As the credits flash on screen, the title Stavisky…, with its punctuative ellipsis, immediately suggests that this second collaboration between Alain Resnais and writer Jorge Semprun will not solely center on, nor completely define, its central character. While the basically linear narrative structure chronicles the downfall of an urbane swindler in Depression-era France, the thread is interwoven with the political fortunes of Trotsky in exile and, by extension, the sociopolitical fabric at large. In La guerre est finie (1966), Resnais and Semprun focused on the fictional Diego Mora in relation to contemporaneous personal and political concerns. Stavisky assumes another dimension by reinventing history as image.

In the introduction to the French edition of his script for Stavisky, Semprun observes: “any film is a fiction, even if that fiction assumes the formal structure—the dramatic mask—of a brief, of a factual file that one appears to be trying to sort out and clarify. In films, to outdo the illusion of reality in no way eliminates the reality of the illusion. The Stavisky written for Alain Resnais is a fiction which has a distinct relationship with reality….”

History, however confused by contradictory investigative reports and media accounts of the period, recalls Serge Stavisky as a small-time con artist operating in Paris during the Twenties. Sometime after his arrest and imprisonment in 1926 stemming from a counterfeit bond scheme, he assumed the persona of Serge Alexandre, financial advisor and theatrical impresario, and married Arlette, an ex-Chanel model whom he adored.

The ostensibly reputable Serge Alexandre gained reentry into the speculative financial circuits of Paris, with only the scandal-sheet press and the police aware of the conversion from Stavisky to Alexandre. He bribed members of both groups into silence, additionally intimidating the police with his friends in high places. As Alexandre, he parlayed his political and financial reputation into a Keynesian plan to provide employment for thousands across Europe by promoting large-scale construction projects—until a Staviskian municipal bond fraud he had been perpetrating was uncovered in December 1933. Stavisky/Alexandre fled Paris, hid in a chalet above Chamonix, and died under circumstances variously interpreted as suicide or murder, the latter alternative allegedly committed to cover up government complicity in his financial machinations. The ensuing chaos precipitated political and economic chaos: Fascist riots erupted on 6 February 1934, and the centrist–leftist government collapsed, to be replaced by a right-wing coalition.

Resnais’ fictive presentation of events is accomplished through conscious recreation of period image and association. His own boyhood view of the Stavisky affair had been filtered through the sensationalist press, and its graphic illustrations, headlines and hysteric text appear frequently in the film. The Parliamentary commissions, convened in 1934 to investigate the scandal and resultant civil disturbances, are indicated by flashforwards that gradually increase in appearance and duration until they dominate the latter segments of the narrative. Besides imparting a fatalistic tenor, the hearings reinforce the mystery by presenting character witnesses who offer conflicting images of Stavisky/Alexandre.

To further intensify the mythic resonance of the film, Resnais in effect created the equivalent of a Hollywood star vehicle. Belmondo’s participation not only ensured the $1.5 million capitalization for Stavisky but also merged a movie star presence with Stavisky/Alexandre’s theatrical, highly publicized image. As the respectable, anti-Semitic Baron Raoul, Charles Boyer defines a dignified humanity that prevents the role from degenerating into easy caricature. In a curious way, Boyer’s death in 1978 enhances the melancholy, beyond the filmic text, of the Baron’s final, voiceover words: “I realized it too late, but Stavisky was announcing death to us…. Not only his own, not only those of this past February, but the death of a whole period of history….” Fittingly, Stephen Sondheim’s evocative score, his first composed directly for a film, conveys the joie de vivre of privileged ostentation along with apprehensive undertones that presage a dying epoch, a page of history irrevocably turned.

Resnais and Semprun originally conceived Stavisky as an exploration of the fraudulent structure that pervaded business and government interests in France, with Stavisky/Alexandre represented as its apex. The intended theme remains, even though Stavisky/Alexandre—with his denial of the past, “amour fou” romanticism and obsession with death—controls the narrative. In a sense, this schizophrenic central figure symbolizes duplicity, both in terms of fraudulence—e.g., Alexandre’s financier image and true financial situation (“I have to keep reinventing the fortunes I squander…”)—and the archaic definition of duplicity, doubleness, that permeates the entire film.

This doubleness is most apparent in the film’s major subplot, Trotsky’s sojourn in France during the last months of Stavisky’s life. (Semprun’s novel, The Second Death of Ramon Mercader, had dealt with Trotsky in exile.) The adventurer and political refugee were contrasting figures, to be sure, yet both were Russian Jews in xenophobic, anti-Semitic France; both came under the scrutiny of one chief inspector; and both their fates were circuitously linked. With the rightist coalition in power after the scandal, the decision was made to expel Trotsky from France. And there is their connection to Erna Wolfgang (Silvia Badesco), the young Jewish actress who auditions at Alexandre’s “Empire” and is companion to one of Trotsky’s disciples. Her fictional character is brilliantly created in direct opposition to Stavisky/Alexandre as a representation of reality rather than legend.

To fully analyze Stavisky would exhaust reams of text; to not completely interpret the film leaves the impression of an Art Deco Watergate. Above all else—its narrative complexity, its meticulously developed structure—Resnais’ Stavisky is a mood piece, the distillation of its visual and rhythmic style. In his next film, Providence (1977), written by David Mercer, one character unknowingly conjured Stavisky: “…style is feeling, in its most elegant and economic expression.”

Note: These program notes for Stavisky… (1974) were written by me (as Renée D. Pennington) for the April 6, 1979, screening at the Film Center of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Copyright © 1979, Film Center. All rights reserved including right of reproduction.