Thérèse Raquin (1953) - film review

After being adopted by her aunt, Thérèse Raquin was forced into marrying her sickly cousin Camille at an early age.  For the past 17 years, she has been trapped in a loveless marriage, working in her aunt’s haberdashery shop in Lyon to support the husband she has grown to despise.  One day, Camille gets himself drunk and has to be carried home by Laurent, an Italian lorry driver.  The instant that Thérèse sees Laurent she is attracted to him.  He is everything a man should be, not the mean sickly creature she is married to.  Laurent is equally drawn to Thérèse and the two embark on a clandestine love affair.  When he realises his wife’s infidelity, Camille decides to take her to Paris, to place her with relatives who will cure her of her wanton nature.  On the train to Paris, Thérèse is met by Laurent, who urges her to elope with him.  In the course of a violent confrontation, Laurent throws Camille out of the train.  For a while, it looks as if the police have accepted Thérèse’s story that her husband’s death was an accident.  Then she receives an unexpected visit from a man who claims to have witnessed Camille’s last few moments...

It is a curious feature of Thérèse Raquin that whilst it is an obvious continuation of director Marcel Carné’s obsession with doomed romantic entanglements it also marks an unmistakable change from what has gone before.  The brooding oppression of Carné’s earlier poetic realist films can still be felt, but the lavender-scented romanticism has given way to something uglier, a sordid earthiness laced in bitter cynicism.  The film represents a conscious attempt by its director to embrace modernity, warts and all, and portray life as it was at the time in which he was working, rather than to adhere to a more romantic style which, in the migration from post-war austerity to the first gasp of the consumer revolution, had become dépassé.  Like Émile Zola, the author of the great novel on which the film is based, Carné appeared to be motivated by a desire to tear himself away from the limiting constraints of bourgeois romanticism and instead offer a more uncompromising view of human nature, one which exposed the savage beast that lies beneath the seemingly civilised exterior.  Or it could be that Carné, aged 46, was just going through the usual mid-life crisis...  

Marcel Carné’s striving for naturalism is as much reflected in the look of his post-WWII films as in their content.  Whilst Les Tricheurs (1958), a vivid and surprisingly acute dissection of contemporary youth, has a distinct Nouvelle Vague glow to it, Terrain vague (1960) feels almost like a documentary with its neo-realist presentation of urban delinquency.  Thérèse Raquin is a transition piece which retains the oppressive mood and fatalist themes of Carné’s earlier films whilst offering a far less generous assessment of human frailty.  Romance is suborned to animal lust, evil rendered banal and almost excusable by the mores of the time.  The old certainties are swept away and the film is steeped in the kind of moral ambiguity that best characterises film noir, of which this an exemplary example.  Just as Jean Renoir had done with his inspired adaptation of Le Bête humaine (1938), Carné takes the substance of a classic Zola novel and re-expresses it in a way that would be instantly relevant to a modern cinema audience.  The film is as much a commentary on the social ills and moral decline of its time as it is a worthy Zola adaptation and supremely satisfying example of French film noir.

Thérèse Raquin shows its modernity most visibly through its extensive location sequences in Lyon, which offer a flattering portrait of a modern industrial city which comes close to rivalling Paris in its bustle, grandeur and diversity of architecture.  The labyrinth of narrow streets in the cramped Old Town in which the heroine lives provides a stark visual metaphor for her repressed, narrow existence from which she can never escape, whilst the grand boulevards further afield represent the freedom that a life with her new lover appears to offer.  The other modernist touch is the choice of male lead actor, Raf Vallone.  Giuseppe De Santis’s neo-realist masterpiece Riso amaro (1949) had made Vallone, a former professional footballer, an overnight star of Italian cinema and a highly sought after actor.  With his rugged good looks and labourer’s physique, Vallone brought a whole new machismo to the big screen, a raw sexual allure combined with an intense brooding presence and a likeable everyman persona.  He was perfect casting for the part of the illicit lover Laurent in Thérèse Raquin and contributes precisely the unapologetic naked sensuality that the role demands.

Cast opposite Vallone is his French female counterpart, Simone Signoret, an actress who had become a byword for smouldering sensuality through such films as Dédée d’Anvers (1948), Manèges (1950) and Casque d’or (1952).  In what is considered one of her signature roles, Signoret ignites both the celluloid and our heartstrings with a performance of understated power and harrowing poignancy.  Whilst neither Vallone nor Signoret’s character can be described as sympathetic, both actors compel us to empathise with their plight and regret the tragic destination their characters are clearly marked for.   The supporting roles of Madame Raquin and Camille went to two very capable character actors, Sylvie and Jacques Duby (both excellent), whilst the part of the wicked blackmailer Riton is beautifully rendered by Roland Lesaffre, Marcel Carné’s close friend and protégé.

It is as futile to flaw the performances in this film as it is to find fault with Carné’s mise-en-scène.  If the film has a weakness it is only to be found in Charles Spaak’s screenplay, which relies a little too much on mechanical plot contrivance and comes close to ruining the film with a deus ex machina plot resolution which owes more to James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice than to Zola’s original novel.  It is a testament to Carné’s skill as a director and the calibre of his actors that the film’s plot deficiencies are so easily overlooked.  Another touch of genius is Roger Hubert’s crisp monochrome cinematography.  This has a cold solemnity that immediately evokes the abject bleakness of Fritz Lang’s film noir classics, providing a suitably dark prism through which to view the grimmest and cruellest film of Marcel Carné’s post-WWII period.

© James Travers 2011

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