La Glace à trois faces (1927)
Directed by Jean Epstein

Film Review

By the time he had completed Mauprat (1926) and Six et demi, onze (1927), the first two films he made for the film production company he had set up in 1925, Jean Epstein was already in financial difficulty.  Unable to raise the capital for another feature he had to reign back his ambitions and content himself with a short - more accurately a moyen métrage - for his third independently made film.  Rather than limiting his creativity, the prospect of impending insolvency seemed to act as a spur, motivating Epstein to explore his cinematic ideas (notably his theory of photogénie) with renewed vigour - much like a condemned man making the most of the days he has left to him.  The outcome of this frenetic burst of artistry was two of the director's most highly regarded films - La Glace à trois faces (a.k.a. The Three-Sided Mirror) and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928).

A short story by Paul Morand (first published in L'Europe galante in 1925) provided the bare bones narrative for La Glace à trois faces, a simple fable that Epstein transforms into an intense hallucinatory experience through some dazzling camerawork and innovative editing.  Watching the film is like taking a trip into another dimension, so brazenly does it dispense with the usual cinematic conventions as it unleashes a radically new concept of film storytelling, one that is driven by feeling and perspective rather than pure incident.  The striking image of the smashed mirror in Six et demi, onze is what the film resembles - a montage of scattered fragments reflecting multiple points of view which ultimately reveal four strikingly different portraits of the same individual.  We like to think that what we see is an objective truth that everyone can agree on.  La Glace à trois faces reminds us that this is not how things are - everything we observe is a distorted shadow of the truth, shaped by our own personality, experiences and aspirations.  The idea that all human experience is innately subjective and should be presented as such in art was central to the French impressionist movement of the 1920s, and it would also figure heavily in German expressionism and subsequently film noir.

Already, as early as Coeur fidèle (1923), Jean Epstein had earned his place amongst the elite filmmakers of the Parisian avant-garde, whose ranks included Marcel L'herbier, Abel Gance and Dimitri Kirsanoff.  Epstein was as much influenced by Gance's startling use of rhythmic editing in La Roue (1923) as he was by the impressionists' use of in-camera effects such as superimposition to express the inner states of their protagonists.  By the time he came to make films for his own production company, Epstein had learned to combine these various cinematographic devices into a uniquely subjective form of cinema that powerfully captures the essence of human experience, perhaps more so than any other form of cinematic expression.  In La Glace à trois faces he attains the zenith of his art, putting images on the screen that make us feel we are inside the heads of the protagonists - not just seeing the world through their eyes but actually experiencing their emotions.  We can but marvel at Epstein's use of close-up (massive close-ups that often only show a small portion of a face), camera movement (taken to dizzying extremes) and editing (including some bizarre jump-cutting in one sequence).  These make watching his film an intensely visceral experience.

In Epstein's hands, the camera lens is not just an instrument for passively recording what happens in the physical world.  It becomes the eye of the protagonist, showing us what he or she chooses to see, and in a way that reflects the observer's character and emotional state.  This is at once apparent in the first three segments of the film, where Epstein differentiates his three female characters more by how they view the world around them than by what they look like or how they act.  The first woman is a socialite who resembles a bird in cage (an impression that is reinforced by Pierre Kefer's boldly geometric Deco set design), a soul yearning for a strong man to come along and make her his prisoner.  The second is a domineering artist who needs to control others - this is why she regards her lover as something she can shape and mould according to her designs.  Suitor number three is a waif-like commoner whose innocence and optimistic outlook is stressed by the fact that we see her mostly out of doors, in sunny river settings that evoke the impressionist painters Renoir and Manet.  The women reveal themselves through the distinct worlds they inhabit, and this is also reflected in how they regard their lover - the dominant male, the submissive weakling, the insouciant romantic.  How odd that they should see the same man in such different ways.

Meanwhile, as the women happily delude themselves as to their lover's true nature, Epstein gives us the occasional glimpse of his true persona.  In one of the film's more striking sequences, the camera locks on to his point of view as he drives his beloved sports car out of an indoor car park.  As the surroundings revolve around him, windows becoming large rectangles of light flying past, he resembles a prisoner desperately seeking escape from a suffocating nightmare reality.  The sequence is later mirrored in the one where the man rows a boat on a river, adding a bitter strain to what would otherwise pass as a cheery excursion in an idyllic romance.  The three women each believes she can possess her man, but, as the fourth segment makes clear, he is not one to be captured.  A man in a fast car is not one who is likely to be tethered by the bonds of matrimony, so by going off on a mad sprint in his souped up roadster our hero not only reaffirms his freedom, he also defies the gods by asserting that he is master of his own destiny.  The gods are not amused by this show of hubris and the outcome is all too predictable.

It is in this, the film's dramatic highpoint, that Epstein slams his foot down on the accelerator pedal and throws just about everything he has into the creative melting pot to make the hero's lunatic joy ride as hair-raising as possible.  A frenzy of fast moving point-of-view shots are edited together at a vertiginous pace to create the image of a man who is so drunk with his illusion of freedom that nothing matters.  Past, present and future are all subsumed into a single sustained moment of bliss that has a sweet taste of eternity about it.  Epstein's own love of fast cars is well-documented and he had already employed similar sequences of a car being driven at speed in Le Lion des Mogols (1924) and Six et demi, onze.  In these earlier films, however, the impression given is one of an intense love of life, whereas in La Glace à trois faces it is the danger, his proximity to death, that the hero seems to relish. The glimpse of a bird on a telegraph wire (eerily reminiscent of Hitchcock's The Birds) prefigures the inevitable tragedy.  Epstein then follows this with one of his most lyrical uses of superimposition, a static shot of the mangled remains of the hero laid over another shot that slowly tracks up towards the heavens.  As his ghost then fades from the three-sided mirror that has held him captive, we can finally be assured he has found the freedom he craved.  The prisoner is no more.

Of the films that Jean Epstein made, La Glace à trois faces is one that was most enthusiastically received on its original release.  Following a reappraisal of the director's work in the 1950s, the film had a profound impact on a new generation of filmmakers and notably influenced two of the most highly regarded films of the French New Wave era - Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and Chris Marker's La Jétée (1962).  For his next film, La Chute de la maison Usher (1928), Epstein would develop his idea of photogénie further and, in doing so, succeeded in crafting the most visually poetic and unsettling work of his career.

Film Synopsis

Three women from three different social spheres each awaits the return of her lover, and as they do so they reflect on the happy times they have spent together.  Pearl, an English society belle, has many suitors but she allows herself to be swept off her feet by a handsome young financier, impressed by his strength and the control he exerts over others.  Athalia, a Russian sculptress, has fallen for an altogether different kind of man, a weak, sensitive thing whom she delights in cosseting.  Lucie, a working class girl, never knew happiness before she met her handsome beau, a carefree and affectionate young man with whom she spent an idyllic day, boating on the river.  Little do they know it, but these three women have fallen for the same individual, an egoistic whose only true love is his sports car.  Neglecting to keep his appointment with his three lovers, the man decides instead to go for a drive in the country in his beloved Bugatti.  Speed is the only mistress he can contemplate surrendering his life to...