Abus de confiance (1937)
Directed by Henri Decoin

Film Review

What is most interesting about Abus de confiance, a low-key drama which was the third of many collaborations between director Henri Decoin and actress Danielle Darrieux, is not its formulaic intrigue but its astonishingly frank social commentary.  Decoin's profound humanism and concern for his fellow man shines through many of his films but rarely as brightly as it does here, in one of his less well-known but most compassionate studies in human frailty.  The plight of young women in Depression Era France (women who all too often were easy victims for exploitative employers intent on extending their harems) is powerfully evoked in the film's first half, whilst society's appalling treatment of juveniles forced into a life of crime through lack of state provision and parental support comes to the fore in the second half, ground that Decoin would pointedly retread in his subsequent masterpiece Les Inconnus dans la maison (1942).

Abus de confiance feels far less like a conventional 1930s melodrama and more like an early experiment with social realism, and this is in part down to Danielle Darrieux's presence in the feisty female lead role.  The reason why Darrieux became so phenomenally successful (by this time she had starred in over 20 films and had only just turned 20) was that, despite her glamorous looks, she had the 'common touch' - she was someone that most ordinary women could easily identify with.  Decoin exploited this facet of his leading lady more successfully than any other film director and in Abus de confiance Darrieux is as much a personification of the 'noble proletariat' as Jean Gabin was in his films of this era (after WWII both actors would look more at home in a comfortable bourgeois setting).  Darrieux's character also has an unmistakable feminist spark to her.  Time and again, she hits back against (male) sexual predators, and it's no wonder she ends up a hardbitten man-hating miss who is driven to commit a brazen act of fraud.  How many other French films of the 1930s can you cite that deal as honestly with the problems faced by women in an overwhelmingly male-oriented society?   (Women didn't even get the vote in France until 1944).

Abus de confiance has another claim to fame - it gave us that striking image of a young female walking through the streets after dark in a beret and black vinyl rain coat.  A year on, Marcel Carné would 'borrow' the same iconic look for Le Quai des brumes (1938), with Michèle Morgan forever immortalised in that most fetching of 1930s female garb.  Simone Simon found herself in the same glad rags in Jean Renoir La Bête humaine (1938), and she was by no means the last.  It was Danielle Darrieux who first burned this smouldering impression of female mystique onto celluloid, and never has the actress looked more inscrutable nor more stylish in the eye-catching montage sequence in which she contemplates her dire situation whilst aimlessly pounding the streets of Paris, the most alluring and mysterious of Gallic femme fatales.

Sequences such as this, so often imitated but rarely improved upon, owe much to the keen visual sense of cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burel.  Burel first made an impact in the silent era, on such visually extravagant works as Viktor Tourjansky's Michel Strogoff (1926) and Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927), but he is best known for his collaborations with Robert Bresson, most notably Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (1956).  Not all of the films that Burel lent his talents to were masterpieces but even comparatively minor films such as Abus de confiance were greatly enhanced by his skill and artistry.  Despite the cloying dowdiness of its subject matter there is a modernity and vitality to this film which owes as much to L.H. Burel as it does to Decoin. 

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Decoin embraced the opportunity to use real locations and it is the abundance of vivid exterior sequences, the most memorable of which is set in a lively fairground, that gives the film its modern, near-documentary feel.  A full two decades before the Nouvelle vague crowd embarked on their trumped up cinematic revolution Decoin was out on the streets of Paris, filming 'sur le vif,' much like Godard, Truffaut and Rivette would do in their heyday.   Abus de confiance may be of its time but it is also, paradoxically, some years ahead of its time, recording the social horrors of 1930s France whilst anticipating some major developments in both society and cinema.

Film Synopsis

Lydia is a promising law student who is struggling to get by after her grandmother's death. She has barely enough money to buy her evening meal and now, to cap it all, her landlord is threatening to evict her! In a bid to raise the money that will allow her to complete her studies, Lydia sets about finding work, but in vain. Most of her potential employers seem to be lechers who make a habit of exploiting their female staff. Her only hope now is her best friend, Alice, who, as luck would have it, has just come across some private correspondence of the famous writer Jacques Ferny.  It seems that, in his youth, Ferny once had an affair with a young woman and that this resulted in the birth of a little girl outside wedlock.  At Alice's insistence, Lydia calls on Ferny at his home and tries to convince him that she is his illegitimate daughter.  It so happens that Ferny is desperate to have a daughter of his own, so he is easily taken in by the innocent deception. Unfortunately, his wife Hélène is not fooled so readily. She starts making her own enquiries to confirm what she knows to be true: Lydia is an impostor...