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Mubi's series Jacques Becker's Companies is showing June 16 - July 18, 2017 in the United States.Le trouA striking thing about Jacques Becker, one of the last great classicists in French cinema, is the range of genres with which he was apparently at total ease. Astonishingly, the great critic and filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier recently said that Becker was maybe greater than Howard Hawks in this respect—a startling admission given that Hawks is an even more sacrosanct name for cinephiles of Tavernier’s age and predilection than his more obscure French contemporary. Becker, Tavernier said, had “an enormous range, and always [made films] with the same deeply organic quality.” Both Hawks and Becker are fascinated by genre, by the way that they can seemingly countermand inbuilt expectations by cultivating an atmosphere of life-like behavior that at least appears to undercut the revolving gears of plot. Both directors have come to be known as the makers of plotless movies,...

At first exposure, we are likely to wonder what it is about Jacques Becker’s films that make them feel distinctive.Antoine et Antoinette, his fourth completed feature, expresses his sensibility as fully as any of his films; yet Becker is clearly playing by a great many of the rules of entertainment cinema. His visual ideas are not radical: he relies on conventional patterns of decoupage, often uses gentle camera moves when introducing locations, favors a moderate expressionism of lighting that enhances the pictorial qualities of his sets. His manipulation of narrative is likewise familiar: the complicated plot is handled deftly and light-heartedly to convey the basically comic nature of the enterprise; there is a stock villain, the lecherous businessman Roland (Noël Roquevert), whose offenses are accompanied by comical music cues that limit his threat; the story line is designed in broad movements of joy and despondency, with events within...

Filmmaker Jacques Becker valued what he called "dead time," the little moments in life when nothing seems to be happening and in which people reveal themselves most fully. As his characters go about their mundane business—whether as master thieves or as simple shopkeepers—they gaze at each other lovingly while making small, clumsy efforts not to give away all their thoughts. The working-class married leads of Becker's fourth film, 1947's Antoine and Antoinette (screening newly restored on Dcp), share a flat and a life in postwar Paris, seen as a busily moving world in which lovers strive to make time for each other. Book-printing-plant worker Antoine (then-relative newcomer Roger Pigaut) comes home to play at petty jealousy with his wife and to try to get out for a w...