Film Review
Such was the impact that Albert Capellani made at Pathé as a director
working under Ferdinand Zecca that within just three years he was made artistic
director of a newly founded subsidiary of the company - Société
Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres (SCAGL). In
this role, Capellani was tasked with adapting important works of French literature
for the cinema, thereby stealing a march on Pathé's biggest rival,
Gaumont, which at the time had no interest in obtaining rights to pre-existing
works.
L'Assommoir was one of the first of Capellani's daring
literary adaptations, based on the famous novel of the same title by Émile
Zola. Running to just half an hour over three reels, it was an incredibly
ambitious piece of cinema for a time when hardly any films exceeded ten minutes
in length.
L'Assommoir is a transitional work, for both Albert Capellani and
cinema in general, an essential stepping stone between the one-reeler that
dominated cinema up until the First World War and the feature film that would
rapidly take its place after the war. Capellani would play an absolutely
crucial part in the development and popularisation of the feature, influencing
not only his contemporaries in France but also having a massive impact on
American cinema in its formative stages, since his films were as widely seen
in America as they were in Europe.
L'Assommoir shows Capellani's
continuing shift from the static (one shot per scene) theatricality that
was prevalent in early cinema towards a more naturalistic and dynamic approach
that other pioneers - notably D.W. Griffith, Louis Feuillade and Abel Gance
- would perfect as they came to set in stone virtually all of the grammar
of modern cinema.
Condensing Zola's six hundred page novel into a thirty minute drama is not
something any sane scriptwriter would want to attempt nowadays, but Capellani's
film achieves this by discarding everything but the three most important
passages in the original narrative - Lantier's separation from Gervaise,
Gervaise's marriage to Coupeau, and Coupeau's tragic decline through alcohol
addiction. The characters are also slightly tweaked to support the
truncated plot and make it more coherent, at the cost of them appearing far
less believable than those in the original novel. The protagonist who
is most altered is Virginie, who is reduced to a creature of pure hatred,
so obsessed with her destruction of Gervaise that she attempts murder twice
and cannot appear in front of the camera without looking like a demented
psychopath.
Just like Capellani's staging of the film, the style of acting is clearly
moving away from the exaggerated, theatrical approach that prevailed in early
films towards a more naturalistic form. The principal cast consists
of established stage actors, and this shows in the quality of their performances,
particularly Eugénie Nau's surprisingly understated and moving portrayal
of Gervaise. Alexandre Arquillière's Coupeau is no less engaging,
despite the actor's tendency to throw his arms and legs about; there is something
endearingly Chaplinesque about his performance, which derives from Capellani's
decision to depict him as a tragic clown rather than an obvious miserablist
victim of fate. Arquillière milks his character's death outrageously,
giving the nearest human equivalent to a dying fly you can imagine - this
is the one silly indulgence the film could have well done without.
There's even less subtlety in Catherine Fonteney's interpretation of the
wicked Virginie - it's essentially a pantomime villain of the worst kind,
and it's a blessing that the actress isn't equipped with moustaches otherwise
she would no doubt have spent the entire film twirling them like windmills.
Unlike her equally charismatic co-stars, Fonteney would make a name for herself
in cinema and survive the transition to sound, her best known role today
being her portrayal of the mother-from-Hell in Julien Duvivier's
Poil de carotte (1932).
The bitter social context of Zola's novel is mostly lost as a result of the
drastic plot and character simplifications but in its stark depiction of
the life of ordinary folk in mid-19th century France the film is remarkably
faithful to its literary source. In contrast to René Clément's
later (slicker) adaptation of the same novel,
Gervaise (1956), Capellani's film
appears to be caked in the grime and squalor of Zola's Parisian underclass,
its interiors so grim you can almost smell the damp and the mould, the exteriors
so bleak that they can hardly fail to crush hope wherever it tries to show
itself. Where perhaps Capellani most distinguishes himself is with
his use of depth of field to create visual drama without the need to edit
or move the camera (something he rarely did, even in later films).
A good example of this is the well-staged scene in the laundry
where a crowd of washerwomen at the back of the set watch on, visibly caught
up in the drama of the situation, as Gervaise and Virginie beat the stuffing
out of each other in the foreground.
L'Assommoir may not be
a faultless piece of cinema but it was an important milestone for
both Pathé and Capellani - and it paved the way for the director's
next, far superior Zola adaptation,
Germinal
(1913).
© James Travers 2016
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Next Albert Capellani film:
Le Roi s'amuse (1909)
Film Synopsis
In Second Empire France, Gervaise is in a state of distress when her lover
Lantier abandons her and her children to live with his mistress Virginie.
The latter savours her victory but the rivalry between the two women turns
to outright hatred when they get into a brawl in the Paris laundry where
they work. For a while it seems that Gervaise will find happiness with
a new lover, a construction worker named Coupeau, but not long after the
wedding misery returns with a tenfold vigour. Driven by pure malice,
Virginie arranges for Coupeau to fall from some scaffolding, with the result
that he is incapacitated and unable to work for a year. In this state
of enforced idleness, Coupeau turns to drink, but in doing so he worsens
his health further and is warned that unless he reduces his alcohol intake
drastically he will die. Virginie's campaign of revenge is about to
reach its terrible climax...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.