Rene Clair's first film was the bizarre surrealist short ENTR'ACTE, which had music (and a cameo) by composer Erik Satie. Also showing up briefly in that film were two of Satie's young protégés, Darius Milhaud and George Auric.
When Clair made the talkie A NOUS LA LIBERTE, he hired Auric to do a completely original score, which was not common at the time, and a lot of the scenes were shot to recordings of the Auric music. This was only Auric's 2nd film (after Cocteau's BLOOD OF A POET) but he already shows the mastery that would lead to well over a hundred further scores.
Clair and his Oscar-nominated designer fill the screen with wonderful art deco visuals, and there's a sympathetic cast cemented by the two central characters, Louis and Emile. There are some wonderful physical comedy bits in the film (mostly in the factory), as well as the social satire which I didn't find particularly heavy-handed (although that adjective has been used by others). The fine balance of music, visuals, and comedy makes this a winner.
Freedom for Us
1931 [FRENCH]
Action / Comedy / Musical
Plot summary
In this classic French satire, Louis, a convict, escapes from prison and takes on legitimate work, making his way up in the business world. Eventually becoming the head of a successful factory, Louis opts to modernize his company with mechanical innovations. But when his friend Émile finally leaves jail years later and reunites with Louis, the past catches up with them. The two, worried about being apprehended by police, long to flee the confines of industry.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
July 01, 2022 at 03:18 PM
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Charming early French comedy, with a fine score
The satire may be dated and gauche, but the film still takes off when it focuses on physical comedy and visual cinema.(possible spoiler in last paragraph)
I saw this on a double-bill with Clair's silent classic 'Paris Qui Dort', and was initially dismayed that the feathery magic of that film was replaced by clunking ironies, heavy compositions, and shrill, caterwauling 'music'. 'A Nous la liberte' is in many ways a forerunner to 'Modern Times', with about as much political subtlety - the factory assembly line disrupted by an inept worker would be 'borrowed' by Chaplin, although, instructively, the sequence is much funnier in the Hollywood film, perhaps because the little tramp is such a recognised, beloved figure, and the rather non-descript Louis is not; or perhaps because Chaplin was such a master at pantomime, and enlivened the mechanical scene with a vibrant display of physical virtuosity; more probably, it is because Chaplin developed the scene, showing not only the effect of human error on the most perfect of technological systems, but also the dehumanising, mechanistic effect of emergent modern capitalism on its workers.
Clair sees life for the worker under capitalism as identical with the life of a convict in prison - both systems seek to stamp out or rigidly order humanity, turn people into socially acceptable machines. With humanity so thoroughly contained, it is not surprising that it should be a fundamental human emotion - love - that causes anarchic chaos in this system.
Clair also links capitalism with criminality - the Big Boss in the film, the man who engenders the new technocratic society, who unites workers and the wealthy, past (his own, his friend, his blackmailers), present and future (the new machines), is an escaped convict. Despite the rigid heaviness of the buildings and machines, and the system they uphold, the status quo is ultimately transitory and fragile. It's easy to climb the social ladder, but just as easy to fall, as Emile shows with remarkably good grace. No such system - and capitalism claims to be natural - can ever offer stability or genuine security for the exploiters who need it most: capitalism carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Clair is also canny or prescient in linking the new capitalism with emerging fascism throughout Europe - Emile's factory is ordered on crypto-military lines, with uniforms, symbols and leader's iconography.
If Clair's politics are heavy-handed, his visual sensibility is not, and this film transcends itself when it looses its political shackles and gives into subversive whimsy, a rondelay of chases, fist-fights, drunken fracas, Bunuellian iconoclasm. Clair may not have been as profound a director as Renoir or Vigo, but neither had his eye, or his way with orchestrating movement, of creating chaos from order, and vice versa. The climactic surreal opening ceremony is obvious politically, but a visual stunner, with even nature undermining the narcissistic parades of power, in a way that anticipates Fellini and Kusturica.
The spare, oppressive sets are a delight, from the 'Metropolis'-like factory, to the unwitting mirror-home of the Big Boss. The end, in its rueful freedom, is pure Renoir. The inspired and inventive use of sound doesn't obscure the fact that much of this movie is beautifully filmed silent cinema.
Freedom for ever.
Emile and Louis are two jailed friends who dream of freedom and plan to escape. Louis is successful and becomes a phonograph factory tycoon, after Emile finally breaks out he seeks work at Louis' factory. Tho initially the harshness of industrialisation keeps them poles apart, they both come to realise that friendship and being honest to oneself is far more rewarding than love or any sort of financial gain.
À nous la liberté {orginaly titled Liberté chérie} is a truly biting musical satire written and directed by the considerably talented René Clair. Filmed without a script, with Clair giving his actors free licence to improvise, the picture focuses on the dehumanisation of workers at an industrial plant. Shifting as it does from prison to this monstrosity place of work, the viewer is forced to wonder just exactly which is the prison of the picture? For workers trundle in to work, punching in to a clock and sitting at a conveyor belt for hours on end, they are merely robots for this corporate machine, life is indeed desperately dull.
Clair pulls no punches in portraying everyone who doesn't work on the shop floor as greedy capitalist schemers, one sequence literally see the elite grasping for Francs strewn by the mounting storm. This wind of change also releases Emile and Louis from their respective constraints, and it's thru this change that we the viewer are rewarded with a truly uplifting ending that closes the film magnificently. The picture was a flop on its initial release, managing to offend parties from various corners of the globe, but now in this day and age the film has come to be hailed as something of a French masterpiece, coming some five years before Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times {Clair's camp even wanted to sue Chaplin for plagiarism, but Clair actually took it as a compliment}, this clearly is the template movie for industrial indictment. At times devilishly funny, at others poignantly sad, À nous la liberté is a cinematic gem that all serious film lovers should digest at least once. 9/10