Boom (1968)
"The best failed art film ever" John Waters
- "There was, but it was a desperate irony because I was so badly in need of work and under such extreme pressure. This can be dangerous, because Tennessee Williams, for instance, had been told by all sorts of people who are not qualified to comment—people with whom I've never worked and who therefore don't know how I work—that I'm death on writers, that I cut ruthlessly, that I have no respect for a script. This couldn't be more untrue. Of course if I get a script which is a piece of nonsense, I will say that I'll do it only if it is rewritten; of course if I get a script from a writer I've previously worked with successfully, and the script isn't right, I will start all over again with another script. But once there is a script, one I believe I can do and is right, I never make a change without consulting the writer. And when I say consulting, if he's available, he makes the change himself. I don't make cuts or even line changes, and this can be testified to by the two writers I have worked with most, Evan Jones and Pinter. The only line changed in Accident was changed by Pinter's wife, Vivien Merchant, with his consent and my approval—a very slight change. I believe in the writer's contribution and I foster it. It annoys me, these judgments passed by people who are presumably colleagues and who have no basis for making them; it's like all the people who said Charles Laughton is impossibly difficult, Wilfrid Lawson is hopelessly irresponsible; absolutely untrue in both cases, though maybe true in other circumstances. Like the man who said to me last night, 'I've dealt with people who are terribly difficult, almost as difficult as you'—and he'd met me fifteen minutes before, didn't know a damn thing about whether I'm difficult or not. I'm not difficult. I'm obstinate; I'm insistent on quality; and I fight like hell for it. And of course this is very inconvenient for some people."
Thus spoke Joseph Losey to Tom Milne, for the interview book Losey on Losey, just as he was embarking on Boom!, which his new collaborator Tennessee Williams was adapting from his failed stage play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore.
Cette citation de Joseph Losey qui, pour une fois, n’est pas tirée de ses entretiens avec Michel Ciment, résume assez bien le problème de ce film.
Loin d’être, comme on le dit souvent, un film baroque et outrancier sorti de l’imaginaire de Losey,
Boom est avant tout un film fidèle au scénario créé par Tennessee Williams à partir de sa pièce de théâtre "The Milk Train doesn’t stop here anymore". Les pièces de Tennessee Williams sont à l’origine d’un certain nombre de grandes œuvres cinématographiques :
La ménagerie de verre,
Un tramway nommé désir,
La chatte sur un toit brûlant,
Soudain l’été dernier,
La nuit de l’iguane, auxquels on peut ajouter
Baby Doll avec un scénario original. The Milk Train, écrite en 1963, était la dernière pièce de l’auteur et avait été un échec lors de sa sortie à New York, avec seulement 69 représentations. Mais la réputation de l’auteur était restée au sommet.
En spoiler, la critique du NY Times de l’époque:
- Spoiler (cliquez pour afficher)
- January 15, 1963
Theater: Tennessee Williams's 'Milk Train'
By HOWARD TAUBMAN
On one level Tennessee Williams is writing with unexampled mastery in "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore." On another and higher level, which few contemporary playwrights dare to attempt, Mr. Williams's new play fails.
Mr. Williams's main character is so scrupulously and humorously observed, so painted to the life with all her vitality and crotchets and pain that one feels this portrait could be hung with the old masters.
Flora Goforth is a dying woman with a flamboyant past and a bruising tongue. She sits on a mountain top on the coast of Italy with her three villas wired for sound so that she will not lose an instant when the impulse seizes her to continue dictating her memoirs.
She is coarse and coy, wise and foolish, vulnerable and tyrannical. She is full of pretense, yet has reached the point of no more pretense. She recalls her first five husbands with a pungent, sardonic objectivity, and for a moment she almost croons over the recollection of Alex the sixth, last and only attractive one.
Hermione Baddeley plays this crude yet uncommon woman with dazzling variety. Her voice has more compass and nuance than the subtlest of singers. She can be droll in the clownish way Mr. Williams means her to be, and she can be as lazily forthright as the sun that beats down on the Italian sea.
Preparing for dinner an interrupting her dressing with bursts of dictation into one of the ubiquitous mikes, she puts on a Kabuki gown and a black wig with delightfully raffish humor. Her recollection that one of her husbands bought the outfit for her on a reconciliation trip to Japan is recounted with a barbed raillery that makes you chuckle at the same time you admire her gallant bluntness. And Miss Baddeley's bits of posturing like a Kabuki actress (she had lessons, you know) is capital fooling.
Mr. Williams evidently has an endless gallery of the wonderfully amusing and pathetic elderly woman. But in the end Flora lacks the size to support the burden the playwright would impose on her- to serve, as he says in a program note, as a protagonist who is not a human being but a universal condition of human beings: The apparently incomprehensible but surely somehow significant adventure of being alive that we all must pass through for a time."
In its effort to disclose how Flora finally reaches for the comfort and grace that will make dying bearable, the play is wanting. For the character who passes this miracle for her is one of those handsome, pallid young men with a dead heart, who has become a fashionable symbol for some of our playwrights. Although Paul Robeling plays the young man earnestly enough, the figure is utterly inconvincing. As a result, the play's denouement leaves one oddly untouched.
Mildred Dunnock, as a sharp-tongued old witch like Flora herself, floats in wearing gauzy brown and looking like a superannuated ballerina prima assoluta. She and Miss Baddeley have a marvelously comic scene which they do a turn. Ann Williams is sympathetic as a put- upon, intelligent secretary.
Herbert Machiz has staged the piece at the Morosco, where it opened Wednesday, with consistently droll invention that always suggests the hidden fear. Jo Mielziner's flexible sets have the brightness and color of the Italian landscape. The costumes by Peter Hall and Fred Zoelpel and the music by Paul Bowles contributes to the atmosphere of sumptuousness and decay.
A terrified comic ferocity courses through "Milk Train" but the play generates little pity. By the standards of other lesser playwrights this is impressive work. By Mr. Williams's criteria it is disappointing because its resolution is hard to credit.
Si une adaptation de cette pièce faisait effectivement partie des projets de Losey, c’est le producteur John Heyman, qui débutait alors dans la production de films, qui choisit la pièce de Tennessee Williams pour sa première collaboration avec Losey, avant
Cérémonie Secrète et
Le Messager. John Heyman avait fondé auparavant l’International Artists Agency, qui représentait notamment Elizabeth Taylor et Richard Burton, et c’est ainsi que les deux stars sont arrivés sur le projet après que Sean Connery et Simone Signoret aient été pressentis. Noël Coward rejoindra la distribution du film, avec peu d’enthousiasme d’après Joseph Losey, mais il apportera un humour caustique à un film qui aurait pu être assez pesant sans cela. On peut aussi noter la présence de Romolo Valli en pleutre médeçin, dans un second rôle qui convient comme un gant à celui qui incarne aussi le père Pirrone dans
Le Guépard ou le Dr Villega dans
Il était une fois la révolution.
Une citation d’Isabelle Huppert à propos du Tramway, qu’elle interprétait l’an dernier au théâtre, résume bien l’imaginaire de Tennessee Williams et ce qu’il pouvait avoir de séduisant pour Losey :
" … j'avais oublié à quel point Blanche est une figure tragique dans une œuvre qui puise aux sources les plus archaïques du sentiment. Tennessee Williams est un auteur tragique, il s'inspire de l'Antique, du mythologique. En cela, ce travail s'inscrit parfaitement dans la logique d'(A)pollonia. Ce qu'il faut parvenir à incarner, c'est l'errance mentale de Blanche, sans démonstration parce que l'écriture de Tennessee Williams est justement dans la tension, le silence, ce qui ne s'exprime pas par les mots…" Ici, Blanche s’appelle Sissy Goforth et le film est centré sur cette femme mûre, coquette et refusant de vieillir, personnage récurrent dans l’œuvre du dramaturge.
L’essentiel du film se déroule sur une île de Sardaigne, appartenant à une richissime américaine, et gardée par une meute de chiens féroces sous les ordres d’un nain en uniforme paramilitaire, l’acteur Michael Dunn. Assez gravement malade, elle est soignée par un médecin particulier, et passe une bonne part de ses journées à dicter ses mémoires à une jeune secrétaire / dame de compagnie, Blackie (Joanna Shimkus). Elle reçoit deux visites au début du film. La première est celle de Chris Flanders (Richard Burton) qui pénètre sur l’île en prétextant d’une ancienne invitation de Sissy Goforth qu’il aurait croisée dans le passé. Après qu’il ait été attaqué par les chiens, il est soigné et finalement hébergé. La seconde visite, attendue et souhaitée celle-ci, est celle d’un vieil ami de Sissy, que tout le monde appelle "le sorcier de Capri". La solitude devant la mort, le peu d’importance de la richesse matérielle devant la jeunesse et la beauté qui s’enfuient semblent être les thèmes de ce film. Le décor, c'est-à-dire la villa méditerranéenne où se déroule le film, est impressionnante mais n’a pas la beauté de la Villa Malaparte du
Mépris de Godard.
Les extravagances sont nombreuses, Burton est très vite affublé d’un kimono noir et d’un sabre japonais, tandis qu’Elizabeth Taylor alterne robes et coiffures plus étonnantes les unes que les autres sans jamais pour autant sombrer dans le ridicule. Du fait de ces extravagances,
Boom a la réputation d’être un film baroque, voire boursouflé, sur un script délirant. J’avoue que je l’ai surtout trouvé froid et, honnêtement, assez ennuyeux.
Il reste cependant des réussites assez notables pour que le film ne soit pas oublié des admirateurs de Joseph Losey ou des principaux acteurs (Taylor, Burton, Coward). La mise en scène n’est pas une des plus inspirée de Losey mais elle reste très honorable. Losey est entouré de techniciens proches avec Douglas Slocombe à la photo et Richard Mac Donald aux décors. Il y a de beaux mouvements de caméra et quelques belles scènes dont particulièrement l’agonie de Sissy Goforth et le rituel observé par Chris Flanders après sa mort, très poétique. Losey sait mettre en valeur Elizabeth Taylor de façon très intense durant la quasi-totalité du métrage et, au final, on peut juste regretter que ce réalisateur et ces trois excellents acteurs soient au service d’un script plutôt pauvre. Durant la même année, Joseph Losey tournera à nouveau avec Elizabeth Taylor un
Cérémonie Secrète à mon avis beaucoup plus inspiré, notamment à l’aide d’un scénario d’une autre ampleur.
Outre le provocateur John Waters, le film a encore ses aficionados. Ici une intéressante critique de l’américain Peter Henne :
- Spoiler (cliquez pour afficher)
- Boom (1968)
I re-watched this film on cable over the weekend. I have a decent DVD
letterboxed burn off of an IFC broadcast from a few months back, and
the film runs fairly regularly on that U.S. cable station. I'm drawn
back to the film over and over. I honestly don't get why this film is
written off as a camp classic. To my knowledge, when people write or
say it's appallingly bad they don't spell out why it is and perhaps
don't think they need to. Maybe they are star struck and can't or
won't get past that level of involvement with the film. Losey comes
across as a self-critical man in the Michel Ciment interview book but
he nevertherless stands by this film. It seems like a finely tuned
Losey film to me and makes a contribution to his great 1967-1970
period equal to the other three films.
What I love about "Boom!" is how it allows the baroque—ornamentation,
incongruity, over-the-top emotion—into a minimalist container made of
silence, the sea, empty spaces, white walls, the wind, a hovering
unity where the baroque is threshed, sorted, made clean. Only it
cannot be destroyed and is respected as a chaos energizing life and
creation, such as the enduring presence of Burton's jagged wind
chime. Commentators on the film mainly key into the brazen flourishes
(such as the Easter Island-like statues on a hill in the far
background) and Taylor's emotional outbursts but overlook the wide
quiet and nothingness surrounding the proceedings and set design and
which is managed by Losey with amazing and abundant skill: these
severe elements are plainly commentative upon the shrill and
outlandish ones, making an aesthetic critique, hedging in loudness
and uproar while demarcating the limit of their own efficacy to
abolish all the lunacy. Losey demonstrates the wisdom that the arch-
Romantic can be protested, but not altogether tamed.
The key to Losey's '60s style is introducing excess then limiting it
by some greater bearer of clarity, such as a stable, sober camera,
parody, or some other emotionally flattening device. "Eva," "King and
Country," and "Modesty Blaise" erupt their frenzy or indignation over
the container wall, overtaking the cautionary restrictions (satire of
ripe art-film clichés, narration-interrupting divisions of the story
structure, precision-tuned color) that Losey designs and running
riot. I find these three films unwatchable. But there is a string of
greatness starting from "The Servant" and going from "Accident"
through "Figures in a Landscape" in which Losey strikes the right
combination of overheated emotion and boundary, where the latter wins
but not crushes and at a necessary price too of foregoing joyfulness
for the characters. I feel Losey is right to do so, yet the solution
isn't and can't be wholly satisfying as life can't be. In Losey's
films contentment remains forever out of reach.
Peter Henne
Et dans Au hasard Balthazar ? 
Faut dire que M. Klein, c'est vraiment un de ses meilleurs films, et c'est vrai que c'est un film au contexte historique pas si fréquent chez Losey (avec L'assassinat de Trotsky, loin d'être si bon).