Yoyo (1965) - #655

- How do you come up with gags? 

- Oh, I don't know. I watch, I observe.

Last spring, I had the privilege of watching an advance screener DVD of Pierre Etaix's 1965 masterpiece Yoyo. The opportunity was given to me in conjunction with the film's screening at the 2013 Portland International Film Festival, part of an Etaix retrospective that was just winding up its theatrical run, shortly before Criterion released its comprehensive box set, simply titled Pierre Etaix. The set features everything that Etaix ever directed (including his debut feature, The Suitor, which I won't cover here because the set came out after I'd passed that point in my timeline) during a relatively short venture into cinema that ended rather unfortunately for him as a filmmaker in the early 1970s, as he signed on to a bad distribution deal that led to decades of forced and undeserved obscurity as the legal rights surrounding his work wound their way through the court system. I won't attempt to recap those travails here; the good news is that the matter has been resolved, and even better, we have these brilliant works available now for home viewing, where they can be watched at our convenience, and with a close attention to detail that will pay off in ever-deepening affection and respect for the artistry of this most winsome and charming of clowns.

By way of a recap, here's the most relevant portion of last year's review:

The gist of Yoyo‘s story concerns a son’s response to his father’s absence and indifference throughout his childhood, but more apparent on the first viewing is the story of a ridiculously wealthy, chronically bored aristocrat (portrayed with jaded elegance by Etaix), who lacks nothing in life except the affection of a beautiful woman he once knew intimately but with whom he has now lost contact. We meet the millionaire in a sequence set in 1925 and presented very much like a film from that era – no spoken dialog, just intertitles and a musical soundtrack emblematic of the times. 

He lives in opulent luxury, but none of the entertainments at his disposal can break the grip of his deep-seated ennui – until a circus rolls into town one day and surprisingly reunites him with his long-lost flame. It turns out that she has a son, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the rich playboy. After the stock market crash and global depression soon wipe out his fortune, circumstances bring the family together, though in much poorer conditions than any of them would have expected when the family was first united. 

The narrative moves through the Depression, into World War II, the war’s reconstructive aftermath and the newly ascendant “golden age of television,” as we see the young boy grow up into the famous and celebrated clown, Yoyo. Etaix changes his make-up and demeanor a bit to take on the role of his son, putting his prodigious skills as a mime, magician and clown to good use while also managing to make Yoyo the man a fleshed-out, sympathetic character as he seeks out a place in the world where he can finally get off the road and settle down for a while.
Still, it’s a big mistake to focus too much on the story that Yoyo is telling, since that narrative is merely a vehicle for Etaix to trot out a seemingly bottomless reservoir of sight and sound gags that need to be closely observed for the full hilarity to sink in. More likely, the jokes will continue to reveal themselves through second- and third-viewings, becoming more droll and ingratiating with each pass.

So even though I gave Yoyo a glowing review in that article I wrote for CriterionCast.com, my thought at the moment is that I may have erred in selling the film short, by not waxing even more enthusiastically than I did. I do have a few alibis to fall back on, though. One is that the copy I watched was a rather mediocre, badly interlaced and non-commercial DVD transfer that required a bit of fiddling around on my part to get the proper aspect ratio. So a lot of the finer details passed by me unnoticed until I had a chance to watch it on Blu-ray. And let me tell you, there are a lot of very fine and very funny details to be enjoyed here. Etaix shows himself to be endlessly creative and patiently eloquent in stringing his sight gags together - some fall into place immediately, others unfold over the course of several minutes or even from one end of the movie to the other. Don't worry about trying to catch them all the first or second time through. I've seen Yoyo four times now and I'm still discovering delightful new bits that amaze me with their deftness and dexterity. Even these clips don't do the film justice, but it's a free sample, so don't complain:

Besides the hi-definition image, which also has the benefit of showing off many of the beautiful details of the French landscape in the middle part of the film and the lavish interiors of the family chateau featured in the opening and closing portions, the uncompressed audio track really stands out all the more now that I have a decent sound system. I recommend that you play it loud, whatever kind of speaker set-up you may have, since the sonic effects play a huge role in provoking the laughs, especially in the first half-hour "silent movie" segment, and the variations on Yoyo's theme music are crucial in sealing the film's emotional impact.

But perhaps the biggest missing piece in my initial viewing experience of Yoyo (other than not seeing it on the big screen, in a theatrical setting as Etaix undoubtedly would have preferred, given his sharp and witty lampoon of television, at least the TV of the early 1960s) was the absence of the supplemental features included in Criterion's comprehensive package. Both Etaix's brief video introduction to the film, and the hour-long interview piece Pierre Etaix, un destin anime (directed by his wife Odile) give invaluable context to what the film meant to its creator and how it fit into the context of a performing arts career that is in essence the fulfillment of his childhood dream. These more personal aspects, describing Etaix's passion for the circus, the theater and cinema, combined with the anguish he endured when his father was tragically killed in an accident as he was in the process of writing what turned out to be his favorite and most important film, add a layer of pathos and triumph to what was already easily recognized as a witty and accomplished piece of work, even if you knew nothing about Etaix.

It's that warmth and emotional tenderness that's put right out there on the screen, rather than the more abstract and implicit humanism of Etaix's mentor Jacques Tati, that makes Yoyo stand out as something more than just droll, skillfully executed visual comedy. Even though there's an unmistakable and inescapable layer of cartoonish artifice from beginning to end in the film, Etaix is telling us a family saga that covers a full generation and also recapitulates a big portion of the lifetime history of his original viewers. Like the toy that the film shares its name with, Yoyo is a three-part process. The initial downthrust supplies the momentum that puts it all in motion. Those opening scenes, presented in a manner wonderfully reminiscent of 1920's vintage silent movies, definitely cut against the grain of the emerging mod fashions of 1965, perhaps complicating the film's reception among those who weren't too keen on embracing the retro style that seems so amusing to us now. The middle section is where most of the fancier tricks occur, as Etaix moves us through the Great Depression, a World War, the postwar reconstruction and the resumption of traditional modes of entertainment, though things are never quite the same. The finale, the big ballroom blowout at Yoyo's lavish estate, wraps it all up in a dazzling display, complete with the clown, recapitulating his idle, aimless father, making a grandiose elephantine exit, just before the spinning discs begin to flounder and run out of energy.

Tati's stories, by comparison, are not so bound to 20th century history, though they do indeed look both backward and forward with lament and trepidation, respectively. Etaix's voice comes through in Yoyo as quite fully realized, perhaps more distinctive here in this project that he "poured everything [he] loved" into, than in the other films in this set which present more of a mixed bag of gags and narratives, some that work better than others. I have a hard time, at this point, finding any fault with Yoyo. Much credit also belongs to Etaix's collaborative partner Jean-Claude Carriere, best known now for his work with Luis Bunuel throughout the Spanish director's late-career renaissance. He provides a fascinating link between the rather famously celebrated Bunuel and the obscure-until-now Etaix. I'm definitely intrigued to discover more of the common threads between those two filmmakers as we get to see the unraveling of Western culture through the latter half of the 1960s through their memorably warped and incisive lenses.

Next: Story of a Prostitute