La Lumière d'en face (1955)
Directed by Georges Lacombe

Film Review

Georges Lacombe's last great directorial flourish before he abandoned cinema for television is this memorably overwrought melodrama which is distinguished by strong performances from two actors whose careers were tending in opposite directions, Raymond Pellegrin and Brigitte Bardot.  As Pellegrin's popularity waned in the late 1950s, Bardot's suddenly went into manic overdrive and it seems scarcely credible that two such contrasting actors were cast as the leads in the same film.  Yet, watching La Lumière d'en face today, the casting of the grimly moody Pellegrin opposite the luminescent Bardot seems to be nothing less than inspired, and seldom has ether actor been as well served by a director as Lacombe, one who knew how to make the most of their respective talents.

In less capable hands, La Lumière d'en face could so easily have ended up as a tediously turgid melodrama, of the kind that was rife in French and American cinema in the mid-1950s.  The plot is not too far removed from that of Lacombe's earlier film, La Nuit est mon royaume (1951), which recounts a similar story of a man struggling to regain his freedom and dignity after a crippling accident.  La Lumière d'en face is a more intense, somewhat darker film, which teeters on the edge of the abyss throughout before tumbling headfirst into a wild vortex of film noir hysteria for its spectacularly dramatic climax.  This bleak denouement is presaged by the film's eerily noir opening, which lingers in our mind like a dark cloud as the action suddenly switches to a sunny locale in the south of France and introduces us to a truck driver (Pellegrin) looking forward to a life of marital bliss with a winsome ingénue (Bardot).

The film's first shock is not far away and after a dramatically staged road accident Pellegrin's character is psychologically diminished, to the point that any kind of physical or emotional stimulus could prove fatal.  So he gives up truck driving, opens a café and does the one thing most likely to drive him bonkers, which is to marry Bardot.  Far from being a scene of conjugal bliss, the couple's new home soon becomes a torrid pressure cooker of repressed desires.  The marriage must remain unconsummated until Pellegrin's mental state improves and so it isn't long before Bardot becomes the proverbial cat on heat, a magnet for any man that comes within sniffing distance.  Tensions reach fever pitch when a sinewy Roger Pigaut takes over a service station across the road and sets the sexually deprived Bardot drooling at the prospect of physical intimacy with a 'real' man.  When the volcano finally does blow its top, which it does in the midst of a mistral that is crudely symbolic of the natural forces being unleashed, Pellegrin is sent over the edge and becomes possibly the most terrifying thing ever to spring out of the shadows of any French film.

La Lumière d'en face deserves to rate as Georges Lacombe's best film - few of his films have anything like this sustained level of dramatic intensity and heartrending poignancy - but it is almost certainly the film in which Raymond Pellegrin's abilities as an actor are used to their fullest.  There is a disturbing brutality to Pellegrin's portrayal, which provides a startling contrast with his character's inner fragility and gentleness.  Emasculated by his illness, driven wild by desires that can never be sated, Pellegrin's character becomes a tragic parody of a man, a cruelly castrated Beast to Bardot's irresistibly sensuous Beauty.  Bardot, likewise, is nothing like the bland gamine she was often cast as during this early phase of her career.  She is a likeable young woman visibly torn between her loyalty to her husband, to whom she was devotedly attached before his accident, and her obvious craving for other men who can meet her physical demands.  As she would demonstrate in later films, Bardot could be a superb actress when directed by someone who saw her as more than just a sex symbol.  As the bitterly conflicted Olivia, she gives the first great performance of her career, one that resonates with truth, sincerity and the darkest of ironies.  Over the next two decades, Bardot would appear in around fifty films, but only in a handful of these would she be as good as she is here, totally committed to her art as she hurls herself into one of her more complex character portrayals. La Lumière d'en face gave Georges Lacombe and Raymond Pellegrin ample scope to demonstrate their talents, but it is equally one of the high points of Brigitte Bardot's career as an actress.

Film Synopsis

After a terrible road accident in which his fellow driver was killed, Georges Moreau had no choice but to give up his job as a long distance lorry driver.  Still traumatised by the accident, Georges consults his doctor, who advises him he must take things easily and at all costs avoid taking on any strenuous work.  Georges decides that the best therapy is to find himself something to preoccupy him, so immediately after getting married to the beautiful Olivia he opens a roadside café on a busy stretch of the National 7 highway.  Things start out well enough but it isn't long before Georges begins to show worrying signs of fatigue.  The work is demanding and, coupled with his inability to consummate his marriage, his temper soon becomes frayed.

Whenever anyone shows an interest in his wife, Georges becomes unreasonably jealous.  He finds he has good reason to doubt Olivia's fidelity when she starts to get on friendly terms with Pietri, the good-looking younger man who runs the petrol station opposite his café.  Georges has nothing to worry about - Olivia is too devoted to him to start anything with Pietri - but in the end his niggling suspicions get the better of him.  Convinced that his wife has been pursuing an affair behind his back, Georges makes up his mind to kill her.  Narrowly escaping being strangled by her husband, Olivia takes refuge in Pietri's place, but even here she is not safe.  Georges appears with a gun, his intention more than evident...