Elevator to the Gallows (1958) review
Jeanne Moreau walking in the rain in Louie Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
A beautifully deluded Jeanne Moreau struts and frets her night hours about the flaring streets of Paris and their neon-lit corner cafes to the sound of Miles Davis' trumpet in search of one Julien. Where is he? Stuck. The elevator. The ill-fated pair, who had hoped to escape murder (her rich arms dealer husband) and buy their freedom with it, suddenly sees itself ensnared in a string of bad luck, accumulating errors into the night, an endless night at that, which all but severs their love and kills their chances of a happy murder-after. Julien and Florence, their plans spiraling out of control in one single night of jazz and claustrophobia, set the tone to Louie Malle's Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, 1958).
A black cat bodes no good after a murder and Julien forgets evidence and has to return to the crime scene (while carelessly leaving the keys in the car, which is robbed). On his way back to retrieve compromising evidence he gets caught in the toils of modern engineering's intricate functionalities: the building's electricity is turned off and he gets stuck in the elevator. Unlucky Julien proceeds, in a scattered series of marvelous shots reminiscent of Bresson, to reenact man's eternal struggle for survival–– only not against nature, but technology and its coffin-esque tendencies.
Florence, free as a dame in Paris, waiting her killer boy at a cafe, sees Julien's car driving by Boulevard Haussmann with a young girl riding shotgun: she misunderstands the goings-on — the hereafter of a murder is definitely not for amateurs— and thinks the worse: there was no murder, Julien got cold feet and flew the coup with the flower shop girl. But she can't be sure, of course. And as it is common knowledge in love, doubt triggers madness, and she storms into the night, endeavoring in most sublime and sullen antics.
With a sudden nostalgie de la boue, she wantonly becomes official mad girl about town, salaciously lovesick, stepping this way and that, in and out cafes, mumbling words of lost love to the sidewalks only, searching all over for Julien, rained down and pell-mell, mingling Paris and chagrin in a strange kind of beauty. Why the despair and the dizzy eyes?, one might wonder. Wouldn't it be reasonable to bide her time and see what happens? But reason has nothing to do with it. Her desperation is matched only by the hastiness of her logic. She immediately assumes Julien's betrayal, that is, she expects the worse for that's the currency she trades in.
French-style madness and eroticism.
This is film noir. And Florence so thinks and acts for so she must: Elevator to the Gallows is rather conscious about being a film noir: it is as if her character has seen so many double-crossings in films in situations like these that she cannot expect anything different, say, a misfortunate stuck elevator. That won't do, no: she badly needs a reason to indulge in some night reverie. And so she wends her way, and we're all the better for it: accompanied by Miles Davis' somber tunes and Parisian lights, Jeanne Moureau's jaw-dropping night walk is captured with rare discretion by Louis Malle's camera, conveying one of cinema's, or any art, most formidable combination of elegance and decay. These scenes are erotically charged and overflow with sensation: one ought only to sit back, watch and listen, without thinking nor interpreting.
Miles Davis' improvised score, an epitome of cool and arguably the greatest film score ever recorded, crowns this late fifties French masterpiece not only as precursor to the Nouvelle Vague and foremost homage to the genre the French first recognized, but also as an eternal exemplar of finesse and taste. Once the film gives up on Miles – the third act – it loses its gas. A brief, hurried criminal procedure ensues in the following morning and Lino Ventura, the French go-to guy when they need a reliable cop on the screen, solves all the crimes and mismeetings. Miles' trompette returns only at the very end, and again it summons greatness: we see for the first and only time in the film Florence and Julien together, as photographs reveal their bloody ways: the end of the line for the ill-starred couple bound to be apart by all things in heaven and earth.
Elevator to the Gallows aims at showing. It cares little about meaning: it thrives on its surface – sound, light and moving pictures. It's a purely aesthetic work, then, for it's all about faces (especially Jeanne Moreau's), places and their interstices (for instance, the insides of an elevator), and, of course, Miles Davis' modal jazz. It is not an artistic hieroglyph waiting to be deciphered nor a box concealing a secret meaning. Susan Sontag claimed that art criticism needed to substitute hermeneutics for an erotics of art. This referred to the critic’s approach to the work. Louie Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows assumes this attitude for art itself and gives us not form and content, style and substance, inside and outside, but just a surface–– everything appears as it is: lavish, simple and misguided.
