** THE ACCOMPANIST
(Worth seeing) Directed by Claude Miller Written by Miller and Luc Beraud
Alternately, one can view The Accompanist as the latest of the disparate films by Claude Miller, its director and cowriter. Miller started out promisingly as an assistant to some key French filmmakers during the 60s, including Robert Bresson (Au Hasard Balthazar), Jacques Demy (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort), and Jean-Luc Godard (Weekend). He then served as production manager or production supervisor on Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her and La Chinoise and no less than seven Francois Truffaut features, from Stolen Kisses to The Story of Adele H. But Miller’s own early features reflect neither Truffaut’s style nor his vision, only his sort of material: Le Meilleur Façon de Marcher (The Best Way to Walk, 1975) is a story about little boys at summer camp and Dites-lui que Je l’Aime (This Sweet Sickness, 1977) is an adaptation of an American-style thriller. Moreover, what seemed personal and peculiar to Miller in these two films—characters with a troubled relationship to masculinity expressed through violence—is completely absent from Miller’s most recent features, The Little Thief and The Accompanist. The Little Thief (1988), Miller’s revision of an old Truffaut project, consciously evokes certain aspects of Truffaut’s style and vision, but only the calculating, crowd-pleasing, and affirmative aspects; Truffaut’s morbid and obsessional qualities are absent. And The Accompanist, apart from faintly calling to mind Truffaut’s hokey The Last Metro (1980), which is also set in Paris during the German occupation, shows little to link it with either The Little Thief or Miller’s early features. So to call The Accompanist a “Claude Miller film” is scarcely to describe it at all.
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The Accompanist is adapted from a novel of the same title by Nina Berberova that’s quite popular in Europe but less known here. I gather that the novel is mainly set in Saint Petersburg in the mid-30s, while the movie is mainly set in Paris during World War II. According to Miller, the movie was inspired by the novel “in the same way a musician is influenced by someone else’s tune in order to develop his own style of sound. The book gave me the basic root for the story, then provided the freedom to embellish and turn it into my own piece of work.”
The central problem, I suspect, is the specter of the novel in relation to the script, which is neither wholly confronted nor circumvented. My nominee for the worst screenplay adaptation last year is Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s script for The Remains of the Day, the nadir of which occurs when the Nazi sympathies of a British aristocrat (James Fox) are spelled out by (1) his silently reading from an anti-Semitic book while his off-screen voice recites the text and (2) his looking up from the book and ordering a Jewish servant fired. While the handling of motivation in The Accompanist never quite reaches such a primitive level, it reflects a similar mistrust of dramatization combined with a comparable compulsion to tell an audience exactly what to think.
