À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ

One of the all-time comedy classics, René Clair's À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ tells the story of Louis, an escaped convict who becomes a wealthy industrialist. Unfortunately, his past returns (in the form of old jail pal Emile) to upset his carefully laid plans. Featuring lighthearted wit, tremendous visual innovation, and masterful manipulation of sound, À nous la liberté is both a potent indictment of mechanized modern society and an uproarious comic delight.

“Happiness—how might one attain it? With factories? À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ is in a sense a definitively radical film. It may be tamer than Vigo’s preadolescent assault of ZERO FOR CONDUCT, but its arena is adult. It may be less libidinous than Buñuel’s wild ride of L’AGE D’OR, but its vectors are less caricatured, more directly representative of actual social forces (although, like L’AGE D’OR, LIBERTÉ is largely prefigured on the frustration of romantic desire—Marchand’s puppyish Everyman falls for a secretary after a single glimpse, but his pursuit of her has all the gravity of a Harpo Marx fixation.) Whereas both the supposedly antithetical ideologies of capitalism and socialism agree that work is indeed liberty, Clair argues that freedom is freedom, for the individual to define individually. Despite the memorable late sequence wherein a crowd of top-hatted corporate vultures scramble through a courtyard after wind-blown money, Clair’s target isn’t the nouveau riche, but the very notion of social control. Still, Á NOUS LA LIBERTÉ isn’t a critical film—it’s a celebration, a living, life-is-a-song proof of the alternatives. Better to own nothing in a field of singing flowers than to sell your life for the right to live.” - Michael Atkinson