La Belle meunière (1948) - film review

Tired of Vienna and his lack of success as a composer, Franz Schubert goes in search of inspiration by taking a walking holiday in the countryside around Salzburg.  Following the course of a river, he arrives at a flour mill whose owner, the amiable Master Guillaume, gives him a cordial reception.  Schubert is about to go on his way when he sees the miller’s beautiful twenty-year-old daughter, Brigitte, bathing in the river.  In an instant, the composer falls in love with the young woman and decides to stay on at the mill, helping out with some manual chores to pay for his board.  Brigitte is enchanted by the stranger and the marvellous songs he sings in honour of his newly discovered love.  Franz intends to marry her, but Fate has other ideas...

La Belle meunière is Marcel Pagnol’s heartfelt tribute to the work of Franz Schubert, a composer he greatly admired.  It has not only the distinction of being Pagnol’s sole colour film but also the only film made with the revolutionary Roux Color system, invented by the brothers Lucien and Armand Roux.  It was also only the second colour film to be made in France, the first being Le Mariage de Ramuntcho, made in 1946 by Max de Vaucorbeil using the Agfacolor process.   Pagnol had originally shot a version of La Belle meunière in black and white but, on hearing about the Roux brothers’ work, he immediately reshot the film using their system.  

The Roux Color system had the advantage of being much less expensive than its nearest rival Technicolor.  Instead of having a single colour image for each frame, the Roux Color process had four separate black and white images, recorded on conventional black and white film by using a special lens.   When projected, these images would be passed through four colour filters (red, blue, green and yellow) and combined on the screen into a single colour image.  Although ingenious, the system was very short-lived – it required special projection equipment that only a few cinemas had and which proved to be very difficult to set up.  In 1985, La Belle meunière was transcribed to Eastmancolor from its original negative, enabling it to be shown in cinemas using conventional projection equipment.  

La Belle meunière is more than a curiosity piece, it is actually an enchanting little film that celebrates and mourns the transience of life and love through the music of Franz Schubert and its glorious pastoral setting.   Tino Rossi plays the part of Schubert with warmth and sensitivity, his songs adding greatly to the film’s lyrical quality and its wistful charm.  The colour may appear primitive by today’s standards, lacking depth and definition, but such imperfections add to the film’s poetry.  La Belle meunière evokes an age of innocence when the pace of life was much less hurried and where simple pleasures made a human existence rich and complete.

© James Travers 2008

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