Manon (1949)

Manon is a French romantic film drama first released in 1949, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.  The film is based on a novel by Abbé Prévost and stars Serge Reggiani, Michel Auclair, Cécile Aubry, Andrex and Raymond Souplex.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


A cargo ship leaves Marseilles loaded with Jews, survivors of the Holocaust who hope to begin a new life in the recently founded state of Israel.  Aboard the ship, the crew discover two stowaways: a young man named Robert Desgrieux and his fiancée Manon Lescaut.   When the captain learns that Robert is wanted for murder, he realises he has no choice but to hand him over to the authorities.  To elicit the captain’s sympathy, Robert tells his sad story.  It begins in 1944, in the last days of the Occupation.  In the course of liberating a Normandy town, Robert, a member of the French resistance, is charged with guarding a young woman, Manon, who is suspected of being a Nazi collaborator.  Robert quickly succumbs to Manon’s charms and the two flee to Paris.  Here, they join up with Manon’s brother, a black marketeer who soon ropes Robert into his illicit moneymaking activities.  Having acquired a taste for the good life, Manon supplements her income by working in a high class brothel, something which enrages Robert when he finds out.  Unable to endure Robert’s excessive love, Manon persuades her brother to lock him up whilst she runs away to marry a wealthy American.  This final act of betrayal sends Robert over the edge...

Perhaps the thing that best characterises the cinema of Henri-Georges Clouzot is a morbid preoccupation with the venality of human nature.  This is apparent in Clouzot’s early films - notably L’Assassin habite au 21 (1942) and Le Corbeau (1943) - but is most keenly felt in those films that he made immediately after the Second World War.  The ignominy and injustice of being disbarred from making films after Le Corbeau was judged immoral and offensive had a lasting effect on the director, influencing his choice of subjects and the style of his subsequent films.  Nowhere is this more noticeable than in Clouzot’s inspired adaptation of Abbé Prévost’s 18th Century novel Manon Lescaut.

Effortlessly transposed to the years following the Liberation of France in WWII, Clouzot’s Manon is not only a powerfully moving love story but one of cinema’s most shocking indictments of the French nation in that murky period that followed the end of the Nazi Occupation.  Whereas most filmmakers of the time sought merely to entertain the masses with escapist melodramas and comedies, Clouzot appeared to be on a one-man mission to open people’s eyes to the decay and moral turpitude that was slowly engulfing the country.  The France that is portrayed in Manon is not the vision that had been promised by General de Gaulle, a proud land reborn as a modern Utopia, but a festering dung heap inhabited by get-rich-quick black marketeers and unscrupulous gold-digging prostitutes.   Although the film predictably provoked great controversy (as much for its overt sexuality as for what it had to say about present day France), it was an internationally acclaimed success and earned its director the coveted Golden Lion award at the 1949 Venice Film Festival.   Today, Manon is less well-known than Clouzot’s other great films but it deserves to be considered one of his finest achievements, valued not only for its honest depiction of France after the Occupation, but also for its humanity, intelligence and sheer artistic brilliance.

The central theme of Clouzot’s Manon is the futility of seeking a Heaven on Earth.  In the exuberant days of the Liberation, the French people would have been justified in thinking that the dark days of Occupation would be replaced by years of peace, prosperity and rejoicing.  By 1948, the fallacy of this dream was well and truly apparent as France, in common with most of Europe, failed to emerge from wartime austerity.  Manon is a subtly allegorical expression of this widely felt sense of disillusionment.  The main story strand concerns a naïve resistance fighter Robert who allows himself to be consumed by an amorous passion for Manon, a young woman of dubious morality who has a well-developed aptitude for deceit and seduction.  Believing that Manon is his ticket to perfect happiness, Robert allows himself to be drawn deeper and deeper into the mire so that he can support her in the life to which she wishes to become accustomed.   When the penny finally drops and his dreams collapse more spectacularly than a badly assembled Ikea wardrobe, Robert’s passion turns to self-destructive hatred.  But the drama is far from over.  Robert’s struggle to find paradise with Manon continues to the very last breath and is ironically mirrored by the attempt of a party of Jews to reach Israel via a hazardous crossing of Palestine.  Both attempts to find the Promised Land will fail, with a tragic inevitability.  Paradise is not to be found in this world.

In her first major screen role, 20-year-old Cécile Aubry is perfectly cast as the morally ambiguous, highly sensual Manon Lescaut.   With a beauty and charisma that came tantalisingly close to making her the Marilyn Monroe of French cinema, Aubry personifies that elusive object of desire, sensual, mysterious and deadly - the kind of woman that every man wants but which no man can ever possess.  It was on the strength of this performance that Aubry was invited to Hollywood by 20th Century Fox, to play the female lead in The Black Rose (1950) opposite Tyrone Power.  She chose to end her acting career after a further six films so that she could marry a Moroccan prince and devote herself to a career as a writer.   Today, the name Cécile Aubry is most closely associated with the popular television series Belle et Sébastien, which she created and scripted.

In making this film, Clouzot appears to have been heavily influenced by contemporary cinema.  Many of the exterior sequences - particularly the spectacular one depicting the liberation of Normandy - evoke the stark neo-realist style of Roberto Rossellini.  The middle section of the film feels like a full-blown homage to American film noir, the high contrast photography and occasionally skewed camera angles suggesting a diseased milieu in which the boundaries between good and evil have become blurred to the extent that no one has a clear sense of what is right and wrong.  The love affair between Robert and Manon is pure film noir material, the former the easily duped hero who cannot help being lured to his doom by the latter, a seductive femme fatale who is prepared to bed anything that will keep her in lipstick and silk stockings.  Although it lacks the thriller elements that we associate with the film noir aesthetic, Manon is classic film noir at its purest and most visually alluring.

Whilst the film has a relentless brutality about it, contemptuous of the mores of the time and almost deriding the notion that any good can come of a romantic entanglement, Clouzot’s Manon still manages to retain something of the poetry and searing romanticism of Prévost’s classic novel.  We never doubt the sincerity of Robert’s feelings for Manon and Manon is less a wilful seductress and more a tragic victim of her own coquettish impulses.  Clouzot holds back his own romantic vision until the final devastatingly poignant reel in which the ill-fated lovers embrace their ineluctable destiny together.  As one they are united, not in the paradise they dreamed of, but in a vast desert wilderness, one dead, the other dying yet supremely triumphant in his victory.

© James Travers 2010

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