La Merveilleuse visite (1974)

La Merveilleuse visite is a French fantasy film first released in 1974, directed by Marcel Carné.  The film is based on a novel by H.G. Wells and stars Gilles Kohler, Roland Lesaffre, Debra Berger and Lucien Barjon.  It has also been released under the title: The Marvelous Visit.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


One morning, the rector of a small French village comes across a young man, lying unclothed and unconscious on a deserted beach.  Intrigued, the rector has the young man carried back to his home.  When he awakes the stranger calmly identifies himself as Jean, an angel who has just arrived on Earth.  Naturally, the rector doesn’t believe this, but decides to humour the young man.  At first, Jean’s arrival in the village causes no upset.  He is a harmless soul, full of good intentions and capable of only the kindest deeds.  But then the villagers grow wary of him, and this wariness turns to outright hostility when Jean unwittingly causes an accident...

Marcel Carné’s last fictional film (and his penultimate film) was this curious adaptation of an early novel by H.G. Wells entitled The Wonderful Visit (first published in 1895).  Carné encountered enormous difficulties whilst making the film – he initially found it hard to finance the project and when it was in production he had recurring problems with his producers.  The film took three years to make, longer than any that the director had previously made.  And it proved to be Carné’s biggest commercial failure.  In response to some extremely damning reviews by several critics, the film’s distributor took fright and withdrew the film after just a few weeks.

To be fair, some of the criticism of La Merveilleuse visite is justified.  It is not Carné’s best film by a long shot and the director’s decision to cast pin-up model Gilles Kohler, who had no prior acting experience, in the lead role was perhaps a mistake.   However, it is far from being all bad and, viewed with the appropriate level of indulgence, it can be seen as an effective, indeed rather poignant, allegory on the dangers of adhering too closely to any form of dogma, religious or otherwise.

It is apparent that the experiences of the film’s central character – a naïve outsider who has nothing but good intentions but who only encounters hostility wherever he goes – seem to echo those of Marcel Carné himself in the latter half of his career.  Once the critics had got their teeth into him in the mid-1950s, his reputation as a serious filmmaker was pretty well destroyed – and this in spite of the fact that he is credited with some of the greatest films in French cinema.  Even today, half a century on, Carné’s final seven or so films are little known and rarely shown on television or in cinema halls. One day, these rare jewels will be rediscovered and viewed in a more positive light.  And on that day, Marcel Carné will be accorded the recognition he deserves, as one of the true poets of cinema.

© filmsdefrance.com 2008

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