Le Chat (1971) - film review

After 25 years of married life, Julien and Clémence Bouin have ended up hating each other.  They live together in a dilapidated house in the suburbs of Paris, a house which is soon to be demolished as part of an urban redevelopment project.  Both cling to memories of happier times, when they were young and deeply in love, but these memories merely stoke their present bitterness and mutual loathing.  When Julien adopts a stray cat and smothers it with affection, Clémence is immediately overwhelmed with jealousy and resentment.  The cat becomes her mortal enemy, a symbol of everything she has lost...

Hard to believe but it wasn’t until they were both nearing the end of their prolific acting careers that Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret, two of the great icons of French cinema, appeared together in a film, the film in question being this superlative adaptation of a Georges Simeon novel by director Pierre Granier-Deferre.  Both Gabin and Signoret were enjoying something of a career boost in the early 1970s, each actor consistently delivering performances of exceptional quality which transformed quite modest films into minor classics with immense box office appeal.  Le Chat exemplifies this - not only do the two actors complement one another perfectly, they both play their characters - an elderly man and woman trapped in a bittery stale marriage - with a harrowing conviction which is at times painful to watch.  For what is arguably his last great performance, Gabin was justly rewarded with the Best Actor Silver Bear at the 1971 Berlin International Film Festival, one of the surprisingly small number of awards he picked up in the course of his monumental career.  

Making only a few small tweaks to the narrative, Pierre Granier-Deferre and his screenwriter Pascal Jardin perfectly recreate the mood and substance of Simeon’s most depressing novel, the result being one of cinema’s bleakest commentaries on married life.  The rundown old house in which the couple live, a relic standing absurdly proud and alone amidst a landscape of busy urban development, wryly symbolises the institution to which the two protagonists have chained themselves, for better or for worse.  Like their erstwhile love, it has become an empty shell which offers sanctuary from a world that is changing too quickly for them, but nothing else, least of all solace.  The cat that Julien (Gabin) adopts is the only thing in the film that appears to be alive, but unfortunately for Clémence (Signoret) it represents all that she has lost - the attention and tenderness of the man she still, in her hopelessly stubborn way, cannot stop loving.  

Le Chat is a darkly ironic film.  Whilst it appears to show the cruel transience of love, it ends by suggesting that whilst love may whither, it can never completely die.  Julien and Clémence’s mutual detestation is more a reflection of their abject disillusionment with life than a total absence of benign feeling towards one another.  Their relationship is the one thing that has endured whilst everything else in their lives has crumbled to dust, so naturally they grow to resent this and, whilst they cannot bear to separate (apart from brief intervals when Julien visits his one-time mistress), they use their marriage as a way to inflict pain on each other, to lash out against the life that no longer means anything.  In the film’s most hauntingly poetic sequence, the two characters share a kind of communion of transcendence, separately watching a gang of cats frolicking contentedly in the wasteland of a building site.  For a brief moment, Julien and Clémence are as one, feeding vicariously on the felines’ zest for life, perhaps lamenting the fact that they never had children, regretting that their lives have not been as full as they might have hoped.  But this moment of revelation comes too late - husband and wife must part as if they were strangers, without the slightest acknowledgement that they were once happy together.  Their hearts have failed them both.  

After this collaborative tour de force, Pierre Granier-Deferre worked with Simone Signoret on two other quite respectable Georges Simenon adaptations - La Veuve Couderc (1971) and L’Étoile du Nord (1982) - although neither of these has anything like the poetry, fractured humanity and visceral realism that Le Chat has in abundance.  Granier-Deferre did subsequently make some interesting, idiosyncratic films - notably La Cage (1975), Une étrange affaire (1981) and Cours privé (1986) - but few of these show the inspired touch that is so evident in Le Chat, which is probably his greatest film.  Gabin would go on to appear in another five films, the most memorable being José Giovanni’s anti-death penalty crowd-pleaser Deux hommes dans la ville (1973) in which he starred opposite the most cat-like of those monstres sacrés, Alain Delon.

© James Travers 2011

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