Every so often a film comes from the left field and plays a complete blinder and The Artist is such a film. It is also glorious, delicious and an unalloyed joy and if you don’t go see it you are a bigger fool than I thought you were, which is going some. It’s a film about silent films but not just a film about silent films because this is a silent film about silent films, and so beguiling and touching and funny and tender and clever without being cute it’ll warm the cockles of your heart. I loved it, adored it, delighted in every frame of it, would run off with it, if I could — right now, today — and as my cockles now say, ‘Thank you. We are warm. It’s nice.’
Written and directed by Michael Hazanavicius, this is a French film but set in Hollywood in the late 1920s. Its story is familiar, a sort of mash-up of A Star Is Born and Sunset Boulevard and Singin’ in the Rain, but I’m supposing this is wholly intentional. This is a movie about Hollywood movies which is constructed from old Hollywood movies about Hollywood, and movies. Neat. Smart. I would shake Mr Hazanavicius’s hand, if he ever asked me over for pie.
This is the movie Scorsese could have made if he hadn’t been so hung up on clocks and whatnot and dull little Hugo bleating about automatons. Our hero here is not dull. Our hero is George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a suave, dashing, preening silent film star adored by his fans. He has shiny hair, a thin moustache, sparkling teeth and lives in a Beverly Hills mansion with his devoted dog and a wife (Penelope Ann Miller) who is rather less devoted, and likes to quietly deface his photograph whenever it appears in Variety.
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