Copie conforme (1947)
Directed by Jean Dréville

Film Review

Copie conforme is aptly titled, as it bears an uncanny resemblance to an earlier American film - John Ford's The Whole Town's Talking (1935) - in which Edward G. Robinson did double duty playing an aggressive gangster and his meek, law-abiding double.  Screenwriter Jacques Companeez reworked the same premise into a more recognisably Gallic comedy-thriller, allowing Louis Jouvet in the dual lead role to prove - if proof be needed - what an astonishingly versatile actor he is.  Jouvet had only recently returned to French cinema after his extended wartime tour of South America, so playing the two lead roles in the same film, one involving various disguises, was the surest way to reboot his temporarily halted film career.

The challenge of directing not one but two Louis Jouvets fell to Jean Dréville, who already had several notable films under his belt, not least of which the box office smash La Cage aux rossignols (1945).  Dréville directed surprisingly few comic films but the ones he did put his name to - Copie conforme, Les Casse-pieds, À pied, à cheval et en spoutnik - reveal a natural flair for comedy that readily transcends the derivative nature of the subject matter.  For Copie conforme, Dréville is greatly helped by a superlative script contributed by Henri Jeanson, one of the most respected screenwriters in French cinema at the time.  It was Jeanson who gave Jouvet some of the best lines of his entire screen career in Hôtel du nord (1938), and he later directed the actor himself in his one and only directorial offering, Lady Paname (1950).

Copie conforme was a gift of a film for an actor of Louis Jouvet's calibre, allowing him to show off his extraordinary range by playing two highly contrasting characters - one a smooth criminal type, the other a doddering but likeable everyman.  The contrast is most striking when, thanks to the film's flawlessly executed split screen photography, the two central characters appear side-by-side in the same shot.  You can scarcely believe that the venal villain of the piece and his easily dominated stooge are played by the same man, so brilliantly, so effortlessly does Jouvet delineate the two characters.  'How can anyone alter his personality so completely and so convincingly?' you ask as the two Jouvets alternately flash up on the screen, one of whom we instantly warm to as a friend, the other we soon come to revile as a fiend.

It looks as if Dréville had great fun with the 'double' theme.  This certainly inspired his mise-en-scène, making Copie conforme not just a tour de force for its lead actor but also something of a coup for its director.  In one particularly striking scene, the heroine (played by the bubbly-as-ever Suzy Delair) is herself doubled up - with the aid of a conveniently positioned mirror.  What better way to show her disorientation when the penny finally drops and she realises she has been dating 'the wrong man'?  A mirror-like reversal in the climactic scene provides the film with its deliciously ironic denouement, with the villainous Jouvet being justly despatched by the cunning ruse he had reserved for his doppelgänger.  It's hard not to be impressed by the ingenuity that Dréville exercises in his shot composition, which frequently picks up and makes light of the duality theme.

The partnering of the effervescent Delair with the restrained Jouvet is perhaps the film's most inspired touch, a winning match that would be replayed in H.G. Clouzot's Quai des orfèvres (1947) and Lady Paname.  Copie conforme did not put an end to Jouvet's double trouble - the following year saw him doubled up again in Henri Decoin's Entre onze heures et minuit (1948), an odd little thriller that has great fun in referencing the earlier film.  All this goes to show is that you can't have too much Louis Jouvet.

Film Synopsis

No one would think that Manuel Ismora, an esteemed society photographer, is an audacious thief and con artist.  The newspapers are filled with accounts of Ismora's criminal exploits, which involve the fraudulent sale of a château and the theft of some valuable jewels, but the police are slow in bringing him to justice.  Instead, it is Gabriel Dupon, a modest button salesman who bears a remarkable physical resemblance to Imora, who ends up being taken into custody.  Positively identified by Imora's many victims, Dupon is branded a criminal, and even when he is released by the police through lack of evidence, his reputation is in tatters.

Dishonoured, friendless and jobless, the wretched Dupon decides to drown himself in the river, but before he does so a voice calls out to him.  The next thing he knows he is sharing a car with Imora, who offers him a mutually advantageous business arrangement.  By posing as the famous photographer, Dupon will provide Imora with a watertight alibi when he is out indulging in his felonious hobby.  Reluctantly, the former salesman agrees to go along with the scheme, but things take an unexpected turn when he falls hopelessly in love with Imora's beautiful mistress, Coraline...