Director: John Huston
Year Released: 1952
Rating: 2.5
I've always had a personal problem with biopics in that I am never quite sure I am getting the true story of an individual's life as much as I am getting life twisted by art - a director and his/her screenwriters re-writing history (hello, Oliver Stone). John Huston's film of the life of hard-drinking cripple painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (played by Jose Ferrar) never quite satisfies me the way I wanted it to - it is dramatically non-existent, too mannered, too cold. The first twenty minutes are set inside the Moulin Rouge bar which Henri frequented - there are haughty girls in excessive makeup dancing with large-chinned gents to the sound of enthusiastic audiences while a young Zsa Zsa Gabor does a show-stopping song and dance number (was the Moulin Rouge truly like this or is the depiction based on Henri's paintings? is it the way he saw them instead of how they really are?). The plot expositions during the first thirty minutes are clunky and set in front of you, one right after the other - you can see the wheels turning. The rest is on auto-pilot, and the film ends where you'd expect it would, given Henri's lust for cognac. Almost every performance other than Ferrar's is annoying and grating - everyone from Zsa Zsa to Colette Marchand (Henri's key love) overact, the latter coming straight from a Fellini movie, writhing around in her costumes like she'd rather not have them on. They are all stark contrasts to Ferrar, who is so composed, so exacting that perhaps Huston thought he needed more excitement to pick up the tempo ... but that fails. Henri is a bit of an enigma as well - for the first hour, he's near mute, exhibiting the same flat affect no matter what; for the second, he's a non-stop philosophy-spouting machine, like Pascal with a cane. What brought about the turnaround? Too much is made out of his disability: the film's drama/tension only comes from people pointing this out with forked tongues. We know he's got image problems, and the women he loved and loved to paint don't appreciate him, but Huston refuses to set the hot poker down.
