Claudine à l'école (1937)
Directed by Serge de Poligny

Film Review

Serge Poligny began his career by directing French language versions of German films at the UFA studios in Berlin - films such as Vous serez ma femme (1932) and L'Étoile de Valencia (1933).  Claudine à l'école was the first film that can properly be called his own, and the first in which his distinctive auteur voice can be readily discerned, anticipating the two great films he would make during the war - Le Baron fantôme (1943) and La Fiancée des ténèbres (1945).  Poligny's Claudine à l'école was cinema's second adaptation of Colette's debut autobiographical novel of the same title (first published in 1900) - previously a silent version had been released in 1917.

Poligny's reverence for the French countryside is apparent in the film's most striking passages, which have a similar impressionistic picturesque quality to what we find in Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne, filmed the previous year but abandoned.  These scenes of bucolic harmony, a hymn to the splendour of nature, effectively counterpoint the emotional turbulence experienced by the heroine Claudine as she succumbs to the first pangs of love, and, as in Renoir's film, they carry an intoxicating evocation of la belle époque, the idyllic period in which much of Colette's fiction is set.  Only in the films of Marcel Pagnol is France's rural hinterland as beautifully presented in a film of this era.

The studio scenes are less impressive and Poligny has some difficulty overcoming the deadening static quality to which films of the 1930s were particularly prone.  Where camera motion is used it is too readily noticed and becomes distracting, and Poligny's use of ceiling shots feels just as gratuitous.  There is however one scene that is hard to forget, the one in which Claudine (Blanchette Brunoy, stunning in her first important role) enters a classroom that is deserted except for the presence of the distraught new schoolmistress Miss Lanthenay.  Bathed in light, as a mockery of a religious painting, Claudine resembles a ministering angel arriving on Earth to heal the afflicted.  In fact, it is the prelude to one of the most scandalous passages in French literature, a lesbian love affair between a schoolteacher and her pupil.

The film draws a discrete veil over some of the more controversial aspects of Colette's novel and, whilst there is an obvious suggestion of homoeroticism, the girly love-in proves to be a chaste affair, without so much as a peck on the cheek.  Claudine's teenage yearnings are soon redirected towards a member of the male sex (a surprisingly sympathetic Pierre Brasseur), although there is some ambiguity as to whether it is Dr Dubois or Miss Lanthenay who is really the apple of Claudine's eye. Despite the liberties it takes with Colette's novel, Claudine à l'école manages to be an engaging coming-of-age piece that is ahead of its time in its honest portrayal of an adolescent's sexual awakening.  For both its lead actor and its director, it was a very auspicious beginning.  Also to be noted is the adorable presence of 14-year-old Marcel Mouloudji, who would make his name not only as an actor but also as one of France's best-loved chansonniers.

Film Synopsis

Neglected by her father and robbed of her mother, Claudine grows up to be an independently minded young lady at her girls' school in the country.  Now she is 15 and, on the threshold of adulthood, she is beginning to suffer from the first mischievous blows of Cupid.  How easily does she succumb to the charms of the handsome young doctor, Dubois!  She had never thought that a man could be so attractive - she grabs any opportunity she can just to have five minutes in his divine company.  Up until then, Claudine always preferred the company of her own sex, including her new teacher, Mademoiselle Aimée Lanthenay.

The latter is so unlike the school's hard-to-please principal, Mademoiselle Sergent, and her trusty lieutenant, Mademoiselle Griset.  These two barely human harridans only want to make life miserable for the girls under their care.  Mademoiselle Lanthenay is different.  Still finding her feet as a teacher, she has no difficulty befriending Claudine, and within no time they are the closest of confidantes.  Now, if there is one thing that the fire-breathing Sergent cannot abide it is fraternisation between her teachers and her pupils, so she relationship between Claudine and Aimée doesn't go on for long before it is brutally extinguished.  Alas, Claudine's sentimental education has a few more hitches in store...