Conflit (1938)
Directed by Léonide Moguy

Film Review

If the Russian-born filmmaker Léonide Moguy is remembered today it is most probably for the three films he made during his time in Hollywood in the 1940s, in particular his 1946 film noir Whistle Stop, in which Ava Gardner had her first career break.  Before his short but productive stay in America, Moguy had made his mark on French cinema with a series of social-realist melodramas which are all-but forgotten today but which were astonishingly ahead of their time.  One of the few European filmmakers of the period to be genuinely concerned with social issues, Moguy was not adverse to raking over subjects that were so contentious he risked an out-right ban from the censor.  In Conflit, his most daring film, he broaches not only female sterility and pregnancy outside marriage but also the two great taboos of motherhood: abortion and adoption.

Conflit is atypical in other ways.  Made in 1938, it is an obvious forerunner of the so-called woman's picture or sentimental melodrama which would become enormously popular in America in the 1940s.  The defining characteristic of this kind of film is that it takes the woman's point of view throughout, in contrast to most film drama which is either gender neutral or (more usually) male-orientated.  Whilst it was all the rage in America, the woman's picture was comparatively rare in European cinema, possibly because the harsh realities of life in the 1930s and 40s made it hard for European audiences to take seriously the heightened sentimentality that was very much a feature of the genre.  In France, poetic realism and early attempts at neo-realism thrived in place of melodrama, which was considered a dated hangover from 19th century theatre.  What makes Moguy's films particularly interesting is that they employ a shamelessly populist format to draw attention to the moral failings of society, much as Douglas Sirk would do in the 1950s with his American melodramas (Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life).

Another curious aspect of Conflit is that it uses a narrative device that is better associated with film noir, the extended flashback.  Most of the story is related in flashback by the main character Claire, a young woman who is forced to give up her child to her older sister Catherine to avoid a family scandal and save the latter's marriage.  By failing to live up to her maternal responsibilities, Claire commits a crime that contemporary society would have deemed heinous, and she ends up paying the price, becoming torn between her duties as a mother and her loyalty to her sister (hence the film's title).  The most richly developed character in Moguy's entire oeuvre, Claire is sympathetically played by the director's muse Corinne Luchaire, who had distinguished herself in his previous (equally provocative) film Prison sans barreaux (1938).  The actress would shine just as brightly in subsequent films - Pierre Chenal's Le Dernier tournant (1939) and Raymond Bernard's Cavalcade d'amour (1940).

The way in which the film is constructed (from one woman's perspective) forces us to take Claire's side, but we also feel for her sister (played just as convincingly by Annie Ducaux), as she stands to lose everything if Claire ever decides to take back her child.  The emotional and moral conflict that underpins the drama becomes almost unbearable as the film wends its way to a brutally explosive climax.  Both sisters emerge as victims of a society that is a slave to the inhuman conventions of middle-class morality.

If the two central female protagonists are realistically drawn and easy to engage with, the same cannot be said of the male characters who blight their lives.  The worst of the lot is Claude Dauphin's despicable chancer, the kind of society vermin who puts pretty young things in the family way and then helpfully points them in the direction of the nearest backstreet abortionist.  Marcel Dalio's sly moneylender is an even more grotesque caricature of male depravity (and Heaven alone knows what nationality he is supposed to be as Dalio milks the part for all it is worth - one of several over-done comic digressions that feel strangely out of place).  Roger Duchesne and Raymond Rouleau, the well-groomed beaux of the two sisters, soon have their failings exposed, and, by the end of it all, you can't help wondering what women ever see in the male sex.  It's a far cry from the sombre romanticism of Carné and Duvivier, and you can hardly fail to notice the aura of feminism that pervades the film.

Moguy wasn't only an agent provocateur, he was also an auteur with a very keen sense of the dramatic possibilities afforded by pure cinema.  This is apparent in Conflit's most memorable sequence, where the two sisters solemnly ascend a tenement staircase to seek an illegal abortion.  Here, Moguy conveys the immense personal tragedy of the situation with the simplest of visual cues, but he delivers the most incredible emotional punch has he does so.  A dramatic musical accompaniment to a long, beautifully composed vertical tracking shot, makes dialogue totally superfluous, and then when the pregnant mother changes her mind at the crucial moment, the mood suddenly changes and it seems as if Moguy has fast-forwarded to the late 1950s, segueing into a breezy Parisian street sequence which might well have come from the early days of the French New Wave.  In this one powerful sequence, Moguy not only asserts a woman's right to choose her own destiny but also the duty of the filmmaker to resist bourgeois sensibilities and show life as it really is.

Léonide Moguy was unfortunate to have started making films in France, at a time when the issues he was most interested in (female delinquency, adoption, military desertion) were almost beyond the pale.  Whilst he enjoyed a certain notoriety for a time, Moguy failed to secure the lasting recognition which he perhaps deserves.  Recently, the American film director Quentin Tarantino has been an unlikely champion of his work, even naming a character in his 2012 film Django Unchained after him.  It there is an auteur filmmaker of the 1930s who deserves to be dug up and given a fresh reappraisal it is this gutsy provocateur who was fatally drawn to the important social concerns of his day.

Film Synopsis

Catherine Lafont, the wife of an eminent explorer, is arrested for the attempted murder of her sister Claire.  The investigating magistrate is unable to shed any light on the mystery until Claire recovers from her injuries.  All that is known is that, shortly before shooting her sister, Catherine raised a large sum of money by selling a valuable item of jewellery.  It appears that Claire may have been blackmailing her sister, but she tells a very different story, one that is far more shocking...  Made pregnant by a man who has no intention of marrying her, Claire realises that she has no choice but to have an abortion.  Discovering she is sterile, Catherine persuades her sister to allow her to adopt the unwanted child and pass it off as her own.  The sibling pact not only saves Claire's reputation, it also salvages Catherine's failing marriage.  A few years later Claire's maternal instincts begin to assert themselves, but Catherine has no intention of surrendering her little boy to her...