondo's battered face, laconic style and roguish smile in the everyman of the street, although perhaps not his charisma. I wasn't alive when he captured the imagination of French 1960s youth, but twenty years later when I first saw him, his screen presence truly felt breathless.

It also introduced me to my favourite New Wave director, Godard. Neither Godard nor Belmondo had any pretensions; Godard was a Jerry Lewis fan, Belmondo in his later years forsook arts cinema for comedy, and both knew the fallacy of believing in your own self-importance. That kind of honesty changes everything. It touches everything with a genuine sheen that protects your work from dating too quickly. Especially if you believe your work is powerful enough to influence the lives of others.

In my post "A Take on Courage" I wrote about how it's a fallacy to assert film is life. I was surprised to see how many views this post received, and how many emails came through to comment on the pretentions (and importance) of high art cinema (thanks for ignoring my wish not to email me guys). I've even rankled one by the oft repeated use of the word "pretentious" when it comes to filmmakers - but history, and many of their (far more) talented brethren, are on my side.

Godard came to be known as the enfant terrible of French cinema. He developed quite the reputation as an experimental filmmaker who had no patience for cinematic conventions, choosing to use the cinematic medium to bring the audience’s attention to the illusory nature of a film’s spectacle instead of hiding it. It was Godard’s mission to make everyone understand that "every edit is a lie". Hence the reason for his choppy edits, bringing his truth to the audience's attention. Godard tells us that even in fantasy, honesty is the best policy.

It's no wonder then, that Ingmar Bergman hated Godard's films - like a magician angry at a fellow magician for revealing the tricks of their trade. Both Bergman and Godard had the same final goal of elevating cinema to the highest of art forms - but with vastly different artistic sensibilities. It's the greatest irony that Bergman dismissed Godard's cinematic works as self-obsessed and a "fucking bore", because arguably the same could be said of Bergman today, while Godard's experiments remain fresh to modern sensibilities. Bergman's films do indeed have a rightful place in schools and museums, but like Shakespeare, Godard's films speak to the streets of today. What is real, what is honest, will always transcend language and time to remain relevant.

As such, in my post I assert that the film camera lens is not a window, but a rabbit hole. And depending on whose hands it is, a dark one. It is not like the lens of a photographer. Or the eye of the painter. Or the arena of the theatre. The manipulation of the medium is a direct manipulation of the audience. It doesn't ask you to feel, it tells you (by showing you in a combination of sight and sound) what to feel. Bergman brings you his uncomfortable obsessions wrapped in artistry, Godard reminds you there is a man behind the camera - just a man, the same as the audience. I know who I prefer to listen to, and who to watch.

Jean-Paul Belmondo: the beaten-up icon who made crime sexy

That means a filmmaker wields a lot of power, and although we're all aware of the idiom that great power brings great responsibility, the horror tales of abuse that have haunted the film industry have shown us that manipulation of the audience isn't the only bogeyman that needs to be slain on a film set. I'm not just talking about Bergman; my own personal experience of being on an (albeit very amateur) film set was so horrendenous, it had the aim (which I am sure the director had intended) of never wanting to set foot on a film set again. Please, let me be clear: We certainly weren't making anything but a Z-grade horror film, but I thought if this is the way films are made, then elevating some to high art status is just plain nonsense.

I mean, it wasn't just the unprofessionalism or disrespect to the work itself; it was the treatment of the people on the set. The director's young male "friends" appearing and disappearing willy-nilly, the horrendous way the female actors were being manipulated by the huge egos of the director and his cameraman made me wonder just what in the hell I had gotten my script and myself into. It was abuse, pure and simple. I wouldn't call it an exaggeration to say I almost stopped watching films altogether; if I knew that Leonardo da Vinci had raped or abused every single subject matter or model in his paintings and scultpures, would I be able to view them? For a while, I felt films were like that.

Although the experience is years old now, I still prefer to stick to honest, escapist fare and documentaries on my streaming devices today. Fantasy epics and documentaries use similar manipulations, but they don't profess to elevate the audience to an experience of high art - which means they just want to make you think or forget your troubles for a while, not impart some "truth" they need you to swallow hook, line and sinker, to satisfy the god-like cravings of some director. Narcissism is the biggest enemy of all things - not just art - but especially in an industry that invites so much celebrity, it's something you have to check all the time. That's why actors like Belmondo, and directors like Godard, still remain a breath of fresh air.

Likewise, the films of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas may be lowbrow, by-the-book storytelling entertainment to some (and often a little too saccharine for me), but at least it elevates the emotions merely for the time allotted, and you don't have to worry about how many humans were harmed during filming. Although I have never watched Spielberg's ET, for example, knowing that the director not only treated the child actors responsibly, but even decided to film in a linear fashion for their benefit, means that if I do decide to sit down and watch it one day, I can do so without worry.

Plus, it doesn't hurt to know that compared to their counterparts, both Spielberg and Lucas seem to be genuinely decent people. I don't think the excuse to suffer for your art, means you have to make other people suffer for your art. The real world holds enough of that, as it is. Causing pain to pay lip service (usually) to some man's skewed, pretentious version of the world isn't worth it. Not to me. And I certainly don't want to be a patron of it. Besides which, I believe the honesty of reality is too much for the screen.

There's a wonderful saying, which is that we're all fucked. We always have been and we always will be. The whole human race is fucked. Otherwise, what other reason can there be for the bloodshed and wars, century after century, if we are so smart? Our mediums of high art may remind us that we have a wonderful brain, but we've destroyed half the planet, so we can't be all that smart. Yet, it's difficult to dent our ego. Even when a little invisible virus stops us in our tracks for a while, we quickly revert to type.

Possibly that's why I prefer irreverance in my entertainment: It's not meant as disrespect to anyone, but as a kick in the pants of one's own ego. Perhaps that is what makes Belmondo's archetypal gangster and tough guy seem so brutally honest, enriched at once with cerebral, thoughtful and comic dimensions of self-awareness. In other movies, too, Belmondo shows us how to play the intellectual, without snobbery: Just because you have a mind that can think, it doesn't mean your shit doesn't stink. A perfect motto for his life, and ours.

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