Un revenant (1946) - film review

Impresario Jean-Jacques Sauvage returns to his home town of Lyons, ostensibly to stage a new ballet production, but as he renews old acquaintances it is evident that he has darker motives in mind.  He receives a cold reception from Jérôme Nisard, a driven businessman who is in severe financial difficulty.   Twenty years ago, Jérôme shot Jean-Jacques to prevent him from marrying his sister Geneviève.  Since, Jean-Jacques have never stopped loving Geneviève, and he is surprised when he finds that she is still romantically attached to him, even though she is married to another man.  To save his business from ruin, Jérôme intends to marry his son François into a wealthy family, but François, an impetuous dreamer, has other plans.   Aware of Jérôme’s machinations, and seeing an opportunity for revenge, Jean-Jacques Sauvage offers François work as a set designer with his company.  Within no time, François finds himself drawn to one of the dancers, Karina, and is soon pursuing a passionate love affair with her.   Needless to say, Jérôme is outraged by this turn of events, but predictably Jean-Jacques refuses to intervene.  Revenge can be very sweet...

Although too easily overlooked in a body of work that is laden with sumptuous, fondly remembered classics, Un revenant is surely one of Christian-Jaque’s most enchanting films, an exquisitely crafted melodrama that offers both an acerbic social satire and a poignant reflection on the destructive power of an amorous infatuation.  The film’s title is particularly apt as this marked the return of Louis Jouvet to the big screen after an absence of five years, during which he was away touring Latin America with his theatre troupe.  The film is based on a true story, the so-called Gillet affair which rocked Lyonnaise society in the 1920s, and which was the subject of the novel Ciel de suie by the author-journalist Henri Béraud.  The similarities between the film and the novel are slight, but sufficiently noticeable for screenwriter Henri Jeanson to have been accused of plagiarism.  Béraud received no credit on the film and was not in a position to contribute to it, as he was at the time in prison, serving a life sentence for his support of the Vichy government during WWII.  

With France in the grip of post-war austerity, Un revenant was filmed under extremely difficult circumstances (watch closely and you can see steam coming out of the actors’ mouths, so under-heated were the studio sets), but this did not prevent it from being a superbly composed piece of cinema.  The moody, high contrast cinematography, redolent of the poetic realist aesthetic of the 1930s, gives the film an oppressive mood that is powerfully evocative of the repressive nature of bourgeois society at its worst.  The exterior shots of the mist-shrouded town of Lyons imbue the film with something of the haunting poetry of films by René Clair, Marcel Carné and Jean Vigo, evincing a fragile beauty that is threatened by dark and sinister forces.  With its gloomy mood and intensely cynical undertones, Un revenant feels more like one of Julien Duvivier’s films, which is perhaps not surprisingly as it was scripted by Henri Jeanson, the man who worked with him on his bleakest film, Pépé le Moko (1937).

Un revenant is particularly well-served by its distinguished cast. Louis Jouvet is fascinating to watch as he tackles one of his most complex screen portrayals, an enigmatic outsider who resembles the nomadic hero of a classic western.  Jean-Jacques Sauvage is a man who is clearly motivated by revenge, a man with a touch of the Machiavellian arch-manipulator about him, and yet Jouvet plays him not as a villain, but as a likeable avenging angel, who wins our sympathy when we discern the scars that he carries from an erstwhile romantic entanglement.  As Sauvage’s former lover interest, Gaby Morlay heightens the tragic dimension of Jouvet’s character whilst making her own character appear an even more cruelly treated victim of circumstances.  The final shot of Morlay watching Jouvet depart is excruciating in its poignancy, marking as it does the bitter end of Geneviève’s dreams for a better life. 

As impressive as Jouvet and Morlay are in this film, their contributions are virtually eclipsed by that of the young François Périer, whose portrayal of a young man being assailed by visceral passions is striking in its modernity.  Périer had appeared in over a dozen films prior to this, in minor roles, but this is probably the first occasion he had to demonstrate his ability to convey extreme inner torment and show that he was an actor of rare ability.  Although, on paper, his character is a pathetic wretch (the archetypal dreamer who will inevitably emulate Young Werther when his first romance ends in tears), Périer manages to give him substance and humanity, so that we have no option but to sympathise and reach for the Kleenex as his world collapses like an under-cooked soufflé.

The supporting cast also has much to commend it.  Making her screen debut is Ludmilla Tchérina, the great ballet dancer who would subsequently feature in two of Powell and Pressburger’s films, The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).  At the other end of the range of experience, and shamelessly stealing every scene she appears in, is Marguerite Moreno, a much-loved doyenne of stage and screen who had recently triumphed in Louis Jouvet’s theatrical production of Jean Giraudoux’s La Folle de Chaillot.  Christian-Jaque had enormous difficulty directing the 70-year-old Moreno, since she had a habit of dozing off between takes.  The only way he could make her stay awake was by keeping her tanked up on beer.

Un revenant was not well-received when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946, but it proved to be a modest box office hit, attracting an audience of three million.  Critical reaction to the film was mixed, perhaps because its resemblance to the poetic realist films of the past made it appear dated.   Today, the film has been all but forgotten, which is surprising given the pedigree of its cast and its obvious artistic merits.  Whereas many of Christian-Jaque’s films are considered classics - Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (1938), L’Assassinat du Père Noël (1941), Fanfan la Tulipe (1952), to name just three - Un revenant, one of his most atmospheric and incisive films, has been sadly neglected and definitely deserves a fresh reappraisal.

© James Travers 2000-2010

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