The Sign Of Leo* (1959)

Director: Eric Rohmer Starring: Jess Hahn, Stephane Audran Genres: Drama, Fantasy Origin: France Certificate: PG Languages: French With Subtitles Subtitles: English Running Time: 98 min

synopsis

The movie's middle section has a pain and desolation perhaps not seen since in Rohmer's work, as the musician slowly slides into homelessness, poverty and borderline madness. Rohmer, with a perfectly measured tone, captures all the tiny escalating humiliations as he wanders through a largely deserted Paris in the heat. Then the musician takes up with a wandering clown, and the movie takes on a broad comic tone again, not seen since in Rohmer, creating an odd symmetry with the movie s early section, when the musician wrongly thinks he's won an inheritance and parties himself into the state of poverty. That kind of symmetry is emblematic of the movie's weakest element - its unenlightening interest in fate and chance and paths of destiny (inherent in the title, in the deus ex machina ending which finds him inheriting the money after all when his cousin's killed in a freak accident, and in the final shot - after his friends have found him and taken him away to restart his life - which pulls away from the earth to show a heavenly constellation (of Leo, I suppose)). There's little here of the smart conversation and introspection that marks Rohmer's later movies, and what there is verges on parody - the smart set gets to seem pretty trivial and inconsequential against the travails of its protagonist. The sequences of him eyeing food, eavesdropping on snippets of life, trying unsuccessfully to shoplift etc. are utterly stark and simple and moving.