The
Man in the Hat (2020)
relates its hero’s travels
through the Midi’s picturesque
summer landscapes
to light
touchstones to memory.
With poignant
and comic
vignettes in mime and an amazing soundtrack,
all is order
and beauty, luxury,
peace, and pleasure.The
story at
first feels
as though
a recurring
dream in which
The Man (Ciarán Hinds)
drives
a Fiat 500 on the
narrow
roads of rural southeastern
France; on
the seat next to him
is
the framed
black-and-white photo of a
young woman.
The audience experiences
the foreign life around The
Man with
his
visitor’s reserve.
His
encounters are mostly
in mime, like French
classic Jacques Tati’s
Monsieur
Hulot. As
The
Man
makes his way, he draws out
people’s best qualities and
brings
strangers
together. Released
in the UK in September 2020 and in the US last May,
this
unusual and
entertaining sleeper
deserves to be seen. |
Camargue dogs (Richard Henry,
Conor Levitt, James Lailey, Sylvain Thirolle, and Mike Pickering) in
The Man in the Hat (2020)
|
The story gets off to a quick
start when The Man flees Marseilles pursued by five bald reservoir
dogs in an orange and blue Citroën Dyane. The men dumped a
body-sized object in the harbor and then realized that The Man,
dining at an outside café, had seen them. The Man and the audience
recall an earlier tabloid headline “Meurtre parmi les Mafieux à
Marseilles” (Murder Among the Marseilles Mafiosi). A woman in a
roadside café (Claire Tran) later fans his fears when he overhears
her stage-whisper to a friend (Laurie Ravaux) an oh-my-god! story
that involves her husband and the Mafia and ends “Pouf! Disparu!”
The Man continues his sentimental journey mindful only to keep out of
the gang’s sight. |
A café
patron (Claire Tran) tells
a friend (Laurie
Ravaux) an
oh-my-god! story that
ends “Pouf! Disparu!”
in The Man in the
Hat (2020)
|
The
Man at first experiences the narrative in images and music much as
the audience does; the few spoken words throughout the film are
incidental and in French (with subtitles). The Man may be a
foreigner, though not necessarily so. The story pivots rather than
plots; its episodes feature a cast whose performances are as rich and
surprising as the film’s music.An
attractive middle-aged local, The Woman (Sasha Hails), rides a
bicycle in and out of episodes. An eccentric who resembles Fedor
Dostoevsky and whom the credits identify as The Damp Man (Stephen
Dillane), appears at first depressed and alone and later much
improved with a vivacious partner, The Chef (Muna Otaru), and a
champion chicken. A pair of gay farmers (Sam Cox and Didier
Bourguignon) are masters of pantomime, and a pair of “Measurers”
(Amit Shah and Zoé Bruneau) uniformed as local government or utility
employees keep turning up compulsively measuring roads and public
spaces but more specifically each other. A uniformed Official (Xavier
Laurent) appears when needed to validate “documents”. Other
characters appear in vignettes: The Hotel Manager (Brigitte Roüan),
The Biker (Maïwenn), The Older Man (Joseph Marcell) and The Older
Woman (Sheila Reid), a priest (Jeremy Herrin), moving nuns, a group
of cyclists, actors staging “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and
not least the five men in the Dyane (a car last produced in France in
1983). But
good music is the lifeblood of this film. Musicians turn up along the
route, from a zydeco duo on small local ferry, to
the tenor Mark Padmore breaking into song (“Venezia”)
at an auberge
dinner table accompanied by a
classical guitarist (Dario Rossetti Bonell),
to the singer Matilda Homer
and two others in The
Man’s
Fiat singing “Memory” which Homer wrote for the movie, to
women garage mechanics
singing of lost cars and lost cigarettes, to
The Nadine Lee Band performing Otis Redding’s “Try a Little
Tenderness” in a village square, to a
klezmer band
at a village festival.Two lovely
aural details are a recurring theme reminiscent of those
Nino Rota wrote for Federico Fellini (though
Alain Romans’s “Quel temps fait-il à Paris?” used by
Tati may come nearer the mark),
and a warm
jazz saxophone like
Cannonball Adderley’s on
several numbers, including
“The Pizza Van” in a scene in
which The Man orders a pizza
from a food van and The Damp Man and The Chef dance while making it.
The
Official “validates” The Man’s journey which the latter
summarized on the back of the woman’s photo with the opening lines
of Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation
au Voyage” (the poem’s refrain is quoted in our opening):
“Mon
enfant, ma sœur,
Songe à la douceur
D’aller là-bas
vivre ensemble!”
(My
child, my sister,
Muse on the sweetness
Of living together
there!)
The Man in the Hat 2020
U.K. (95 minutes) Open Palm Films/Rather Good Films/Gravitas
Ventures. Directed and written by John-Paul Davidson and Stephen
Warbeck; music by Warbeck; casting by Nanw Rowlands; cinematography
by Kanamé Onoyama; editing by Peter Boyle; produced by Daniel-Konrad
Cooper and Dominic Dromgoole.
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