Au p'tit zouave (1949)
Directed by Gilles Grangier

Film Review

It is fair to say that director Gilles Grangier was at his most inspired and imaginative in the first decade of his long career, when he had more freedom than he would later have when helming conventional crowd-pleasers with big name actors.  Au p'tit zouave is one of the bleaker and less formulaic films in his eclectic oeuvre, one that blurs the boundary between comedy and drama and holds back its darker moments until the final reel.  For the most part, the film feels like a documentary, depicting the banal goings on in a Parisian working classing watering hole in the late 1940s.  It's worth noting that the entire film takes place in one location, an experiment that pays off as it brings an everyday realism to the entire film and an oppressive claustrophobia  to the final dramatic scenes.

Robert Dalban (soon to become a habitué of the comedy thriller genre) looks so at home as a café owner that you'd think he'd spent his entire adult life behind a bar.  His obsessive protectiveness towards his pet goldfish provides the film with its one comic vein.  (Note how the fate of the goldfish and its feline tormentor mirrors the fate of the two main characters in the drama.) Marie Daëms is no less convincing as a prostitute, here (at the start of her career) looking as sultry and mysterious as Marlene Dietrich.  Daëms's husband at the time, François Périer gets top billing in a role that capitalises on the actor's curious dual character.

Early in his career, Périer was the archetypal matinee idol, his likeable persona perfectly suited for romantic roles.  Later on, he would gravitate to towards more complex and sinister screen portrayals.  In Au p'tit zouave he makes the transition from one to the other, and is absolutely terrifying in the stand out scene in which he does so.  Périer's love interest is played not by his off-screen wife but by the adorable Dany Robin, who featured alongside him in many a film, their most effective coupling being in Guy Lefranc's sparkling comedy Elle et moi (1952).  Also deserving a mention is Paul Frankeur (a favourite of Luis Buñuel), who manages to be even creepier than Périer as he haunts the set in the guise of a suspicious looking detective.   Au p'tit zouave is one of those strangely unclassifiable films that is likeably weird, and far more satisfying than Grangier's subsequent brushes with film noir.

Film Synopsis

Au p'tit Zouave is a café run by Armand Billot and his wife in a working class district of Paris.  The café is a popular haunt for ordinary people working in the area, although Billot's main preoccupation is his treasured goldfish, which he guards day and night from his wife's cat.  The only permanent boarder at the café is Hélène, although another room is put to good use by prostitute Olga.  The main topic of conversation amongst Billot's clientele is the so-called 'milk bottle' serial killer who is at large in the area.  The latter leaves a full milk bottle at the scene of every murder he commits, his victims consisting of young women.  One day, a well-dressed young man, Monsieur Denis, shows up at the café and asks for a room.  Within no time, Hélène falls for the charms of her handsome fellow boarder, but it will not be long before she discovers his dark secret...