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They Live by Night
by David Denby
  
   
The nighttime street scenes in “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” have a likely precursor in Louis Malle’s elegant first feature, “Elevator to the Gallows,” in which Jeanne Moreau wandering the Paris boulevards in search of he lover, passes in and out of shadows. At the time (1957), beautiful actresses were normally photographed in full light and, if possible when sitting, reclining, or standing still. The half-light playing on Moreau’s face as she walked became something of cinematographic scandale—a shift away from conventional craftsmanship and toward expressive imperfections. “Elevator to the Gallows,” which is being given a theatrical run (at the Sunshine) in conjunction with a Malle retrospective at the Walter Reade Theatre (from June 24th to July 19th), is a proto-New Wave movie, very much a work of the fifties but one that, in retrospect, appears to be pointing toward a liberated future.

The fifties elements can be seen in the formal attire worn by the principals (Moreau is in evening clothes and heels and a straight-from-the-beauty-parlor do) and in the symmetries of the story, which yield a facile, sub-Hitchcockian irony. Moreau’s lover is a former war hero, played by Maurice Ronet, who works for her scoundrel of a husband, an international arms profiteer. Ronet kills the husband in his office but gets stuck in the elevator as he makes his escape from the building (the power has been turned off), leaving Moreau to think that he has run off with someone else. Meanwhile, a teen-age boy and his girlfriend steal Ronet’s car and, using his name, go on an odd, murderous spree in the suburbs. Will Moreau and Ronet ever get together? A dazzlingly passionate closeup of Moreau at the very beginning of the movie suggests the depths of her longing. This is a movie built around a missed connection, and Moreau’s nocturnal wanderings are made unbearably poignant by an exquisite Miles Davis jazz score that became famous in its own right (and is still available on Verve). Ronet’s attempts to climb out of the elevator, meticulously staged and photographed, suggest a conscious homage to “A Man Escaped,” the Robert Bresson masterpiece on which Malle had served as an assistant director the year before. But the street scenes, the bizarre, anomalous adventures that Moreau has on her nighttime quest, the anarchic kids who just pick up and go—all this looks forward to the New Wave, and to such spontaneous urban prowls as “The Beat That My Heart Skipped.” Audiard’s movie may feature Bach rather than Miles Davis, but it’s jazzy in spirit, and Malle probably would have loved it.

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