L'Horloger de Saint-Paul (The Clockmaker of St. Paul). 1974. France. Directed by Bertrand Tavernier. Screenplay by Tavernier, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, based on the novel L’Horloger d’Everton by Georges Simenon. With Philippe Noiret, Jean Rochefort, Jacques Denis. New York restoration premiere. DCP courtesy Rialto Pictures. In French; English subtitles. 105 min.
Casting his favorite actor, the great, droopy-eyed Philippe Noiret, as the village clockmaker whose estranged son is on the run for murder, Bertrand Tavernier brings surprising compassion and emotional depth to this adaptation of a novel by Georges Simenon, the crime novelist who shared with Patricia Highsmith a rather more misanthropic outlook on human goodness. The film was a breakthrough success for Tavernier, who collaborated for the first time with the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, rescuing them from Cahiers du cinéma purgatory (a young and snarky François Truffaut dismissed their “tradition of quality” in a 1954 article). A melancholic beauty pervades The Clockmaker thanks to the cinematography of Pierre-William Glenn (the film mysteriously opens on a burning car seen from a train window at night) and the spirit of Jacques Prévert, who wrote some of France’s most hauntingly poetic songs and films of the 1930s and to whom Tavernier dedicated this remarkable debut feature. The screening on January 10 is presented by Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, the Institut Lumière, and the Lumière Film Festival.