I have to admire the guts it took to make The Artist. It would be difficult enough to get away with making merely a black-and-white film these days, but The Artist is not only black-and-white: it's French, and it's silent. Getting international distribution for a silent film must have been a nightmare; it can't have been easy to convince the studio heads that foreign audiences would be interested in this film. But thank goodness it did get released over here, because it's a masterpiece.
The film is set during the late 1920s and early '30s, and is about George Valentin (played by Jean Dujardin), a silent film star, and Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), and up-and-coming actress. It covers the time period during which silent films fell out of fashion and talkies became successful; while Peppy rises to super-stardom in the talkies, Valentin falls out of favour because of his refusal to change. The plot is simple, yes, but that's no bad thing, and since The Artist is, in a sense, a throwback, a complicated plot would reduce the effect of the film. And just because it's simple doesn't mean it's predictable: the audience where I saw it applauded during the credits, and the happy ending will make you want to get up and cheer.
Much of the film's success is down to the two leads. Dujardin looks every inch the silent film star, all slicked-back hair and Errol Flynn pencil moustache, and is unfailingly charming and charismatic as Valentin, while Bejo radiates warmth and movie-star beauty, complete with a Marilyn Monroe-esque beauty spot. John Goodman, the film's biggest American star (although Malcolm McDowell does have a brief appearance) is very entertaining as the cigar-chomping boss of the studio where Valentin and Peppy work. It's actually really refreshing to watch a silent film: since the actors can't speak, they have to rely entirely on facial expression and body language to get their emotions across. This could result in mugging (which, in fact, is one of Peppy's criticisms of silent actors within the film), but here allows the actors to really show off their ability; Dujardin has already won Best Actor at Cannes, and he ought to at least be nominated for an Oscar. At no point in the film does the lack of dialogue make it difficult to follow what's happening: the actors' expressions tell the whole story without need of words. That said, where Dujardin and Bejo act out the story, it's Ludovic Bource's near omnipresent score which acts as the narrator. By turns whimsical, bombastic, and heartbreakingly sad, it perfectly conveys the mood of each scene and elevates great scenes to magnificent ones.
The film seems to be aware that, as a silent film in 2012, it's something of an oddity, and there's a pleasant amount of metacinematic humour at its own expense. There is one scene in particular which has a lot of fun with the fact that the film is silent, but the joke is too good to spoil here. The appealing thing about it is that the film reveres silent cinema without idolising it, and accepts that the time of the silent film had to end in favour of the talkies; during an argument between Dujardin and his wife, he remains sullen and refuses to talk, prompting her to ask, “Why do you refuse to talk?” Her criticism of his refusal to act in talkies is also an acceptance that cinema had to move on. The time period covered by the film continues into the early '30s, when talkies thoroughly dominated cinema, and instead of mourning the passing of the silent film, The Artist instead celebrates the newfound opportunities which sound offered to filmmakers. The sheer love of cinema itself on display here is absolutely wonderful, and is a strong contributor to what makes The Artist such a great film: when this much joy has gone into making something, it's hard to leave the cinema feeling anything else.
Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest directors who ever lived, once said that silent films “are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be”. As far as The Artist is concerned, he was absolutely right. This is one of the year's best films.
And it has the year's best dog in it, too.
