Three Rooms in Manhattan

 

The story of Georges Simenon's novel Three Bedrooms in Manhattan* is about a man named François Combe who meets a woman named Katherine, or Kay, by chance in a Manhattan bar one night. They strike up a conversation because they discover that they're French. They leave the bar together and spend the following several days, which seem to turn into weeks, with each other. The story is told from the point of view of François. 

But that is only the action of the story, because what Simenon explores is much deeper than the actions of the man and woman. He comes closer to examining the full volatility of love than any novelist since Proust. From one moment to the next, as these two people are beset with emotions so violently passionate, like passengers on a transcendental rollercoaster, it's astonishing that they manage to sit still and maintain their composure. And it hurtles them back and forth, up and down, all the way from page 3 until the end of the novel. Beautifully, Simenon makes you feel almost all of the many emotions to which he subjects François, which is a little tiring. 

Poor François, a French actor in New York, fresh from the loss of his wife to a gigolo, sleepless, prowling the bars, 

The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn’t go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

winds up one night sitting next to a woman calling herself Kay, 

Picking at random, he ordered grilled sausages. Then he looked at his neighbor and she looked at him. She had just been served fried eggs, but she hadn’t touched them. She lit a cigarette slowly and deliberately, leaving a trace of her lipstick on the paper.

“You’re French?”

She is too good to be true, but she will not stop talking about her life, of all the men she's known, and fascinates François sufficiently to  inflame his jealousy and incredulity. At one point, a few days into their affair, he becomes so tormented by the tumult of his feelings that he punches her in the face "as hard as he could with his fist, once, twice, three times," and all she can say to him is "my poor darling!" But gradually, over the course of several days together, her stories turn out to be true, and he finds that he loves her and cannot live without her. Luckily, she reciprocates his feelings. 

Somehow, through unforgiving prose, they survive Simenon's brutal assault on their - on our - psyches to arrive at a place of certainty and peace. It is utterly transfixing. But that is the novel, told from the inside, and it's a tour de force for Simenon. The whole trouble with the film, Trois Chambres à Manhattan, directed by 59-year-old Marcel Carné, is that the story, told from the outside, doesn't even work as soap opera. Co-written by Carné and Jacques Sigurd, the film exposes the full extent to which Carné had been reliant on Jacques Prévert, the poet who had written Le jour se lève, Le quai des brûmes, Les Visiteurs du soir, and The Children of Paradise. Carné, in fact, offers a challenge to the auteur argument, since Prévert was the true author of those films, not the director Carné. 

The superb actor Maurice Ronet is too young to play François, who is 48 in the novel, and Annie Girardot has none of the mystery that Simenon gives Kay. The cinematography, by the venerable Eugène Schuftan, who photographed - magnificently - Le Quai des brûmes, among others, is seriously handicapped by the cross-cutting between location shots in New York and studio scenes done all the way back in France (the continuity people had quite a job on their hands). The exterior scenes in Manhattan seem to exist merely to establish the actuality of the setting. The Central Park scenes are especially egregious because they show us views we've seen in countless other films set in Manhattan. (When I visited Washington, D.C. I sat down on a bench in a park but was quickly told to get up because someone was shooting a scene there for a TV series.)

While we get enough exterior shots of Manhattan to provide the film with enough Nouvelle Vague street creds, the film opens with a terrible rear-screen night shot of Maurice Ronet and Geneviève Page in a Mercedes sports car on the Champs-Elysees. Back at their posh residence, Page announces to Ronet that she's leaving him for a younger man who's waiting outside. (We see him sitting like a handsome mannequin behind the wheel of a convertible.) Ronet is resistant to her leaving. She tells him that divorce is only a formality and that can find acting work in America. Cut to Ronet occupying a cheap flat in Manhattan - the first "chambre." He gets out of bed, paces the room, looks out of the window, grabs his jacket and goes out into the night time street. The camera rises to show us the Manhattan skyline and the credits roll (see above). 

Because it's the 60s in the film and not the 40s in the book, the costumes and sets are far less louche. François already has a telephone in his flat. François and Kay meet on adjacent stools at a snack bar. Kay isn't wearing a fur and pearls. The first half of the film is mostly Kay talking, telling François of all the men she's known and the places she's been. François acts as if he doesn't believe her - that she's bullshitting him. 

The Hotel Sherman is the 2nd room in Manhattan. (In the book it's the dreamlike Lotus, although everything in the book is dreamlike.) It's nearly forty minutes into the film before we see daylight. Through it all, Annie Girardot's hair, which makes her look much older, remains exactly the same. The film is black & white, so we can't see how Kay's lipstick smudges her cigarettes. There is one improvement the film has over the book: instead of Kay playing their song on a jukebox, she asks a jazz pianist to play it. The pianist is Mal Waldron, who supplies the film with his marvelous jazz.

What I felt that the movie needed was the mock-noir style of Jean-Pierre Melville in Bob le flambeur. Towards the end, when Kay has flown to Mexico to be with her ill daughter, François, unconvinced that she will return, picks up a young woman, played by the stunning Margaret Nolan - an English actress who had been Sean Connery's masseuse in Goldfinger. As Raymond Chandler once put it, she's the type who would make a bishop kick out a stained-glass window. Lying in bed next to Ronet, their lovemaking is interrupted by the ringing phone. Of course, it's Kay calling long-distance. The naked girl slides out of bed and gets dressed. From the tone of François's voice, Kay suspects that he isn't alone. Oh brother! 

As happens too often, by the time the film is over you will want to return to Simenon's novel, which I highly recommend that you do. It is richly satisfying in ways that will surprise you. 

*Georges Simenon, Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, translated by Marc Romano and Lawrence G. Blochman (New York Review Books, 2003). The French title is simply Three Rooms (Chambres) in Manhattan. The three rooms in question are two small apartments and a hotel room. All three have beds.