The Artist is the toast of the town. Everyone and their dog is gushing breathlessly over the black and white, silent (but not really), French melodrama starring Jean Dujardin and directed by Michel Hazanavicius which secured a UK release at the end of 2011 thanks to the Weinstein Company.
The story is set in 1920s Hollywood and is a simple tale of a star who watches his career in silent movies disintegrate while the young woman he plucked from obscurity rises as the fresh, glamourous face of the new-fangled talkies.
The film is enjoyable enough with accomplished performances and a solid period feel. It also has a nice dream sequence where silent star George Valentin pictures with terror the new world of cinema where every shot is polluted with in-your-face, cranked-to-11 sound effects. The contemporary fashion for overly dramatic sound effects is, however, nothing more than the equivalent of silent actors mugging to camera in the misguided belief that audiences are too stupid to understand more nuanced methods of storytelling.
And that's my biggest problem with The Artist. While undoubtedly charming if you like that sort of thing, the film is nothing more than a simplistic melodrama which thinks the challenge of watching a silent movie is more than enough and it's probably best not to trouble audiences with anything approaching a complex storyline. The breathless praise lavished upon The Artist seems not to be the result of extended consideration but rather the more immediate result of shock. Shock that a silent film could actually be understandable. Shock that black and white is not just for serious, arty films and can also be employed on cinematic fluff.
The Artist left me feeling much the same way as I did after watching Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg's war movie was billed as the most realistic cinematic portrayal of war. Ever. Veterans said so. When I went to see it at the cinema, I laughed out loud at the opening sequence and was left feeling like I'd just offered herbal tea and homemade biscuits to a room full of Spanish Inquisitors. I did broadly enjoy the film though. The same can be said of The Artist, it's an enjoyable enough movie but I completely fail to see what makes it worthy of such lavish praise. After the credits rolled we got up, leaving five people deep in conversation over the merits of the film they'd just watched. I wish I'd stayed behind to eavesdrop because it still mystifies me how anyone could have so much to say about the film. Perhaps this is only to be expected from a marketplace that shuns complex cinematic stories in favour of simplistic movie events. George Valentin's nightmare has come to pass, and it's worse than he could ever have imagined.
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