Ain't Misbehavin (Un voyageur) (2013)
Directed by Marcel Ophüls

Film Review

We owe Eddie Constantine far more than we thought.  If it hadn't been for him, or rather the cinematic disaster Feu à volonté (1965) to which he lent his dubious talents, Marcel Ophüls' career path may have looked very different.  Instead of becoming a world-renowned documentary filmmaker, Ophüls may conceivably have stuck to turning out third rate potboilers (of the Lemmy Caution variety) for less discerning mainstream audiences.  This is one of the more believable revelations that spring, jack-in-a-box-like, from Marcel Ophüls' long overdue self-portrait, released in France under the title Un voyageur and almost everywhere else as Ain't Mishavin.  The latter title, taken from the famous song by jazz legend Fats Waller, is the one that suits the film best, betraying as it does the maverick persona and mischievous sense of fun of its author.  Now in his 85th year, Ophüls still clearly relishes a controversy and it is with a fierce gusto that he sets about eradicating his own mystique in what we fear may well be his swansong.

There are two facts about Marcel Ophüls that are known to just about everyone.  First, he is the son of the highly regarded German-born filmmaker Max Ophüls, who is remembered mainly for the fine series of films he made in France in the 1950s, including La Ronde (1950) and Madame de... (1953).  Secondly, he is the man who made Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969) (a.k.a. The Sorrow and the Pity), a landmark documentary that revealed some unpalatable truths about the French nation at the time of the Nazi Occupation during WWII.  This is the film that put Ophüls Junior in the same bracket as his illustrious father (as far as worldwide appreciation of his work goes).  Not only did this film finally lay to rest the old De Gaulle myths about France's period of Occupation, it also proved to be hugely influential, providing a template for the modern critical documentary.  Le Chagrin et la pitié had such a wide-reaching and enduring impact that it hardly matters that Marcel Ophüls made two other substantial films after this: The Memory of Justice (1976), a daring attempt to compare Nazi war crimes with the United States' involvement in Vietnam; and Hôtel Terminus (1989), an account of the life of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie which won Ophüls his Oscar.

In total, Marcel Ophüls made around twenty films for the cinema and television.  What is less well-known is that he started out as an actor in Hollywood, working as an extra, before becoming an assistant for his father.  Perhaps the most curious thing about Ophüls' self-portrait is that he has so little to say about his own work.  The brouhaha in France surrounding Le Chagrin et la pitié (which led it to be banned for over a decade) hardly gets a mention, and Ophüls' only interest in the film appears to be the letter he received from Woody Allen thanking him for allowing him to mention it in Annie Hall (1977).  This is no false modesty; Ophüls just cannot help downplaying his achievements and is openly suspicious of any praise that comes has way.  At one point, he remarks that critics feel bound to flatter him out of respect for his father.

Marcel Ophüls has far more to say about his father than himself, from which we may safely conclude that Max Ophüls was the most important figure in his life.  Marcel certainly doesn't stint himself when dishing out the juicy anecdotes about his father, particularly those relating to his colourful and taxing time in Hollywood in the 1940s.  Preston Sturges is cast as the principal villain of the piece, the monomaniac who made a habit of dragging people back to his house so that he could show them his films.  It was Sturges who (we are told) subjected Max Ophüls to the ultimate humiliation, only allowing him to say "Action!" and "Cut!" during their doomed collaborative effort on Howard Hughes' Vendetta (1950).  As his father traipsed from studio to studio, struggling to find someone who would take him seriously, young Marcel was becoming a fully fledged cinephile, developing a voracious appetite for American cinema, from Groucho Marx to Josef von Sternberg.

Max Ophüls' late success in France in the early 1950s made him something of an idol for the reviewers on Les Cahiers du Cinéma, particularly a new firebrand recruit named François Truffaut.  A man who was constantly in search of a father figure, Truffaut became Max Ophüls' fondest admirer, and it was inevitable that he should also become a close friend of his son.  It was Truffaut who gave Marcel Ophüls his first break, the opportunity to direct a short film in the anthology Love at Twenty (1962).  After this, Truffaut persuaded Jeanne Moreau to take the lead in Marcel Ophüls' first feature, Peau de banane (1963), a comedy caper movie that was to be the director's only successful fictional film.  After the aforementioned disastrous collaboration with Eddie Constantine, Ophüls gave up fiction and opted to become a documentary filmmaker for French television, his first notable work being Munich or Peace in Our Time (1967), followed by the film that made him both famous and infamous, Le Chagrin et la pitié.

The emotion that Marcel Ophüls displays whenever he mentions Truffaut's name, even in passing, speaks volumes of the closeness of their friendship.  How bizarre then that, whilst having a friendly chat with Jeanne Moreau in a restaurant, he suddenly asks whether Truffaut was having a secret affair with his wife.  It is just the kind of random, off-kilter digression that Ophüls would make, reminding us just what a live wire he had been for much of his career, asking the questions that no one else dared to ask and showing us just what a malleable commodity truth is.  Ophüls throws another curved ball when he asserts that a documentary can never be entirely objective and must therefore be considered a work of fiction.  By choosing where to point his camera, the documentarist is bound to adopt a point of view, which may or may not be valid but can never be the whole truth.  This admission of partiality is succinctly expressed by Ophüls when he and the BBC journalist John Simpson improvise a rendition of the Marx Brothers song "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It!"  (Neither of them should give up the day job.)

Rather than bore us with a formal, well-structured account of his life, Marcel Ophüls opts for something completely different - a colourful and chaotic collage that feels like a messy scrapbook of memories.  Appropriately for a filmmaker who spent much of his career sniffing out unsavoury truths and causing controversy at almost every turn there seem to be no no-go areas.  Ophüls talks candidly about his marital disharmony, his suicide attempts, his professional failures and his missed opportunities (which include turning down Marlene Dietrich for an amorous liaison - well, she was old enough to be his mother).  From the jovial tone of his film, Ophüls is clearly a man who has few regrets and who is glad to have lived a full and happy life.   Almost twenty years after his last documentary, Veillées d'armes (1994), he turns up unannounced like an ageing rocker desperately in need of an adrenalin fix.  A born raconteur, Marcel Ophüls has no difficulty holding our attention as he takes his random walk through his life, dropping names as carelessly and as gratuitously as a Cockney drops his aitches, punctuating his story with film clips that range from Blonde Venus (1932) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) to just about every film made by his father.  Ain't Misbehavin is as illuminating as it is enjoyable, a characteristically idiosyncratic self-portrait from one of cinema's true mavericks.

Film Synopsis

After an absence of 19 years from our screens, director Marcel Ophüls comes out of retirement to construct a cinematic self-portrait, a substitute for the autobiography he always intended to write but never got round to.  Ophüls recalls his childhood in Germany and his subsequent moves to France and America.  He recalls the endless setbacks his father Max endured as he tried to find work in Hollywood, and the happier times when they returned to France in the 1950s.  It was through his father that Marcel Ophüls met and became close friends with François Truffaut, the critic-turned-director who launched him on his filmmaking career.  After a promising start, Ophüls soon suffered his first setback and realised that his future lay in documentary filmmaking.  Le Chagrin et la pitié was the film that brought him international acclaim in the early 1970s, but it was so controversial that it very nearly ended his career in France...