La Fausse maîtresse (1942) - film review

In a village in Catalonia, Lilian Rander works as a trapeze artist for a travelling circus.  One day, the owner of the circus asks Lilian to pose as the mistress of René, a rugby player whose best friend Guy suspects he is having an affair with his wife.

A circus, a rugby team and a corrupt journalist - André Cayatte threw everything but the kitchen sink into this update of Balzac but, luckily for us, one of those things was the divine Danielle Darrieux, rapidly ascending the North face of a dazzling career and here appearing in her third film for Continental.  If, as she sings at one stage, flowers are the words of love (les fleurs sont des mots d’amour) then Darrieux is the supreme bouquet, a sort of prototype Audrey Hepburn.

Not that Darrieux needs any help, as the daughter of the circus owner who gets involved with both a local rugby player and the crooked journalist, but Cayatte has surrounded her with talent such as Gabrielle Fontan, Charles Blavatte and André Alerme, with Continental regular Andrej Andrejew handling the set design.  Light comedy was not Cayatte’s natural habitat - he was more at home crusading against social injustice - but even he couldn’t foul up the spectacle of Darrieux performing acrobatics on a rope.

© Leon Nock (London, England) 2010 

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