The Artist Review

A silent, black-and-white, Academy-ratio picture about the coming of sound took Best Picture, and the joke is that it earned the attention on craft alone. Michel Hazanavicius does not treat silence as a gimmick needing apology: he uses the grammar properly, iris transitions, title cards spent sparingly, performances pitched to the back row, and Guillaume Schiffman photographs it with the soft key light and deep focus of a 1927 production. Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin as a man whose entire personality is a smile he can no longer sell, and the physical comedy is genuinely good, which matters in a film that cannot lean on a line reading.

Berenice Bejo brings the appetite the plot needs. The single sound sequence, in which a dressing room fills with noise Valentin himself cannot make, is the best idea here by some distance. The story is a straight star-is-born structure with a dog attached, and it borrows a Bernard Herrmann cue in a way that undercuts its own period discipline. Charming rather than deep, but the charm is real and the execution is close to flawless.