Breaking Up/Down: As Long as You’ve Got Your Health

Yoyo attracted some inexplicably harsh reviews, causing its creator considerable angst—which seems to have fed into his follow-up, As Long as You’ve Got Your Health (1966), a compendium film of four hilarious yet fraught episodes. It continues the fragmentation and experimentation of Yoyo, starring Etaix and his stock company but as different characters in each part. Stress, frustration, fatigue, and disaster dominate the stories, but they are so short and so funny that no overall feeling of oppression is passed to the viewer. Of course, comedy nearly always comes from pain, but rarely does it mine such a consistent seam of dissatisfaction and malaise.

Insomnia, which appears first but was the last short to be filmed—it replaced Feeling Good, which Etaix removed after the release and which I’ll get to later—plays with cinematic form in a way that increasingly preoccupied Etaix and, like many of his films, features him in a double role: as a sleepless man reading a horror novel while his wife snoozes contentedly beside him, and as the vampire in that novel. This allows him variety as an actor but even more as the director, playing with expressionist tropes and having fun with film conventions. The best jokes have to do with the way the reader’s experiences in the real world affect the progress of the fictional one: distractedly picking up the novel the wrong way up, he “sees” an image of the vampire upside down.

In The Movies, Pierre struggles to find a good seat in a busy cinema. The screen is barely glimpsed, and always from extremely distorting angles, but it’s apparently showing a western, as imagined by Etaix, the cacophonous soundtrack consisting solely of hooves, gunshots, and absurdly amplified birdsong. The perils of cinemagoing have a long tradition in comedy, from the snoring, guzzling patrons drowning out the movie in Sullivan’s Travels (1941) to A King in New York (1957), with its neck-cricking parody of CinemaScope. In such visions, the plight of the customer always seems heavily filtered through the eyes of the auteur, who is either saying to the cinemagoer “I feel your pain” or “Thank God I don’t have to go through this to see a movie.” This is one of the few times Etaix’s on-screen persona feels like a filmmaker rather than an everyman, even though the indignities showered upon him suggest the comedic persecution of a low-status schlemiel.

Then Etaix’s camera jumps into the screen action itself, for a series of grotesque commercials, followed by the depiction of a full-scale fantasy world in which people actually behave like they do in ads. Etaix turns up in this world as a dismayed outsider, unable to understand why his friends’ maid walks about in her underwear and intimidated by his male friend’s aggressive comparison of his wife’s pie with one of Etaix’s. In its jaundiced view of modernity, this and the following episode may seem to follow the lead of Tati’s Mon oncle, or anticipate Playtime (1967), but Tati’s gizmos and gadgets always seem lovingly imagined. Etaix’s take is less ambivalent—it’s hard to read his hurling of a hand grenade into the commercial as anything less than a revolutionary act.

The darkest vision of all appears in the film’s title episode, where modern Paris is portrayed as uninhabitable, almost apocalyptic. “Atmospheric pollution” is often mentioned in Etaix movies as a kind of catchall modern concern, but here it becomes a serious threat, as the familiar cast of clowns is menaced both by choking black exhaust fumes and by unending noise pollution from traffic and road drills.

Etaix piles together fast-cut gags illustrating the toxic nature of the modern city. The external pollution is accompanied by inward crumbling, as his players shuffle through the offices of a doctor, himself overstressed to the point of breakdown, who diagnoses mental strain in every case. His own nervous system seems contiguous with his patients’: when he taps his knee with a hammer, his patient’s legs kick.

Etaix himself appears in three sequences: struggling to negotiate his apartment, where the pneumatic drills from the street cause everything to thrum, vibrate, and shimmy out of position; visiting the doctor and awkwardly limbo dancing under the voluptuous nurse’s bosom; and attempting to take his medication in a restaurant where the confusion caused by overcrowding results in an unsuspecting patron ingesting the chemical cocktail intended for Etaix (judging by the results, he is lucky to escape).

After this purgatorial episode, the final sequence has a gentler mood, or at least a quieter tone. In Into the Woods No More, Etaix is a weekend hunter, as hopeless as Buster Keaton in Battling Butler (1926). But while Keaton strolls through meadows infested with every variety of rodent and wildfowl, observing that “there doesn’t seem to be anything to shoot,” Etaix barely sees another creature, except for three human beings—a couple of bourgeois picnickers and an elderly farmer attempting to repair a fence—whom he nearly assassinates. At one point, the sound of a cuckoo causes him to check his watch, suggesting his unsuitability to rustic life.

Like the other segments, Into the Woods No More is built on the theme of frustration, with a packed picnic hamper gradually reduced to dust as the itinerant diners struggle to transport it over rough ground in their eternal quest for a peaceful site, Etaix’s hunter unable to locate any target save for a shoe and a power line, and the farmer made to watch as his posts are once more yanked from the ground in neat sequence. Tantalus and Sisyphus would both recognize the modern world of Etaix at once.

The excised episode, Feeling Good, treads similar ground, with Etaix as a camper struggling to prepare a cup of coffee in nature, before being banished to a fenced-in campsite alarmingly akin to a concentration camp (in fact, the short anticipates Etaix’s forthcoming collaboration with Jerry Lewis on The Day the Clown Cried, particularly in a shocking gag where a man in pajamas greets his mother across the wire fence).

By cutting this episode from As Long as You’ve Got Your Health, Etaix removed the only happy ending in the bunch, leaving the anthology to transmute disenchantment into laughter. Feeling Good stands nicely by itself, however, and its liberating ending seems now to symbolize the escape of Etaix’s work from its own imprisonment.

Intermission Two: A Woman’s Face

Denise Péronne: an omnipresent figure in Etaix’s features, from her role as his mother in The Suitor through multiple appearances in As Long as You’ve Got Your Health to her cameo as a conspiratorial gossip in Le grand amour. Like Fellini, Etaix sometimes cast his actors for their faces or silhouettes, but here he obviously found a true collaborator. Imperious yet graceful, her face comes equipped with ready-pursed lips and naturally narrowed eyes, making disapproval not only her permanent expression but her very identity. Between eyes and mouth, a nose points in silent accusation. Seemingly hand drawn to play snitches and snobs, the actor has a graceful bearing, a gentleness, and a gift for nuance that means she can defy her own stereotype and appear immensely lovable. Each of her appearances in an Etaix film is like a visit from a welcome aunt.