Et Satan conduit le bal (1962)
Directed by Grisha Dabat

Film Review

One of the unfortunate consequences of the French New Wave is that it allowed pretentiousness to run rampant amongst a category of filmmaker which reckoned it could pass off cheap tat as high art merely by emulating the style of the Nouvelle Vague trendsetters.  The most visible among these crass imitators was Roger Vadim, whose early (accidental) successes with films such as Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956) blinded him (and others who should have known better) to the sublime vacuity of his notion of cinema.  Vadim not only directed several New Wave-like abominations, he also produced a fair number, including the hideously self-conscious Et Satan conduit le bal.  Scripted by Vadim, this was the first and only film to be directed by Grisha M. Dabat, and you don't have to be the world's greatest film critic to see why.

Raoul Coutard's distinctive cinematography - which frequently calls to mind his previous work on Jacques Demy's Lola (1960) - brings a thin veneer of New Wave modernity to the film, but this is as far as the film's true artistry extends.  In every other respect, Et Satan conduit le bal reeks of shallow pretense, preening itself as absurdly as a five year old girl trying to glam herself up in her older sister's make-up and glad rags.  It would have required a far lesser cast for the true horror of the film to hit home, but garnished with some of the most charismatic and glamorous young actors of the day, it somehow gets away with murder - literally, as it happens.

Vadim's motivation for making the film is all too apparent - to make a star of his latest teen conquest, Catherine Deneuve, exactly as the Svengali filmmaker had done with his previous unwitting Trilby, Brigitte Bardot.  What better setting for the stunningly beautiful 19-year-old actress than a coastal setting similar to the one that had elevated the buxom Bardot to the status of international sex goddess, surrounded by other tasty eye candy in the form of Jacques Perrin, Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Brion?  With such a seductive cast, surely the plot and direction would take care of themselves?  Mistaking himself for Jean-Luc Godard, Vadim is happy to allow his ensemble of beautiful people to laze about contemplating their own and each other's navels as they linger languorously in a film that not only knows that it has no reason to be, but positively seems to revel in the fact.

It's hard to fathom the presence of Jacques Doniol-Valcroze in this film.  Another (somewhat more respectable) satellite figure of the French New Wave (and, incidentally, one of the co-founders of the Cahiers du cinéma), Doniol-Valcroze looks worryingly at home playing the boring intellectual alongside his real-life partner Françoise Brion.  Both bring a semblance of respectability to the film, although ultimately their efforts are wasted - annihilated by the life-sapping listlessness of the mise-en-scène and a script that fails abysmally to marry its borrowed B-movie trappings with its abundance of quasi-intellectual posturing.  After this grim excursion into the barren wastes of abject futility, Doniol-Valcroze and Brion redeemed themselves handsomely in their subsequent screen collaborations - L'Eau à la bouche (1960), Le Coeur battant (1961) and La Dénonciation (1962).  As for Catherine Deneueve, it was Jacques Demy, not Roger Vadim, who made her a star, with Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964).  Demy also partnered the actress with Jacques Perrin far more successfully in two subsequent films - Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) and Peau d'Âne (1970).  Et Satan conduit le bal is one of those entries in Deneuve's filmography it is probably best to draw a discrete veil over - until such time as science comes up with the means of deleting it from all of our memories.

Film Synopsis

Yvan, a 20-year-old drifter, is idling away his days in the south of France in the company of his naive girlfriend Emmanuelle.  Stony broke, he sponges off Jean-Claude, the son of a rich businessman, and stays at his villa with Emmanuelle.  Completing the sextet of friends are Jean-Claude's girlfriend Isabelle, a free-spirited young actress, and another couple that comprises Éric, a successful writer, and his wife Monica.  Yvan gets himself into trouble by joyriding in a car he 'borrows' from a garage and subsequently smashes up.  A sinister-looking stranger offers to clear Yvan's debts if he ends his relationship with Emmanuelle.  So begins a dangerous game of seduction and manipulation that will end tragically for one of the six friends...