The Artist

This film has received a lot of praise and is in some lists as one of the best, and in some cases the best, film of 2011. I went to see it with high expectations that came away a little disappointed.

The film tells a story spanning the years 1927 to about 1932 and is made in the style of a silent film.  It is a story of a silent film star, modelled after Douglas Fairbanks, and a young starlet. She finds success as his career declines because he is unable to make the transition to sound cinema.  The film has many imaginative and effective details. I particularly liked the use of a beauty spot. It has a truly splendid dog, played by Uggy.

I was a little disappointed because the film tells a simple and rather predictable story and ends up being a simple romance. It is as though the filmmaker, pleased with having come up with such an interesting original idea as to make a film that looks like a silent movie, was content then not to seek anything fresh or original in the story. Also, if I were nitpicking, I would say that the two leads do not look very authentically of the late 1920s, and neither does the quality of the image, apart from being in black and white . I am not sure whether this is an important detail. By some coincidence I recently saw again Woody Allen's is Zelig, which has some similarities to this film. Zelig is like a modern documentary about a figure who lived in the 1920s, and it uses simulated images of that character at that time. Of course Woody Allen plays that character and we see simulated images of him in the company of well-known figures, such as Adolf Hitler. I thought those simulated images, created by Gordon Willis, were more persuasive than the images in The Artist.

I found the music in The Artist truly trying and when I left the cinema I had the beginnings of a headache from its incessant and rather tedious quality. At heart The Artist tells a simple and rather sentimental and soft-hearted story. This may, of course, have been deliberately a part of its way of celebrating silent cinema. Nevertheless, 2011 was a very good year for cinema and a film would have to be more ambitious and complex than The Artist to become one of the best films of the year. I can understand that a film articulated around the transition from silent to sound cinema, as is The Artist, may have a special appeal to some film enthusiasts.