Certainly the most underrated of the best-known directors to
emerge from the French New Wave of the 1950s, Louis Malle
(1932-1995) was also one of the most versatile. Unlike his
contemporaries Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, et al., Malle was born
into French nobility (as an heir to the Beghin beet-sugar
fortune), which only makes The Documentaries of Louis Malle more
remarkable for their compassionate humanism and empathy for the
daily struggles of everyday people. Having be his career as an
underwater-camera operator for pioneering ocean explorer Jacques
Cousteau, Malle quickly developed a highly personal approach to
filmmaking, and after co-directing Cousteau's O-winning
documentary The Silent World (1956), he made an auspicious
directorial debut with the taut and commercially successful
thriller Elevator to the Gallows. And while Malle is best known
for such classics as Murmur of the Heart, Atlantic City, My
Dinner with Andre and Au Revoir, Les Enfants (in addition being
married to Candice Bergen from 1980 until his death), this
terrific box set (comprised of seven films on six DVDs) stands as
a testament to Malle's uncommon skill as an astutely observant
documentarian.
One short and two feature-length documentaries show how Malle's
gift for nonfiction filmmaking was fully formed at an early
stage. The 1962 short "Vive Le Tour" (19 minutes) is a remarkably
look at that year's Tour de France bicycle race,
offering a vivid account of the race itself, in addition to the
rural French surroundings, rabid fans, and bicyclists in various
stages of exhaustion as their endurance test continues. The
72-minute Humain, Trop Humain ("Human, All Too Human," 1973) is a
fascinating and pointed experiment in verité style, eschewing
narration as Malle's camera probes the numbing routines of
dehumanizing labor on the assembly line of a Citroën auto
factory. In the middle of the film, Malle offers the stark
contrast of eager auto consumers at a Paris motor show, but
otherwise this remains a riveting (pardon the pun) look at
laborers performing robotic duties, with Malle serving as a
subtle admirer of their daily endurance. Malle returned to the
subject of working people in Place De La République (1974), a
wryly amusing, 95-minute study of a small stretch of sidewalk in
a working-class Parisian neighborhood. As Malle interviews
various passersby, the film evolves into a penetrating and often
humorous examination of the social and personal factors that make
people happy or discontent, and a testament to Malle's refined
sense of class-conscious curiosity.
In 1969, Malle said he was "fed up with actors, studios,
fiction, and Paris" (referring to his battles with Alain Delon
during the making of the omnibus film Spirits of the Dead), so he
traveled to India with a two-man crew to create his seven-part,
363-minute masterpiece Phantom India. Originally broadcast as a
miniseries on French television and financed with Malle's own
money, this was the film that Malle considered the most personal
of his career. Epic in yet in its embrace of
India's impoverished majority, it provides what was (in the late
'60s) an unprecedented portrait of India's culture--its poverty,
caste system, and maddening contradictions. As a companion piece
assembled from his vast a of Indian footage, Malle made
Calcutta (99 minutes) to focus on that city's own unique history,
personality, and people. Here, Malle trades the slow,
contemplative pacing of Phantom India for a more intensely
focused examination of the sociopolitical issues that plagued all
of India, most conspicuously in its most densely populated city.
After relocating to the United States in 1975 (to direct Pretty
Baby), Malle continued to alternate narrative features with
documentary projects. The PBS-funded God's Country (89 minutes)
was originally broadcast in 1989, and focuses in the close-knit
farming community of Glencoe, Minnesota, with 80% of its
population of 5,000 comprised of German descendents. Most of the
film was in 1979, but when it took several years for PBS to
finance the editing process, Malle returned to Glencoe in 1985,
only to find the farmers (who had welcomed Malle as a curious
outsider) struggling in the aftermath of economic recession.
Thus, once again, does Malle's work focus on the tenacious
survival of working-class people. It's only fitting, then, that
the final film in this set (also Malle's final documentary) is
titled ...And the Pursuit of Happiness (81 minutes), in which
Malle focused on recent immigrants to America including Cambodian
refugees, a Pakistani schoolteacher-turned-cosmetics salesperson,
an Ethiopian cab-driver, a NASA astronaut from Costa Rica, and
many others. Drawing upon his own perspective as an outsider in
America, Malle continued to express his uncommon empathy for
people in various stages of adjustment or displacement.
As the reasonably priced "Series 2" release of the Eclipse
division of the Criterion Collection, The Documentaries of Louis
Malle does not include any supplemental materials aside from
well-written liner notes, but the superiority of these films
speaks for itself. If it wasn't obvious before, it's now quite
clear that Louis Malle ranked highly among the most accomplished
documentary filmmakers of the 20th century. --Jeff Shannon