Film Review
For all his standing as one of the leading lights of French cinema, Julien
Duvivier is not particularly known as a committed social commentator or reform-advocating
polemicist, and this makes
Au royaume des cieux, one of his few forays
into socio-political filmmaking, all the more interesting. Work began
on the film within a year of Marcel Carné and his trusty screenwriter
Jacques Prévert drawing a line under their aborted project
La Fleur
de l'âge, which, with its uncompromising portrait of life in a
brutally administered education and reform centre for juvenile delinquents, treads virtually identical
ground, and even had the same up-and-coming star Serge Reggiani cast in a
leading role. It's a great lost to cinéphiles that this earlier
film was never completed, as it would doubtless have been interesting to
compare it with Duvivier's offering, which saw its director taking up a similar
challenge of departing from the poetic realist melodramas of the previous
decade and moving onto the less familiar and far more contentious ground
of contemporary social drama.
As the caption at the top of the film spells out,
Au royaume des cieux
was not based on a real-life story (in contrast to Carné's abandoned
film) but is entirely fictitious, conceived by Duvivier after being inspired
by various faits divers, and with dialogue supplied by another screenwriting
legend, Henri Jeanson. Duvivier made the film in France between two
English language productions,
Anna Karenina
(1948) and
Black Jack (1950), which
had been filmed respectively in England and Spain. At the time, the
director's reputation had taken a severe knock, after the critical and public
rejection of
Panique (1947), an inspired
Simenon adaptation which was a widely condemned for its deeply pessimistic
view of human nature.
If Duvivier had taken heed of his critics he would not have gone anywhere
near a subject as shockingly grim as life in a girl's brutally run reform
school, and whilst the film does occasionally throw out a few shards of light
(most notably in the fierce spirit of solidarity exhibited by the victimised
prisoners, encouraged by the compassion of a minority of their warders) it
is for the most part a gloomy affair (at times eerily evocative of much of
Ingmar Bergman's subsequent oeuvre) and serves to underline, with an unsettling
mix of dark humour and biting cynicism, the director's unstinting pessimism
in his post-WWII years.
With its oppressively spacious sets (a nod to German expressionism) and harsh
high-contrast lighting (shades of film noir),
Au royaume des cieux
is startlingly effective in conveying the stark brutality and crushing injustice
of the regime to which wayward teenagers (most victims of parental abuse
or abandonment) were routinely subjected at the time the film was made.
Suzy Prim's uncompromising portrayal of the central villain of the piece,
the breathtakingly vile Mademoiselle Chamblas, is arguably French cinema's
most potent indictment of a reform system that is still looked back on in
shame and disgust, one that was so unspeakably bad it could very well have
taught Hitler or Stalin a thing or two about the limits of subjugation of
helpless captives.
Effective as the film is in getting across its central message, condemning
the state-sanctioned brutalisation of rebellious or neglected teenagers for
all it is worth, its impact is somewhat diminished by the inclusion of a
tacky melodramatic story strand depicting the inevitably doomed romance between
the principal heroine (a captivating Suzanne Cloutier) and her impeccable
knight in shining armour (Serge Regianni, somewhat less convincing as the
flawless preux chevalier).
Au royaume des cieux is at its most
powerful in the masterfully crafted group scenes that allow us to gain access
to the fluctuating moods and pent-up resentment of the far from uniform ensemble
of prisoners (euphemistically referred to as students)'. Duvivier's artful use of portrait montage and
Jeanson's authentic punchy dialogue provide some grim, occasionally harrowing,
insights into the corrosive impact of the monstrous abuse to which the girls
are routinely subjected, to which the spirited performances from the aspiring
young female ensemble (which includes a number of stars-in-the-making, notably
a waif-like Juliette Greco) can only lend further notes of intense realism
and pathos.
The problem, alas, is that the pudding is a tad over-egged, with dramatic
incident and lazy caricature serving to undermine the film's credibility
at key moments. Mademoiselle Chamblas is the film's most blatant example
of Duvivian overstatement. It would have taken an actress far more
capable than Suzy Prim (here in the premature twilight of her career after
finding immense success as a comedy actress throughout the 1930s) to have
made the two-dimensional monster conceived by the screenwriters into a fully
rounded character. At no point are we invited to sympathise with the
hyper-prim corseted harridan, and when she does finally get her grisly
comeuppance (narrowly escaping death as dog food) we are on the side of the
cheering Amazonians who brought about her downfall whilst faithfully re-enacting
the anarchic climax to Jean Vigo's
Zéro
de conduite. If this only dimly registers with the spectator
it might possibly be because, just a few minutes prior to this, the protagonists
are all fleeing from a flood of Biblical proportions, an event that culminates
in the suicide of the film's most sympathetic character.
Not even a Dan Brown novel or Hollywood disaster movie manages to cram this much
shock and awe plotting in so small a space.
Serge Reggiani may have been just about the most charismatic thing on legs
in France at the time, but he is badly served by a script that fails to make
his stock character anything more than the blandest and most predictable of dewy
eyed good guys. The actor would fare far better as the screen Romeo
in André Cayatte's
Les
Amants de Vérone, which was, coincidentally, made about the
same time. If there is a single stand-out performance it is that supplied
- with an abundance of understated charm and tenderness - by a dazzling ingénue,
Suzanne Cloutier. Orson Welles was so taken by the former fashion model
after seeing her in this film that he immediately offered her a long-term
contract and a leading role as Desdemona in his ambitious production of
Othello (1952).
At the time of its first release,
Au royaume des cieux did little
to restore the opinion of Julien Duvivier in the eyes of his critics and
the cinema-going public, and this might well explain why it remains one of
his most overlooked and underrated works. As a new decade beckoned,
Duvivier was seen very much to be part of the old guard and his miserable
reflections on the frailty of human nature were ill-received by an austerity-weary
public that was desperately in need of cheering up. It was only by
turning to lighter fare, with
Le Petit monde de Camillo
(1952), that the director managed to win back his fickle audience - a final
grudging concession to mainstream frivolity before the work of scorning human
depravity could continue in deadly earnest.
© James Travers 2020
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Next Julien Duvivier film:
Black Jack (1950)