Croisières sidérales (1942)
Directed by André Zwoboda

Film Review

A hearty appetite for escapism and restrictions on contemporary themes are mostly to blame for the weird burst of fantasy films coming out of France at the time of the Nazi Occupation.   Of these the weirdest is undoubtedly André Zwobada's Croisières sidérales, a rare foray into science fiction (the genre being virtually non-existent in France until recent times) which, via a few glib allusions to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, convinces us that time travel will one day become as commonplace as air travel.  Apparently it's all to do with a phenomenon known as time dilation, which causes any moving object to age more slowly than one that is stationary - an experience grimly familiar to anyone who has ever travelled economy class on a longhaul flight with a budget airline.

One thing the film neglects to mention is that time dilation was first proposed by the Irish physicist Joseph Larmor in 1897 (predating Einstein's famous theory by eight years), so Einstein gets all the credit.  (How brave of Zwobada to make a film in a country under Nazi occupation that went out of its way to promote the work of the world's most famous Jew.)  Another omission is any reference to the so-called Twin Paradox, an idea that would have made the plot appear logically absurd instead of merely bananas.   Rather than blind us with science, the film's authors exert, shall we say, a degree of poetic licence, and lead us to think that, to stay young and beautiful, all you have to do is to go up into the stratosphere in a spherical pod attached to a balloon, ignite the balloon with a misplaced cigarette, go whizzing off into space, somehow find a way to turn around said pod and land back on earth without getting killed in the impact.  Somehow, I don't think the firms that manufacture all those anti-ageing products have much to fear...

At the start of the film, there is a mea culpa caption which admits that, whilst the ideas underpinning the narrative are based on established scientific theory, some grandes libertés have been taken with the numbers.  This is something of an understatement.  To achieve a time dilation effect so that 25 years is reduced to 14 days, the craft would have to travel at a thousand million km/h, which would involve a journey into space and back of roughly a thousand times the radius of the solar system.  Even assuming that the pod could reach such a stupendous speed (it's hard to see how this could be achieved by a balloon exploding), the passengers would doubtless be crushed to death, if not totally atomised. in the acceleration, or else smashed to pieces on collision with a meteoroid.

Of course, the same objections can be made against Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes (1968), which gets away with the same dodgy science, but slightly more convincingly (partly because it doesn't include a ridiculous detour via Venus, a planet apparently inhabited by the smuggest race of beings in the galaxy outside Paris).  Schaffner's film is in fact derived from a French novel (La Planète des Singes) by Pierre Boulle, so it seems that France led the way in time dilation themed fantasy.  (French comic book author Alain Saint-Ogan set the ball rolling with an episode in his Zig et Puce au XXIème siècle, way back in 1935).  Planet of the Apes is a sci-fi classic that everyone has heard about (and apparently everyone wants to remake) whereas Croisières sidérales is a daft little fantasy that seems to have tumbled into a black hole - why? you may ask.

Well, mindblowing, crass scientific implausibility aside, Croisières sidérales suffers from what is known in the trade as chronic silliness.  It starts out with the silliest of premises (apparently based on scientific fact) and just gets sillier and sillier until the silliness quotient becomes unbearable.  Take, for instance, Mr Julien Carette.  In this film, he is supposed to be an intelligent, well-trained, trustworthy scientist, but within a few hours of sharing a space pod with Madeleine Sologne (before she became a blonde icon) he comes a panicky buffoon who wrecks the entire mission (the original purpose of which completely eluded this reviewer) just by lighting up a ciggy.  After this show of ineptitude, you'd think that Mr Carette would be the last person you'd want to go up into space with, but no, he ends up in the second space pod, risking even more lives as he goes off the rails a second time. 

And then there's the lovey-dovey Monier couple, who have just got wed and apparently cannot bear to be parted for a second.  After Sologne's Carette-induced time slip, devoted hubby Jean Marchat decides to leave the young wife he hasn't seen for the last 25 years alone on Earth, whilst he goes off in a space pod so that, when he gets back home, his wife will be the same age as he is.  Is he mad?  Does Sologne protest?  No, she meekly stays on Earth for a quarter of a century, welcoming the grey hairs as they come whilst her beau idéal is happily gallivanting about the galaxy for a fortnight's worth of time dilation.

About the only thing the film manages to get right is the rapidity with which the moneymen seize on a scientific discovery and try to make a quick buck from it.  No sooner have Sologne and Carette come down to Earth in 1966 than the entrepreneurs get to work and build a 'stellar station' (une gare sidérale), promoting tours into the future for those sad individuals for whom life in the mid-1960s holds little appeal (think how much happier they'd be if they had landed up in 1991...).  The commercial exploitation of science is shown at its most lurid and grotesque when the stellar station is made to resemble a set of a Busby Berkeley musical from the 1930s.  Here we have a glimpse of what lies in store for us when commercial space jaunts to the planet Mars get underway.

Croisières sidérales was the first (and arguably most interesting) of the seven films that André Zwobada directed.  Prior to this, he had contributed to the political documentary La Vie est à nous (1936) (the film in which Madeleine Sologne made her screen debut) and had worked as an assistant on Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (1939) (something that might account for the sillier interludes in that film).  Croisières sidérales has one unlikely claim to fame - it is the film in which comedy legend Bourvil made his first film appearance - uncredited, he crops up briefly as a scientist in the background near the start of the film.  And, proving that lightning does occasionally strike twice in the same spot (often resulting in more damage the second time round), Madeleine Sologne and Julien Carette had an earlier sci-fi fling together, in Richard Pottier's slightly more believable Le Monde tremblera (1939). 

Croisières sidérales certainly has plenty of shortcomings (Heaven knows what an Occupation Era audience, let alone the censor, made of it), but amidst all the silliness and liberty taking with scientific exactitude there's much fun to be had.  The special effects are also better than you might have expected, with reasonably convincing model shots and an impressive sequence where Carette and Sologne are seen to walk up the walls of their spherical space pod (presumably the camera was fixed to the set as it slowly rotated through 360 degrees).  There's even a pretty convincing weightlessness sequence, which milks some obvious gags.  And in what other French film is the Lorentz time dilation formula quoted?   How sad that Zwobada never got round to making a film about quantum mechanics.  It might have been fun to see Carette in the role of Schrödinger's cat...

Film Synopsis

Scientists Françoise and Robert Monier plan to spend their honeymoon in a space-pod high up in the stratosphere.  What was to be the culmination of years of research suffers a major setback when Robert sustains a serious injury.  Lucien, his assistant, agrees to take his place and the space-pod is launched successfully.  Unfortunately, the scientists slip up and their ship risks being flung into deep space.  On their return to Earth, Françoise and Lucien find that a quarter of century has passed...