La Dénonciation (1962)
Directed by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze

Film Review

"Nous vivons dans l'oubli de nos métamorphoses...".  It is with this enigmatic quote from Paul Éluard's Le Dur désir de durer that director Jacques Doniol-Valcroze propels us into his darkest and most ambitious film, La Dénonciation.  Éluard's quote expresses the notion that we live in a state of perpetual renewal, like a blackboard being continually wiped and written on.  But in Doniol-Valcroze's film, the past continues to impinge on the present, and far from being wiped clean it can exert a powerful control over our present behaviour.  This applies as much to the film's central protagonist, a man haunted by his war time experiences, as it does, in a much wider sense, to a nation that still hasn't reconciled itself with the shame of the Occupation and is in the process of building up a mountain of future self-loathing through its futile war with Algeria.  La Dénonciation may resemble a conventional thriller of its time but it was one of the most political films of the French New Wave, one of just two films to make an allusion to the Algerian situation (the other being Jean-Luc Godard's banned Le Petit soldat), and one of the first films to venture a critical reflection on the Occupation.  Unfortunately, it was released at the height of summer, and so what is arguably the most significant French film in a generation came and went without anyone noticing, tombé dans l'oubli.   

La Dénonciation was the third feature to be directed by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, a leading critic who was one of the founders of the influential film review magazine, Les Cahiers du cinéma.  Prior to this, Doniol-Valcroze had made two full-length films - L'Eau à la bouche (1959) and Le Coeur battant (1961) - that could hardly be more different, light romantic comedies that perfectly evoke the era of free love.  La Dénonciation is, by contrast, a dark psychological drama that pays homage to classic film noir whilst offering up a not-so-thinly veiled critique of France's present and past political failings.  Whereas the early film noir offerings served up by the director's Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, Truffaut and Godard, are little more than stylish pastiches, La Dénonciation is a far more profound film, one that would have had a much greater relevance to a contemporary French audience.

Two possible influences for the film are Franz Kafka's novel The Trial and Jean-Paul Sartre's play Les Main sales (Dirty Hands).  As in Kafka's novel, the film begins with the main protagonist, a film producer named Michel, finding himself implicated in a crime of which he is completely ignorant.  The policemen who interrogate him and with whom he is unwilling to confide are faceless bureaucrats of a distinctly Kafkaeqsue hue and Michel's attempts to uncover the truth, together with his ultimate fate, also mirror what happens to Joseph K. in The Trial.  Where the stories differ is that the hero in Doniol-Valcroze's film appears to be in control of his own destiny - it is he, not some external agency, who is rolling the dice.  Michel is his own judge, jury and executioner as he attempts to purge himself of a crime that has long haunted him, the heinous crime of denouncement.  (Interestingly, Orson Welles' French-produced adaptation of The Trial, Le Procès, was released just a few months after La Dénonciation.)

As the film intercuts between two periods in Michel's life, we see a strong parallel between the events of his past and present.  During the war, Michel gave in under torture and interrogation, betraying his resistance colleagues to the Gestapo.  The fact that his testimony proved to be of no value (the resistance cell had already been smashed) does not lessen Michel's sense of guilt.  As he says at one point in the film, to surrender is to surrender everything.  Immediately after the war, Michel is saved when a collaborator facing execution refuses to denounce him.  Fearing the consequences for himself, Michel is unable to return the favour and when a similar set of circumstances arise sixteen years later he becomes aware of the significance of his betrayal.  Again, he finds himself in the predicament of denouncing someone to the authorities, but rather than do so (which would have been the logical thing to do) he uses this as an opportunity to expunge his inner torment.  Like the protagonist in Sartre's play, Michel makes an existential choice that allows him to take on himself the consequences of his actions.  In doing so, he sets himself free, but at the possible cost of his life.

As engaging as Doniol-Valcroze's first two films are, these pale into significance compared with the confident masterpiece that followed.  Beautifully photographed in black and white Cinemascope, La Dénonciation combines the sensuous modernity of the New Wave era with the bleakly oppressive, gritty feel of those memorable American film noir classics.  This is the work not of a jobbing filmmaker but of someone who loves cinema with an all-consuming passion, a close cousin of François Truffaut.  From Huston to Hitchcock, the influence of other great filmmakers can be felt throughout the film, but Doniol-Valcroze also imposes on it his own signature, a mischievous sense of fun which is most evident in the scene in which his wife at the time, Françoise Brion, performs a parody striptease for the benefit of Maurice Ronet.

Even before he utters his first line in the film, Ronet proves he is the ideal casting choice for the part of the main character, a natural development of the one he had recently played in Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958).  Through Ronet's subtle portrayal, Michel emerges as a complex but likeable individual whose outward affable ordinariness is belied by a tempestuous inner conflict.  In the course of the film, we can hardly help being drawn deeper and deeper into Michel's tormented soul, and Ronet gives us a real sense of how guilt can destroy a man, poisoning his essence and slowly devouring his will to live.  Here, the actor - possibly the finest French actor of this period - gives us a startling depiction of a man at war with his inner self that anticipates his greatest performance, in Malle's Le Feu follet (1963).

Flitting between genres, casually referencing other films and literary works, combining narrative styles (including the voiceover narration beloved by Truffaut and old-fashioned flashbacks) and never quite going where we expect it to go, La Dénonciation has no difficulty fitting into the French New Wave mentality of cinema.  But lacking Godard's scattergun anarchy and Truffaut's warmth, it stands apart as an altogether different kind of film, one that delves far deeper into the human psyche and contains within it a powerful morality tale.  An intensely haunting meditation on the nature of guilt, redemption and free will, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze's most inspired film has a lasting impact and deserves to be far more widely appreciated than it is.

Film Synopsis

October 1961.  Michel Jussieu, a successful film producer, returns to a Parisian nightclub he visited the previous night to collect a sweater.  He almost trips over the body of a dead man and then he catches a glimpse of a man and a woman before he is overpowered and knocked unconscious.  The next day, he is questioned by Inspector Malferrer, who has no doubt of his innocence.  Haunted by the memory that he cracked under interrogation by the Gestapo during WWII, Michel refuses to offer any information to the police as he pursues his own investigation into the killing.  It turns out that the dead man was an extreme right-wing journalist and his assassins are members of a secret political organisation who served in the French Resistance during the war.  Fearing that Michel may betray them to the police, the latter begin sending him threatening letters.  This merely goads Michel further into uncovering the truth, but in doing so he puts himself and his wife Elsa in great danger...