Luc Moullet’s Les Sièges de l’Alcazar (1989) is a semi-autobiographical love letter to cinephilia. Les Sièges de l’Alcazar is bittersweet in tone and playful in its execution. Like so many of Moullet’s films the director had only a modest budget and must do his best to disguise the inherent limitations of such circumstance. It seems that Moullet’s style has been entirely informed by these types of conditions. The static shots, long takes and jump cuts that comprise the theatrical blocking and expressionistic montage are the hallmarks of a film by Luc Moullet.
The protagonist of Les Sièges de l’Alcazar, Guy (Olivier Maltinti), could easily be the younger, more naive version of He (Luc Moullet) in the earlier film Anatomy Of A Relationship (1976). He and Guy are socially inept men who value the cinema more than their relationships (prospective or real). These two films are complimentary portraits of a life lived in service to an obsession with the cinema. Les Sièges de l’Alcazar is critical of the nostalgia for a moment in time where auteurism ruled the day where as Anatomy Of A Relationship is a more immediate and unfiltered reflection of a filmmaker’s marriage hanging in the balance. Les Sièges de l’Alcazar represents memory just as Anatomy Of A Relationship represents a present reality.
The main consistency between these two pictures is that the Moullet figure himself is a kind of oafish buffoon or clown. Guy looks like Harold Loyd (or like Silvio Bagolini) and is visually equated with schoolboys numerous times. The single mindedness when it comes to the cinema is much more destructive in Anatomy Of A Relationship where the stakes are higher and the Moullet surrogate is further along in his life. The Moullet in Les Sièges de l’Alcazar is just starting out and the Moullet of Anatomy Of A Relationship is experiencing a mid-life crisis.
Yet it was a younger Moullet who made Anatomy Of A Relationship. In youth the filmmaker and his wife Antonietta Pizzorno-Moullet created a reflexive portrait of their marriage as a kind of relationship comedy à la Sacha Guitry. There is an urgency to Anatomy Of A Relationship that just cannot exist within the complex of nostalgia that forms Les Sièges de l’Alcazar. Between the time that Les Sièges de l’Alcazar is set and when Moullet made the film at least twenty years have passed. The relationship between Les Sièges de l’Alcazar and Anatomy Of A Relationship to Luc Moullet’s biography is akin to the relationship between Charlie Chaplin’s life and career to his film Modern Times (1936).
Les Sièges de l’Alcazar evokes its setting beautifully and with a satirical bite. The internal dialogue of Guy reflects what so many cinephiles think and feel, particularly in the scene where he worries that, while on a date, he may give the impression that he is simply imitating the movie. But beyond such truths Les Sièges de l’Alcazar renders its historical moment with details such as the importance of a final screening of a film or the competition between Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. Moullet is deliberately self-mocking in those scenes where Guy is evaluated intellectually and romantically by rival writer Jeanne (Elizabeth Moreau) and it is the conflicting views of Positif and Cahiers du Cinéma that provide a means for this scathing self-analysis.
The most amusing scene in Les Sièges de l’Alcazar feels as though it could have been lifted right out of Brigitte et Brigitte (1966). In this scene Guy calls on the Paris Police to enforce a law which states that in France a film can only be screened in the form which received approval from the ratings and censorship board. Guy’s outrage over a beloved film being screened in a truncated form is a familiar one. Yet Guy’s reaction, though it may satisfy some sort of wish fulfillment for the audience, is ludicrous. Even more absurd is the notion that such a law could be enforced this way. It’s a sequence that represents Moullet at his best as a comedian; gently pushing reality just far enough into fantasy that it becomes a parody of itself.
It’s important to note that Les Sièges de l’Alcazar barrows its title from an Augusto Genina film made in 1940. Moullet is equating the Cinéma L’Alcazar to a military academy in Spain; thusly comparing cinephiles to soldiers. The title, like so much of the film, is a pun at history’s expense. Luc Moullet’s fifty-four minute paean to cinema is probably his masterpiece.
