La Vie de château (1966)

La Vie de château is a French comedy romance film first released in 1966, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau.  The film stars Catherine Deneuve, Pierre Brasseur, Philippe Noiret, Henri Garcin and Mary Marquet.  It has also been released under the title: A Matter of Resistance, Gracious Living.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Normandy, 1944.  Jérôme is the proud owner of a large country estate, a man who is far more preoccupied with his orchards than with the fate of his country.  His wife Marie is young, beautiful and bored with country living.  She thinks only of starting a new life in the busy hubbub of Paris, so the sudden appearance of Julien, a captain in the Free French Forces, seems to her like the answer to a prayer.  Julien’s mission is to gather information about the area so that an advance party can knock out a German defence post ahead of the planned Allied Invasion.  Unfortunately, a division of German soldiers has chosen this moment to requisition Jérôme’s house..

Having worked as an assistant director and screenwriter on around half a dozen films, Jean-Paul Rappeneau made his directorial début with La Vie de château, a big budget mainstream production which featured three major film actors at the time – Catherine Deneuve, Pierre Brasseur and Philippe Noiret.  Although the film veers towards juvenile silliness in several places and suffers from weak characterisation and an uneven narrative, it is one of Rappeneau’s most entertaining and stylistically inspired films, capturing something of the essence of the French New Wave. 

The film won the Louis Delluc Prize in 1966, a controversial decision since many believed that Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou was a far more worthy recipient of the award.  The reason for Rappeneau’s surprise win is believed to be because his film was the first which dared to broach one of the biggest taboos in French cinema at the time – a comic portrayal of the Nazi occupation.   The film’s success cleared the way for a whole raft of similar films, notably La Grande vadrouille (1966), Le Mur de l’Atlantique (1970) and Papy fait de la résistance (1983).

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