52. À Nous La Liberté (Freedom For Us) (1931)

Directed By Rene Clair

Synopsis

An escape from jail, only one of the escapees makes it leaving his friend behind. Escapee makes it big in the gramophone business, gigantic factory not unlike prison. Friend finally escapes prison, gets job at gramophone factory. Friends Reunited! Big Gramophone man gets found out as a prison escapee by blackmailers, runs away with friend to be tramps on the road, leaving behind the world of capitalism, big cars and women.

Review

Some of the first films I saw as a kid were the Asterix animations that my father taped. Living in Portugal they were in French with subtitles. They were of course musical comedies in cartoon form. Now I can see where they are coming from.

A Nous La Liberte has many similarities to those films, and it's not only the frenchness or the sense of humor. In fact even the songs are similar, and the vocabulary used by the characters as well, a kind of comedic laid back French that didn't change much from 1931 to 1980 at least.

So, not only was this a discovery but also a trip down memory lane. The film is successful in many respects actually, it is a good comedy, with great images and a quite interesting message. You will laugh through it, there are really precious moments, but you will benefit immensely if you have some notions of French. In fact the DVD version I have has the most horrid subtitles, that leave a lot of the film unsubtitled and when they do subtitle it make a butchery of it. I would advise getting the Criterion Collection version (Region 1) as the Region 2 one is very crappy indeed. If you know French you are fine however. In terms of message it is an interesting leftist point of view, where capitalism creates a system where theose on the bottom of the scale are slaves and prisioners of those on top of it, and those on top are themselves slaves to greed. The scene towards the end where a huge group of men in top hats, white gloves and canes run around trying to catch the money that is falling from the sky is at the same time deep and absurd. It will make you laugh and think... so a good film in my books. Buy it at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

The first 5 seconds of the clip are fucked, but its the only one, better than nothing:





From Wikipedia:

The film later created controversy with the release of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, which bore some similarities to this film -- such as the conveyor belt gags. In the end, instead of going to court, they reached a settlement, but the whole controversy took around a decade. Chaplin maintained that he had never seen the film, as did everyone else at the studio. René Clair himself, was never a part of the case and was actually quite embarrassed by it, since he had great admiration for Chaplin and had always maintained that they were all in debt to him, and any inspiration Chaplin might have gotten from his film would be an honor for him. A speculation over this case was that it was a conspiracy from Nazi Germany to discredit Chaplin; À Nous la Liberté's production company, Tobis, was German. It is notable that the out-of-court settlement was reached only after the end of World War II.