Summary
In the sunny seaside town of Nice, wealthy tourists enjoy the luxury hotels and gambling
casinos. Scarcely noticed are the local working class people who clean the
streets and prepare for the town's annual carnival.
Review
Limited financial resources more or less compelled Jean Vigo to begin his film-making
career with this short documentary film. A propos de Nice is not Vigo's most
ambitious work but it is striking how much of his own personality and view of life emerges
from this short but hugely impressive work. Assisted by a very gifted camera
operator, Boris Kaufman, Vigo presents a unique portrait of the town he grew to love whist
convalescing from his recurring respiratory problems.
Vigo himself described the film as a social documentary, but it is clear to anyone watching
the film that it is much more than that. The way in which Vigo contrasts the
wealthy elite with the poor working class clearly shows where his sympathies lay.
With some brilliant satirical touches, he ridicules his "social superiors", even contrasting
them with wild animals (a self-important ostrich and viciously snapping crocodiles).
Indeed some of the intrusive shots and awkward camera angles give the impression that
Vigo is making a nature film, secretly spying on the exploits of some unfamiliar species
of animal. All this goes to emphasise the extent to which he felt excluded
from the kind of world he is filming in A propos de Nice.
The film's last few minutes convey a darker message, however, and one which illustrates
both Vigo's creative vision and the intensity of his emotional involvement with the subject
of his film. The final image is one of a furnace disposing of the discarded
remains of the Nice carnival. This comes immediately after protracted scenes of
hedonistic revelry set during the carnival. Vigo has apparently widened the scope
of the film into a brutal condemnation of any form of corporeal excess. A life of
grotesque overindulgence deserves to be followed by a protracted stay in Hell.
Vigo is not just angry with social divisions and the complacency of the idle rich; he
is positively seething with a bearly controllable sense of social injustice.
A propos de Nice is not so much a documentary about Nice, but more a brilliantly
crafted assault on everything that the young debutant film-maker Jean Vigo hated.
It is witty, it is charming, but it is also dangerously subversive.
© James Travers 2002
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