Dédée d’Anvers (1948) - film review

Dédée is a young prostitute who works in a bar in the Belgian port of Anvers.  Her boyfriend, Marco, is the bar’s bouncer, a man despised by all, even Dedée.  One day, the prostitute meets an Italian sailor, Francesco, and realises that she is in love for the first time.  The couple decide to start a new life together.  However, Marco has other ideas…

Simone Signoret gives a notable performance in this atmospheric French film noir, which was directed by her husband at the time, Yves Allégret.  The seemingly vulnerable woman with a hard interior and a nasty streak of malice is the character that Signoret plays particularly well, here as in so many subsequent films (notably Couzot’s Les Diaboliques).  Other significant contributions are made by Bernard Blier and Marcel Dalio, two great actors who were well served by this kind of intense melodrama.

Similarities with the poetic realist films of the late 1930s are apparent, with the harbour setting closely resembling that of Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes (1938).  By the late 1940s, this style of film, with its oppressive mood and pessimistic outcome, was most definitely going out of fashion.  Whilst the film’s predictable plot may count against it, the shocking film noir ending gives it a grimly visceral impact.

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