La Cigarette (1919)
Directed by Germaine Dulac

Film Review

Enter the priestess of film art

Germaine Dulac's reputation as one of the leading lights of the Avant-Garde group of French film directors of the early 1920s is all the more remarkable given that she was only the second woman to make a successful career in France as a filmmaker.  In the mid-to-late 1890s, Alice Guy was the first person to anticipate the commercial and artistic possibilities of the newly invented medium of cinema and it was largely through her pioneering efforts at Gaumont that filmmaking took off in the way it did.  Over the following two decades cinema was an almost exclusively male preserve, the number of women filmmakers around the world barely making it into double figures.

Dulac's contribution was particularly noteworthy as it challenged the status quo and helped to bring about a creative renaissance in French cinema, just at the point when it was most at risk of being smothered out of existence by the all-conquering American film industry.  Unlike the vast majority of her contemporaries, Dulac saw that cinema had the potential to become a truly great art - on the same level as music and literature - and she was committed to making this a reality.  From her first film in 1915 (Les Soeurs ennemies), she strove to develop the artistic possibilities of filmmaking by tackling popular subjects in a far more realistic way, avoiding the cheap sensationalism and phoney emotionality that cinema audiences had become hooked on by the mid-1910s.

It is an immense tragedy that the majority of Germaine Dulac's films have been lost, although the few that survive more than testify to her genius for cinematic expression and penchant for bold experimentation.  Perhaps the greatest loss to posterity is her 1919 film La Fête espagnole which she made in collaboration with Louis Delluc, a leading film critic and theorist who would, like her, have a substantial impact on the reshaping of French cinema in the 1920s as part of the Avant-Garde group of radical new filmmakers.  It was in La Fête espagnole that Dulac and Delluc introduced stylistic tropes that would come to be known as impressionistic - superimposition, optical distortions, subjective camerawork, rhythmic montage and expressive lighting effects.  These were intended to give the spectator a privileged insight into the psychological states of the protagonists, revealing their thoughts, feelings, beliefs and dreams, and thereby endowing the film with a heightened reality.  La Fête espagnole proved to be one of the most important and influential French films of its time, and it encouraged a new generation of filmmaker - most notably Marcel L'Herbier, Jean Epstein, Abel Gance and René Clair - in their endeavours to extend the artistic range of filmmaking in pursuit of what came to be known as cinéma pur - cinema completely dissociated from its literary and theatrical moorings.

La Fête espagnole's significance at a crucial time in the evolution of French cinema is undoubtedly large but as only a few excerpts of the film (running to eight minutes in total) exist today it is virtually impossible for us to gauge how genuinely groundbreaking it was.  However, we can perhaps get some sense of this from the film that Germaine Dulac made immediately before this - the far more conventional domestic drama La Cigarette.  By this time, Dulac was an established and moderately successful filmmaker, having made around half a dozen films for the production company she founded with her husband, DH Films.  Her subjects reflected her reputation as an ardent feminist writer and thinker, acquired through her earlier work as a journalist, dealing with the place of women in society at a time when the Suffragette movement in France was failing to have the impact its UK counterpart was making.  (At a time of great social, political and economic change, women's rights were not a priority of the French Third Republic and it wasn't until 1944 that women finally won the right to vote in elections.)

Warning: misogyny can kill

La Cigarette makes an effective companion-piece to the director's later magnum opus La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923), both films dealing in a highly ironic vein with the seeming impossibility of the wife finding real fulfilment in a conventional marriage.  Lacking the impressionistic flourishes and more sombre tone of the latter film, La Cigarette can't help looking like a much less significant piece, but, the earliest surviving example of Dulac's work, it is quite revelatory, showing not only a filmmaker of immense technical ability, but also one who was genuinely committed to delivering through her art an accurate representation of how women were abused, neglected and misunderstood in a doggedly patriarchal society.  Being a fiercely independent woman who was herself married to a man she no longer loved, Germaine Dulac was well placed to comment on the inadequacies of married life, and her distinctly female perspective is what makes La Cigarette such a groundbreaking and fascinating piece of cinema, even if it lacks the technical flair and ambition of the director's later work.

Despite being co-authored with Jacques de Baroncelli (who would later become an incredibly prolific film director, best known for his lavish literary adaptations such as Le Père Goriot (1921) and Les Mystères de Paris (1943)), La Cigarette is easily identifiable as the work of one of France's leading feminist thinkers.  It deals with a domestic situation that would have been familiar to cinema audiences of the time - a modern young wife seeking escape from an unfulfilled marriage with a much older man to whom she is clearly ill-suited.  But, unusually, it tells the story from the perspective not of the free-spirited flapper wife, but rather that of the husband - a doddery middle-aged academic who would rather spend his time dissecting desiccated Egyptian corpses of the ancient past than indulge in the pleasures of the flesh in the here and now.  Played by Gabriel Signoret, a gaunt-faced character actor in his early forties, and 18-year-old Andrée Brabant, a former dancer with a startlingly vivacious personality (well used by Julien Duvivier in his maritally themed satire Le Mariage de Mademoiselle Beulemans), the protagonists could hardly be more ill-matched.  As he researches the history of his museum's latest mummified exhibit, Pierre Guérande becomes obsessed with the idea that his wife Denise, a thoroughly modern miss several decades his junior, is too young to love him and must therefore find her pleasures elsewhere.  Spying on her, he is gratified to learn that she is indeed meeting up with a handsome man of her own age, and so he uses this as a pretext for an over-elaborate suicide plan involving a poisoned cigarette.

The convincing way in which La Cigarette presents Guérande's slow decline as he succumbs to obsessive paranoia is the film's most striking aspect.  With her deft use of close-up and deep-space photography (to say nothing of the remarkably modern style of acting), Dulac appears to have been strongly influenced by Léonce Perret and André Antoine, two of her contemporaries who shared her intense conviction in the artistic possibilities of cinema.  These techniques she uses with particular skill to skew the narrative towards the male protagonist, but in a way that is clearly intended to be cruelly ironic.  The film is much more a satirical black comedy than a traditional melodrama. The subjective shots showing what Guérande sees - damning evidence of his wife's infidelities - appear to be contradicted by cut-away sequences in which Denise's supposed betrayals are shown to be nothing more than harmless self-indulgences.  Through some smart and sophisticated editing (which uses iris effects to create smooth transitions between scenes), the film builds on these apparent narrative inconsistencies to achieve a gripping, almost Hitchcockian level of tension and suspense, with an undercurrent of dark humour that taunts and amuses us as the deadly cigarette comes ever closer towards its victim's lips.

Me, my husband and the 3000-year-old body in the box

Although La Cigarette is a slick and assured production, there isn't much evidence of the stylistic innovation that would mark Dulac out as a particularly radical filmmaker.  Compared with the impressionistic films that would follow (La Souriante Madame Beudet, L'Invitation au voyage, La Princesse Mandane), and her subsequent surrealist endeavours (La Coquille et le Clergyman), it is almost rigorously conventional, its subversiveness lying not in its form but in its content.  In its blithe mockery of the traditional marriage La Cigarette makes little attempt to conceal its provocative pro-feminist agenda.  It is Guérande's misguided concept of what a wife should be (little more than a silent inanimate body sealed in a box), not his wife's apparent frivolity, that leads him to the pitiable state of wanting to make himself a martyr of perfidious Venus.  Smoking can seriously damage your health, but so can being a male chauvinist pig.

For all his learning, Guérande is too deeply entrenched in the mindset of his pre-WWI generation not to see women as equals rather than mere chattels.  It is not the age difference that threatens his marriage but the far greater gulf in their attitude towards the conjugal state.  The box containing the mortal remains of the ancient Egyptian princess acquires an obvious symbolic significance when it is stood on its end and given pride of place in Guérande's private study.  The 'borrowed' museum exhibit isn't here for detailed research, as the academic claims.  It is here, in his inner sanctum, to represent what the foolish man thinks a wife should be.  There's no doubt that Guérande would be far happier being wed to a crumbling skeleton in a coffin than to a flighty creature who looks like the sort who gallivants about town in the company of worthless playboys.  He and Norman Bates have a lot in common.

It is only right at the end of the film that Denise's own feelings about her marriage come into view, in an extended flashback which shows how she discovered her husband's plan to kill himself and then acted to thwart the attempt.  On the face of it, her actions show her to be the model wife.  She saves his life and in doing so demonstrates her love for him - what more could he expect of her?  But it was only a few minutes earlier in the film that Denise appeared to be willing to share her husband's suicide, both taking turns to draw on the cigarette that they knew to be poisoned.  The union-in-death notion appeals so much to Guérande's warped romanticism that he appears delighted with the idea that his beautiful young wife should die with him.  So much for his idea of love.

When the deception is then suddenly revealed Denise's more benign form of romanticism saves the day and it is her saner, but no less idealistic, notion of love that triumphs.  Or does it?  If Denise is willing to playact a part in a shared suicide, is she not equally capable of a less benign kind of dissemblance in future?  What kind of future can she look forward to, being matriomonially tethered to a creaking old fossil with a suicide complex and an all-consuming fascination with the bones of the long dead?  Whereas La Souriante Madame Beudet grimly concludes with an unhappy wife realising she is forever trapped in a loathsome marriage, La Cigarette ends on a note of false optimism, with the bogus illusion of a happy reconciliation between a husband and wife who patently could not be more ill-suited for one another.

Film Synopsis

The mummy of an ancient Egyptian princess is the latest addition to a museum of oriental art curated by the esteemed academic Pierre Guérande.  The legend of the princess, notorious for her love of jewels and adventure, is well-known to students of Egyptian history.  She was the wife of a fabulously wealthy prince, a man many years her senior.  On discovering his beloved had been pursuing affairs with men of her own age, the prince decided to end his own life by putting some poison into dough being made in his palace bakery.  The dough, he knew, would be baked into cakes which he would consume day-by-day, until the fateful day when the poison would find its mark.  Death, when it came, would come as a surprise.  It so happens that Guérande, a prematurely aged 50-year-old, is married to an attractive wife who is much younger than he is.  Despite the age difference, Denise has always been the devoted wife and has never given her husband any reason to doubt her fidelity - until the day he discovers she is taking golfing lessons with the playboy idler Maurice Herbert.  Guérande's suspicions that his wife has begun an extra-marital affair are confirmed when he sees her meeting up in secret with Herbert at the house of a friend.

Inspired by the legend of the mummified princess, Guérande decides to end his days by injecting into one of his cigarettes a toxic substance he finds in his wife's bathroom cabinet.  He places the poisoned cigarette in a box with many others, mixing them up so he will never know which cigarette will kill him.  To account for the syringe his wife notices on his desk, Guérande explains that he used it to inject some perfume into the cigarettes to make them more palatable.  Denise sees through the lie at once - the perfume bottles her husband claims to have used have been empty for some days!  As time passes, Guérande continues nonchalantly smoking his way through the contents of his cigarette box, knowing that sooner or later the cigarette he lights up will be the one containing the deadly poison.  Then, one day, he is struck by how affectionate his wife has suddenly become towards him.  Is it possible that he has misjudged her?  Does she love him after all?

Guérande is on the point of abandoning his suicide project when he discovers that Herbert has been out of town for the past few days.  So this is why Denise has been so keen to play the part of the attentive wife - with her lover away she has nothing better to do with her time!  Now more certain than ever of his wife's perfidy, Guérande continues smoking the cigarettes - until there is just one left.  This must be the one with the poison!  As he lights up the cigarette and begins what is sure to be his final smoke Denise appears.  She knows the cigarette is poisoned and takes turns with her husband to smoke it.  What further proof does Guérande need to know that his wife loves him after all?  Then Denise drops her bombshell.  She confesses that, after she found out what her husband had intended, she disposed of the cigarettes in the box and replaced them with a fresh batch.  What more could a loving wife do?  The Guérandes' marriage and future happiness would seem to be secure - for the time being.