Like many of you, I first discovered the French New Wave as a budding cinephile in high school. It was my introduction to how the world’s cinema historians structured film history as their short “waves” could represent both a shift in global culture in toto in the 1960s as well as secretly signify a “golden age” without actually using that discredited term. I’d picked up the behemoth and leviathan, The 400 Blows and Breathless, of the wave and, of course, not being familiar with all the other history surrounding these films, didn’t quite understand their influence at the time. But, having been told that the Wave was the Single Most Important Moment in film history by the wizards of the MUBI Forums (at the time called The Auteurs), I delved further — Rivette, Chabrol, Varda, further Truffaut, further Godard, Rohmer, Marker, Resnais, Demy, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Eustache, and all those increasingly pedantic arguments about who else is really included and how much the Left Bank stood contrapposto. I suspect many of your journeys are very similar, as those were the directors whose work, while usually not immediately available outside Region 2 DVDs and .avi files, was at least discussed on the more obsessed parts of online film forums. With the Criterion Channel now thankfully making available the works of Jacques Rozier, the greatest name usually left out of the New Wave lists, I decided to look at a figure whose initial influence rivals that of Godard and Truffaut but whose work is never celebrated: Jacques Doniol-Valcroze.
As one of the founding members of Cahiers du cinéma alongside André Bazin and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze served as editor of the magazine during its early days of 1951-1957 and defended François Truffaut’s famous attack on la qualité française. As his writers’ dissatisfaction with French cinema stimulated their own independent filmmaking, Doniol-Valcroze also supported them, offering his apartment for Truffaut’s first essai, Une visite, a film now legendary for also including a young Jacques Rivette and Alain Resnais in its production as well as being destroyed by an embarrassed older Truffaut. A year later, he made an appearance in one of Rivette’s first works, Le Coup du berger. He’s even considered to be the major force behind the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight, which celebrated films made with that initial nouvelle vague spirit: new filmmakers, attention to mise-en-scène, low production budgets, and a communal rather than competitive approach. Between all of these celebrated accomplishments, he made his own films. So why isn’t the work of a Cahiers co-founder being celebrated today?
Well, they just may not be very good. A key example here is his (according to the imperfect Letterboxd metric) most popular film, A Game for Six Lovers. Released in January 1960 in between the premieres of The 400 Blows and Breathless, the film treats casual infidelity as a dangerous game with winners and losers. The setup: an aristocratic family stands to inherit their recently deceased grandmother’s fortune only if they’re all gathered and end a decade-old family squabble. The American cousin Fifine (New Waver Alexandra Stewart, who was the partner of quasi-New-Waver Louis Malle) arrives to the mansion expecting her brother Jean-Paul to be not far behind, but Jean-Paul’s work partner and Fifine’s current fling Robert Godard (Jacques Riberolles, who later had a bit part in The Young Girls of Rochefort and whose character’s surname is something of a nod) shows up and, as a game, pretends to be Jean-Paul. A further game: Fifine and Robert challenge each other to “play around” with others. Robert sets his eyes on Fifine’s cousin Miléna (Françoise Brion, Doniol-Valcroze’s wife who would later star in Robbe-Grillet’s L’Immortelle) and Fifine takes the family lawyer, Miguel (Gérard Barray). The background tryst between the house’s two servants Prudence (Bernadette Lafont) and César (Michel Galabru) bounces between a concerning rape plot and broad comedy reminiscent of, say, Pepé Le Pew. These are our “six lovers” of the Anglicized title, and it ends with everyone having learned a moral lesson about the dangers of libertinism and identity fraud.
As someone who would be keenly aware of the antagonistic energy emitted by his stable of writers, it’s odd that Doniol-Valcroze would settle on a set-up akin to plays of the 18th century Comédie-Française. Rather, it’s odd that this film, despite a smattering of light nudity, plays with those themes of aristocratic buffoonery, class identity, and romantic foibles so safely. As I watched Fifine and Robert concoct their plot, I was reminded of the edgier works of Claude Chabrol and especially the sadomasochistic works of Alain Robbe-Grillet (in whose later works Doniol-Valcroze would himself play small roles), but here, the romance fizzles out and the film is all too quick to correct our voyeuristic interest in how far this game will go. Only two elements kept my interest: one, a young girl whose curiosity has made her mystically omniscient about the goings-on of the manoir, and two, a keen interest in the architecture of the house, complete with a balletic arc shot around the estate as all three couples do their due dalliance.
The inclusion of a jazz soundtrack and a title song by none other than Serge Gainsbourg (which would become a small hit in France) help keep the film feeling modern, but this is not the cinéma verité neorealism nor experimental genre play that we expect from New Wavers. Though clearly inspired by Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, it also never quite hits the dramatic or comedic highs of that film, and, though it may seem unfair to compare a director’s first feature work to the most lauded film of French cinema, it fails even as a carefree, bawdy update. A Game for Six Lovers, overshadowed by the experimental work of its peers and the grand accomplishments of its predecessors, was doomed to be merely fine.
Doniol-Valcroze’s later films would also fizzle. 1962’s Le Dénonciation is a loose pseudo-policier thriller that never hits as hard as an average American noir nor as cool as Jean-Pierre Melville’s updates to the genre. 1960’s Le cœur battant, even starring heavyweight actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, saw modest returns and polite reviews. Though he continued to make a spattering of films until his death in 1989 (his last, a TV movie called La vie en couleurs, released that same year), he also appeared in films by his friends and students: he’s one of the johns in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, stars opposite his wife in L’Immortelle, appears as a member of the mysterious Thirteen group in Rivette’s Out 1, and smiles widely as a cucked voyeur in Emmanuelle 3 of all things. Like Bazin, Doniol-Valcroze incubated and encouraged talent and was repaid with these roles to acknowledge his influence. His films, while certainly not masterpieces, are clearly ready for reappraisal as they’re still central to our understanding of how the nouvelle vague started and flourished.
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