Film Review
Stendhal's epic historical novel
La
Chartreuse de Parme receives a suitably epic treatment in this
extravagant adaptation from director Christian-Jaque. With
production values to rival any Hollywood blockbuster of the time and a
cast of exceptional calibre, the film serves as a prime example of the
quality period drama that was highly popular in France in the 1940s and
50s. Released at a time of painful post-war austerity, the film
offered a gargantuan dose of escapism, all for the price of a cinema
ticket. It is no surprise that the film was a box office hit -
attracting an audience of over six million, it was easily the most
successful French film of 1948 (even more popular than Marcel
Carné's
Les Enfants du paradis, a
similarly lavish period piece released a few years previously).
Christian-Jaque was in some respects the Luc Besson of his day, a
flamboyant, highly productive filmmaker with an uncanny knack for
turning out popular big budget films, although only a few now stand up
to critical scrutiny and many have been lost in the mists of
time. With its palatial sets, fluid camerawork and
meticulously choreographed set pieces,
La Chartreuse de Parme is one of
the director's grander films, and a respectable adaptation of
Stendhal's novel. Despite its epic length (the film runs to two
hours and fifty minutes), time and budgetary constraints made it
impossible to transpose the whole of Stendahl's weighty tome to the
screen, and its omissions (notably the Napoleonic battle scenes at the
start of the novel) were considered to be a betrayal of the novel by
some critics. Even with its narrative truncations, the film feels
overlong and ponderous.
Heading a stellar cast of French and Italian actors is the 25-year-old
Gérard Philipe, a rising star of stage and screen who had become
a household name in France after his previous film,
Le Diable au corps (1947), a
controversial adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's famous novel directed by
Claude Autant-Lara. Philipe was not only a superlative actor, he
was also a man of considerable personal charm and possessed a timeless
heroic élan which meant that he was never out of place in any of
his films. He is as convincing as the swashbuckling hero in
Christian-Jaque's subsequent
Fanfan la Tulipe (1952) as he
is as the ill-fated artist Amedeo Modigliani in
Montparnasse
19 (1958). Philipe was an actor with star quality but
he did not trade on his star image (unlike later French film icons such
as Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo) and could therefore mould
himself into a surprisingly wide repertory of roles. As the
romantic hero of
La Chartreuse de
Parme, Philipe evokes the complexity of Stendhal's creation and
is not afraid to give his character an almost feminine vulnerability
(one of the interesting, almost revolutionary, characteristics of the
original novel is that the female characters prove to be far stronger
and nobler than the male protagonists who seek to exploit them).
Alongside Philipe are some equally fine actors of the period (most
sadly forgotten today), including the beautiful Renée Faure, the
charismatic Louis Salou (an actor with a particular aptitude for
playing charming villains) and the magnificent María Casares (in
possibly her most poignant screen role).
The one thing that counts against the film, and which perhaps most
explains why it is not held in the same high esteem as other
blockbuster literary adaptations of this era, is its sluggish
pace. Even with its stunning production values and
compelling performances,
La
Chartreuse de Parme is something of a chore to sit through and
it lacks the necessary momentum to carry it through its near-three hour
runtime. Christian-Jaque was a competent film maker, but he
was by no means what we would now term an auteur, and so whilst his
films are generally well-made and entertaining they are generally
lacking in poetry and true human emotion.
La Chartreuse de Parme exemplifies
this - the film is lovingly crafted, well-acted and beautifully
photographed by Nicolas Hayer, but it is something of a soulless
mastodon. It typifies what the critics on the
Cahiers du cinéma and future
directors of the French New Wave (notably François Truffaut)
felt was wrong with French cinema at the time. Like many of his
contemporaries, Christian-Jaque was content with merely transposing the
images described in the novel onto the screen; he was less concerned
with making his own personal statement or in trying to capture the
voice of the man or woman who wrote the novel. Visually and
dramatically,
La Chartreuse de Parme
is an impressive piece of 1940s French cinema, but it is really little
more than an exercise in painting by numbers, a dead approximation to a
chef d'oeuvre rather than a living work of art in its own right.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Christian-Jaque film:
Souvenirs perdus (1950)