The Two of Us: A Bucolic Dream Amid the Horror of the Holocaust

As newlyweds working their way through college while living in Berkeley's Elmwood District in the late 1960s, my parents had little money to spare. The only forms of entertainment they could afford were the occasional game of Video Pong at Dream Fluff Donuts and a monthly visit to the Elmwood Theater. At the time it was an arthouse theater, and the eclectic programming opened up a whole new world of cinema to two young folks raised on Hollywood fare.

Ten years ago or more, my father recalled to me the pleasures of the Elmwood Theater in those days, and rattled off a list of great films that played there. But the most moving film he saw was one whose title he had long forgotten. All he could remember was that it was a simple and endearing story about the friendship between an old man and a young boy.

Last week, about halfway through Claude Berri’s debut film The Two of Us (1967), newly released on DVD by Criterion, I realized that this was the film I had heard about all those years before, and that it more than lives up to my father’s fond memory.

The story takes place during World War II, when a young Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris is sent by his parents to the countryside to live with a family friend’s parents—a Catholic and wholly anti-Semitic elderly couple. The boy is instructed by his parents to conceal his true identity and pass himself off as Catholic, adopting a new name, learning the Lord’s Prayer, and by all means concealing any sign of tell-tale surgical procedures.

The boy’s new “Grampa” is strident in his opinions about the war that is tearing his country apart, railing against the Communists, the Freemasons, the Brits and the Jews, his ire fueled by the ranting editorials of Philippe Henriot, “the French Goebbels,” to whose Radio Paris broadcasts the old man listens with rapt attention. Against all odds, the old man and the boy, Claude, become inseparable companions, the boy patiently listening to the man’s bigoted speeches and at times playfully debunking them.

The film begins with sadness and uncertainty as the parents put their boy on a train, unsure whether they’ll ever see him again, but quickly gives way to bucolic depictions of a pastoral summer spent tending rabbits and chasing chickens amid the joy and companionship of a blossoming friendship. Berri’s direction, aided by a wonderful score by Georges Delerue, paints a lyrical portrait of childhood, both in the form of Claude and in the second wind his presence gives to the old man, whose heart has grown weary amid warfare and old age.

Berri visited Paris schools in search of a boy to play the role and found Alain Cohen, who delivers one of the great child performances. For the old man he cast Michel Simon, a beloved French actor who had fallen on hard times, his career essentially washed up. The Two of Us was a comeback of sorts for him, giving him one of his most memorable roles late in life. Simon’s sensitive portrayal of Grampa delves far deeper than the usual depictions of racists and bigots, revealing the old man as a gentle soul, a kind, generous man whose only real fault is ignorance. When Alain Cohen’s mother showed him a picture of the man he would be acting with and asked the boy if he was nervous about the meeting, Cohen couldn’t understand her meaning. How could anyone be afraid of this big “chocolate cake of a man,” an adorable teddy bear who looked like Santa Claus?

Much of the film’s power is in its subtlety, for once the action shifts to the farm, the war and all its attendant horrors are barely mentioned. Aside from the old man’s radio, the global context for the tale is merely suggested. But the subtext is nevertheless clear in every scene, providing a quiet undercurrent of solemnity.

Claude Berri based the movie on his own experience. As a young boy he spent the last six months of the war in hiding on a farm in the countryside with an elderly couple, and The Two of Us is his attempt to capture that magical period of his life. And his choice of Cohen was fortuitous, as the boy, despite his youth, was well aware of the tragedies of the war, his grandparents having perished at Auschwitz.

French New Wave director Francois Truffaut hailed The Two of Us upon its release. For 20 years, he said, he had been waiting for “the real film” about World War II France—not a story not about those who collaborated with their Nazi occupiers, nor about the Resistance, but about the vast majority who simply waited out the war, those “who did nothing, either good or bad.”

Criterion’s new disc features a beautiful transfer and plenty of extra features, including a new interview with Alain Cohen, 1967 interviews with Claude Berri and Michel Simon, a 1975 television show featuring Berri and the woman who secured his family’s safety during the war, and essays by Truffaut and critic David Sterritt.

But the best addition to the release is his Le poulet (The Chicken), Berri’s Oscar-winning 1962 short film, in which the roots of his style are evident. It’s a charming little story of a boy who seeks to save the life of his beloved pet rooster by sneaking out each night to place an egg in its nest in hopes of persuading his parents that it’s a hen. Berri’s affection for the conceits of childhood and his talent for bringing them to the screen are clearly on display here, and he would master the method in his debut feature.

The Two of Us (1967). Written and directed by Claude Berri. Starring Michel Simon and Alain Cohen. Music by Georges Delerue. $39.95. 87 minutes. In French with English subtitles. www.criterion.com.

The Meditative Art of Kiarostami

It’s a perverse world that lets the name of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami remain obscure to the vast Western film-going public. He is considered by many to among the three or four greatest artists in cinema today, the creative force behind some of the most thoughtful and compelling films of the past 25 years.

Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley Art Museum are celebrating his career with an exhibition of his work entitled “Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker,” consisting of screenings of his movies at PFA and an exhibition of his photography at BAM. The films series runs through Aug. 30; the photography exhibit is on view through Sept. 23.

Much of Kiarostami’s cinema consists of contemplative, intelligent films that probe into the thoughts and souls of his characters, using non-professional actors selected for their faces and for their innate character. He began his career making documentaries about the lives of children in Iran, later fusing documentary work with fiction in the creation of dynamic hybrid films. But it was with 1999’s Taste of Cherry that Kiarostami firmly cemented his international reputation, becoming the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival.

Taste of Cherry, showing Aug. 11, is a slow, meditative film about a man, Mr. Badii, trolling through the outskirts of Tehran in search of someone to help him committ suicide. He has dug a hole in a dusty mountainside and intends to take an overdose of sleeping pills and settle into the pit one night, never to wake up. But he worries that he might survive, and so he goes looking for someone who will agree to check on him in the morning and either rescue or bury him.

The film consists primarily of Badii driving around Tehran in his beat-up Range Rover, scanning the faces of work-soliciting day laborers, of scroungers and hitchhikers and passersby, looking for a sympathetic and competent assistant. He finds three prospects along the way: a young soldier, a middle-aged seminarian, and an aging taxidermist. Badii engages in long discussions with each as they drive along, contemplating life and death and trying to persuade them to help him.

It is a thoughtful tale infused with philosophical dialogue and simple symbolic devices. We never learn the secret of Badii’s despair, for it is irrelevant. What Kiarostami is really aiming for is allegory. Badii, in the form of his passengers, is taken from youth through old age, from fear and naiveté to religious conviction to aged wisdom and practicality. All the while the truck slowly navigates meandering, desolate roads on its way up the mountain.

The film closes with an ambiguous shot of Badii withdrawing into the hole, closing his eyes and receding into darkness as a storm gathers above him. Kiarostami gives no signal as to whether Badii lives or dies, and some critics have questioned this decision. But there really is no other appropriate conclusion; the ending can only be ambiguous, as this is not simply the story of Badii’s suicide attempt but a discussion of suicide in general, and specifically in a religious society that forbids it. It is likewise just as much a story about the passengers that share Badii’s Range Rover and the ways in which his plan forces them to confront their own beliefs and values, as well as an invitation to ponder such thoughts ourselves, thereby making us complicit in the exercise. “I believe in a cinema which gives more possibilities and more time to its viewer,” Kiarostami told film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, “a half-fabricated cinema, an unfinished cinema that is completed by the creative spirit of the viewer, [so that] all of a sudden we have a hundred films.”

There has always been a contingent of directors who have fought against the inherent passivity of the cinematic experience. Live theater requires audience participation in the suspension of disbelief in the face of fabricated sets, as well as the necessity of response via laughter or applause. In its golden age in the 1930s and ’40s, radio, the so-called “theater of the mind,” enlisted the imagination of the listener to fill in the gaps left by the lack of visuals. Even silent film required the use of that imagination, requiring audiences to imagine voices and sound effects to accompany the action on the screen.

But full-color, sound-era cinema supplies nearly all that is necessary, and thus the experience requires far less of the viewer. Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry instead asks the audience to take part, to contemplate the value of life, the nature of suicide, and the search for meaning in the face of despair.

But what critics of the film have found most baffling about it is the coda which follows Badii’s ambiguous fate. After 890 minutes of meditative imagery and philosophic discussion, the appearance of behind-the-scenes footage is jarring. We see the lead actor passing a cigarette to Kiarostami, technicians positioning microphones, and a group of soldiers from an early scene in the film are given the OK to call it a day and relax. At first it may seem like an ironic distancing measure, a shallow gesture to simply remind the audience that, after all, it’s just a movie. But the coda is far more compelling and profound than that, for it serves as a life-affirming counterpoint to the bleakness that preceded it.

The presence of soldiers in the shot recalls Badii’s earlier reminiscence about his military service, where he met his closest friends and took part in a group dynamic, as opposed to the action of the film, in which he is largely alone, and never in the company of more than one person at a time. What Kiarostami shows us with this final scene is the reality behind the story of Badii—that filmmaking is a communal experience, consisting of comrades taking pleasure in community, in art, in craft, and in the simple act of lounging together in the grass, with shots of the soldiers taking a break from their soldiering, enjoying each other’s company beneath blooming trees and clear skies. Yet all this takes place to the strains of Louis Armstrong’s recording of “St. James Infirmary,” a song about impending death. It is a gentle reminder, an endorsement of the views of Badii’s final passenger, that simple moments are what defines a life. “Would you give up the taste of cherries?” he had asked Badii, and here Kiarostami gives us that taste, demonstrating in effect that there is much to be appreciated in this life if one is willing to reach for it, and than even a despairing conversation along a dusty road in a beat-up Range Rover is an experience not to be missed.

"Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker"

Through Aug. 30 at Pacific Film archive; through Sept. 23 at Berkeley Art Museum. www.bampfa.edu.

Photo caption: Homayoun Ershadi as Mr. Badii in Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry.

Tough Old Broad: A Barbara Stanwyck Centennial Retrospective

You’d think a beautiful young woman with a name like Ruby Stevens would have had it made in 1930s Hollywood. And she very well might have; the name conjures images of a bright-eyed ingenue, lovely, ambitious and 100 percent red-blooded American.

But that’s exactly what Barbara Stanwyck wanted to avoid, and thus, on the advice of a Broadway director, she changed her name, adopting a moniker that better suited her unique blend of strength, beauty, class and seductive allure.

The name suited the woman as well as the actress, for Stanwyck was already the woman she would soon portray: a tough, hard-luck dame, clawing her way to the top. Orphaned at a young age, she was raised in a series of foster homes, working as a fashion model and Broadway chorus girl before landing a theatrical role that caused the movie industry to take notice.

“I’m a tough old broad from Brooklyn,” Stanwyck once said. “I intend to go on acting until I’m 90 and they won’t need to paste my face with make-up.” She didn’t quite make it to 90, but she did work well into her 70s in a career that spanned nearly 60 years and earned her four Academy Award nominations, an honorary Oscar in 1982, and the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.

Pacific Film Archive is presenting a retrospective of some of the actress’ best work in honor of the centennial of her birth. The series runs through July 31 and begins Friday with Night Nurse (1931), a Pre-Code classic that pairs Stanwyck with the brassy Joan Blondell, and Stella Dallas (1937), considered by many to be Stanwyck’s best.

Stanwyck’s early career is full of commanding, riveting performances as working-class femme fatales struggling to survive and conquer in a man’s world. Baby Face (1933) and Ladies They Talk About (1933) are essentially companion pieces, telling similar tales accompanied by the same musical theme—the drawling, bawdy, jazz-era strains of “St. Louis Blues.” In both films Stanwyck’s character uses her body, her grace and her wit to manipulate men in pursuit of her material desires; she knows full well what they want and how to entice them with it, cynically selling notions of romance and passion in which she has long since ceased to believe. Stanwyck was judicious with her contempt though; she not only looked on her victims with disdain, but always managed to imbue her gutsy golddiggers with an undercurrent of self-loathing, an awareness that the dirty business of life soils everyone it touches, and that the path to the top runs through more than a few fetid swamps of vice.

There was much more to Stanwyck than sex, however. Few actors could convey as much with just their eyes. “Eyes are the greatest tool in film,” Director Frank Capra told her, and she put the advice to good use. Her gaze was piercing and challenging, while simultaneously conveying the bemusement and weariness of a woman long tired of playing the fantasy object for legions of sweaty old businessmen in rumpled suits. She was also a gifted comedienne, comfortable in the delivery of droll putdowns and flirtatious witticisms. Yet she was fully capable of more overtly comedic roles, as in The Lady Eve (1941), in which she played a con-artist trying to play it straight but needing all her vice and cunning to get there. “My only problem,” Stanwyck said in response to a question about her signature roles, “is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth.”

As good as she was, the movie industry was not altogether kind to its young stars, and many actresses saw their careers vanish as the studios ditched them at the first signs of middle age. But Stanwyck’s startling talent, screen presence and behind-the-scenes negotiating prowess gave her an edge. By avoiding long contracts, she was never bound to any one studio, keeping her career and her paychecks healthy as a prolific freelancer.

Thus few actresses progressed as smoothly from eye-candy vixens to middle-aged dramatic roles. Double Indemnity (1944), for instance, saw her updating Baby Face’s Lily Powers by moving her to the upper class enclaves of the Hollywood Hills, now as a kept woman looking for adventure to stave off her domestic boredom—a door-to-door salesman’s wet dream, who lures insurance man Fred MacMurray into a lurid web of murder and intrigue. And still again she updated the portrait in Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night (1952). Here Stanwyck presents a stirring portrait of the opportunistic dame, but older now and tired of living a rootless life. Whereas the younger Stanwyck played women in dire or mundane circumstances looking for a way out, here she plays a woman on her way back home, returning to her humble origins on Monterey’s Cannery Row with the hope that she can finally set aside her nagging restlessness by embracing a simple domestic life. Yet her eyes belie the painful truth, revealing the jaded intelligence that knows her dissatisfaction is innate, that whatever she has is never enough, no matter how good the man and how safe the home he provides.

It’s a compelling picture of a complex woman, requiring the sort of feminine insight that director Lang was entirely incapable of throughout his long career, resulting in a fascinating case of professional role reversal, with a talented actor bringing out heretofore untapped talents in her director. And all in marked contrast to her co-star, a young Marilyn Monroe, who might have led a much different life had she adopted just a bit of Stanwyck’s steely resolve.

"Ball of Fire: A Barbara Stanwyck Centennial Retrospective." Friday, July 6 through Tuesday, July 31 at Pacific Film Archive. 2575 Bancroft Way. 642-5249. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.