Although I am not a physician or a recent organ donor, not long ago I answered the phone to hear a French man say, "Hello, Lisa. This is the man whose life you saved." May the gods of hyberbole strike me down if I'm making this up. The voice belonged to filmmaker Arthur Joffé. And if what happened to Joffé had happened to me, I would have slit my wrists. Joffé is the writer and director of "Que la Lumière soit!" (Let There Be Light!), a delightful and ambitious star-studded comedy about God's attempts to have a script He's written turned into a movie. The Supreme Being starts his quest in Hollywood but gets the bum's rush in the City of Angels so opts instead for the City of Lights. Once in Paris, God finds a producer, who has an, uh, devilish tendency to tamper with the script even though the Almighty Auteur protests that he knows his way around a gripping story line, having penned "the Bible the best-selling book of all time!" Funny, touching and possessed of a luminous sheen and nifty special effects, "Que la Lumière soit!" is one of the best French films nobody's ever seen. Joffé spent eight years waiting to make his movie about God trying to make His movie. For five of those he was under exclusive contract to CiBy 2000 (a pun, in French, on director Cecil B. DeMille), the film-producing branch of gargantuan construction firm Bouygues. After trimming the budget by 20 million francs, CiBy 2000 finally said "yes" and the film was completed in plenty of time for its scheduled Christmas 1997 release. The trailer featured Pierre Arditi as the Voice of God asking: "Do I exist or don't I?" as the camera hurtled toward earth from the heavens, followed by the words: "The Answer Arrives on December 27." But by then CiBy 2000 was being dissolved and its staff and decision makers had scattered to other jobs. Lost in the executive shuffle, "Que la Lumière soit!" didn't come out until the summer of 1998. July 8, to be exact. Which, students of recent national euphoria will recall, was the day of the World Cup semi-final match. "It would be like trying to get people into a movie on the day Paris was liberated," says Joffé from his modest office on a cobblestone courtyard not far from the Parc de Montsouris. One shelf holds the red velvet presentation case containing a Palme d'Or from the 1982 Cannes Film Festival in the Short Film category, which Joffé won for "Merlin and the Gold Market." Some years after graduating from the French film academy IDHEC, Joffé made his big screen debut with a lavish but ill-conceived English language film called "Harem" (1985), in which a lonely Arab prince (Ben Kingsley) kidnaps a woman (Nastassja Kinski) off the streets of New York in order to introduce her to a different lifestyle, against her will. The movie wasn't very good, but over a million people went to see it. Joffé's second feature, made mostly in Italian, was "Alberto Express" (1990), the sweetly frenetic tale of a guy whose first child is about to be born, the catch being that he forgot he'd promised that before becoming a parent he'd reimburse all the money his dad spent raising him. The reviews were swell, the box-office results less swell. Which brings us to the present. In some sort of reverse pyramid from hell, as Joffé's films got better, fewer and fewer people ended up seeing them. French magazines and newspapers had pretty much ignored or dismissed "Que la Lumière soit!," not bothering to see it because, with few exceptions, the summer months in France are one big dumping ground for substandard fare. A summer release date is like a scarlet "Don't Bother" emblazoned across the scorned Hester Prynnes of filmdom. All told, the juncture of decent movie and lousy release date hadn't been this rotten since Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game," now considered a classic, landed with a thud just as WWII got under way. "There wasn't a single thing about my film on television," says Joffé, "and the only radio station in all of Paris that wanted to interview me was Radio Shalom. I was sitting on a bench outside the studio and a bum said, 'You're like me down and out, huh?'" Joffé gave the clochard a free pass to his movie, then entered the Radio Shalom building. Where, believe it or not, he got stuck in the elevator. "People were already going nuts about France's victory and the streets were crazy with noise, so nobody could hear me yelling for help. I had my cell phone, which shouldn't have worked in a metal elevator cage, but it did. I got the radio host on the line and he says, 'I can't leave the studio because I'm all alone here running the station.' So we conducted the whole interview over the phone! The interviewer called the fire department but it took them forever to get me unstuck because they had to fight their way through the streets." To put it mildly, Joffé was depressed. "I was numb. I couldn't begin to relate to all that soccer-fueled joy. So I bought a motorcycle and I drove nonstop from Paris to Marseilles going 150 kilometers an hour. I told my wife, 'If I make it to the south of France in one piece, I'll call you.'" Joffé says he was ready to "pull up stakes and leave France, go to America and start over." So how did your humble scribe inadvertently do her bit to rescue a despondent soul? I didn't know a thing about Joffé's state of mind but I caught the next-to-last séance of the film at the UGC Danton, the only cinema that was showing it on the Tuesday night before it vanished for good after three meager weeks in theaters. Sincerely impressed (and not a little shocked by the film's utter lack of local support), I wrote a glowing review for the American trade paper Variety. Joffé didn't see the review right away it didn't appear until August but once he did, he says, "I decided to pick up the phone and fight back. Not for my own ego but for my métier, because if I couldn't get the outside world to acknowledge that the film existed, I wouldn't be able to make sense out of my chosen profession. I could understand if the movie had turned out to be worthless, but that wasn't at all the case. Through a rotten convergence of circumstances, my film had quite simply been sacrificed despite its merits. It's obscene to relegate 45 million francs [the film's budget] to the trash." Joffé likens his bad luck to a hospital where a medical error has been made and the staff agrees to hush it up: "The patient shouldn't have died. If you just give up on a film that can entertain people, it makes no sense to be a filmmaker." "My Russian Jewish ancestors rose up in me," says Joffé, laughing, "and I demanded that the film be screened three times for professionals who are eligible to make nominations for the César Awards. I was so ferocious they agreed!" The three private screenings were packed. In fact, 100 people were turned away from the last one as word spread. The result? Hélène de Fougerolles, the film's radiant young star, was nominated in the Most Promising Newcomer category. Not bad for a movie that hardly anyone had seen. The Variety review helped get the film and its director invited to the Washington Jewish Film Festival where audiences loved it as well as a Jewish fest in Sydney, Australia. "I'd never been to Australia before," says Joffé of his November trip. "And I'd never eaten kangaroo meat before. I'm sitting and eating when they tell me, 'There's a phone call for you from Paris.' And it was the archdiocese calling to say the head of Notre-Dame cathedral, Cardinal Lustiger himself, had heard about the film and wanted to arrange a private screening!" Lustiger, who converted from Judaism as a young man, adored the film, in which God cranks out His screenplay, right to left, on a manual typewriter with a Hebrew keyboard. Joffé reports: One of the first things he asked me was, 'Has this been dubbed into English? I'm sure English-speaking audiences would love it.'" Film historian Claude-Jean Philippe called Joffé to say, "I haven't seen your film yet, but it seems to me it hasn't gotten a fair shake." Philippe showed it to his Sunday morning ciné-club and asked the crowd: "If this film were rereleased, would you recommend it to your friends?" The answer was a resounding "Yes." Although movies are sometimes reassessed decades after they first hit theaters, never before has a film that flopped the first time around been given a second chance less than a year after its initial release. Thanks to Vincent Paul-Boncour, an enterprising young distributor with a taste in movies from which his established elders could learn a thing or two, "Que la Lumière soit!" was rereleased April 28. "I'm not expecting it to be a massive hit," says Joffé of the one print on display in Paris and the dozen or so in the provinces, "but it's a major symbolic victory." F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. Arthur Joffé can thank his lucky stars he's French. |
