Gangsters in Wonderland: Rene Clement's And Hope To Die as a reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice stories
1998; Salisbury University; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoRene Clement's transatlantic thriller And Hope To Die (original title La Course du lievre travers les champs, 1972) begins in Paris where young boy, Tony, has come to live. Under the watchful gaze of the Cheshire cat (a poster hanging in bookshop window), Tony approaches group of gypsy children, hoping to make new friends. Rejected by them, he climbs flight of steps and comes across second gang of children, who seem more friendly. Smiling, he offers them bag of marbles. But the leader of the gang produces penknife and slits open the bag. As the marbles, filmed in slow motion, bounce down the steps, quotation from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass fills the screen: Nous ne sommes, o mon amour, que des enfants vieillis, qui s'agitent avant de trouver le repos. This is fatalistic and poignant rendering of the original verse, We are but older children, dear, Who fret to find our bedtime near (Carroll 123). The treatment of the epigraph is emblematic of the film's general transposition of elements from Lewis Carroll's Alice stories into doomed adult world, namely that of the thriller, courtesy of kidnap plot taken from David Goodis's Black Friday. To this extent, And Hope To Die resembles an earlier French hybrid of the thriller and the fairytale, Franqois Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist (Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960), also loosely based on David Goodis novel. But Clement's film was less well received than Truffaut's, the French critics prepared to accept ambiguities of tone from New Wave director far more readily than from veteran representative of the postwar tradition de qualite. The failure of the press to appreciate And Hope To Die is epitomised by Positif s description of the film as unsubtle and contrived. Positif targeted in particular the allusions to Lewis Carroll made by script-writer Sebastien Japrisot, notably the two gratuitous appearances of the Cheshire cat, and the naming of one of the female characters as Pepper, recalling chapter title from Alice in Wonderland (Eyquem 127). But Japrisot was to continue his fascination with Carroll undaunted, using an extract from the mouse's tale as the epigraph to his 1978 novel L'Ete meurtier. Moreover, Japrisot and Clement were neither the first nor the last French auteurs to take inspiration from Carroll's Alice stories. Carroll's standing in France has always been high. The clever nonsense of Alice in Wonderland-an English version of French symbolism (Conrad 540)-was first published in French in 1869, and has been translated into that language more times than into any other (Weaver 53, 118). Given the canonical status of Carroll's work by the turn of the century, it is surprising that Georges Melies, the pioneer of fantasy cinema, did not film Alice alongside his versions of Cinderella, Blue-Beard, and Little Red Riding-Hood. But possibly the most famous French fantasy film ever, Jean Cocteau's Orphee (1950), used the mirror from Through the Looking-Glass as gateway to the surreal kingdom of the dead. If the work of Melies and Cocteau is an exception to the rule that French national cinema is a classic realist cinema, little inclined to explore the fantastic or the grotesque (Vincendeau 12), so too is the period of the early 1970s. While Jean Rollin's lesbian vampire series and Walerian Borowzyck's erotic horror films were perhaps merely grotesque, the fantastic was represented by several films taking the Alice stories as their point of departure: notably Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating (Celine et Julie vont en bateau, 1974), Louis Malle's Black Moon (1975), and Claude Chabrol's Alice or the Last Escapade (Alice ou la derniere fugue, 1977). All three films explore the boundary between fantasy and reality and feature the topography of Carroll's world, Gothic houses and enchanted gardens. Rivette's circular Celine and Julie begins with Julie conjuring up an image of Celine running through Parisian park, dropping her belongings like the white rabbit. …
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