Angele
With Orane Demazis, Fernandel,
Directed by Betty Thomas
Michael McKean, Christine Taylor,
But even though I’m not an expert on Pagnol or Angele (1934)–commonly regarded as his greatest film, playing this Saturday in a beautiful new 35-millimeter print during Facets Multimedia’s long-overdue Pagnol retrospective–or on The Brady Bunch Movie, still playing commercially all over town, these very different films offer fruitful comparisons. Released 61 years apart, they are both highly popular populist entertainments about the way a particular group of people in a particular closed environment live and behave, and together they provide a good many clues about how popular entertainment has changed during those six decades. Furthermore, it’s curious that The Brady Bunch Movie–a product of my own culture and time and in my native language–strikes me as an esoteric object, an artifact from another planet, while Angele–made in an unfamiliar language about an unfamiliar period and culture–communicates to me fully and directly. Obviously this won’t be everyone’s experience, but I can’t believe that my feeling is unique either. To organize my thoughts about movies that are at once so similar and so different, I’ve grouped my impressions in three categories.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Nationality/regionalism. In most people’s minds, Angele will be as quintessentially French as The Brady Bunch Movie is quintessentially American, but in each this essence is framed and communicated very differently. In the 50s the late Andre Bazin noted that “together with La Fontaine, Cocteau, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Pagnol completes the average American’s ideal French Academy,” and even recently four French movies based on Pagnol material (Jean de Florette, Manon of the Springs, My Father’s Glory, and My Mother’s Castle) have been enormously successful. But as Bazin went on to say, “Pagnol paradoxically owes his international reputation above all to the regionalism of his work.” The local feeling of Pagnol films–chiefly set in Provence and steeped in the precise details of life in southern France–is what makes them seem so French.
The Brady Bunch Movie has its own regional qualities, though whether the “region” is southern California or American television is worth pondering. At the beginning the movie takes great pains to establish the setting as contemporary Hollywood, but once we’re reintroduced to the Bradys and their peculiarly insulated 70s world, the sense of an actual physical location becomes increasingly attenuated. Since most of the comedy is based on the premise that the original Brady family have been preserved as if in formaldehyde while the fashions, folkways, and assumptions of the world around them have radically changed, the movie takes great care to reproduce the look and feel of the original show, minus the laugh tracks and all the original actors: interiors and exteriors alike are as overlit as Bavarian beer commercials, and even the show’s flip-flopping transitions between sequences are revived.
