Maldone (1928) - film review

For twenty years, Olivier Maldone has lived the life of an itinerant labourer, content to earn his meagre wage by toiling on the land and the canals.  One day, he sees a young gypsy girl, Zita, and is mesmerised by her beauty.  They meet up again at a country ball and Maldone becomes jealous when he sees Zita dancing with another man.  After Maldone’s younger brother Marcellin has been killed in a horse-riding accident, his uncle sends a servant out to look for Maldone and persuade him to come back home.   Reluctantly, Maldone returns to his family seat, and marries Flora, the daughter of a wealthy landowner.  Three years later, Maldone has come to hate his new life.  During a holiday break in the city he has a chance encounter with Zita.  For a brief time he relives his former passion but soon realises that the romance has no future.  Maldone cannot turn the clock back - or can he?

Jean Grémillon had turned out around twenty documentary shorts before, in his late twenties, he made Maldone, his first full-length fictional film.  Given that Grémillon has made several notable contributions to French cinema - Gueule d’amour (1937), Remorques (1941), Lumière d’été (1943) and Le Ciel est à vous (1944) - it is hard to explain why he continues to be overlooked and why much of his oeuvre remains relatively unknown.  Even those familiar with Grémillon’s work will be surprised by the innovative flair that he exhibits in Maldone, a film in which its director made a conscious attempt to transcend the anaemic realism of the documentary by embracing a more subjective approach to filmmaking.  His intention is not just to show what things look like on the surface, but also to reveal what lies beneath, to capture the feelings of his protagonists as vividly as possible.  The film’s striking visual impact probably owes as much to cinematographer Georges Périnal as it does to Grémillon, and it is hard to tell who deserves most credit for what we see on the screen.   This was Périnal’s first major assignment; he would go on to have a very distinguished career, leaving his mark on such classics as René Clair’s Le Million (1931), William Cameron Menzies’ Things to Come (1933), Zoltan Korda’s The Four Feathers (1939) and Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).

What sets Maldone apart from most films of its era is its attempt to construct an entire narrative from a single point of view.  With its real locations, vertiginous point-of-view shots and unusual camera angles, the film has an almost brutal sense of reality, a style which presages both the neo-realist and French poetic realist developments of the following decade and yet, at the same time, manages to be startlingly different.  The juxtaposition of its documentary-style location photography with an abundance of bold stylistic touches suggests a timeless surface calm that is periodically punctured by moments of immense emotional intensity, reminiscent of what most of us experience in real life.  The film begins with a portrait of idyllic bucolic calm, the camera gently gliding through a rural landscape of exquisite peace and beauty.  This is the carefree paradise to which the main character Maldone belongs and against which his subsequent miserable existence as a wealthy landowner will later be compared.  Maldone’s expulsion from his own personal Garden of Eden begins, in a suitably Biblical fashion, when he succumbs to the temptress, in the guise of a gypsy girl.  It is at this point that the rural idyll breaks down and Maldone experiences new and violent passions, which are revealed to us by some dizzying camera movements and a kaleidoscopic superposition of images.  Maldone’s conflicting needs and emotions are what propel the narrative in a way that mirrors the fatalist trajectory of a poetic realist drama, and yet the film ends not with unambiguous tragedy but with a question mark.  As the violent forces of nature coalesce with Maldone’s inner turmoil, it is left to the spectator to decide whether the film’s hero will find his way back to his lost paradise or whether he is merely chasing an illusion that will end in disaster.

The film’s main protagonist, Olivier Maldone, is sympathetically played by Charles Dullin, a distinguished character actor and theatre director who enjoyed much greater success on the stage that in film.   Dullin’s few notable film credits include a marvellously venal Thenardier in Raymond Bernard’s Les Misérables (1933) and an equally repugnant impresario in H.G. Clouzot’s Quai des Orfèvres (1947).  It was Dullin who financed Maldone (the sole film that he produced), although it proved to be a poor investment as the film was not a great success (perhaps because Dullin was not an established screen actor).   Despite his somewhat intimidating appearance, Dullin gives an arresting performance that shows a simple soul being put through the wringer by the severest case of mid-life crisis - not a conventional hero but nevertheless someone whom we can readily engage with.  The supporting cast includes such luminaries as Annabella, in one of her earliest film appearances, and Roger Karl, a notable actor of the silent era.  Cast as the stunningly beautiful gypsy girl is the Rumanian-born actress Genica Athanasiou, a leading player in Charles Dullin’s theatre company who had distinguished herself a few years previously in Dullin’s original Paris stage production of Jean Cocteau’s play Antigone.

Having languished in virtual obscurity for around seventy years, Maldone was painstakingly restored in 2001 by Centrimage for ZZ Productions, one of several treasures of the silent era to have been rescued in recent years.   Now available in an almost pristine print, the film can be more widely appreciated, both as a superlative example of experimental silent cinema and as an auspicious debut feature from one of France’s great film auteurs.  Maldone may lack the coherence and polish of Jean Grémillon’s later films but it shows the director at his most uninhibited and inspired.  It is here that Grémillon establishes his fierce rejection of what he referred to as mechanical naturalism, by attempting to show the world not merely as it is seen by the human eye, but how it is felt by the human soul.  Grémillon’s approach to cinema was uniquely impressionistic and Maldone is, arguably, his most successful attempt to extend the principles of impressionism to the moving image.

© James Travers 2001-2010

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