Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde (1948) - film review

Gérard Favier is a famous composer who has been married to the charming Sylvia for almost 20 years.  Still deeply in love, they walk the streets of Paris and, one day, they hear a sonata that Gérard once wrote, played on a piano in a house.  Gérard is surprised to find that the piano player is a 20 year-old girl named Monelle.  Impressed by her talent, Gérard decides to adopt Monelle as his protégé, but very soon his interest in her takes a less paternalistic turn.   It is through a gossip magazine that Sylvia learns about her husband’s infidelity but she is uncertain how to react.  After all, he did write a new song for her, "Lovers are alone in the world..."
© Willems Henri (Brussels, Belgium)

This is a little gem that deserves to be far better known than it is, but then what would you expect from a script by Henri Jeanson, direction by Henri Decoin and a cast led by Louis Jouvet?  The main story is beautifully topped and tailed by Decoin, who gives us an opening sequence in which Jouvet, a celebrated composer and pianist, is strolling through the woods and comes upon a wedding party at an inn.  Content to be mistaken for a vagrant, he entertains the revellers by playing popular tunes on the piano for tips.  Then comes the story proper. 

Long married and deeply in love, Jouvet and his wife are out walking when they hear someone playing the piano to a remarkable standard.  It turns out to be a young girl to whom Jouvet becomes mentor and eventually lover, something his wife is unable to bear.  Decoin shot this film simply, in the ’old fashioned’ way, i.e. master shot, long shot, mid shot two-shot, close shot, etc., which is all the more effective for this kind of storyline.  Following the tragic outcome, Decoin takes us back to the woods that formed the Prologue and, in a shot that echoes the close of Casablanca, Jouvet and friend walk off together.  Fade out.  Brilliant.

© Leon Nock (London, England) 2010 

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