Day for Night Magazine

The Forms of Submission [Wages of Fear DVD review]

BY DAN ABBE

 “The Wages of Fear… is a work in which I was wary as one could be of exoticism, which can so easily mask a lack of solid architecture.” -Henri-Georges Clouzot

“The foreigner cultivates the taste of that misery, not as a tragic symptom, but merely as an aesthetic object within his field of interest.” -Glauber Rocha

The Wages of Fear is a European film, set in South America, about European people involved with an American company. A group of expats in a postwar malaise find themselves in Las Piedras, a nondescript South American town. None of them have regular work, so they pass the time hanging around a local bar. The film’s French protagonist, Mario, is involved with Linda, a woman from the town who works at the bar. When another Frenchman, Jo, arrives, he makes a big impression: he wears a fancy white suit, takes a taxi from the airport, and demands the most expensive drinks that the bar offers. Mario and Jo hit it off, and the two decide to team up in order to raise enough money to get back to Europe.

Their chance finally comes when the American owner of an oil company offers a high-risk, high-paying job. For $2,000 each, two teams of two men must drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerine, a highly explosive chemical that is sensitive to shock, over extremely treacherous terrain. The two teams have to overcome various obstacles, and in the end, only Mario reaches the final destination—but on his way back to Las Piedras, giddy at the thought of finally returning home, he careens over a cliff.

The Wages of Fear is rightly hailed as a master thriller; in the second part of the film, director Henri-Georges Clouzot has only a few elements with which to work: two trucks, four men and a road. The result is a consistently gripping series of scenes that are all the more impressive for the economy of Clouzot’s formal techniques. The first part of the film, which takes place in Las Piedras, is not as formally engaging, but establishes the characters and the setting.

Two aspects of The Wages of Fear stand out: its highly formal style, and its Eurocentric treatment of Las Piedras. This formalism comes to the fore in the second part of the film, while the Eurocentric perspective—which also steers the film towards exoticism—is most obvious in the first section. However, these two aspects of the film are not entirely isolated from each other. Whether he is aware of it or not, Clouzot’s formal techniques privilege the European characters: they are set off from their surroundings in such a way that they appear as romantic heroes.

Clouzot claims to have been “as wary as one can be” of exoticism, but the film does not bear this out. The novelist Dennis Lahaine suggests that the characters are in fact treated fairly; in the liner notes for the DVD, he says that “one of the basic tenets of cinematic humanism as employed by Clouzot” is that “by removing all hint of subjectivity from the point of view, one thus removes the stain of sentimentality.” Lahaine writes of “Clouzot’s chilly remove from his main characters”: this view is a questionable one, and in any case, the possibility of identification never exists in the first place for the people of Las Piedras.

Linda, Mario’s love interest, is the character most representative of the exoticism in the film. Even though she is the native of Las Piedras who has the largest role in the film, she is marked as a character that is clearly subservient to the Europeans—Mario, in passing, calls her “half-savage.” In Linda’s first scene, we see her on her hands and knees,scrubbing the floor of the local bar as Mario looks on. We cut to see her shot, very gratuitously, from behind. Soon afterward, she crawls over to a window, where Mario sits out of view. She is still on all fours; Mario literally pets her like a dog as she looks up at him, out of the frame. Later on, after she fears she may have inconvenienced him, she says: “You can beat me if you want.” Linda is played by Vera Clouzot, the wife of the director, who, to be kind, does conceal her Frenchness on screen in an entirely convincing fashion. Her Spanish is poor, and she is, by no small number of shades, the whitest resident of Las Piedras. The most prominent native character, in other words, is a caricature.

The formal qualities of the film effectively isolate the European characters from their surroundings. In the first part of the film, this is achieved through a manipulation of
the mise-en-scene that emphasizes certain aspects of the set in order to distinguish the Europeans. In the second part, the combination of long shots and close-ups serves to draw a sharp distinction between the characters and their environment—a technique that reinforces their plight.

Las Piedras is presented as a place that one has to break out of: at one point, Mario remarks to Jo, “It’s like prison here.” The formal presentation of the town reflects this idea. In a scene outside of the bar, the European characters sit under slatted awnings. They are shot in such a way that the shadows that fall on them suggest jail cell bars. Later, when Mario shows Jo around his living quarters, the shadow of a chain-link fence falls on Jo’s body. This scene is important in that it introduces another European element of the film, Mario’s only prized possession, a metro ticket from Paris. This small ticket is always given a prominent place in the mise-en-scene, no matter how Jo and Mario are aligned. Far from any sort of “chilly remove” from the main characters, Clouzot’s direction instead presents them as imprisoned tragic figures.

The second part of the film, which is occupied by the drive through the mountains, sees the Europeans overcome a series of obstacles in pursuit of their freedom from Las Piedras. The film is almost claustrophobic in its presentation of these challenges, since Clouzot almost always shows either a close-up of the characters or a long shot of the trucks rumbling along. In the first event of this sort, one truck is speeding along at forty miles an hour while the other is only going five. Due to an extremely bumpy stretch of road, the fast truck cannot slow down, and the slow truck cannot speed up. Clouzot cuts between close-ups of the trucks’ speedometers, the worried faces of the drivers, and long shots of the trucks on the road to create tension. The landscape beyond the road is completely barren: these long shots do not draw attention to the scenery, since there is no real scenery to speak of. Instead, they emphasize the direness of the situation. Like the presentation of the Europeans in Las Piedras, in these scenes, they are shown against an essentially hostile background. This contrast brings out the romantic overtones of the film, since there is a natural force for the main characters to struggle against.

It is not by accident, then, that the last shot of the film is of Mario’s metro ticket, which appears front and center as flames from his exploded truck lick the bottom of the screen. Even Mario himself is relegated to a lesser role, as the audience only sees his disembodied hand clutching the ticket. This is a fundamentally tragic image: the hero dies holding the symbol of his dream. In the context of the film, though, it acquires a Eurocentric connotation—even in the midst of “half-savagery,” the European man can hold on to his enlightened ideals.

If The Wages of Fear is, as Lahaine suggests, a work of “cinematic humanism,” then this humanism is only available to the European characters in the film. The natives of Las Piedras do not have any access to the high-minded romanticism that Clouzot offers to his protagonists, such as in Mario’s Parisian metro ticket. The European characters of the film, to be fair, are not always shown in a flattering light. But it is as if their general rudeness is justified by the fact that they have ended up in the “prison” that is Las Piedras—an idea that the film bears out formally. The audience, it seems, it meant to pity them.

Clouzot’s own preoccupation with exoticism, in any case, is not one that is based in skepticism of Eurocentrism. Rather, he is only concerned with it on formal grounds: that it “can so easily mask a lack of solid architecture.” In other words, he is worried that the film might be perceived as a work of exoticism because this would be a slight to his abilities. Clouzot needn’t have worried about this—even if the charge of Eurocentrism can be leveled against him, his skill as a director is undeniable. What is questionable about The Wages of Fear, though, is the way that it romanticizes the main characters at the expense of the native ones.

In this sense, Clouzot’s work falls in to the trap outlined by Glauber Rocha, that the European artist sees the Latin American’s misery as “merely as an aesthetic object within his field of interest.” Rocha, a prominent director of the Brazilian Cinema Novo, writes from a position that is informed in large part by Neorealism. His critique of European aesthetics is, therefore, political: the essay from which this quote is taken is called “An Aesthetic of Hunger.” The Wages of Fear takes no interest in the material suffering of the natives of Las Piedras, which is not surprising given that it was shot in a studio in the South of France. It’s not as if Clouzot intentionally set out to make a film that marginalized the material problems of Latin Americans. But looking at The Wages of Fear in light of Rocha’s critique, it is impossible to not see this aesthetic process at work.