Goupi mains rouges (1943) - film review

The Goupis are a proud, self-sufficient family living in the Charentes region of France.  Most of them live at an inn that is run with an iron hand by the shrewish Goupi Tisane and her tight-fisted brother Goupi Mes Sous.  The oldest Goupi is the 106-year-old grandfather, l’Empereur, who is revered because he alone knows the location of the family treasure.  In a cabin nearby lives the poacher Goupi Mains Rouges and his son Goupi Tonkin, who has not been himself since returning from the colonies.  One day, Goupi Mes Sous invites his estranged son Goupi Monsieur back home so that he can marry his cousin Goupi Muguet, not knowing that his son’s entrepreneurial career in Paris has not been as brilliant as he pretends.  On the evening that Goupi Monsieur arrives in his home village, Goupi Tisane is killed by an unknown assailant and, with all the other Goupis above suspicion, Monsieur is the obvious culprit.  Goupi Mes Sous knows that his son arrived at the inn earlier than he claims and suspects that he may have absconded with the family treasure.  L’Empereur is unable to shed any light on the matter as he knocked himself out after helping himself to too much wine just before Goupi Monsieur’s arrival.   Because he himself has designs on marrying Muguet, Goupi Tonkin attempts to incriminate his cousin, but the cunning Goupi Mains Rouges sees through the deception and soon uncovers the identity of the real killer...

Goupi mains rouges was the film that put director Jacques Becker on the map and immediately established him as one of the leading French filmmakers during the Occupation.  Becker had started out as an assistant to Jean Renoir, on such films as Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) and La Grande illusion (1937), before making his directing debut with L’Or du Cristobal (1939), a film which he had to abandon when he was called up to serve in the French army at the outbreak of World War II.  His next film, Dernier atout (1942), a gangster parody, was fairly well received, but it was with his third feature, Goupi mains rouges, that Becker came to be considered one of the most important French film directors of his generation.  Outside France, the film is far less well-known than Becker’s subsequent great films but it occupies an essential place in his oeuvre, presaging the auteur masterpieces that would surely follow.       

Goupi mains rouges is based on a novel of the same title by the writer Pierre Véry, who worked closely with Becker on the screenplay.  At the time, Véry was a highly successful crime writer, and two of his novels had previously been adapted to great success - Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (1938) and L’Assassinat du Père Noël (1941).  In bringing Véry’s book to the big screen, Becker provides a mischievous, if not overtly contemptuous, commentary on the specious impression of rural life which the Vichy government had been keen to promulgate.  Far from toeing the Pétainist line that country folk represented the traditional values of France, selflessly slaving away in the interests of their community and their country, Goupi main rouges offers up a far from flattering caricature - one that was much nearer the truth than the fantasy that Marshal Pétain wished everyone to believe.

From the outset, the Goupis appear to be the stereotypical peasant family - insular, distrustful of outsiders, living by their own laws and riven by petty differences.  The comicbook characterisation is at odds with the film’s almost neo-realist presentation and the film seems to be torn between being an authentic documentary on rural life and the wickedest satire.  The end result is truly weird, deeply unsettling and yet irresistibly funny.  As exaggerated as the characters initially appear, they soon acquire a measure of reality and it isn’t long before the spectator is drawn into their hermetically sealed little universe.  Insular Voodoo-practising yokels with a pathological dislike of strangers and the police, the Goupis could hardly be further from the model that Pétain was so eager to promote and from which French society was to take its cue.   So much for Travail, famille, patrie!  The Goupis’ slogan was far more likely to be:  Every Man For Himself!

Given the film’s overt anti-Pétanist subtext, it is surprising (if not downright miraculous) that it managed to escape censure and ended up being well-received by both the critics and cinemagoing public.  Compare this with the fate of H.G. Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943), which offered a similarly scathing attack on French society during the Occupation.  Whereas Becker’s film was widely praised as wholesome satire, Clouzot’s was considered dangerous anti-French propaganda and would be banned after the Liberation, its director placed unceremoniously on a blacklist.   Goupi mains rouges and Le Corbeau had a similar hidden agenda, to expose the hollowness of the Pétainist lie that Nazi-occupied France was a nation that was happy and unified.   That Becker’s film succeeded and caused less of a brouhaha than Clouzot’s is probably down to the fact that it employed the razor-sharp scalpel of satire, rather than the blunt mallet of drama.   Or maybe it was because Becker threw in a bottom-covering escape clause at the end of the film.  Mains Rouges’s belated apologia for the Goupi clan is clearly nothing more than a Pétanist-pleasing sop, added to placate the censors and keep Becker in a job.  

For anyone whose exposure to Jacques Becker is limited to the director’s classic masterpieces - Casque d’or (1952), Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Le Trou (1960) - Goupi mains rouges will come as something of a surprise.  It is a film which practically defies classification, and yet it skilfully blends together elements of romantic melodrama, farce and murder mystery into an impossibly satisfying whole.  Becker’s mise-en-scène is characteristically restrained, the film deriving most of its energy from its magnificent (and very nearly certifiable) ensemble cast.  With his matinee idol good looks Georges Rollin is every inch the outsider, the Goupi who doesn’t belong, when placed alongside the more roughly hewn Arthur Devère and Fernand Ledoux, who are both so quaintly rustic that you can almost smell the damp grass and cow dung on their boots.   Germaine Kerjean has a formidable presence as the tyrannical Goupi Tizanne (is there any significance in the fact that she resembles a Nazi, governing the other Goupis with a barbed tongue and a ready whip?).  How much more satisfying that this fire-breathing beldam should be put out of the way instead of the endearing Goupi L’Empereur, charmingly played by the spry 75-year-old Maurice Schutz, a talented character actor who started out in the silent era, appearing in such films as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928).   Robert Le Vigan has no difficulty winning the award (by several miles) for the most over-the-top performance.  As the wonderfully deranged Goupi Tonkin, Le Vigan makes chewing the carpet an art in its own right, particularly as his character goes from mildly weird to utterly unhinged in less time than it takes to change a light bulb.

Whereas too many of Jacques Becker’s later films would tend to wrap themselves in cosy conformity, sticking perhaps too rigidly to the norms of acceptable melodrama, Goupi mains rouges is an altogether different proposition, a subversive tour de force into virgin territory which cannot fail to take you by surprise.  It is hard to know exactly how contemporary French audiences reacted to the film, whether they warmed to its anti-Pétanist satire or were merely entertained by its heady concoction of farce and whodunit.  The film is certainly one of Becker’s most inspired and enjoyable offerings, taking risks not only with its subject but also with its unconventional mix of themes.  It may not be as groundbreaking as Touchez pas au grisbi or as intensely poetic as Casque d’Or, but Goupi mains rouges has its own singular appeal and deserves its reputation as one of the most important French films of the Occupation.

© James Travers 2011

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