Banks and Mountebanks

"It's easy to make money. You put up the sign 'BANK' and someone walks in and hands you his money. The facade is everything." Christina Stead, "Credo"   from House of All Nations

IT'S AS TRUE today as when it was written, in 1936 by an Australian novelist working in a private bank in Paris. When Bernie Cornfield ten years ago asked the question, "Do you sincerely want to be rich?" he was playing the game according to these rules; William Make peace Thackeray knew that "the facade is everything" when he told Victorian England "How to live well on nothing a year" in Vanity Fair. Alain Resnais's Stavisky, based on a real swindler who flourished in mid-30's Paris, is a man who understands this first principle of high class fraud, but the film derives most of its interest not from the ethics or mechanics of chicanery but from its recreation of the rogue's paradise of inter war Europe. To a certain extent, facades are as important to film-makers as they are to bankers, and Resnais's pastel facade is everything you could ask for--intricate, exotic, and above all pleasing to the eye.

Stavisky himself (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a two-bit swindler blown up to a Hindenburg of a con man, manipulating fake international corporations and floating fake bond issues. Stavisky thinks he's left his old world of petty fraud behind, and Resnais seems to agree with him, emphasizing the discontinuity between the pickpocket and the cosmopolitan "financier." Stavisky affects history in a way a pickpocket cannot, Resnais maintains; I'affaire Stavisky, when it's blasted out of the water, shakes the Popular Front Government of Leon Blum and forces the deportation of Leon Trotsky, who until then had enjoyed political asylum in France. Resnais asks us to believe that Trotsky could have held the European Left together by his commanding presence--and here I fail to follow him, for it is far from certain that Trotsky's location had such resonant historical consequences. And it seems likely that the Stavisky scandal was merely the occasion of Trotsky's expulsion and not its cause. Trotsky's appearances in the film are curious but handled without any major blunders, and the Trotsky theme does make the important point that the world--the world that Stavisky thinks is simply an oyster waiting to be raped--is a very serious world indeed. Resnais is trying to take advantage of the audience's knee-jerk response to celebrity by incarnating a great historical figure in his film; anything Trotsky does is interesting simply because he is Trotsky. Resnais can just sit back and register the impact of his effects without working very hard for them.

For all Resnais's efforts to give his film grave historical significance, Stavisky remains first and foremost a mood picture, an evocation of a sensibility. Stavisky's mise en scene is more important than its philosophical point. Its characters are only skin deep, if they go even that far--usually they stop, on purpose, at the make-up. Talleyrand said of those who were born after 1789 that they could never really know how good life could be. The same feeling--a combination of nostalgia, snobbery, and contempt for the newfangled present--permeates Stavisky. The final value judgement on this feeling, though, is thoroughly ambiguous. The life of a fake Parisian millionaire in the thirties is attractive, but are we meant to be seduced or purged of our attraction?

I can't remember a single ugly moment in Stavisky--even after he has either committed suicide or been shot by a government anxious to have his secrets dies with him, he is laid out in a statuesque repose that is not dismaying. The unrelenting beauty of the film gives it almost all of its impact, you can wallow in it and you can hardly escape seduction to at least that extent. Everything is painted in pastel; Deauville and Biarritz; corks popping out of magnums of Moet & Chandon; Rolls-Royces and Hispano-Suizas; tuxedoes and boutonniere roses; country houses with immaculate lawns; Alps, pale sandstone rocks beneath pale aquamarine waves, and flowers, thousands of them, everywhere. You don't think much about politics in a setting like this, as Stavisky plays ball with Right and Left, bilking ministers in Blum's cabinet with one side of his mouth and hot-blooded Spanish grandees with the other. Stavisky and his entourage attend the famous 1933 performance of Coriolanus in Paris, and though we hear the actor declaiming his lines and listen to the applause of the fascists and the catcalls of the socialists, we never see the stage itself. We remain in Stavisky's box, largely concerned, as he is, with a crisis brewing in Biarritz regarding some jewels he has pawned to cover gambling debts.

Stavisky remains a relatively opaque character. His facade is everything. He was born a Russian Jew; his family fled from the pogroms, and his respectable father, a dentist, committed suicide when he learned of Stavisky's first arrest some years before the action of the film takes place. Despite his own doctor's diagnosis of megalomania and schizophrenia, Belmondo's Stavisky is relatively attractive, down to the last minutes when he is trapped like an animal in a Swiss chalet, with stubble growing on his chin like a cheap American gangster, a ruined man awaiting the machine guns of his enemies. Above all, Stavisky is a man whose sense of living is somehow heightened, whose gestures are grandiose and larger than life. But, like a force of nature, or a mutant, he is never explained--we are left unclear whether this strange, attractive figure is the eternal type of the low-born, high-living con man, an Ivar Krueger or Bernie Cornfeld, or the unique, demented product of his own life history.

Arlette (Anny Duperey), Stavisky's wife, is even thinner as a character; she is a walking, talking Vogue cover; a silent, cosmetically perfect femme fatale who faints at the proper time and ornaments Stavisky's life in the most necessary way. The center of sympathy in the film is Baron Raoul (Charles Boyer), an aristocrat whose purpose in life has been to dissipate a fabulous century-old fortune. "It was very satisfying," he says of this experience. He is old now, and penniless, with only his courtliness and wry smile left, but he defends his dead friend Stavisky before the Parliamentary inquiry much as Talleyrand might have defended himself before a revolutionary tribunal: you didn't know what it was like to live, he testifies, if you hadn't lived in Stavisky's world. In the end, he tilts the film's sympathies towards Stavisky, towards a feeling that these hollow thirties--when every glass of champagne must have had something of the clink heard in Phnom Penh last week as Lon Nol toasted his new chief of staff--were a hothouse for a kind of life different from anything we can experience now.

Perhaps, though, we will end up living in an age like Stavisky's, and we may not like it where it comes our way. Changes in taste seem to adumbrate changes in reality, and when "that Depression look" came back it brought with it a new depression. Stavisky is a movie for people who are sincerely worried about how to spend the time that remains between tomorrow morning and Armageddon; not for those, like the circle of young men and women who gather around Trotsky, who take life seriously and don't have to worry about boredom.

Resnais's Stavisky is a cold film--a bored film, I think--without the cerebral pleasures of Resnais's earlier experiments in film technique, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, although traces of the narrative trademarks worked out in those films persist into this one. House of All Nations, for all the up-to-date sound of its "Credo," was written in 1936; it was an examination of a phenomenon that still existed. Stavisky is nostalgia for two things--first, for the eternal appeal of the rogue, the high-energy, affable cheap who spends more money than he screws out of other people; second, for the miasma of the thirties, the thrill of the moment when you can no longer be sure that the roller coaster you're on is going to carry you up again, and you just lay back and abandon yourself to the pleasures of a swift rocketing downwards.