L'Assommoir (1908)
Directed by Albert Capellani

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).

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...