Saul Dibb's 'Suite Française'

Films based on novels often disappoint those who read first and view second. So I should say that I haven’t read Suite Française, based on Irène Némirovsky’s unfinished sequence of novels and published in an English translation in 2006, but the film was disappointing enough in its own right.

Even now, after so many other traumas since 1945, from Dien Bien Phu to Charlie Hebdo, the years of the Nazi Occupation remain a raw memory in France. Not surprisingly, French films and TV dramatizations set during those dark years tend towards providing comforting myths of heroic resistance rather than portrayals of acquiescence, not always sullen. The few conversations touching on the Occupation that I’ve had with French people of my own generation (the one with parents who were young adults during the war) underline just how difficult a subject it remains. In her review of Suite Française in The Times, Kate Muir, an admirer of the book, concluded:

If I were the French, I’d get the rights back to Némirovsky’s work, and make a sophisticated movie in my own language.

Well nigh impossible, I suspect – that is securing the sophistication, not the rights which are in fact already with TF1, more or less France’s BBC1/ITV equivalent. According to IMDb, Suite Française is a UK/France/Canada production, was mostly filmed in Belgium and the director and much of the crew came from the UK. But while nuanced enough to avoid “Nazis all bad, French all good”, it still offers the “Germans mostly bad and even the odd good one flawed, French mostly good and even the odd bad one rising above themselves” mythical formulation beloved of French TV. I

It is obvious from the outset that this is going to be a film with a simple narrative – occupied France, young handsome German officer, young attractive French woman whose husband is away at the war - so just how is this going to end badly? And, as a drama, it unfolds well if not pacily; Matthias Schoenaerts as Leutnant Bruno von Falk and Michelle Williams as Lucile Angellier perform soundly in their parts. Kristin Scott Thomas provides a particularly stiff and icy mother-in-law foil to Lucile and Bruno, who has been billeted chez Angellier. (Why Scott Thomas should have complained on BBC1’s The Marr Show recently about a lack of parts for actresses of her age, I can’t understand – she turns up in posts here every six months). The film looks good but still conveys the horribleness of war and the tragedy of Occupation, despite its implausible conclusion. Belgium provides a convincing substitute for France and the interiors, bourgeois ou paysan, match anyone’s expectations of French Country Style. Whether the Wermacht equipment was strictly 1940 issue, I wouldn’t like to say, but I was a little puzzled by the exact period of the film, if not the location.

A little history for anyone interested. France and the UK declared war on Germany in September 1939; Germany invaded France (and the Benelux countries) in May 1940. The French government soon departed for Bordeaux and a partly evacuated Paris fell on 14 June 1940 (not 1941, as Kate Muir seems to think). France signed an armistice on 22 June and was then divided, as indicated in the map below, into Occupied and “Free” Zones, the latter being administered from Vichy in the centre of France.

So the film Suite Française is set in the summer of 1940 during and after the invasion and surrender of France. Note, however, that the deportation of the country’s Jewish population did not start until 1942, the year Némirovsky died in Auschwitz, and something which Scott Thomas fans should be aware of from Sarah’s Key (2010). At the start of Suite Française, its setting is given as “Bussy, Central France”, though some reviewers place the town east of Paris. Given the extended presence of the Wehrmacht (von Falk’s unit is replaced at the end of the film), Bussy would have been in the Occupied Zone, as was Burgundy where Némirovsky spent the period from 1940 to 1942 when she started writing her novel sequence. In reality, the French police and civil service were the main agents for the rounding up and deportation of the Jews in France, working with the Gestapo rather than the Wehrmacht.

This film will be released in France in a couple of months. I can’t imagine that its content will prove that controversial, but the language convention used might. As produced, the cast speak English instead of French and any German being spoken is subtitled in English. It is straightforward enough for German to be subtitled in French instead, but French characters speaking English and being subtitled in French … or will they have to be dubbed?  At least, Suite Française won’t present TF1 with the problems it had with Marcel Ophuls’ unsparing anti-mythical 1969 documentary about the Occupation, Le Chagrin et La Pitié.

The Reichsmarschall at the Channel

If my comments seems unsympathetic to the French, they aren't meant to be. The only sensible perspective from Britain, saved from the Nazis by 20 miles (33 km) of sea, has to be one of “There but for the grace of God …”. The Nazis’ intention - quite by coincidence a chillingly obvious reminder of it appears in the post before this one – was to invade the United Kingdom and subjugate its citizens to the will of the Third Reich just like the rest of Europe. To imagine that, if that had happened, the British would have behaved better than anyone else is an illusion, but at least we were spared a myth.

Paris Exhibitions (2) Braque

Two exhibitions currently at the Grand Palais in Paris are coming to a close early in 2014 but both will transfer elsewhere. This post might therefore remain of interest, as could the previous one about Félix Vallotton. 

Georges Braque 

Georges Braque (1882 – 1963) was one of the 20th century’s major artists and his life and works are the subject of a major retrospective at the Grand Palais. Braque was borne at Argenteuil near Paris and in 1890 moved with his family when they took their painting and decorating business to Le Havre. A year ago I posted about an exhibition then running at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, Le Cercle de l’art moderne Collectionneurs d’avant garde au Havre (The Modern Art Club Avant-Garde collectors in Le Havre):

Between 1906 and 1910, a group of art collectors and artists formed the Modern Art Club in Le Havre with a membership including Braque, and Raoul Dufy … and some of the town’s wealthiest businessmen. They set themselves the objective of promoting modernism in Le Havre, organising exhibitions, lectures, poetry readings and concerts. Guillaume Apollinaire and Claude Debussy supported the Club, which had links to the newly established Salons d’Automne and des Indépendants in Paris. Arguably, Impressionism began in Le Havre when Monet painted Impression, soleil levant there in 1872, so it is not surprising that the Club showed acquisitions by Monet and Renoir at their annual exhibitions. But some of the collectors also took an interest in the Post-Impressionists and the Fauves … buying from galleries (left), auctions or the artists themselves. …

Growing up in this milieu (Braque was taught the flute by Dufy’s brother) it isn’t surprising that the painting business seemed less attractive than becoming an artist. His family were prosperous enough to allow Georges, at the age of 19, to return to Paris where he received both a tradesman’s and an artist’s training by the end of 1904. It is also, given his connections, unsurprising that he would begin his artistic career in 1905-6 as a Fauvist. In fact, for me the most interesting part of this exhibition covers the years before the First World War. In 1907 Braque not only began to be influenced by Cezanne but through Apollinaire met Picasso, saw Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and was introduced African sculpture.  Braque's artistic response was the Grande Nue, 1907-8 (right). Returning to the Fauvist haunt of L’Éstaque in 1908, he moved rapidly away from works like Le Port de La Ciotat, 1907 (The Port of La Ciotat, below left) to a new style as in Le Port, 1909 (Harbour, below right).

Pictures like the latter were rejected by the Salon d’Automne in 1908, and, when exhibited later that year, Matisse, according to Braque, described them as being made of little cubes. In the years that followed Braque and Picasso would develop Cubism, as Braque put it: «un peu comme la cordée en montage» (“a little like two climbers roped together on a mountain”). This would lead by 1911 to what the exhibition calls the Analytical Cubism of Les toits à Céret (Roofs at Céret, below left) and Le Guéridon (The Pedestal, below right).

Between 1912 and 1914 Braque would develop collages (papiers collés) like Violon et pipe, 1913/14 (below left) and La Mandoline, 1914 (below right). Braque was able to make use of his craftsman’s training to create wood effects in oils instead of glueing fake wood and in lettering.

In 1914 Braque enlisted in the French army and received a serious head wound at Artois the following year. He was able to resume painting in 1916 in the style referred to as Synthetic Cubism with a marked dissociation of form and colour, as in Rhum et guitar, 1918 (Rum and guitar, below). The exhibition seemed to gloss over what must have been a major interruption to both Braque’s life and his artistic development.

I have to admit to finding Braque’s later work less interesting but obviously the exhibition provides a valuable opportunity to appreciate it. From the 1920s classical Mediterranean themes appear in his work, for example studies of Canephores and, in the 1930s, Le Duo, 1937 (below, left) and Femme à la palette, 1936 (Woman with a palette, below left).

Perhaps inevitably, Braque’s work during the 1940-45 period would turn inwards: Grand intérieur á la palette (Large Interior with Palette, below top) and Les Poissons noirs (Black fish, below lower) both 1942; and, unlike some fellow artists during the Occupation, he managed to keep his distance from the authorities.

The exhibition has brought together a large number of his billiard table paintings, Le Billard, 1944 (below),

and from his Atelier series, Atelier VIII, 1954-55 (below), produced between the mid-1940s and mid 1950s. The bird theme appears in the latter and again in a series of bird paintings, for example, 1960 (Black and white birds, poster above).

Georges Braque ends at the Grand Palais on 6 January and will be at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts from 16 February to 11 May 2014.

European exchange rates – now and 70 years ago

The BBC website has recently posted a helpful guide, What really caused the eurozone crisis? Although not attributed to a particular author, reading it one starts to hear the unmistakable tones of Robert Peston, the BBC’s Business editor, though surely Stephanie Flanders, the Economics editor was involved. One of the most interesting graphics in the guide shows the trends in the trade balances of the major eurozone economies since the currency union was established in 1999. Germany’s is now nearly 6% of GDP in surplus. After investing huge sums in the modernisation of the former East Germany in the 1990s, Germany seems to have ensured it could put that investment to work. The initial Deutchsmark/euro rate was set at a level low enough to favour the pricing of German exports to the rest of Europe and the world.

Seventy years ago, exchange rates were set in Europe to favour Germany, but in the opposite direction. In 1979 Len Deighton published one of his non-fiction military histories, Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk. In the concluding section he provided this description of the economic consequences for the French of their defeat in 1940:

German soldiers were provided with occupation marks. The French and Belgian francs and the Dutch florin were pegged artificially low - the French currency about 20 per cent below its true value - and issue banks were forbidden to devalue.
This not only had the effect of draining everything - from champagne to real estate - into German hands at bargain prices, but it prevented German goods leaving Germany, except at bonanza prices. It was a subtle form of plunder …
In addition, each defeated country was made to pay for the maintenance of the German occupation forces. In the summer of 1940 France began paying 400 million francs per day as a 'contribution to her defence against Britain'. …

(p361 Triad/Granada edition 1981)

From 1940 to 1944 the economies of both Vichy France under Pétain and occupied France were ruthlessly exploited so that resources of all kinds could be directed to the Nazi war effort. Insufficient rationed goods of all kinds were available to meet the French domestic demand with inevitable results. For example, the government-set price of butter in 1942 was 43 francs a kilo. On the marché amical (relatives and friends) it sold for 69 francs, and on the black market for 107 francs.

Eventually about 2/3 of the population could not afford to buy the minimum ration diet (1400 calories a day) due to a combination of declining wages and steadily increasing prices. People who had assets like small antiques, porcelain, pictures and so on sold them for what they could get, ultimately to finish up in the occupiers’ hands and be taken back to Germany. Presumably what wasn’t blown to smithereens during the Allied bombing offensive, or sold to the occupying forces in Germany after 1945 is still there. There always seems to me to be a paucity of antiques, antique dealers and so forth in France by comparison with the UK, which avoided Nazi occupation (apart from the Channel Islands). The inadequate nutrition of children, adolescents and women of child-bearing age during the Second World War might explain why, at 6 feet (1.8m), I seem so much taller than most Frenchmen over 50, markedly less so with the under 30s.

The wartime statistics above are taken from The Civilian Experience in German Occupied France, 1940-1944, Meredith Smith , Connecticut College, January 2010; see pages 17 and 24 for the supporting references.

Two Paris Exhibitions

Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, and it was in Provence that many of his most celebrated works were produced. However, encouraged by his school friend, Émile Zola, he first travelled to Paris in 1861 and would return there many times to paint in the city or in the surrounding countryside (Pontoise, below). About 80 works from in or around the capital provide the theme for Cézanne et Paris, currently at the Musée du Luxembourg.

Cézanne now seems to be classed as a Post-Impressionist rather than as an Impressionist (“un peintre déjà sorti de l’impressionisme”, said Renoir), and many of the works in the exhibition (portrait of Mme Cézanne, left) hint at later developments by other artists, particularly Cubism . He is often called the father of modern art ("notre père à tous" said Picasso or Matisse, or both of them). Nonetheless, Cézanne had exhibited at the 1863 Salon des Refusés and at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 when his works were among the most disliked.

The son of a banker, Cézanne had no financial need to sell his work and it was only after the solo exhibition put on by the dealer Ambroise Vollard (right) in November 1895 that his reputation became established. Cézanne died in Aix-en-Provence in 1906. By this time some wealthy young Americans had come to live in Paris, and their art collection is the subject of the second exhibition, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso… L’aventure des Stein, in the Petit Palais, across the Seine from the Musée du Luxembourg.

The Stein family were of German-Jewish origins and had become wealthy through the San Francisco tramway business co-owned by Daniel Stein. Daniel died in 1891 at the age of 59, three years after his wife who had died at 46. This left their four children, aged between 17 and 26, to pursue lives that, but for their intellectual inclinations, might have been labelled trustafarian in Britain a century later. Leo Stein (1872-1947) was the first to develop a serious interest in art. In 1900 he was studying 15th century Italian art in Florence under the influence of Bernard Berenson. However, while there he met Roger Fry (who was to introduce Post-Impressionism to Britain in 1910) and saw a Cézanne for the first time. At the end of 1902 he moved to Paris. In 1903 he purchased a Cézanne and was joined by his younger sister Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). By 1904 Leo and Gertrude had bought more works by Cézanne, as well as by Gauguin and Renoir. That year they were joined by the oldest Stein brother and would-be paterfamilias, Michael (1865-1938), and his wife Sarah (1870-1953). In the years that followed all four Steins were to make substantial purchases of works by these and other artists.  Hung in their two Paris apartments (Michael and Sarah's, left; Gertrude and Leo's, right) the paintings were to be admired during Saturday soirées held for Paris’s artistic avante garde.

Picasso became a close friend of Gertrude and painted her famous portrait  in 1905-6 (below), (photographed together by Man Ray in 1922). Gertrude had by then started her literary career and became a supporter of Picasso during his development of Cubism. She famously remarked of Picasso:

He alone among painters did not set himself the problem of expressing truths which all the world can see, but the truth which only he can see.

The exhibition brings together some of the exceptional works which passed through the Steins’ hands, and are now dispersed in museums and private collections around the world. Michael and Sarah collected many works by Matisse only to lose some of the best during the First World War while on loan to a gallery in Berlin. In the late 1920s Le Corbusier designed them a Modernist villa near Paris but they were to leave after a few years when the rise of fascism prompted their return to the US. By 1914 Leo had taken himself and his preferred pictures, mostly Renoirs, to Italy. This left his sister and her companion, Alice B Toklas, to be the core of the American literary and artistic community in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, (recently portrayed in Woody Allen’s comedy, Midnight in Paris). 

After the First World War, Gertrude could no longer afford to buy Picasso’s work and, although she continued to act as patron to emerging artistic talent, her later acquisitions turned out to be much less significant. The expensive exhibition catalogue (63 euros for the English edition) makes little mention of her experiences in France during the Occupation of the Second World War (she and Alice had been highly regarded for their American Red Cross work during the First). However, as Barbara Will has shown in Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma, Gertrude's judgement in becoming an apologist for Pétain’s Vichy France, particularly by translating his speeches for US consumption, was questionable, even if it ensured the preservation of her art collection. 

Both exhibitions contain works of the highest quality and are rewarding to visit. Cézanne et Paris is the more straightforward as a retrospective on one artist, whereas L’aventure des Stein has to weave together the works of four major artists (63 Matisses, 43 Picassos etc) and many others and the histories of their collectors, a complex task skilfully done.  Cézanne et Paris continues to 26 February 2012. Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso… L’aventure des Stein has been extended to 22 January (check!) and then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1 February to 3 June 2012). It started at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May to September 2011).