The Artist (***3/4)

As a child, one favorite of mine was Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976), a nearly silent movie about a latter-day effort to make a silent movie. In its opening, this irresistible effort from Michel Hazanavicius — who’s French — goes Brooks one better in the movie-within-a-movie department by being a silent movie set at the gala Hollywood premiere of a silent movie whose star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, star of Hazanavicius’s OSS 117 spy spoofs), is both onscreen and backstage. Hazanavicius has great fun confusing what’s happening with what’s on screen. Valentin’s accidental encounter with a young female fan, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), sparks her Star Is Born-style ascent as the sound era dawns. That revolution, which doomed many a real career, creates irony and pathos as Valentin (whose name recalls silent star Rudolph Valentino) resists adaptation and Miller embraces the change, the irony being that we, the audience, can’t hear her voice.

Far from being ponderous, Hazanavicius’s film playfully relies on our collective storehouse of Hollywood tropes to both celebrate and satirize movie history. The lack of audible dialogue creates humor that only works in that context, where imagination supplies what is missing. As does music. Even people who rarely notice a film’s soundtrack might notice its heightened importance here, and Ludovic Bource’s score gorgeously sets the mood, though it’s more representative of the early sound era, especially when it cops Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo theme for the climax. While never abandoning the comic overtones, Hazanavicius reminds us of how, even in its earliest days, cinema had the power to move us in ways different from earlier media.

IMDB link

viewed 10/27/11 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/22/11