And The Accompanist, apart from faintly calling to mind Truffaut’s hokey The Last Metro (1980), which is also set in Paris during the German occupation, shows little to link it with either The Little Thief or Miller’s early features. The Little Thief (1988), Miller’s revision of an old Truffaut project, consciously evokes certain aspects of Truffaut’s style and vision, but only the calculating, crowd-pleasing, and affirmative aspects Truffaut’s morbid and obsessional qualities are absent. Moreover, what seemed personal and peculiar to Miller in these two films - characters with a troubled relationship to masculinity expressed through violence - is completely absent from Miller’s most recent features, The Little Thief and The Accompanist. But Miller’s own early features reflect neither Truffaut’s style nor his vision, only his sort of material: Le meilleur facon de marcher ( The Best Way to Walk, 1975) is a story about little boys at summer camp and Dites-lui que je l’aime ( This Sweet Sickness, 1977) is an adaptation of an American-style thriller. He then served as production manager or production supervisor on Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her and La chinoise and no less than seven Francois Truffaut features, from Stolen Kisses to The Story of Adele H. Miller started out promisingly as an assistant to some key French filmmakers during the 60s, including Robert Bresson ( Au hasard Balthazar), Jacques Demy ( Les demoiselles de Rochefort), and Jean-Luc Godard ( Weekend). Seen as such, they all can be enjoyed primarily as excuses for listening to good music their dramatic and narrative qualities are strictly secondary.Īlternately, one can view The Accompanist as the latest of the disparate films by Claude Miller, its director and cowriter.
As all three films have the same producer, Jean-Louis Livi, they can be regarded as “Livi films” rather than as the discrete expressions of three directors. As a producer’s film, it is the latest in a recent cycle of French art movies involving classical musicians and including extended stretches of classical music - in other words, as a spin-off of Tout les matins du monde and Un coeur en hiver, both huge commercial successes, especially in France. The Accompanist can be viewed as a producer’s film, as a writer-director’s film, and as a quintessentially French film. But what could the disappearance of one Ambrose, in Texas, have to do with the disappearance of another Ambrose, in Canada? Was somebody collecting Ambroses? There was in these questions an appearance of childishness that attracted my respectful attention.” - Charles Fort, Wild Talents (1932) Newspapers all over the world had made much of the mystery of Ambrose Bierce. “About six years before the disappearance of Ambrose Small, Ambrose Bierce had disappeared. With Richard Bohringer, Elena Safonova, Romane Bohringer, Samuel Labarthe, Julien Rassam, Nelly Borgeaud, and Claude Rich. From the Chicago Reader (January 28, 1994).
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