French Duplass

So I was at the gym this morn­ing and I put on TCM, as one does, and it took me just two shots to fig­ure out the chan­nel was show­ing Le Feu Follet, Louis Malle’s 1963 proto-mumblecore movie (not really) and it’s the din­ner party scene before the blunt/sad end­ing, and Henre Serre, best known from Jules et Jim, shows up in a bit part and I think, “Whoa, he looks like someone.”

And I remembered this photo, which was e‑mailed to me yes­ter­day by my frenemy Jeff “Captain Cockatoo” Wells, pre­sum­ably to ride me because I don’t much like the new movie that Elizabeth Moss and Mark Duplass co-star in (point of fact, I called it “yup­pie puke” in an exchange with Jeff, which was more just to rile him up than any­thing else; that said, no, don’t like the movie), and I thought, “That’s kinda funny, I should do a blog post on that.” 

Because that’s what it’s come to at this blog, I guess.

Since I got you here I’ll tell you my one mea­ger Louis Malle story. It’s some­time between 1986 and 1988, and I’m hanging out in Tower Video on Lafayette and West 4 in Manhattan. And one of the floor guys, a stout young African American fel­low, is walk­ing about in the laser­disc sec­tion, hold­ing a copy of the laser of Atlantic City. And trail­ing behind him is an older gen­tle­man, white, dis­tin­guished, short of stature, with salt-and-pepper hair and a bemused look on his face. The Tower employ­ee says to anoth­er Tower employ­ee, “This gen­tle­man is look­ing for all of the movies on laser disc dir­ec­ted by a Lewis Mal.”

A cinephile, I think, and I con­sider inter­ven­ing. I then notice the older gen­tle­man is wear­ing a brown leath­er quasi-aviator jack­et, on the back of which is sewn on a large decal, bear­ing the logo of “FYI,” the fic­tion­al tele­vi­sion pro­gram on which the fic­tion­al sit­com char­ac­ter Murphy Brown worked. And then it hit me—the guy actu­ally WAS Malle. Because he was mar­ried to Candice Bergen and all. At which point I got all sorta star­struck and did­n’t inter­vene after all. 

Lest you infer that Malle was on some sorta ego trip, remem­ber that in this peri­od home video was only just becom­ing a really big thing, and pri­or to this the idea of the “dir­ect­or approved” video ver­sion of a movie was only form­ing. So I sus­pect that what Malle was up to was some catch-up.