‘Stavisky‘ (1974) is Alain Resnais‘ most successful film with the public, which may be partly due to the fact that it’s one of his most accessible films, but mostly to the exceptional cast led including Jean-Paul Belmondo. For him, the role of Serge Alexandre Stavisky is one of the most complex and serious of his career, a role in which he is brilliant without abandoning the personal charm that built his fame. It was also one of the cases where the critics did not quite agree with the audience, as Resnais‘s elegant and colorful vision did not match the political approach and social criticism that they expected from a film that recreated one of the famous cases of French history, a time when the Third Republic was closer than ever to an economic catastrophe and a coup d’état. In the perspective of the 50 years that will soon be celebrated since the release of the film, we can appreciate that Resnais‘ bet on the complexity of the character and his relations with the surrounding society was won, at least from an artistic point of view.
As this is a film by Alain Resnais, we are not surprised if the story is not told linearly. The narrative structure seemed very modern to me, and then I realized that it is almost identical to that of ‘Oppenheimer’, one of the blockbusters of 2023, with three narrative planes: the testimonies from the Stavisky Case investigation that generate flashbacks related to the events set in the final months of the hero’s career and life, which are in turn interrupted by flashbacks to the period of the 1920s in which his first adventures and encounters with the law had taken place. The portrait of Stavisky is drawn gradually and it is a complex portrait. Apparently in 1933 he was at the peak of his glory, living an exuberant lifestyle together with his beautiful wife, Arlette, surrounded by politicians, bankers, nobility and men of the law, some of whom were his cronies or bought by him, and at the same time he was known in artistic circles as a patron of the arts and especially of the theater. But everything was based on a series of scams, pyramid schemes facilitated by the years of inflation due to the great global economic crisis. His social position means that he is surrounded by friends, false friends, but also enemies waiting for the moment to destroy him. There is a scene in ‘Stavisky‘ where the hero reveals his vulnerability. Without ever telling him directly, his political and business enemies spread rumors about his ethnic origin – he was second generation in France and son of Jewish immigrants from early 20th century Tsarist Russia. Citizen Stavisky throws in the face of the interlocutor his identity card, his voter card and his invalid card, a proof that he had fought at the front in the Great War and had been wounded for France. In the eyes of many of those around him and part of the press, however, he remained a ‘meteque’.
Jean-Paul Belmondo is terrific as Stavisky. Nonchalance and bravado characterized him until the last moments of his life. The mystery of his death is not resolved in the film. Suicide or assassination? We’ll probably never know. His wife is played by Anny Duperey, and his friend Baron Jean Raoul is played by Charles Boyer in the penultimate role of a formidable career. In parallel with the main plot, a secondary plot follows the period of Leon Trotzky’s stay in France as a political refugee after fleeing Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stavisky and Trotzky never met, and their destinies represent two poles of the possible destinies of Jewish émigrés from what had been the tsarist empire, two men who choose opposite paths: one takes advantage of the system and climbs the capitalist social and economic hierarchy, the other plans and acts to destroy it. I also noticed in the cast Silvia Badescu, a beautiful and talented actress born in Romania who had a surprisingly short career, Michael Lonsdale, an actor I love who never disappointed and Gérard Depardieu at the beginning of his career, proving in just one scene his huge talent. The film’s score is composed by Stephen Sondheim, one of only two films for which he composed an entire soundtrack (the other being Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’) and it contributes, along with Sacha Vierny‘s cinematography and Jacqueline Moreau‘s costume design, to the sophisticated and sumptuous look of the film. Befitting the hero and befitting the ambitions of Alain Resnais.