Jean-André Fieschi on Ford's "Donovan's Reef" (1963)

The following is a translation of “A l’Est des Philippines,” Jean-André Fieschi’s review of John Ford’s Donovan’s Reef (1963) originally published in Cahiers du cinéma no. 149, November 1963, pp. 59-60.

East of the Philippines

     We would love, in order to speak of certain films, to find the freedom of language with which they were conceived. Criticism of Donovan’s Reef would thus become a nonchalant digression interrupted by confessions, by winks, by notes at the bottom of the page. But how much all idleness appears laborious in the face of this Ford, which isn’t, we know, self-denial or impotence, but fulfillment and serenity. The king amuses himself: he returns to his foundations, quenches himself, talks of that and of those he loves, without affectation as without complacency; he knows the same happy old age as a Matisse, a Bonnard, a Renoir father or son. The color and the line are purer than ever, what was once their support now confessed as a pretext for a casual virtuosity. Virtuosity which neither feeds on itself, nor seeks: it finds. And the beauty that it finds is neither tracked down nor courted; it’s a matter of neither framing nor “forms”: it is there, within reach of the camera, the rest is to see it and to show it. Carnally, as Ford shows it, with brutality and delicacy, simplicity and profundity.

     Old age has rejected all the pitfalls of singularity. Matisse, the beard whitened, returns to the nudes of his youth, without the apparent security of the drawing, what his former passion believed to be the privilege of an insolent affirmation of self. The insolence took refuge in the controlled tremor of the line, which then begins to dream, in contempt of the laws as in contempt of their violation. And the old filmmaker no longer bothers to establish his dream, to justify it. Simply to paint it, and to paint himself through it, and the friendship with, and the prize of happiness. Ford’s nudes, they are commonplaces, the found conventions that he helped, after Griffith and with Hawks, to elevate to a mythological dignity. Others came, who exerted themselves there: take them back to his own account to show the vitality, to say all his past rejuvenated by a looseness, a great master’s loose-filming, that’s Donovan’s Reef, which demands of us the same youthfulness, whereas we have perhaps been born old.

     He has there firstly everything one imagines, in watermark on the completed film: another film, Polynesian vacations with old friends, comparable without a doubt to Hawks’ African vacations. The fervor is easily communicated, one suddenly deplores the dark cinema hall, one too would prefer to frolic and film in the sunlight, and Ford would give us reason, for his oeuvre proclaims that the whisky or the women, it’s good on the screen, but it’s better in life. An invitation to travel. But the world is there, vacations don’t last. Then, in the sense that Barthes was able to say that literature has been the Utopia of the language, one realizes that this Tavern is the Utopia of the gaze. The sky and the sea too blue, the hills too green, a conventional paradise where time and brawls don’t hurt, reduced to their deceptive choreography. In the nostalgia which silently dawns, we have recognized the aesthetic of the musical comedy: everything becomes melodic, the “accidents” which, elsewhere, would disrupt the natural course of the story, also participate in the harmony of the ensemble. Here, the old man hides pain: too much harmony to at no point conceal come secret pang, too much joy not to be the regret of the joy. This mythological spectacle then reveals his contradictions. When Ford has focused on showing routes (The Long Voyage Home, Stagecoach, The Searchers), he has loved to reveal, through the sudden fatigue of his tired heroes on futile journeys, their sweet hope of a refuge. When he has on the contrary painted intimacy, old age, the return to the setting of childhood (The Sun Shines Bright, The Quiet Man, The Rising of the Moon, The Last Hurrah), he has expressed by locations, in his idle characters, the nostalgia of the space or the action. In Donovan’s Reef, the action abandons its reality to become its own simulacrum, brawls repeated on fixed dates, as the anniversary of the two heroes; they transport their Ireland with them, which is less a homeland than a state of mind, a temperament. Here, once again, Ford gives up his taste for collage: the burlesque vein which pushed him, in Four Men and a Prayer, to shake up all the places of the world in a farandole of postcards, finds a more intimate response. Polynesia, Ireland, two conventions blown up by their unlikely convergence. This postulate, gag in itself, invokes others, which will bloom there quite naturally. Character gags, object gags, situational gags, provide a celebration of the color and the light which doesn’t destroy the nonchalant course; the burlesque renounces its aggressive virtues to find a new accord between the world and the dream. It no longer criticizes (or very little, and very gently), but sings in its own way the excess of naturalness whereby happiness gets closer to its caricature: exaltation of impish misbehavior, of simple conduct where the funny faces of an old globetrotter joins those, in unintentional homage to the first vintages of our dear Ozu, of some mischievous and Eurasian brats.

     So much charm and ease, however, would touch the exercise of style, if they had not been tempered with the hint of melancholy which suffices to render them serious. The photogenicism of happiness, it’s the concordance between the movements of a being and the space, which he continues to breathe. This world had to reconcile a threat (or a semblance of a threat) that would measure the price: it is, in a distant and bourgeois capital, the stilted heiress who goes to war. Script device? That through which, rather, the contemplation of serenity is transformed into its discovery.

                                                                          Jean-André FIESCHI