Le Blé en herbe (1954) - film review

Some time in the 1920s, the Ferrets and their two daughters, Vinca and Lisette, spend their summer holiday on the coast of Brittany.  As is their custom, they are accompanied by a friend, Madame Audebert, and her son Philippe.  Vinca and Phil are almost brother and sister, but now that he is 16 and she is 15 their feelings for one another are beginning to change.  Neither can understand what is happening to them, why their seemingly harmless disputes should leave them with so much hurt and regret.   Neither is yet ready to acknowledge the truth, that they have started to fall in love.  To complicate matters, Phil finds himself strangely attracted to an older woman, Madame Dallery, the tenant of a grand holiday home further up the coast.  Although the woman is thirty years his senior, Phil cannot help being drawn to her, as if she holds the key to the mysteries of love.   Grateful for the teenager’s attentions, Madame Dallery takes it upon herself to indoctrinate him in the ways of love...

By the time he made Le Blé en herbe, adapted from Colette’s scandalous 1923 novel, director Claude Autant-Lara was no stranger to controversy.  His previous films Le Diable au corps (1947) and L’Auberge rouge (1951) had fanned the flames of censure and were labelled immoral by the rightwing press and the Catholic Church.  This was nothing compared with the outrage that Le Blé en herbe ignited when it was released in 1954, a film that was branded as having a dangerously corrupting influence on the young.  Both its director and its leading actress, Edwige Feuillère, received threatening letters of disapproval even before the film was completed - perhaps not surprisingly, as the film attempted to breach one of the biggest taboos of its time: the thorny issue of teenage sex.   

The age of consent for a man being 21, the portrayal of a love affair involving adolescents was as fiercely censured in film as it had been for the past half a century in literature, so a film that explicitly presented an amorous encounter between a sixteen year old boy and a woman in her late forties was bound to fall foul of middleclass morality.  Yet for all the controversy that Le Blé en herbe aroused, in spite of the fact that several screenings were disrupted by violent protests, it proved to be a major box office hit, attracting an audience of just over three million.  The film also garnered critical acclaim in some quarters and was awarded the 1954 Grand prix du cinéma français, the prestigious forerunner of the Best Film César.   It seems fitting that Claude Autant-Lara’s most controversial film should be one of his greatest commercial and critical successes.  Of all his films, it is the one that has probably stood the test of time best, by virtue of its subject matter and the honesty and delicacy with which Autant-Lara tackles it.

Le Blé en herbe is certainly a provocative film for its time.  It begins with a sequence which appears to have been conceived expressly to mock the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie: a young man is washed up naked on a beach in front of a party of schoolgirls and prim old ladies, with predictable results.  This is, of course, merely a limbering up exercise for the shocks that are yet in store for the po-faced subscriber to Le Figaro and other trenchantly conservative publications.   Not only do we get to see a pair of teenagers talking about things which are the sole preserve of grown adults (and only then in hushed whispers behind closed doors), but within no time at all we are confronted with the shocking spectacle of a pretty teenage boy being lured into the bed of a smouldering middle-aged woman who is at least three times his age!  The readers of La Croix must have thought this was the end of civilisation; if only heretic burning hadn’t gone out of fashion...

In their zeal to condemn the film for its supposedly immoral content, its detractors failed to recognise its artistic merits, let alone appreciate the immense sensitivity with which Autant-Lara and his faithful screenwriters Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche broached some very delicate themes.  Le Blé en herbe is one of the most authentic and poignant coming-of-age films to have been made in France, one that is all the more powerful because it leaves so much unsaid and does not demean itself (unlike much of today’s drama) with pointless audience titillation.  A first rate screenplay is well-served by some extraordinary performances which powerfully convey the traumas and complexities of an illicit romantic entanglement.   In a performance that easily counts as one of her best, Edwige Feuillère is not so much the calculating temptress as a tragically vulnerable woman whose need for love, we imagine, far surpasses that of the adolescent she ends up seducing.  Little is revealed about Feuillère’s character, and much is left to our imagination, but we sense that she is far more scarred by the amorous encounter than is evident on screen.  

By contrast, the feelings of the main teenage protagonist, Phil, are broadcast with an almost deafening stridency, the maelstrom of confusion, resentment, frustration and general hormonal overload being vividly evoked by Feuillère’s co-star Pierre-Michel Beck, one of the forgotten talents of French cinema.  Beck had previously featured in two similarly groundbreaking films - Jean Delannoy’s Le Garçon sauvage (1951) and Lionello De Felice’s L’Età dell’amore (1953) - and has something of the young Marlon Brando or James Dean about him.  Beck’s unpolished performance, burnished with raw emotions that betray an incongruous mix of primal savagery and well-developed sensitivity, is perhaps the most striking thing about this film, giving it more than just a patina of New Wave modernity.  Had Beck gone on to make more films, instead of ending his screen career here, he would doubtless have become one of the greatest French actors of his generation.  Posterity has been a little kinder to his young co-star Nicole Berger, whose stunning presence in Le Blé en herbe gave her a boost at the start of her career (a career that was tragically cut short when the actress died, aged 32, after being fatally injured in a car accident).  One of the most beautiful aspects of Le Blé en herbe is the degree to which Beck and Berger complement one another, the pent-up aggression and gauche insecurity of the one gradually subdued by the sublime tenderness of the other, as a modern retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fable.  

By the mid-1950s, Claude Autant-Lara had become identified, in the minds of some reviewers (including many of those who went on to become directors of the French New Wave), as being out-dated and out-of-touch.  If there is one film that confounds this absurdly simplistic characterisation it is surely Le Blé en herbe, one of the most daring French films of the decade and one of the few to tackle the theme of adolescent sexual awakening with the sensitivity and seriousness it merits.  The film may try a little too hard to match the production values of the contemporary Hollywood-style melodrama, but beneath the surface gloss and slightly dated cinematic conventions there is something that a modern audience can still engage with - a powerful and timeless story about two young people making the painful transition to adulthood, alone in a world that offers them little in the way of guidance or consolation.  It’s a familiar story, one that has been expressed in film a thousand times since, but rarely with as much conviction and poetry.

© James Travers 2011

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