Lumière d’été (1943) - film review

Michèle, a young dress designer from Paris, arranges to meet up with her boyfriend Roland, a temperamental artist, at a mountain resort in Provence.  When Roland fails to keep the rendezvous, Michèle attracts the attention of two men - local chatelain Patrice and a young dam engineer, Julien.  Patrice’s obvious interest in Michèle is immediately noticed by his longstanding mistress Christiane, who runs the hotel where Michèle is staying.  When Roland finally puts in an appearance, making a drunken exhibition of himself as he does so, Michèle is so incensed that she decides to end her relationship with him and return to Paris.   Naturally, Christiane is delighted by this turn of events and agrees to lend Michèle the money for her return ticket, but Patrice has other ideas and forces Michèle to stay by giving Roland a commission, to paint one of the rooms in his château.  At a masked ball hosted by Patrice, Michèle discovers that it is Julien she loves...

With the benefit of hindsight, Jean Grémillon’s most perfect film, Lumière d’été (1943), can be seen for what it is, a blatant attack on the shortcomings of the Vichy government during the Occupation.  The famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" is stressed and pretty well gives the game away, although if contemporary French audiences missed that hint there are other, less subtle pointers for those seeking some reassurance that not every French filmmaker was in the pocket of the Vichy administration.  It is pretty obvious that the sickening collusion of Pierre Brasseur’s decadent opportunist and Paul Bernard’s murderous chatelain is meant to represent the relationship between Vichy and the Nazis, and it is not too difficult to interpret the heroine Michèle as the unyielding spirit of France, mirroring the symbolic role of Garance in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis (1945).   (The fact that both films were scripted by Jacques Prévert may have had something to do with this.)

Unusually for Grémillon (one of the most prominent purveyors of poetic realism at the time), the film ends on an optimistic note that could hardly fail to resonate with French cinema audiences.  Michèle (Madeleine Robinson) manages to extricate herself from her two despicable suitors and finds true love with someone (Georges Marchal) who, going by his wearing apparel and incorruptible nature, is obviously a fully paid up member of the French resistance.  Although many films made during the Occupation have a pro-resistance, anti-Nazi, anti-Vichy subtext, most managed to get past the Nazi censors without so much as a twitch.  Lumière d’été was the one notable exception - its anti-Vichy tone was so evident that the censors would have been deaf, blind and chronically stupid not to have realised what it was trying to say.  The film was banned outright in France during the Occupation but it was released, with some degree of success, after the Liberation.

Lumière d’été is not only Grémillon’s most overtly political film, it is arguably his finest technical achievement, more polished than his better known Gueule d’amour (1937) and more satisfying than his subsequent hit Le Ciel est à vous (1944).  The only other French film of this period that compares with it is Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939), which at times it closely resembles, both films offering a virulent attack on the bourgeoisie whilst idealising the simple virtues of the proletariat.   Grémillon may not have been as politically driven as Renoir but his characterisation of the self-serving rich as a malignant force exerting a dangerously corrupting influence on society is as pungent and forceful as anything that Renoir included in his films.  It is curious indeed that whilst Renoir’s film is universally acknowledged as a masterpiece, often cited as the greatest film of all time, Grémillon’s is virtually unheard of outside France.  Posterity can be a very fickle mistress.

With its rural setting (evocative of an idealised France untainted by the disease of Nazism), Lumière d’été is visually quite different from Jean Grémillon’s previous film, Remorques (1941), but there are some strong thematic similarities.  Madeleine Renaud once again plays a rather pitiful women who struggles in vain to keep alive a love affair that has long since died.  Having fought to fend of Michèle Morgan in Remorques, she now finds herself up against an even deadlier threat, Madeleine Robinson, and Renaud’s attempts to salvage her affair with Paul Bernard are as poignant as they are pathetic.  Robinson, by contrast, appears weak and indecisive, a surprisingly passive lead female role for a Jean Grémillon film.  Her character (Michèle) appears to be at the mercy of events, an impression that is reinforced when she ends up in the backseat of a car driven by an idiotically drunk Pierre Brasseur.  (Again, the anti-Vichy subtext is not too hard to divine.)

As the tension is ratcheted up towards the predictably explosive climax, there is a touch of The Perils of Pauline, with Robinson fulfilling the role of the helpless heroine just so that she can be saved at the last minute by an act of working class solidarity.  This flagrant concession to narrative and/or political expediency may have troubled Grémillon at the time, particularly as it seems to faintly echo the Vichy government’s assertion that a woman’s place is in the home.  This may partly explain why Grémillon’s next film, Le Ciel est à vous (1944), is so earnestly pro-feminist.   If Lumière d’été appears to be far less concerned with gender roles, this is presumably because Jean Grémillon and his screenwriter Jacques Prévert had far bigger fish to fry, namely to shine a light on the treachery of the Vichy government.

© James Travers 2012

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