Lac aux dames (1934) - film review

Éric Heller, an unemployed engineer, finds work as a swimming instructor at a popular Austrian resort beside the alluring Lac-aux-dames lake.  Éric’s good looks and manly physique make him especially popular with the lady tourists, particularly Dany, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist named Lyssenhop.  One evening, whilst attempting to swim across the lake, Éric comes close to drowning but is saved by a mysterious young woman in a rowing boat.  The woman, who is almost a girl, introduces herself as Puck and takes Éric back to her home, situated on a small island at the centre of the lake, so that he can recover from his ordeal.  Puck has spent all her life alone with her father, a well-known recluse, and so takes an immediate liking to the handsome young engineer.  With Puck’s help, Éric returns to the mainland and is soon pursuing a love affair with Dany.  He regards Puck as no more than a friend, although she is infatuated with him.   When Éric asks Lyssenhop for his consent to marry his daughter he is sent away with a harsh rebuff.  Having lost Dany, Éric’s fortunes take a turn for the worse.  Penniless and stricken with a fever, he rejects Puck when she comes to visit him.  When Puck’s boat is found abandoned on the lake, Éric draws the obvious conclusion that he drove her to her death...

After a promising start to his filmmaking career with such films as Mam’zelle Nitouche (1931) and Fanny (1932), Marc Allégret was considered a safe pair of hands when he was commissioned to direct this big budget production which featured not only a prestigious cast but also a substantial location shoot at an exotic location: Lake Constance in Austria.  Lac aux dames was to be one of Allégret’s biggest films of the 1930s, a popular crowdpleaser that not only bolstered his own reputation but also brought his talented young protégée (and off-screen lover) Simone Simon to the attention of American movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck.  It was the latter who, newly installed as vice-president of Twentieth Century Fox studios, gave Simon her ticket to Hollywood within a year of the film’s release.

Lac aux dames is a superior example of the kind of film melodrama that could be relied upon to fill the cinema halls in the 1930s.  It was based on the 1927 novel Hell in Frauensee by the celebrated Austrian author Vicki Baum, whose subsequent bestseller Menschen im Hotel had previously been adapted by MGM as Grand Hotel (1932).  The dialogue for the film was written by none other than Colette, one of the most important French novelists and playwrights of the period, now best known for her 1944 novel Gigi.  Allégret’s penchant for working with highly photogenic up-and-coming actors (of both sexes) is borne out by the casting of such talented young performers as Jean-Pierre Aumont, Odette Joyeux and Rosine Deréan, in addition to the aforementioned Simone Simon.  The most well-known actor in the cast-list, Michel Simon, is relegated to a comparatively minor supporting role, albeit one that suits him admirably and allows him to introduce a smattering of burlesque humour into what might otherwise have been a stodgy piece of melodrama.

If there is one thing that allows the film to rise above its out-dated kitsch subject matter it is Simone Simon’s show-stealing performance as the waif-like child of the lake.  In a strangely alluring portrayal that is tantalisingly evocative of her subsequent great roles in Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938) and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), Simon combines a child-like innocence with the subtle eroticism of the classic noir femme fatale, but there is also an otherworldly aspect to her portrayal which gives her character an enigmatic, ghostlike quality.  Perfectly cast opposite Simon is another charismatic young performer, Jean-Pierre Aumont, one of the few juvenile actors of his generation to achieve star status in French cinema, able to hold his own alongside such  screenhogging heavyweights as Raimu and Harry Baur.  Allégret exploits Aumont’s immense physical beauty perhaps far more than any other director dared and allows the actor to give what is arguably one of his finest performances, one that has a surprising naturalism and modernity.  Aumont is not the only member of the cast to go topless in this film.   The Russian beauty Illa Meery exposes her upper body for quite a few minutes in one memorable sequence which would have been unthinkable in Hollywood and was pretty rare even in France at the time.  Meery enjoyed only a short career before she enlisted in the Soviet secret services; she ended up working against the Nazis as a spy during WWII.

If Lac aux dames is somewhat let down by its plodding narrative and trite melodrama conventions, it is more than redeemed by Jules Kruger’s atmospheric photography, which brings a haunting Cocteau-esque poetry to the film, most notably in the exterior location sequences on and around Lake Constance.  Influenced by German expressionism, Kruger’s style has an unmistakeable film noir edge to it, although this is more noticeable in the films he later made for director Julien Duvivier: La Bandera (1935), La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937).  In Lac aux dames, Kruger somehow manages to extract from the picturesque Tyrolean location something of the timeless savage beauty that is to be found in the work of the great German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, raw landscapes veiled in cold mist and harbouring a grim sense of foreboding.  Whilst the film has, overall, not dated as well as other great films of the 1930s, its lyrical charms still have considerable appeal and it remains one of Marc Allégret’s most artistically inspired films.

© James Travers 2011

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