Le Cheval d’orgueil (1980) - film review

Pierre-Jakez Helias recounts his childhood experience from 1908 to 1918.  Growing up in a small Brittany village, Helias recalls with affection his father Pierre-Alain and mother Anne-Marie.  Life in this tightly knit peasant community is hard and death is never far away.  Then war breaks out and Pierre-Alain is mobilised, leaving his wife to support her family alone...

Le Cheval d’orgueil is an atypical film for Claude Chabrol, the French New Wave director who is better known for his slick psychological thrillers that have earned him the epithet "the French Alfred Hitchcock".  This film gets tantalisingly close to providing an authentic depiction of the life of ordinary Breton peasants at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, but, despite its near-documentary approach, it doesn’t quite make it.  The film was badly received by the critics and is often overlooked by even the most fervent admirers of Chabrol’s work.  Chabrol himself regretted not having recorded the film with Breton dialogue, since this is one of the reasons why the film feels slightly phoney.

To its credit, the film does given an insight into how ordinary folk lived in a rural community in the early 1900s.  It reminds us just how much has changed in the last century, how much living standards have improved, how much we have to be grateful for.  Without washing machines, the womenfolk had to spend hours beating cleanliness into household linen and clothes with wooden bats.  Without modern farm machinery, the men had to toil from dawn to dusk, reaping the harvest and threshing wheat by hand.  As a pictorial account of how our forebears lived, the film is both educative and poignant.

The problem is that Chabrol fails to get much beyond this instructive backdrop and the film is little more than a picture postcard from a bygone era.  The central drama, involving a typical Breton family, doesn’t connect with the audience.  The characters are interesting, and well-portrayed by some talented actors, but we do not engage with them.  Chabrol’s direction is as cold, detached and remote as the subject matter, and if you are looking for more than a documentary the film quickly loses its appeal.  However, imperfect as it is, Le Cheval d’orgueil is well worth watching, if only to remind ourselves how unremittingly tough life was, barely three generations back.

© James Travers 2009

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