Antoine and Antoinette

Antoine and Antoinette, Jacques Becker’s 1947 ode to the everyday life of working-class Parisians, opens amid the rhythmic, pounding machinery of a printing press. Antoine runs a machine that slices the edges off book blocks: we see the blades coming down and the white strips of paper falling away. Narrative cinema in the Hollywood studio style is trimmed just as ruthlessly: all that’s extraneous, or that dulls the pace, is cut away. What makes Becker so radical a director was his interest in just these things that are usually discarded: the space around events, the in-between moments when we see people just being. He called it “dead time,” but it is filled with life, whether it’s Jean Gabin’s middle-aged gangster making the bed and brushing his teeth in Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954), or Antoinette ironing a new polka-dot dress while her husband listens to a ham radio in their little garret. It’s not a day in the life, it’s the life in a day.

A portrait of a marriage, Antoine and Antoinette is also a film with two identities, harmonious complements. The first half is pure quotidian realism, setting up the lives of the young married couple: where they work, where they shop, who their friends are, what they do on Sundays. The only element of drama comes from a middle-aged grocer who shamelessly pursues Antoinette, courting her with fresh leeks and free sardines, and even buying a new bicycle wheel for her husband. His attentions naturally cause some jealousy and friction, but there is never any question of the wife giving in. The second half of the film is intricately plotted and somewhat contrived, as Antoine and Antoinette realize they have a winning lottery ticket, only to lose it, think they’ve found it, think they’ve lost it again, and finally…but I won’t spoil it.

Throughout, the film is animated by Becker’s eye for detail and his refusal to treat anything onscreen as mere background. Minor characters like the young boxer who shares not merely an apartment but a room with his parents, or the bespectacled clerk who is the grocer’s put-upon paramour, are not sketched in as supporting players, but are fully realized people, of whom we catch only fleeting glimpses. Most notably, the wedding going on at the back of a bar where Antoine drinks blossoms from background noise to a poignant vignette in a single scene. We know nothing about the couple getting married, but Becker takes time to show us the bride at the piano, singing a mournful song and looking bleak; the groom fussily refusing a cigar from his new father-in-law. This doomed-to-be-unhappy couple is entirely tangential to the story, but aside from providing a counterpoint to the happy couple at the center, they also make a simple point: what’s going on in the next room is just as real.

There is a marvelous feeling of light and air in this wintry Paris. A scene that consists of nothing except Antoine getting up early, having breakfast and going to work, is flooded with morning sunlight so clear, so bright, so real that the mundane becomes heart-catching, especially as Antoinette leans from a window in her nightgown to watch Antoine ride away on his bicycle over the finely-patterned cobblestones. Becker insisted on using relatively unknown actors in the lead roles, and drew from them fresh, spontaneous, low-key performances. Like the Parisian locations they inhabit, Roger Pigaut and Claire Mafféi have an ordinary beauty, or perhaps a beautiful ordinariness. Their features and performances have the elegant simplicity of a bicycle or a daily baguette. On the other hand, when Antoine goes to cash in the lottery ticket, only to confront the unbearable realization that he’s lost it, the impassive lottery clerk is the ubiquitous Gaston Modot (of Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game.) His familiar face has the effect of reminding us that we are watching a movie, that Antoine is at the mercy not of fate or chance but of a script. This scene is made even more penetrating by the underscoring of a piano tuner banging out tuneless, insistent notes that amplify Antoine’s anxiety and despair. The tuner was a happy accident: the scene was shot in a real office, and a man happened to be there tuning the piano; Becker recognized serendipity and asked him to continue.

Despite its postwar date and common classification as neo-realism, the film often feels like it belongs to the 1930s. It’s partly because the couple’s poverty, and the way that poverty is accepted as normal, recall the texture and attitude of the Depression years. When Antoine wants to check the winning lottery numbers, he has to retrieve the newspaper he cut out to line his shoes. Also, the unapologetic sympathy for the proletariat and disdain for the bourgeois was a stance that had gone well underground in postwar America. Becker was a member of the communist party, and he depicts warm communal solidarity among the workers; but if his sympathies are clear, they are also subtly expressed. Throughout the film, class and economics are intertwined with love and romance. The lecherous grocer feels certain he can win over the wife, and that he somehow deserves her, because he can offer her more money and luxuries than her husband. Even though they are so much in love, Antoine continually frets about the possibility of losing Antoinette, a fear that seems part of his vulnerability as a low-paid worker. We see both husband and wife subject to petty bossing and denial of freedom at their jobs; their dream for a better life centers on a gleaming motorcycle on which they can zoom down the road, a very thirties vision of joy in mobility, speed and streamlined chrome.

Finally, there are echoes of the thirties, even of René Clair (the lottery plot inevitably recalls Le Million, and in the workers’ yearning for freedom there are hints of A Nous la Liberté), in the film’s ebullient rhythms, the effortless way it turns daily life into a kind of dance—without, at least in Becker’s case, sacrificing realism. The lottery exemplifies randomness, the sheer chance that plucks this one couple out of the crowd—out of the mass-produced pulp fiction Antoine’s factory churns out, the impersonal portraits spat out by the photo booth where Antoinette works, the hordes of soccer fans with whom they spend their Sunday, the commuters streaming through the Metro—and makes them the focus of the story. In a key moment, Antoine asks Antoinette whether she could have found love with someone else; it matters to him desperately to believe that their love is like the one winning ticket. She never answers.

by Imogen Sara Smith