The Clockmaker

Bertrand Tavernier's first feature-length film, l’Horloger de Saint Paul (The Watchmaker of Saint Paul, known as The Clockmaker for English audiences) was released when he was 32 years old. It was based on a novel by Georges Simenon titled l’Horloger d’Everton, written in 1954 when Simenon was living in the U.S. The novel was set in New York state and in Indiana, but Tavernier and his two co-writers, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, changed the novel's locale to the French city of Lyon. Michel Descombes is a watchmaker who lives with his young son Bernard above his shop. Coming home late one night, he finds that his son isn’t home and his van is missing. Opening his shop in the morning, two policemen approach Michel and tell him that they located his van. They take him there where a police inspector informs him that his son killed a man. 

The political divisions in France at the time of filming were extreme. Calling someone a “leftist” was considered an insult. Since the murdered man, Razon, was a gun advocate, a right-wing cause, Bernard’s crime is labelled “leftist” by the media. When Bernard is captured with his girlfriend, who perhaps provoked him to murder Razon, he refuses to cooperate with the defense that it was a crime of passion, and his father agrees to do the same. He murdered a man but he refuses to have it explained or dismissed as unpremeditated or unprovoked. Even when he is sentenced to twenty years.  

Philippe Noiret is marvelous in the role of Michel. He is one of those actors who make up in intelligence what he lacks in looks. For some reason, Jean Rochefort, who plays the police inspector, was dubbed with another actor’s voice, and it is a distraction since his performance is otherwise excellent. Michel and this cop develop a kind of friendship – until Michel refuses to cooperate with the Inspector’s attempt to pigeonhole his son’s crime, to force it into a mold in which it doesn’t fit. 

There is a great deal of eating in the film, simply because it is another aspect of life that Tavernier loves. There is a funny moment when a cop asks the Inspector: “Did you see La Grande Bouffe? Usually, there’s nothing more innocent than food. In this film, the food is disgusting and overly obscene. It should be banned. Especially in Lyon.” Philippe Noiret had appeared in La Grande Bouffe, an Italian film made by Marco Ferreri, in which a group of wealthy men gather to commit suicide – by gluttony, by eating themselves to death. Was it Tavernier’s joke on Noiret or his criticism of the film? 

In his first appearance on the film scene, one that had been dominated since 1959 by members of the Nouvelle Vague, Tavernier set himself apart by addressing the concerns of an older generation. He doesn’t follow the more dramatic flight of young lovers from the law. We learn of their whereabouts from what the inspector tells Michel or from an old housekeeper to whom Bernard was close. Though we, like Michel, very much want to know the motive for the murder (it had something to do with Razon’s coercion of Liliane, Bernard’s girlfriend, when he caught her stealing transistors), Tavernier never leaves Michel as he wanders across Lyon trying to understand where he went wrong as a father. 

Tavernier also deliberately snubbed the auteurs of the French New Wave, who had sought to wreck the careers of members of the older generation “cinema du papa,” by getting the screenwriting team of Aurenche-Bost to co-write his script. Eager to establish their dogma that it was directors who were the autueurs of their films and not the script-writers (of which French cinema had many great ones), the Truffaut-Godard-Chabrol cabal had singled out Aurenche and Bost as a contradiction of their dogma. Pierre Bost died during the long production of The Clockmaker, but Jean Aurenche continued to work with Tavernier on his early films. As a tribute to Bost, Tavernier later adapted a novel of his for the beautiful film A Sunday in the Country. 

Early in The Clockmaker, as Noiret is climbing the stairs to his flat, we overhear a song being sung in a neighbor’s flat – a song that was also sung in Jean Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu. It is another reference to the rich past of French cinema, to which Tavernier wanted to create a continuity. The last credit of the film is a dedication to Jacques Prévert, poet and perhaps the greatest script-writer who ever lived. 

Just before the film’s last scene, Michel is sitting alone inside an old church watching a medieval clock chime the hour. Michel also repairs old clocks in Lyon, and it is a beautiful moment. After his sentencing, Michel visits Bernard in prison. Their conversation is constrained by the shouting of others during the visiting period. Bernard smilingly tells Michel, “Don’t shout. Enunciate!” They have a touching, friendly reconnection. Bernard’s time is up and he is led away, looking back at his father repeatedly. Outside the prison gate, Michel looks up at its imposing exterior, and as he walks along its impregnable walls, he touches its old masonry with his hand and a strange smile appears on his face as he looks forward to the years of visits with his son that are to come. 

As in so many of Simenon’s novels, the crime committed is eclipsed by a study of character. Michel and Bernard, who never seemed to understand each other, are thrown together by an impulsive, violent act. The murder is never trivialized – Bernard must sacrifice twenty years of his young life. Justice is satisfied. Another aspect of the story that Simenon must have found ironic when he set it in America is its attitude toward murder. The killing of one man by another was and is a commonplace and unedifying event in America. To Simenon, it is so much more than the dramatic catalyst of a story. The death penalty remains stubbornly present in American life. In 1954, it was largely unquestioned. In September 1981, France outlawed capital punishment. The last execution by guillotine was in 1977. In France, as in other European countries, the taking of life is taken far more seriously than it is in America. 

In an unemphatic, eminently humane way, The Clockmaker is a noble and an ennobling film. Tavernier, abetted by two marvelous veteran script-writers, illuminates and discovers the truth in a single human life. The last moments, accompanied, like a coda, by Philippe Sarde’s beautifully sad music, let us linger over what we have seen – Michel Descombes’s discovery of what has been right under his nose, the son that he almost lost, whose soul is stubbornly intact.