La Foire aux chimères (1946)
Directed by Pierre Chenal

Film Review

In the last week of October 1946, French cinema audiences were treated to not one but two film renditions of the classic Beauty and the Beast tale, the first a traditional period fantasy interpretation by Jean Cocteau (La Belle et la bête), the second a darkly pessimistic film noir melodrama with a contemporary setting, entitled La Foire aux chimères and directed by Pierre Chenal.  Whilst Cocteau's film has endured and now rates as an undisputed classic of French cinema, Chenal's has been virtually forgotten, and yet the two films complement one another perfectly and together they give an insight into the mood in France in the austere aftermath of WWII.  The Beast was certainly an apt metaphor for a nation that, shamed by the years of Occupation, was in danger of withdrawing into self-pitying retreat from a scornful and unforgiving world.

La Foire aux chimères is the most perfectly constructed, and also the most atmospheric, of the half a dozen or so films noirs that Pierre Chenal put his name to in the 1930s and 40s, all imbued with the poetic realist style that was popular in France at the time.  Before the film noir thriller had become a staple of American cinema, Chenal had already helmed two impressive examples of the genre, L'Alibi (1937) and Le Dernier Tournant (1939), the latter being cinema's first adaptation of James M. Cain's famous crime novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.  L'Alibi featured the great Austrian actor-director Erich von Stroheim in one of his earliest French film roles and, on his return to France after a brief stint in Hollywood, the actor was easily persuaded to take the lead in La Foire aux chimères, in a role that might have been tailor-made for him.

Whereas Jean Marais's Beast in Cocteau's film has the slight misfortune of being likeably cute, von Stroheim's reclusive fiend in Chenal's film is positively terrifying (and with far less make-up).  With his stern, forbidding features and stiff, military bearing (to say nothing of his creepy diction), Erich von Stroheim was perfectly suited for villainous roles, but few (if any) of the characters he played were outright villains.  As the disfigured banknote printer in La Foire aux chimères, he is a wonderfully contradictory character, his sinister and threatening exterior distracting us from the essentially good man that lies within.  In some scenes, harshly lit from the side or rear (as villains invariably are in films noirs), von Stroheim looks like something out of an expressionistic German horror film, filling the screen with menace and murderous intent.  And yet, at the same time, the actor compels us to sympathise with his character, to see that his actions are motivated not by greed or malice but by an overriding desire to buy acceptance in a society from which he feels permanently excluded.  Like all good monsters, von Stroheim just wants to be loved.

As the Beauty to von Stroheim's Beast, Madeleine Sologne is admirably served by a character that is every bit as ambiguous and surprising as her co-star's.  Playing the blind but stunningly beautiful siren Jeanne, Sologne ought to be von Stroheim's redeemer, but in Chenal's wickedly inverted version of the classic fairytale, she becomes his destroyer, the innocent charmer who unwittingly converts a decent man into a coldly calculating crook.  Sologne wears the mantle of femme fatale with elegant ease when, her sight restored, she rejects von Stroheim in favour of a far more prepossessing example of manhood, albeit one who makes his living by throwing knives at her.  Von Stroheim and Sologne are flawed characters who, ill-used by fate, must negotiate a perilous course to damnation or redemption. By contrast, Louis Salou's single-minded blackmailer is as one dimensional a villain as they come - a louche, Mephistophelian figure in the background who becomes the instrument of Von Stroheim's destruction and Sologne's release.

The film's hysterical climax anticipates Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949),with boldly expressionistic lighting and camerawork used to dazzling effect to exteriorise von Stroheim's mental collapse as fear and desperation take him over and propel him to his doom.  When he treads the steps down into a seedy nightclub it is as if he is knowingly descending into Hell, and amid a frenzy of oblique camera angles we see him transformed into a murderous fiend intent on wreaking havoc on a world that has alienated and spurned him for too long.  What begins as an eerily baroque fairytale suffused with hope and poetry ends as a desperately grim expressionistic tragedy, and the final shot of Sologne revelling in her newfound freedom offers precious little comfort after the nightmarish episode that precedes it.  This is as noir as it gets - Pierre Chenal's one great masterpiece.

Film Synopsis

Frank Davis is the unimpeachable director of a company that prints what he claims to be unforgeable banknotes.  In his fifties, he is an object of ridicule on account of the facial disfigurement he acquired in an accident.  One evening, he is passing through a busy fairground when he notices an angelic young woman named Jeanne coming his way.  Being blind, the woman cannot see Frank's facial scar and she strikes up an immediate friendship with him.  She gives up her life as an assistant to a knife-thrower and becomes Frank's wife.  Frank gives Jeanne every comfort she could ask for, but in doing so he ruins himself and he ends up having to pass off forged banknotes to keep up his extravagant lifestyle.  When Furet, the manager of a gambling joint frequented by Frank, discovers this he blackmails Frank into forging banknotes for him.  Meanwhile, Jeanne has regained her sight through an operation and, having seen her husband's face, she is ready to return to her former lover...