THE WATCHMAKER OF SAINT-PAUL (BERTRAND TAVERNIER, 1974)
L’HORLOGER DE SAINT-PAUL
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
11:40 AM
Saturday 02 May
4:15 PM
Thursday 07 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
11:40 AM
Saturday 09 May
4:00 PM
Wednesday 13 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 105 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Philippe Noiret, Jean Rochefort, Jacques Denis, Yves Afonso, Julien Bertheau, Clotilde Joano, Jacques Hilling, Sylvain Rougerie, Christine Pascal
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
11:40 AM
Saturday 02 May
4:15 PM
Thursday 07 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
11:40 AM
Saturday 09 May
4:00 PM
Wednesday 13 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 105 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Philippe Noiret, Jean Rochefort, Jacques Denis, Yves Afonso, Julien Bertheau, Clotilde Joano, Jacques Hilling, Sylvain Rougerie, Christine Pascal
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
‘A work of old-fashioned precision … the physical and political ambience is rendered with a classically “invisible” aura of authenticity.’ – Paul Taylor, Time Out
‘An extraordinary film – the more so because it attempts to show us the very complicated workings of the human personality, and to do it with grace, some humor and a great deal of style.’ – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
In Bertrand Tavernier’s feature directorial debut, adapted from a Georges Simenon novel, the quiet, orderly life of a widowed watchmaker (Philippe Noiret) is blown apart by the revelation that his teenage son has gone on the run after killing a man. Forming a relationship with a sympathetic police inspector (Jean Rochefort), the watchmaker searches for answers and grapples with the realisation that he knows far less about his son than he believed.
A classic of 1970s French cinema, The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul won the Special Jury Prize at the 1974 Berlin International Film Festival and launched its director’s distinguished, decades-spanning career.
Introduced by Barrie Pattison at Ritz Cinemas and Andrew McGregor at Lido Cinemas.
‘A work of old-fashioned precision … the physical and political ambience is rendered with a classically “invisible” aura of authenticity.’ – Paul Taylor, Time Out
‘An extraordinary film – the more so because it attempts to show us the very complicated workings of the human personality, and to do it with grace, some humor and a great deal of style.’ – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
In Bertrand Tavernier’s feature directorial debut, adapted from a Georges Simenon novel, the quiet, orderly life of a widowed watchmaker (Philippe Noiret) is blown apart by the revelation that his teenage son has gone on the run after killing a man. Forming a relationship with a sympathetic police inspector (Jean Rochefort), the watchmaker searches for answers and grapples with the realisation that he knows far less about his son than he believed.
A classic of 1970s French cinema, The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul won the Special Jury Prize at the 1974 Berlin International Film Festival and launched its director’s distinguished, decades-spanning career.
Introduced by Barrie Pattison at Ritz Cinemas and Andrew McGregor at Lido Cinemas.
FILM NOTES
By Ben McCann
By Ben McCann
| Ben McCann is Associate Professor of French Studies at Adelaide University. |
Bertrand Tavernier’s debut, L’Horloger de Saint‑Paul, announced a filmmaker who would spend the next four decades making films of a deep moral seriousness and a richly defined democratic humanism. The film - adapted from a Georges Simenon novel and anchored by an extraordinary central performance from Philippe Noiret - is both a procedural drama and a quiet domestic study. It exemplifies Tavernier’s committed social conscience that would define his subsequent work. Critics loved the film, commending Tavernier’s ability to show the ‘very complicated workings of the human personality, and to do it with grace, some humour and a great deal of style’ (Roger Ebert, 1976).
Michel Descombes (Noiret) is a widowed watchmaker whose carefully ordered life is upended when his teenage son Bernard is implicated in a killing and goes on the run with his girlfriend. What begins as a crime plot becomes an exploration of paternal responsibility, the limitations of knowledge between people who are close and the ways ordinary individuals become entangled by larger social currents. The film’s economy (brief running time, uncluttered plotting, absence of melodramatic flourish) is not austerity for its own sake but a strategy of attention. Tavernier directs the camera to listen and to look, focussing on small gestures, domestic details and the human faces that convey interior complexity.
The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul emerged at a moment of recalibration in French cinema. The immediate shockwaves of May 1968 had passed and the early 1970s now saw filmmakers grappling with questions of authority, institutions and everyday social responsibility rather than the earlier iconoclastic formal ruptures of the New Wave. Tavernier belonged to a slightly younger generation than Godard or Truffaut, and his sensibility was shaped less by youthful rebellion than by historical curiosity and a desire to reconnect cinema with a broad public. This context matters: The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul is quietly political in its insistence that crime, justice and morality are social problems rather than abstract philosophical puzzles.
Tavernier is known for his ‘immersive, lived-in films, privileging atmosphere and detail above narrative and spectacle,’ as Bilge Ebiri once noted (2017). This cinematic style can be read as a meeting point between classical French craftsmanship and a post‑New Wave conscience. He had worked for years as a critic, programmer and assistant director and that apprenticeship is evident in the film’s assured visual style. Tavernier favoured longish takes and unobtrusive camera movement that let actors occupy space organically. His camera often holds at a comfortable distance, creating deep, composed frames that allow the audience to choose where to look. Such an approach emphasises an observational realism over intrusive subjectivity that is perfectly attuned to Simenon’s source text.
Indeed, Tavernier’s decision to adapt Simenon was itself significant. Simenon’s romans durs [serious novels] were widely read, socially grounded and morally ambiguous. Transposing the film to the director’s hometown of Lyon from the small New York state municipality of Simenon’s original reinforces this strategy. Lyon is presented here as a lived‑in place of work, routine and modest aspiration, aligning the film with a provincial realism. To assist with the adaptation, Tavernier turned to Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, a pair of wartime-era writers from the so-called cinéma de papa [daddy’s cinema] generation thoroughly discredited by the likes of Godard and Truffaut, who argued that these writers often betrayed the source texts they adapted by altering them to fit a predictable, safe formula. Tavernier’s decision to hire the duo itself felt like a profound break with the cult of the New Wave – Tavernier needed to go back into the past to shape post-68 film culture.
Noiret’s performance is the film’s beating heart. He portrays a man whose dignity and ordinariness are never simplified into either nobility or pathos. His watchmaker is practical and taciturn, a man of routine whose profession symbolises the measured life he thought he understood. The friendship between Descombes and the investigating police inspector (Jean Rochefort) is crucial here. Rather than setting up a simplistic opposition between citizen and state, Tavernier explores a fragile alliance based on mutual respect. The inspector’s empathy does not erase institutional duty, and Descombes’s decency does not grant moral exemption. The film’s ethical world is therefore relational: morality is something negotiated between people and systems, not imposed from above.
The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul helped to establish several patterns that recur in Tavernier’s oeuvre: the fusion of genre elements with social inquiry, the collaboration with hardy, upstanding actors (Noiret became a regular collaborator) and a refusal to sacrifice moral complexity for dramatic neatness. While the film is less showy than some of the director’s later work, it is no less important as a declaration of aesthetic principles: cinema should be attentive to ordinary lives, should approach characters with empathy, and should remain in conversation with history and society.
Tavernier avoids spectacular violence; the crime itself remains largely offscreen, which keeps the viewer’s attention on consequence rather than act. This strategy aligns the spectator with Descombes’s position: we encounter the crime through fragments of information, police reports and rumours, mirroring the father’s gradual, agonising acquisition of knowledge. Watching the film today painfully reminds us that a parent can be profoundly ignorant of a child’s inner life. Descombes must negotiate this ignorance without collapsing into recrimination. Tavernier deftly examines what it means to stand by someone whose actions are morally intolerable.
Carloss James Chamberlin once described Tavernier as ‘a moral filmmaker, politically engaged, an eternal scrapper, a man obsessed with lighting up dark corners of French history’ (Chamberlin, 2003). More than forty years on, The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul reads as a manifesto for the kind of cinema Tavernier would pursue: film as civic conversation, as a tool for understanding the human consequences of crime and social rupture and as a medium that privileges moral nuance over rhetorical certainty. It is a film that trusts quietness, respects the intelligence of its audience, and finds drama in the small gestures of daily life.
Michel Descombes (Noiret) is a widowed watchmaker whose carefully ordered life is upended when his teenage son Bernard is implicated in a killing and goes on the run with his girlfriend. What begins as a crime plot becomes an exploration of paternal responsibility, the limitations of knowledge between people who are close and the ways ordinary individuals become entangled by larger social currents. The film’s economy (brief running time, uncluttered plotting, absence of melodramatic flourish) is not austerity for its own sake but a strategy of attention. Tavernier directs the camera to listen and to look, focussing on small gestures, domestic details and the human faces that convey interior complexity.
The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul emerged at a moment of recalibration in French cinema. The immediate shockwaves of May 1968 had passed and the early 1970s now saw filmmakers grappling with questions of authority, institutions and everyday social responsibility rather than the earlier iconoclastic formal ruptures of the New Wave. Tavernier belonged to a slightly younger generation than Godard or Truffaut, and his sensibility was shaped less by youthful rebellion than by historical curiosity and a desire to reconnect cinema with a broad public. This context matters: The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul is quietly political in its insistence that crime, justice and morality are social problems rather than abstract philosophical puzzles.
Tavernier is known for his ‘immersive, lived-in films, privileging atmosphere and detail above narrative and spectacle,’ as Bilge Ebiri once noted (2017). This cinematic style can be read as a meeting point between classical French craftsmanship and a post‑New Wave conscience. He had worked for years as a critic, programmer and assistant director and that apprenticeship is evident in the film’s assured visual style. Tavernier favoured longish takes and unobtrusive camera movement that let actors occupy space organically. His camera often holds at a comfortable distance, creating deep, composed frames that allow the audience to choose where to look. Such an approach emphasises an observational realism over intrusive subjectivity that is perfectly attuned to Simenon’s source text.
Indeed, Tavernier’s decision to adapt Simenon was itself significant. Simenon’s romans durs [serious novels] were widely read, socially grounded and morally ambiguous. Transposing the film to the director’s hometown of Lyon from the small New York state municipality of Simenon’s original reinforces this strategy. Lyon is presented here as a lived‑in place of work, routine and modest aspiration, aligning the film with a provincial realism. To assist with the adaptation, Tavernier turned to Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, a pair of wartime-era writers from the so-called cinéma de papa [daddy’s cinema] generation thoroughly discredited by the likes of Godard and Truffaut, who argued that these writers often betrayed the source texts they adapted by altering them to fit a predictable, safe formula. Tavernier’s decision to hire the duo itself felt like a profound break with the cult of the New Wave – Tavernier needed to go back into the past to shape post-68 film culture.
Noiret’s performance is the film’s beating heart. He portrays a man whose dignity and ordinariness are never simplified into either nobility or pathos. His watchmaker is practical and taciturn, a man of routine whose profession symbolises the measured life he thought he understood. The friendship between Descombes and the investigating police inspector (Jean Rochefort) is crucial here. Rather than setting up a simplistic opposition between citizen and state, Tavernier explores a fragile alliance based on mutual respect. The inspector’s empathy does not erase institutional duty, and Descombes’s decency does not grant moral exemption. The film’s ethical world is therefore relational: morality is something negotiated between people and systems, not imposed from above.
The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul helped to establish several patterns that recur in Tavernier’s oeuvre: the fusion of genre elements with social inquiry, the collaboration with hardy, upstanding actors (Noiret became a regular collaborator) and a refusal to sacrifice moral complexity for dramatic neatness. While the film is less showy than some of the director’s later work, it is no less important as a declaration of aesthetic principles: cinema should be attentive to ordinary lives, should approach characters with empathy, and should remain in conversation with history and society.
Tavernier avoids spectacular violence; the crime itself remains largely offscreen, which keeps the viewer’s attention on consequence rather than act. This strategy aligns the spectator with Descombes’s position: we encounter the crime through fragments of information, police reports and rumours, mirroring the father’s gradual, agonising acquisition of knowledge. Watching the film today painfully reminds us that a parent can be profoundly ignorant of a child’s inner life. Descombes must negotiate this ignorance without collapsing into recrimination. Tavernier deftly examines what it means to stand by someone whose actions are morally intolerable.
Carloss James Chamberlin once described Tavernier as ‘a moral filmmaker, politically engaged, an eternal scrapper, a man obsessed with lighting up dark corners of French history’ (Chamberlin, 2003). More than forty years on, The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul reads as a manifesto for the kind of cinema Tavernier would pursue: film as civic conversation, as a tool for understanding the human consequences of crime and social rupture and as a medium that privileges moral nuance over rhetorical certainty. It is a film that trusts quietness, respects the intelligence of its audience, and finds drama in the small gestures of daily life.
THE RESTORATION
Source: Studiocanal
4K restoration by Studiocanal.
Director: Bertrand Tavernier; Production Company: Lira Films; Producer: Raymond Danon; Script: Jeanne Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Bertrand Tavernier; based on L’Horloger d’Everton by Georges Simenon; Photography: Pierre-William Glenn; Editor: Armand Psenny; Production Designer: Jean Mandroux; Music: Philippe Sarde // Cast: Philippe Noiret (Michel Descombes), Jean Rochefort (Commissaire Guilboud), Sylvain Rougerie (Bernard Descombes).
France | 1974 | 105 mins | 4K DCP | Colour | French with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+
4K restoration by Studiocanal.
Director: Bertrand Tavernier; Production Company: Lira Films; Producer: Raymond Danon; Script: Jeanne Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Bertrand Tavernier; based on L’Horloger d’Everton by Georges Simenon; Photography: Pierre-William Glenn; Editor: Armand Psenny; Production Designer: Jean Mandroux; Music: Philippe Sarde // Cast: Philippe Noiret (Michel Descombes), Jean Rochefort (Commissaire Guilboud), Sylvain Rougerie (Bernard Descombes).
France | 1974 | 105 mins | 4K DCP | Colour | French with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+