Au bonheur des dames (1930)
Directed by Julien Duvivier

Film Review

The last rites were being performed over the dying remnants of silent cinema as director Julien Duvivier embarked on his last silent film, so it is highly fitting that this film should serve as a lesson on the futility of resistance in the face of unstoppable progress. Although he already had twenty films under his belt, including the enchanting Poil de carotte (1926), Duvivier had yet to make his name as a filmmaker and it was only after he had made the transition to sound that he would emerge as one of France's leading film directors, the author of such enduring classics as La Bandera (1935), La Belle équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937).  Au bonheur des dames deserves a place alongside these other important works and is surely the highpoint of Duvivier's silent period, a cinematic melting pot of 'borrowed' aesthetics (the influence of Abel Gance, D.W. Griffith, Sergei Einsenstein and Fritz Lang is readily apparent) within which the first traces of poetic realism and the author's trademark cynicism are just discernible.

Au bonheur des dames is based on Émile Zola's novel of the same title, the eleventh in his Rougon-Macquart series, time-shifted from the 1860s to the late 1920s.  Zola's timeless tale of innocents caught up in the tide of progress ensures that the film is as relevant today as it was when it was made and, of all Duvivier's films, this is the one that still feels frighteningly pertinent. Unlike André Cayatte's subsequent 1943 film adaptation, which reads as a forced apology for Pétainism, Duvivier's film genuinely does convey a sense of the hopelessness of trying to defy the ineluctable march of progress.  'Change or die' is the film's sombre leitmotif, palpably expressed by the contrasting fates of the two principal characters, the shopkeeper Baudu who refuses to buckle to the inevitable and his more pliable niece Denise, who is young enough to accept change as an unavoidable part of life.

The film begins with a shot that is almost identical to that which opens Jean Renoir's La Bête humaine (1938) (coincidentally another Zola adaptation) - an engine driver's view of a train surging forwards on a set of railway tracks.  In both films, the opening serves as a stark metaphor for the powerful forces that will guide the protagonists to their ultimate fate.  In the case of Renoir's film, the driving force is an hereditary illness; in Duvivier's film it is something far less tangible but far more powerful - progress.  What progress is or where it comes from no one knows, but it is the thing that propels humanity ever onwards, an unfaltering cosmic dynamo fuelled (not controlled) by capitalism and the fruits of scientific endeavour.

The most striking manifestation of progress in Duvivier's film is the department store of the film's title - a vast concrete and glass monolith that dwarfs the dusty old little shops that surround it and threatens to swallow them up and thereby increase its gargantuan bulk even further.  Far from being a static piece of decor, the store feels like a living entity, one that makes captives of all who enter it (employees and customers alike), transforming them into mindless automata that carry out its essential functions like corpuscles in the human body.  As the camera sweeps backwards and forwards in the palatial interior (in reality the Galeries Lafayette, the world's most famous department store), there is nothing to distinguish one individual human being from another.  Shot from high above, they become a seething mass of animated flesh, like innumerable ants milling about their nest or a thick carpet of maggots devouring a rotting carcass.  There is no place for individuality in this so-called 'temple of pleasure'.  Like the subterranean slaves in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and the silent production line workers in René Clair's À nous la liberté (1930), people become no more than mechanically animated cogs in one vast machine, willing sacrifices to the Moloch of human advancement.

Those who resist the dehumanising effect of change, like the defiant draper Baudu, have an even worse fate in store for them (forgive the pun).  They will be crushed under the wheels of the unstoppable locomotive of progress.  In the film's most striking sequence (an incredibly effective use of Eisensteinian dialectic mointage), Baudu's last stand against those who are determined to buy him out is dramatically inter-cut with shots of a man demolishing an adjacent building with a pick.  It is as if the implacable storeowner is himself being demolished and you feel his rage and distress every time the pick comes down, knocking another chunk out of his marble-like resilience.

This stunning coup de théâtre is followed by another, as the old man goes totally berserk and makes a puny but terrifying assault on the object of his loathing.  It is as futile an act as a minnow attacking an aircraft carrier but far from appearing feeble and pathetic Baudu acquires a heroic nobility, and Duvivier's main achievement is to project onto the screen the sheer naked fury of a man driven to the limits of despair by forces he cannot hope to oppose.  So richly expressive are the visuals that you barely notice this is a silent film.  Indeed there are scenes that appear to scream with a piercing intensity.  Denise's first reaction to the sights and sounds of the big city is powerfully conveyed by some inspired use of superimposition, fast cutting and camera motion, creating a dizzying sense of euphoria tinged with mild panic.

Armand Bour's intensely involving portrayal of Baudu compels us to sympathise with the doomed character - it is through his senses that the terrible destructive power of change is experienced.  A great actor of the French stage, Bour was a comparative stranger to cinema but he had previously appeared in two other notable films, both Zola adaptations: André Antoine's La Terre (1921) and Marcel L'Herbier's L'Argent (1928).  The part of the heroine Denise went to a comparative newcomer, the German actress Dita Parlo, who would achieve considerable success both in France and her own country - today she is best remembered for her starring roles in two of the most iconic French films of the 1930s - Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) and Jean Renoir's La Grande illusion (1937).  Octave Mouret, the arch-capitalist who is ultimately redeemed by the power of love, is played by the debonair Pierre de Guingand, who was famous at the time as the musketeer Aramis in Henri Diamant-Berger's Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921) and its sequel Vingt ans après (1922).  One other familiar name on the credits is Christian-Jaque, here employed in the capacity of set designer - he made his directing debut a couple of years afterwards and soon became one of France's most prolific and commercially successful film directors.

Had it found its way onto cinema screens just a year earlier, Au bonheur des dames would most likely have earned its director considerable prestige.  How ironic that the film's subject - progress - should have been its undoing.  Overly concerned with recouping their investment, the film's producers took the fatal decision of delaying the film's release by several months to allow time for synchronised sound to be added to a number of scenes.  By the time Au bonheur des dames was released in 1930 silent cinema was dead and half-way houses like this were readily passed over by a cinema-going public that had already succumbed to the fad of sound cinema.  Duvivier was undeterred by this spectacular setback - he followed it with David Golder (1930), his first major success.  Almost three decades on, the director returned to Zola's world with Pot-Bouille (1957) (a prequel to the original Au bonheur des dames) with Gérard Philipe playing the younger Octave Mouret.  This was to be the director's last big commercial success as he himself succumbed to the inevitability of changing tastes.  Progress gets us all in the end.

Film Synopsis

After the death of her parents, Denise, a young woman from the country, arrives in Paris to live with her uncle Baudu, the owner of a small draper's shop, Le Vieil Elbeuf.  Baudu's delight at being reunited with his niece is tempered by his realisation that he cannot afford to keep her.  The opening of a massive department store Au Bonheur des Dames across the street is driving him to ruin and his income is barely adequate to keep himself and his sick daughter Geneviève.  Denise has the answer: she will get herself a job with the rival store.  Originally hired as a model, Denise is on the point of being dismissed after an altercation with another girl when the store's owner, Octave Mouret, intervenes and offers her work on the perfumery counter.  Mouret's motives are far from unselfish.  He is strongly attracted to the girl from the provinces and is determined to add her to his list of acquisitions.  Meanwhile, Mouret's plans for expansion continue apace, helped by a wealthy investor.  Only Baudu stubbornly resists selling up but it is only a matter of time before he yields to the inevitable, just as Denise will one day give in to the persistent Mouret...