La Chartreuse de Parme (1948) - film review

At the beginning of the 19th Century, the Marquis Fabrice del Dongo returns to Parma, his home town, after having completed his studies in Naples.  There he receives a warm welcome from the Duchess Sansévérina, the aunt who brought him up.  It soon becomes apparent to Fabrice that his aunt’s feelings for him are no longer maternal but deeply amorous.   Such is her love for her nephew that Sansévérina abandons the Count Mosca and spurns the advances of Prince Ernest, her most ardent admirer.  In a bid to win Sansévérina for himself, the Prince has Fabrice arrested and thrown into jail for twenty years.  In his cell, Fabrice falls in love with the governor’s daughter...

Stendhal’s epic historical novel La Chartreuse de Parme receives a suitably epic treatment in this extravagant adaptation from director Christian-Jaque.  With production values to rival any Hollywood blockbuster of the time and a cast of exceptional calibre, the film serves as a prime example of the quality period drama that was highly popular in France in the 1940s and 50s.  Released at a time of painful post-war austerity, the film offered a gargantuan dose of escapism, all for the price of a cinema ticket.  It is no surprise that the film was a box office hit - attracting an audience of over six million, it was easily the most successful French film of 1948 (even more popular than Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis, a similarly lavish period piece released a few years previously). 

Christian-Jaque was in some respects the Luc Besson of his day, a flamboyant, highly productive filmmaker with an uncanny knack for turning out popular big budget films, although only a few now stand up to critical scrutiny and many have been lost in the mists of time.   With its palatial sets, fluid camerawork and meticulously choreographed set pieces, La Chartreuse de Parme is one of the director’s grander films, and a respectable adaptation of Stendhal’s novel.  Despite its epic length (the film runs to two hours and fifty minutes), time and budgetary constraints made it impossible to transpose the whole of Stendahl’s weighty tome to the screen, and its omissions (notably the Napoleonic battle scenes at the start of the novel) were considered to be a betrayal of the novel by some critics.  Even with its narrative truncations, the film feels overlong and ponderous.

Heading a stellar cast of French and Italian actors is the 25-year-old Gérard Philipe, a rising star of stage and screen who had become a household name in France after his previous film, Le Diable au corps (1947), a controversial adaptation of Raymond Radiguet’s famous novel directed by Claude Autant-Lara.  Philipe was not only a superlative actor, he was also a man of considerable personal charm and possessed a timeless heroic élan which meant that he was never out of place in any of his films.  He is as convincing as the swashbuckling hero in Christian-Jaque’s subsequent Fanfan la Tulipe (1952) as he is as the ill-fated artist Amedeo Modigliani in Montparnasse 19 (1958).  Philipe was an actor with star quality but he did not trade on his star image (unlike later French film icons such as Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo) and could therefore mould himself into a surprisingly wide repertory of roles.   As the romantic hero of La Chartreuse de Parme, Philipe evokes the complexity of Stendhal’s creation and is not afraid to give his character an almost feminine vulnerability (one of the interesting, almost revolutionary, characteristics of the original novel is that the female characters prove to be far stronger and nobler than the male protagonists who seek to exploit them).  Alongside Philipe are some equally fine actors of the period (most sadly forgotten today), including the beautiful Renée Faure, the charismatic Louis Salou (an actor with a particular aptitude for playing charming villains) and the magnificent María Casares (in possibly her most poignant screen role).

The one thing that counts against the film, and which perhaps most explains why it is not held in the same high esteem as other blockbuster literary adaptations of this era, is its sluggish pace.   Even with its stunning production values and compelling performances, La Chartreuse de Parme is something of a chore to sit through and it lacks the necessary momentum to carry it through its near-three hour runtime.   Christian-Jaque was a competent film maker, but he was by no means what we would now term an auteur, and so whilst his films are generally well-made and entertaining they are generally lacking in poetry and true human emotion.  La Chartreuse de Parme exemplifies this - the film is lovingly crafted, well-acted and beautifully photographed by Nicolas Hayer, but it is something of a soulless mastodon.  It typifies what the critics on the Cahiers du cinéma and future directors of the French New Wave (notably François Truffaut) felt was wrong with French cinema at the time.  Like many of his contemporaries, Christian-Jaque was content with merely transposing the images described in the novel onto the screen; he was less concerned with making his own personal statement or in trying to capture the voice of the man or woman who wrote the novel.  Visually and dramatically, La Chartreuse de Parme is an impressive piece of 1940s French cinema, but it is really little more than an exercise in painting by numbers, a dead approximation to a chef d’oeuvre rather than a living work of art in its own right.

© James Travers 2012

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