L'Auberge rouge (1923)
Directed by Jean Epstein

Film Review

So impressed were the Pathé brothers by Jean Epstein's first film Pasteur (1921) - a docudrama commissioned to mark the centenary of the birth of Louis Pasteur - that they immediately offered him a ten year contract at their Paris studios.  The first film that Epstein made for Pathé was L'Auberge rouge, based on a short story in Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine series, first published 1832.  Despite the freedom he enjoyed at Pathé, Epstein felt his creativity was being limited, so when a rival studio Albatros came along a few years later and offered him more favourable terms he wasn't slow in ending his association with the company that had jump-started his career.  After L'Auberge rouge, Epstein made only three further films for Pathé, the most important being his early masterpiece Coeur fidèle (1923).

L'Auberge rouge is a comparatively minor work in Epstein's oeuvre, a low-key crime-drama that gave the 25-year-old director the opportunity to experiment with the impressionistic techniques that were being deployed, with varying degrees of success, by his avant-garde contemporaries - Abel Gance, Louis Delluc, Marcel L'Herbier and Germaine Dulac.  By this time, Epstein had come into contact with Gance and was familiar with his work.  La Roue (1923) had a significant influence on the young filmmaker - not just Gance's groundbreaking use of the close-up to achieve greater emotional realism, but also his application of superimposition and rhythmic editing.  In addition, Epstein's use of high-contrast lighting and occasional skewed camera angles in his early films shows an obvious leaning towards German expressionism. Combining impressionistic and expressionistic influences, Epstein strove to develop his own aesthetic which he termed photogénie, an attempt to capture the fleeting essence of life through the new medium of cinema.

Epstein's cinema is inherently subjective, showing the world not as it would be recorded by a mechanical device but as it feels to a human observer.  It is the four-dimensional nature of reality, seen through the distorting prism of human perception, that Epstein sought to convey in his films.  L'Auberge rouge was ideally suited for this, because the interest lies not with the story itself - a fairly anodyne tale of a man wrongly accused of murder for easy profit - but rather with the experiences of the protagonists.  It is the inner life of the characters that Epstein sets out to reveal in this film, and he does this most eloquently through the impressionistic device that was at the core of his art: the close-up.

Epstein doesn't limit his close-ups to complete, conventionally framed portraits of his actors.  He moves the camera in even closer and manages to fill the entire screen with magnified portions of a face, usually the eyes or the mouth.  It is these extreme close-ups that allow us to see into the soul of the protagonists and glimpse their innermost feelings - their motivations, their fears, their guilt, their anticipation, their desires.  Had it been directed in a more conventional way, L'Auberge rouge would surely have ended up as a pretty mundane melodrama.  By focusing in on the characters and making their internal dramas the crux of the film Epstein delivers something far more compelling and meaningful - a chilling excursion into the darker places of the human soul.

In the two main characters - two medical students who spend a fateful night at the titular Red Inn - Epstein has two perfect subjects with which to demonstrate the revelatory power of the close-up.  One, the ironically named Prosper, is inherently good but he is also deeply flawed.  The temptation to kill a diamond broker so that he can rob him is one that he very nearly succumbs to, and when he is charged with the crime, knowing he is innocent, he is unable to save himself.  Prosper's flaws are obvious and forgivable, so the close-ups that reveal his deficiencies make him a sympathetic character.  The moment of revelation comes when an old woman tells him his fortune.  In his facial reaction we see more than surprise and horror, we also detect fatalistic submission.  The close-up establishes him as a doomed man who accepts his doom passively.

The other student Taillefer (who turns out to be the real killer) is more interesting, and not just because he is present in the two interweaving parts of the narrative - a dinner party set in 1825 and the story of the inn set in 1799.  Long before the killer is unmasked, Taillefer's guilt becomes apparent to us through his reactions as the story is narrated as an after dinner amusement.  Taillefer is scarcely noticeable in the Red Inn story strand - when he appears on screen he is mostly seen in long-shot or mid-shot, often obscured by shadow.  It is only after the murder has taken place and one of the likely suspects has absconded that we put two and two together and realise that Taillefer must be the killer.  Years of repressed guilt flood out when Taillefer is finally forced to accept his crime after being drawn into a card game with the man who had intended to marry his niece.  The earlier fortune telling scene is replayed, with the same three damning cards being dealt.  In a sudden flurry of images (Epstein's accelerated montage imitating Gance's) we see the cards, the old fortune teller and Taillefer's stunned reaction - the murderer's judgement has finally come.   

It isn't only the two main protagonists that have their souls ripped open for scrutiny by Epstein's all-seeing close up.  Most of the characters are similarly favoured and, as a consequence, acquire a surprising depth and reality.  In the memorable scene in which the Dutch diamond merchant shows his wares to the students, the innkeeper and the latter's daughter a quick succession of close-ups showing the reactions of these four individuals provides a sickening montage of pure greed.  Any one of these four appears more than capable of committing murder to obtain these fabulous stones.  Later, when Prosper fails to exculpate himself, the intensity of the feelings that the innkeeper's daughter has for the unfortunate student are apparent through the tormented look on her face. It is the look of abject despair you feel when the one that you love is to be taken from you.

If Epstein's use of the close-up brings us into contact with the souls of his characters, the camerawork, lighting and editing have the effect of binding them all together in a collective tragedy and heightening the sense of predestination.  How gratifyingly do the two story strands come together at the end - it is as if they are two halves of the same picture, neither complete without the other.  Different as they may seem at first, the sumptuously decorated Parisian apartment and the crowded country inn have an indefinable sense of connection, and this impression merely grows as the film builds to its climax, the two parallel strands finally converging with the unmasking of the murderer.

With its overt 'greed is bad' moral it is tempting to read an anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois subtext into L'Auberge rouge, and this would certainly chime with the director's own leftwing sympathies (most of the Parisian avant-garde with whom he associated were committed socialists and communists).  Whilst it never became a major theme of Epstein's work (despite his obvious affinity for ordinary working-class people), the corrupting power of money is alluded to later films, notably Le Lion des Mogols (1924) and Le Double amour (1925).  Just as Balzac's compact novella feels like an outline for a much grander piece, so Jean Epstein's adaptation of this work cannot help resembling a sketch for the more fully realised films he would make once he had mastered his craft - La Glace à trois faces (1927) and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928).

Film Synopsis

One evening in 1825, a wealthy banker hosts a dinner party at his home in Paris.  His guests include a well-known merchant, Hermann, and an arms supplier for the French army, Jean-Frédéric Taillefer.  The latter's niece Victorine has recently become engaged to the banker's son André.  Hermann is a man who has travelled a great deal and he is invited to tell one of his stories in the course of the meal.  As Hermann embarks on his gripping tale, Taillefer starts to become agitated.  The story begins in October 1799, with two young French medical students riding across France on horseback to take up their first posts in Alsace.  Caught in a sudden downpour, the two friends take shelter in a remote inn which is so crowded that there is hardly room to sit down.

One of the students, Prosper Magnan, allows a wizened old woman to tell him his fortune.  From the three cards that Prosper draws, the woman foretells wealth, crime and death.  Not long afterwards, another man arrives at the inn.  He introduces himself to the two students as a diamond merchant from Amsterdam, and then shows them the bag of jewels he is carrying.  The three men agree to share the same room that night, whilst the storm continues to rage outside.  Unable to sleep, Prosper yields to temptation and is about to strike the diamond merchant dead when he comes to his senses.  Horrified by the crime he so nearly committed, the young man rushes outside and allows the rain to wash over him.

The next morning, Prosper awakes to find the lifeless body of the merchant beside him, covered in blood.  Of his friend - whose name is now revealed to be Frédéric - there is no trace.  As his own scalpel is stained with blood, Prosper is the obvious culprit.  The innkeeper's daughter, who has fallen in love with the unfortunate young man, watches on helplessly as Prosper is arrested and charged with murder.  Unable to defend himself at his trial, Prosper accepts the fate that was promised him by the fortune teller.  Once Hermann has told his tale, André realises that the killer who stole the diamonds and the arms supplier Taillefer are one in the same man.  Knowing this, how can be bring himself to marry the niece of a criminal...?