La Veuve Couderc (1971) - film review

In rural France of the 1930s, the old widow Couderc struggles to keep her farm going single-handedly.  She welcomes a strange young man, Jean Lavigne, into her home when he offers to help her in her work.  It transpires that Jean is a criminal who is on the run from the police, and his presence on the farm is useful to Couderc’s scheming step-sister, Françoise.  The latter has been trying for years to persuade her elderly father, Henri, who lives with the widow Couderc, to sell his farm for her benefit.  The widow Couderc’s amorous designs on Jean are frustrated when her step-sister’s teenage daughter, Félicie, takes an interest in Jean...

Simone Signoret and Alain Delon – two of the most celebrated actors in French cinema – are brought together in this unsettling melodrama, a respectable adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel which explores the possibility of love between a man and a woman from two different generations and wildly contrasting backgrounds.  The film was directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre, a greatly respected filmmaker who shows more insight into human relationships, and certainly more sensitivity, here than in most of his other films.  It is arguably his most poetic and incisive work – beautifully shot and skilfully directed, presenting a starkly realistic portrait of French country life in the 1930s.   Granier-Deferre offered the starring role to Signoret immediately after they had worked together successfully on Le Chat in 1970 (where the actress played opposite another screen legend, Jean Gabin).

The film’s leisurely pace and unpretentious, sometimes dour, cinematic style are entirely appropriate for this kind of low-key emotional drama, and it allows the spectator to focus on the contributions of the lead actors.  Alain Delon and Simone Signoret are at the top of their form, each turning in a captivating, totally believable performance.   Both actors bring great depth and poignancy to a very simple story – an interesting variation on the film noir tragic love story, in which a seemingly impossible romance involving a young man and a much older woman is convincingly played out.   Delon and Signoret would subsequently appear together (somewhat less effectively) in Jean Chapot’s 1973 film, Les Granges brulées.

It is possible to read into this film an allegory of life in France during World War II.  The film is set five years before the start of the war but already signs of societal rift are apparent.   The brutally antagonistic and ultimately destructive relationship between the widow Couderc and her estranged in-laws – a maelstrom of greed, mistrust and betrayal – presages the kind of tensions that will play on French society under the impending Nazi Occupation.  Granier-Deferre drives home the point – perhaps too unsubtly – by comparing the outsider Lavigne with a Jew and portraying a unit of armed police (in the film’s dramatic conclusion) as bullet-pumping fascist troops.  The inference, possibly, is that the Nazis did not create the evil that allowed one Frenchman to betray another when Germany took overall control of the country in 1940; they merely exploited what was already there.

© James Travers 2007

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