The Watchmaker

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Watchmaker (L’Horloger de Lyons) a Bertrand Tavernier movie adapted from a Georges Simenon novel.

In this one simenon, instead of following the detective, focused on the father of the accused. Michel is just an ordinary watch repair sales guy with his own shop. One day the cops come tell him his car’s been found abandoned. Turns out his son took it, and with a girl murdered a man. The couple is now on the run.

The movie shows how the innocent father is caught up, manipulated by cops, journalists; how friends of the murdered man smash his shop, and friends of the girl come to give support; people whisper about him behind his back. And he doesn’t have any idea why his son did it. The defense attorney wants to build up a fake case, and the cops also want the other worker girls to testify.

The father gets increasingly annoyed by the circus, and though at first he finds he didn’t understand his son at all, by the end he comes to feel a closer bond to him than ever. His only testimony at the trial is that he stands by his son, in all solidarity.

The second to last scene shows the father visiting his son in prison. Son has been sentenced to 20 years, so he’ll be almost 40 when he gets out. The father and son have a nice talk. The father shares a story of when he was a young man, beginning of WW2, how he hit a general in defiance. He says he will take care of the girl and his son’s child, which will be his grandchild.

The film is shot very messy, hand held, natural light, ugly looking. Very low key performances, which accords well with the usual simenon approach to life and stories. Tavernier shot it all in lyons and at times he chooses locations and shots to kind of say, ‘Hey! We’re in lyons!’ – not really in a pushy way the James Bond way, but it gets borderline; this is the only real flaw I find in his approach. Phillippe Noiret is very good as the father. Noiret and Tavernier worked together a lot; this movie I think is their beginning together, and they were in Revenge of the Musketeers which I saw last night, which was 30 years after Watchmaker, which was 1974.

There is a sort of feeling of hope and happiness at the end, oddly enough. The irony of this was intentional. In one sense, at this point the circus has moved on to new scandals and cases, so the man and his son can go back to private lives.

At the same time, Simenon was interested in sociology more than psychology, and there are references here to the political scene in France that I don’t understand. No doubt if I knew better, I would appreciate more of what Tavernier was doing.

At first the movie seemed ugly and badly made. But seeing the Simenon source and how it played out, it was right, I thought.

Phillippe Sarde did the music. He did music for Revenge of the Musketeers too, and both film scores did little but annoy me. He was bad in 1974 and still bad in 2004.

Watchmaker is a movie that really calls for no score. It’s low key, and just wants to look at these characters almost in a documentary way. Music wants to tell us how to feel, and build our feelings. It just works wrong here. As for Musketeers, in the very first scene, he’s using a sort of music and instrumentation that seems avant-garde, modern – totally out of place for the 17th century.

(29 January 2009)