Mélo (1932) - film review

After many years, Pierre is overjoyed to be reunited with his old friend Marcel, who has become a world famous virtuoso violinist.   One evening, Pierre invites his friend to his home, where he introduces him to his wife Romaine.  It proves to be a cataclysmic meeting.  As soon as they see one another, Marcel and Romaine know they are in love.  The following day, Romaine visits Marcel without her husband’s knowledge and begins a love affair that cannot end well.  When Pierre falls ill and is bed-ridden, Romaine faithfully devotes herself to caring for him, knowing that as she does so she risks losing Marcel forever...

Paul Czinner’s lacklustre adaptation of Henri Bernstein’s popular 1920s play has not worn well and must have appeared pretty dated when it was first screened in 1932.  Apart from a few fleeting stylistic touches (which are actually more distracting than helpful), the film is virtually little more than a filmed stage play, alas one that is singularly lacking in the vitality of a stage production.  The three leading actors - Gaby Morlay, Pierre Blanchar and Victor Francen - were all major players in 1930s French cinema, but each of them turns in a dull performance that is painfully mannered and theatrical, robbing the film of any emotional truth and reality. 

A sorry epitome of the creaking old-fashioned melodrama which today is so oft derived (and rightly so), Mélo has little to engage a modern cinema audience and serves only to illustrate how filmmaking technique and tastes have evolved since it was made.  Incidentally, the play is not entirely to blame - director Alain Resnais subsequently adapted it for the cinema in 1986 and made of it a compelling and highly nuanced piece of drama, without departing that far from the theatrical form.  Next to Resnais’s film, Czinner’s is unbearably stilted and passionless, worth watching only if you have a perverse desire to see Gaby Morlay perform a forward roll (with the grace and enthusiasm of someone diving into a pool of sharks).

© filmsdefrance.com 2011

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