4th EDITION

International Film Heritage Festival

Yangon, 4 – 13 November 2016
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Yoyo
Pierre Étaix
France – 1965

yoyo

Cast: Pierre Étaix (Yoyo / Le millionaire), Claudine Auger (Isolina), Philippe Dionnet (Yoyo as a child), Luce Klein (The equestrienne)
Screenplay: Pierre Étaix, Jean-Claude Carrière
Cinematography: Jean Boffety
Production: C.A.P.A.C.
Language: French
Duration: 92 min
Color: Black and White

Synopsis: A millionaire has everything: servants, a mansion, land, any pleasure money can buy—except Love. Sooner or later he always finds himself alone in his study, sighing over the photograph of the one girl that got away. One fine day a travelling circus rolls into town and, although some time has passed, the man recognizes the lovely equestrienne as the girl from the picture. He finds out that her young boy, Yoyo, is his son. The market crash of the Great Depression leaves the millionaire destitute, which is just as well because he feels happier sharing the simple life of travelling circus performers than spending another night alone in the empty mansion. With WWII raging on in the background, Yoyo grows up to be a successful clown and, with the advent of television, becomes a renowned artist, a film-maker, a millionaire. Now that he has the means, he longs to restore his father’s estate to its former glory.

Notes:
Pierre Étaix, one of the last classic slapstick comedy geniuses, passed away in Paris at the beginning of October this year, at age 87. Some of his most important films, including Yoyo, had been the subject of distribution disputes until they were restored and re-released by Studio 37, the Fondation Technicolor and the Fondation Groupama Gan decades later. Perhaps it was the success of The Artist (2011) that generated an interest in the tradition of French comedy of the silent era, of which Étaix’s cool wit was emblematic.

Born in 1928, Étaix was enlisted by Jacques Tati as a cartoonist and deviser of gags for 1958’s Mon oncle, but the two fell out when Tati demanded the rights to one of Etaix’s stage routines. He co-directed two shorts with Jean-Claude Carrière, who would continue to work with him as a writer: Rupture (1961), about a man ditched by his girlfriend, is a gentle, slightly laboured succession of sight gags, and the more ambitious Happy Anniversary (Heureux anniversaire), about a man braving traffic chaos to join his wife for dinner. The successes of these productions was followed by several longer films, The Suitor (1963), Yoyo (1965), As Long as You’ve Got Your Health (1966) and Le Grand Amour (1969).

The sweetly melancholy Yoyo is often considered his masterpiece, a black-and-white comedy made under the influence of Fellini and the French silent comic Max Linder, whose top-hatted dandy persona Étaix adopts at the start. The film is an imposingly meticulous refinement of the art of visual comedy, which in its witty sophistication includes sight gags about Fellini’s La strada, Tati’s Jour de fête and Millet’s painting The Angelus. It also toys with the possibility of sentiment while skirting sentimentality altogether—some achievement for a film featuring a child clown. One of the themes Étaix rails against in Yoyo is the idea of comedy as industry. The film culminates in a variation on the desolate glamour of La dolce vita before Yoyo the clown rides off to freedom on the elephant that haunts the film throughout. (The elephant is the circus’s ambassador to the world, yet its attractions are only alluded to, making this a strange circus film without a circus.)

Although Étaix’s filmmaking career paused in the 1970s and resumed only in 2009 due to various administrative obstacles related to the film industry, he won the admiration of directors such as Woody Allen, David Lynch and Terry Gilliam. Jerry Lewis, whom the French saw as a kindred spirit, cast him in his film The Day the Clown Cried, which was never released. He appears as a doctor in Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011) and has cameos in Otar Iosseliani’s last two films, notably in Gardens in Autumn (2006), among a crowd of elderly gents having themselves measured for their coffins while still alive. “He is the last star of slapstick in Europe, if not the world,” comments director Alain Jomier. “In France there was Tati and then there was Étaix and now there are no more.”

Notes drawn from Romney, Jonathan. “Buried Treasures.” Sight & Sound 23, no. 7 (July 2013): 94-95.