DVD Chronicle

8 Femmes, François Ozon's murder-mystery-spoof of 2002, was greeted on arrival in the United States as being quintessentially French, and without question it puts Frenchness of a certain sort—period couture for its eight stars, dialogue nicely balanced between knowingness and hysteria, a plot as richly layered as and no more substantial than mille-feuille—on colorful display. I confess to a weakness for Ozon's confectionery, especially in scenes where he sets Fanny Ardant or Catherine Deneuve or his other glamorous cast members to singing. The music in 8 Femmes bubbles up charmingly out of nowhere and leads to nothing in particular: at one moment Virginie Ledoyen is making her Nancy Drew-like way through clues and alibis, and at the next she is performing a bubble-gum pop duet with her little sister. The effect is quite different from that of American movie musicals, where the songs and dances are more elaborately and theatrically presented, where entertainment takes its rightful place within a well-understood convention, and where (at its best) the music contributes something to plot and character. Nor is 8 Femmes at all like French films from the 1960s, say Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or The Young Girls of Rochefort, where all the dialogue is sung. In these operettish works, some of the singing comes from the young Catherine Deneuve, touchingly vulnerable, astonishingly beautiful, at the start of the grand career which would lead nearly four decades later to her performance for Ozon.

It is unpredictability, anti-conventionality, which makes the music of 8 Femmes so distinctive. Its singing has nothing to do with established forms like operetta or musical comedy, but rather comes as an unexpected gift from the filmmaker; sometimes it seems to surprise the characters themselves. For something comparable, and even more recommendable, in French cinema, we must go back to the early work of René Clair. He was a director as cinematically sophisticated as Ozon, but both funnier and more substantial, and more technically inventive, even with limited means at his disposal. He directed the avant-garde Entr'acte in 1924, then six well-received silents, and (in English) the still watchable haunted-castle comedy The Ghost Goes West (1935). But the film best showcasing his talents is unquestionably a French one, A nous la liberté, released at the start of the sound era in 1931 and now available in an excellent DVD edition from the Criterion Collection.

A nous la liberté—"Liberty for us!" or "Hurrah for Liberty!" or even, as though the characters were ordering something at a bistro, "Make ours Liberty!"—follows two amiable pals, Louis and Emile, as first they share a prison cell, then are separated, then join again in the world of big business. The opening sequence of the film shows an assembly line where toy horses are being manufactured. With characteristic wit Clair's camera tracks along the line of horses in adoring close-up, as if we were being treated to a view of Santa's workshop, then slows and reverses and lifts up to show us the true situation: grey-clad convicts sadly wielding their hammers and screwdrivers. Meanwhile Georges Auric's music on the soundtrack modulates in a complementary way, from chipper melody to a resigned-to-our-lot number not too tunefully sung by the convicts ("It's the sad story we tell / From a prison cell"). This chorus might be thought "real," belonging plausibly to the moment and the characters—but not so the duet performed by Louis and Emile a little later, in the silence of the nighttime prison. Rising from their cots to make yet another assault with...