Movie review: The Artist ****

Stars: Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, Penelope Anne Miller, James Cromwell
Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Rated: PG-13
Showing: Neptune Cinema week of Friday, March 9. For more information call 292-7296.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 100 minutes
Romantic comedy

Riotous laughs, breathless thrills and weeping pathos - film managed all that when the movies were silent, the movies were black and white, and the movies were shot on actual celluloid.

The Artist is a light, sweet, pretty much irony-free tribute to the silent era, an homage to the era when pantomime reached its cinematic zenith - that age Gloria Swanson, as Norma Desmond, remembered with a zeal touching on mania in Sunset Boulevard.

Like Hugo, it's a movie-lover's movie, a slice of early cinema history. But where that film had an American filmmaker (Martin Scorsese) briefly touching on the cinema's origins in France, The Artist has French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius immersing himself and us in a sublime, serio-comic sampler of all that the silent cinema was, way back when.

Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a matinee idol whose light comedies, romances and adventure pics have made him the toast of Hollywood. And he knows it. What a ham! His leading lady (Missi Pyle, hilarious) can't stand him and his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) whiles away the silent hours in their mansion, doodling warts and missing teeth onto his many magazine cover photographs.

Enter the plucky young interloper.

Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) is a fan who stumbles into George at a premiere and who works her way into the business, up from extra to leading lady in a few short years.

In the best A Star is Born and Singing in the Rain tradition, we watch Peppy's rise, just as the talkies were ushering silent movies out the door, and George's decline.

Hazanavicius lets his French leads get across the chemistry, the flirtation and romance in a world without words. A wonderful "nightmare" sequence has Valentin hear sound effects, chatter from others, but not his own voice.

Film buffs will see John Gilbert in the Valentin character, a silent superstar ruined by the talkies, and Clara Bowe and assorted other "It" girls in the beauty-marked Peppy.

The Artist drags, as any film telling its story with its mouth and ears tied behind its back can be expected to. But it's a lovely bit of froth, the meringue on a cinema season that is both high-minded and awards oriented.

Also showing: The Descendants
Next attraction: John Carter