Film Review
After the success of
Mater dolorosa
(1917), Abel Gance immediately began work on a similar marital
melodrama,
La Dixième
symphonie, with the alluring Emmy Lynn once again cast in the
lead role as the victimised heroine. It was the last film that
Gance completed for Film d'Art, the company where he had cut his teeth
as a director and emerged as one of the great pioneers of the new
medium of cinema. After a short spell working for the Service
Cinématographique in the French Army, Gance would then go on to
make the film which would bring him international renown,
J'Accuse
(1919), followed by his grandest and most ambitious melodrama,
La Roue
(1923). The progressive evolution in technique across these early
Gance films is striking, revealing an increasing degree of
sophistication, inventiveness and daring that would culminate in the
director's greatest film,
Napoléon (1927).
Although
La Dixième symphonie
feels modest compared with Gance's subsequent cinematic achievements it
surpasses the vast majority of melodramas made at its time. The
plot isn't much to write home about, just the usual hopelessly
contrived soap-style nonsense involving the usual stock characters
acting pretty much as we would expect them to in a film of this
period. Some unexpected bursts of humour (rare for Gance) pep up
an otherwise predictable narrative, the scenes with André
Lefaur's eccentric marquis (the unlikeliest suitor for a sweet little
ingénue) offering a welcome break from the over-egged
confrontation scenes involving the principals. Like Douglas Sirk
in the 1950s, Gance elevates melodrama to a higher plain and gives it
far more psychological realism and artistry than audiences of the time
might have expected.
The film's highpoint is a protracted musical break from the narrative
in which the titular tenth symphony is presented to us. With
music specially written for the film by Michel-Maurice Levy, Gance
offers his first cinematic bombshell, a panoramic ballet featuring a
dancing water nymph. For his later
Napoléon, Gance would create
a far grander wide-screen effect with his 'Polyvision' process, which
projected separate images on three adjacent screens to create a single
picture. In
La Dixième
symphonie, he employs a far simpler, but still remarkably
effective, ploy to achieve the same end, simply by sandwiching the
wide-screen image between patterned top and bottom borders within a
conventional single-screen set-up. More than thirty years before
wide-screen cinema took off and became the de facto industry standard,
Abel Gance was already exploiting its artistic possibilities.
Gance's inventiveness manifests itself throughout the film in other
ways, doubtless with considerable input from his faithful
cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burel, who would achieve miracles
on his subsequent masterpieces. The lighting is particularly
impressive and gives an expressive depth and mood to each shot that
almost renders the inter-titles superfluous. Gance's trademark
visual metaphor is put to good use here, with the fate of the
heroine symbolised by a little bird trapped in the hand of her vile
tormentor. Another Gance gimmick, superimposition, is used liberally,
to lend an aura of mystique and fatalism to the proceedings.
The editing is not as elaborate as it would become on
Gance's later films, but it is faultlessly executed, so that the film,
whilst offering few narrative surprises, proceeds at a suitably brisk
pace and has no difficulty holding the spectator's attention.
The film's most obvious shortcoming lies on the acting front. By
today's standards, the performances are laughably melodramatic (for
want of a better word), and Emmy Lynn seems to spend the entire film
rolling her eyes, doing double takes or looking like a pathetic rabbit
trapped in a cage with a dozen ravenous tigers. Whilst the
theatricality extends to most of the cast, the two male leads -
Séverin-Mars and Jean Toulout - at least bring some semblance of
reality to their performances. Toulout makes a superbly
oily villain, the kind best suited for pantomime, and you can hardly
watch the film without hissing whenever he shows up (Gance presumably
had this in mind when he cast him as the villain in his comedy short
Au secours! (1924)).
Toulout has a darkly humorous quality that makes him strangely likeable, although
in the scene where he attempts to rape the heroine he is utterly
groteque. Séverin-Mars has an equally strong presence as
the tormented artist, a strange character who seems to be far more
preoccupied with his music than the prospect that (a) his wife is
having an affair with another man and (b) his daughter is about to wed
an outright scoundrel. Gance so admired Séverin-Mars that
he later cast him as the lead in his next two films,
J'Accuse and
La Roue, although it was the latter
film that sent the actor to an early grave. Given that
Séverin-Mars's character is supposedly modelled on Beethoven
(who failed to complete his 10th symphonic work) there's a curious
irony that the actor should die not long after appearing in a film
entitled
The Tenth Symphony...
© James Travers 2014
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Abel Gance film:
J'accuse (1919)
Film Synopsis
The wealthy Eve Dinant soon regrets becoming the mistress of a totally
depraved adventurer, Fred Ryce. When the latter's sister
threatens her Eve kills her in self-defence. To save herself and
her honour, she then gives Ryce a large sum of money, insisting that he
never speaks of the crime again and stays away from her. A year
later, Eve is happily married to a well-known composer, Enric Damor,
who is struggling with his tenth symphony. To her horror, Eve
discovers that her stepdaughter Claire has fallen in love with Fred
Ryce and intends to marry him. When Eve acts to prevent
the marriage, Ryce furnishes her husband with a letter which hints that
she is having an affair. Rather than reveal the truth, Eve
confesses that she has been an unfaithful wife, thereby providing Damor
with the inspiration he needs to finish his next great musical
composition. Realising that Ryce will stop at nothing to marry
Claire, Eve decides that he must be exposed, even if it means
sacrificing herself...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.