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Stavisky... is a 1974 French biographical drama film based on the life of the financier and embezzler Alexandre Stavisky and the circumstances leading to his mysterious death in 1934. This gave rise to a political scandal known as the Stavisky Affair, which led to fatal riots in Paris, the resignation of two prime ministers and a change of government. The film was directed by Alain Resnais and featured Jean-Paul Belmondo as Stavisky and Anny Duperey as his wife, Arlette. Stephen Sondheim wrote the film's film score.
Interposed in the narrative are moments of flashback (to his teenage awakening to a hedonistic life, to his arrest as the petty crook Stavisky in 1926, and to his father's suicide after this family dishonour) and flash-forwards (to his funeral, and to the parliamentary enquiry into the Stavisky affair at which his friends and associates testify with varying degrees of honesty).
Also punctuating the main story are scenes depicting the arrival of Leon Trotsky in France to seek political asylum, and his sojourn in various country houses and hotels, receiving visits from left-wing activists. These scenes appear to have no link with the main narrative (apart from two minor characters: the young German-Jewish actress who moves between both stories, and the police-inspector who monitors Trotsky's movements and then also investigates Alexandre), until the end of the film when, in the wake of Stavisky's fall and exposure as a Ukrainian immigrant, a Jew, and a confidant of members of the left-of-centre government, Trotsky's presence is deemed undesirable and he is expelled from the country, while a new 'government of national unity' is formed.
The death of Alexandre/Stavisky in a chalet in Chamonix becomes a further mystery: either a suicide by gunshot, like that of his father, or an assassination by the security forces to ensure his silence.
Semprún described the film as "a fable upon the life of bourgeois society in its corruption, on the collaboration of money and power, of the police and crime, a fable in which Alexander's craziness, his cynicism, act as catalysts". The Times (London), 22 May 1974, p.11, col.C.
Resnais said: "What attracted me to the character of Alexandre was his connection to the theatre, to show-business in general. Stavisky seemed to me like an incredible actor, the hero of a serial novel. He had the gift of bringing reality to his fantasies by means of regal gestures."Quoted in Dictionnaire des films (G. Sadoul); Paris, Seuil, 1983. p.296. (Among many theatrical references, the film features a scene in the theatre in which Alexandre rehearses a scene from Jean Giraudoux's Intermezzo, and another in which he attends a performance of Coriolanus. His office is adorned with theatrical posters.)
The first screening of the film was given at the Cannes film festival in May 1974. After this performance further distribution was delayed when Stavisky's son sought to have the film seized in a legal action against the producers of the film because of its depiction of the relationship between Alexandre Stavisky and his wife.
Gérard Depardieu appears in a small role, the first of his several performances for Resnais, as a young inventor of the Matriscope, a device for determining the sex of a child in the womb, to which Alexandre impulsively gives his financial backing.
A British reviewer expressed several of the doubts which were felt by critics: "No one could fail to respond to the elegance of the fashion-plate costumes, the Art Deco interiors, the gleaming custom-built cars, the handsome grand hotels, and so on, all paraded before us to the tinkling thirties-pastiche foxtrot music of Stephen Sondheim... But Resnais's and Semprún's Stavisky is just not a very interesting figure... what he represents to the film's authors is not clear... What the picture does not do is use the Stavisky affair to make any larger comment upon the drift of twentieth-century life, or capitalist society, or even human gullibility... One's ultimate impression of the film is of an immense gap between the sophistication of its technique and the commonplace simple-minded notions it purveys."Philip French, in The Times (London), 23 May 1975, p.9, col.D.
The theme of uncertainty in a fragmented narrative (previously explored by Resnais among equally elegant surroundings in L'Année dernière à Marienbad) was identified by a more sympathetic American reviewer, though with some reservations about the density of the historical background: "The difficulty of knowing what is true, of discovering what really happened, ripples throughout Alain Resnais's "Stavisky" — a spell-casting mood piece that is also factually frustrating. Ideally, it should be possible to relish this fascinating movie on its own. But, since so little French history of the nineteen-thirties is provided, it's likely to send you flying to the library.... Despite its mystifications, Stavisky is one of the most rewarding films I've seen this year—and also one of the most intelligent."Norah Sayre, in New York Times, 30 September 1974.
Robert Benayoun, Resnais's commentator and friend, writing some years later, felt that his intentions in the film had been widely misunderstood, especially by those who looked for a politically engaged analysis of a crucial period in French history and found instead a retreat into nostalgia. For Benayoun, Resnais had seen in Stavisky a Faustian archetype, haunted by visions of his oncoming death, who fights to hold on to his 'empire' ("Alexander the Great"), resorting to every kind of illusion and delusion to gain more time for himself. The kaleidoscopic method of the narrative, its theatricality and romanticism provided the director with exactly the tools to represent the dazzling and elusive career of this "sublime crook". He concluded that Stavisky was perhaps one of the films in which Resnais had engaged himself most personally.Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imaginaire. Paris, Editions Ramsay, 2008. p.144-152.
Another critic took up the theme of theatricality in identifying the true subject of the film, as well as linking it to the political background: "It is not a portrait of Stavisky, but of the rôle he sought to play. It is not a study of character, but of a performance. It is not an image of reality, but the analysis of an illusion. By starting precisely from these 'false appearances' which Resnais can liken to those of the pre-war political establishment, what he speaks of here is quite simply the death of an era whose false splendours will be lifted, like a curtain in the theatre, upon the outbreak of fascism in Europe and the Second World War."Frédéric Vitoux, "La double mort d'Alexandre Stavisky", Positif, n.161, septembre 1974; republished in: Alain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. (Collection Folio). p.224. "Ce n'est pas un portrait de Stavisky, mais celui du personnage qu'il prétendait jouer. Ce n'est pas une étude de caractère, mais celle d'une mise en scène. Ce n'est pas une image réaliste, mais l'analyse d'une illusion. En partant justement de ces faux-semblants que Resnais peut assimiler à ceux du pouvoir politique d'avant guerre, ce dont il nous parle ici, c'est tout simplement de la mort d'une époque dont les fastes mensongers vont, tel un rideau de scène, se lever sur le déferlement du fascisme en Europe et la Seconde Guerre mondiale."
Stavisky made Monte Hellman’s top-10 list in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made.
The film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film by the U.S. National Board of Review.
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