La Petite Lise (1930)
Directed by Jean Grémillon

Film Review

The sudden arrival of synchronised sound recording in the late 1920s brought about a cinematic revolution that posed insuperable challenges for established filmmakers of the silent era whilst creating immense opportunities for the New Turk experimentalists.  Abel Gance and Marcel L'Herbier were two avant-garde titans of French silent cinema who failed most spectacularly to move with the times and embrace the innovation that had been thrust upon them.  Jean Renoir and René Clair were two comparable auteurs who appreciated at once the creative possibilities that sound brought to their art and made the transition so successfully that they grew in stature and found international acclaim.  Jean Grémillon was no less a talent, but for him the crossover from silent to sound cinema proved to be more of a stumbling block than a galvanising force.  By the end of the 1920s, Grémillon had made around twenty short films and two very impressive silent features - Maldone (1928) and Gardiens de phare (1929).  Although the rookie director's creative flair was recognised at once by some (notably Jacques Feyder), his first two features had been a commercial disappointment, so his career was literally in the balance as he began work on his first sound film.

Fortunately for Grémillon, his promise had been appreciated by Charles Spaak, a screenwriter of burgeoning renown, and Bernard Natan, the producer who had recently acquired Pathé, France's largest film production company.  With Spaak's formidable screenwriting abilities and the resources of Pathé-Natan to call upon, Grémillon's first sound film La Petite Lise stood a good chance of being a box office winner.  Sadly, this is not how things turned out.  La Petite Lise was such a flop that it brought an immediate end to Grémillon's association with Pathé-Natan, which was itself in massive financial difficulty in the wake of the 1929 stock-market crash.  With little prospect of future backing in France, Grémillon was driven into exile, lending his talents to mostly mediocre fare at the Ufa studios in Germany.

It wasn't until 1937 that Jean Grémillon had his first notable success with Gueule d'amour, the first in a run of poetic realist masterpieces that earned him his reputation as one of France's leading cineastes.  L'Étrange Monsieur Victor (1938). Remorques (1941) and Lumière d'été (1942) represent Grémillon at the apex of his creative abilities, but the prickly irony and haunting melancholia that characterise these masterworks are just as palpably felt, perhaps even more so, in the director's first sound film, a work that resounds with an abundance of human feeling despite the abject simplicity of its story.

La Petite Lise begins, shockingly, with a harrowing depiction of life in a densely populated prison in the French Guianan capital, Cayenne.  Grémillon's striving for slice-of-life authenticity - so evident in his previous two features - is taken to its naturalistic extreme here, with an opening that is far closer to hard-hitting fly-on-the-wall documentary than traditional film drama.    By the end of the second reel, the stench of crushing oppression is so keenly felt that you are compelled to sympathise with those condemned to this zombie-like mechanical existence in France's toughest penal colony.  As the camera pans slowly across a packed dormitory, it is as hard to make out the individual prisoners as it is to make sense of anything they say - all meaning is lost in a constant hubbub of indecipherable sound.  These lost souls make up a formless mass of stinking human detritus, the spirit driven out of them by the inhumane conditions of their incarceration.  Then something remarkable happens.  A choir of prisoners begin to sing the popular lullaby Ferme tes jolis yeux and a strange sense of calm washes over the inmates, comforting them, as they fall into a silent reverie.  As soon as the singing ceases, the lights go out and the prisoners are left to embrace the only freedom that is left to them - in sleep.

After this startling introduction, La Petite Lise continues on pretty conventional lines, with a pedestrian melodrama that is painfully typical of the era.  Indeed, the plot is so contrived and simplistic that you can't help wondering why a director of Grémillon's abilities would have bothered with it.  The hackneyed tale of a Parisian prostitute who accidentally kills a pawnbroker whilst trying to rob him, with her (conveniently) newly arrived daddy willing to take the wrap for the crime as a gesture of paternal self-sacrifice... surely Grémillon was above such trashy hokum?   We could just as easily ask: how could a writer of Charles Spaak's standing come up with such a pile of formulaic twaddle?  Simple though its plot is, La Petite Lise is far from being a conventional film.  Indeed, it exhibits a degree of sound and pictorial experimentation that is on a par with Jean Renoir's La Chienne (1931), arguably the most influential of the early sound films made in Europe around this time.  Grémillon's use of sound is nothing less than inspired, streets ahead of anything offered by even his most accomplished contemporaries, and yet his achievement was never recognised at the time.

Throughout La Petite Lise, sound is used not merely to reiterate what is shown on the screen, but more often to create a jarringly different impression between what we see and what we hear - a dissonance or disconnection between the two senses.  Sound is also used by itself - without any pictorial support - to avoid the need to show us something that is likely to cause a strong emotional reaction.  A good example of the latter is the climactic murder scene, in which the audience is denied the cheap thrill of seeing a man having his head beaten in.  Immediately after we see the heroine Lise grab hold of a conveniently placed vase, the camera fixes on a window for several seconds during which we hear the sound of breaking china.  After a further silent pause, with our gaze still fixed on the window, there is another long static shot of the broken vase on the floor, along with a dropped gun.  An ominous pool of dark liquid slowly comes into view and we know the worst.  In a whole minute of virtually unbroken silence only three words are spoken (by the boyfriend André) - Tu l'as tué (You killed him).  The absence of sound - helped by the fact that we see neither the murder nor the murdered man - gives this scene an extraordinary dramatic power.  Not even the famous shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) conveys a more palpable sense of the horror of the moment.

Another place where the parsimonious application of sound is used to great effect is the earlier scene in which Lise and her father Victor are first reunited after their decade-long separation.  With the camera fixed in a low position, we see Lisa apprehensively ascend the stairwell to her room at the top right of the frame.  As soon as the door closes behind her, we hear her father's emotional greeting 'Lise, ma petite fille'.  Then there is a sharp cut to a shot of the window from outside the flat, and we hear Lise's plaintive reply, 'Mon papa'.  So vividly can we imagine the warmth and poignancy of the long hoped for meeting from these two simple suggestive shots that nothing further is gained by our seeing it actually enacted on the screen.  Grémillon achieves the maximum effect by giving us the minimum of information and emotional stimulus - this isn't just well-judged artistic economy, it is film art of an extraordinarily high order.

The presence of the 'wrong' kind of sound is used to equally devastating effect in the later scene in which Lise's makes her shock confession of murder to her father.  As Victor is left contemplating the grim ramifications of his daughter's crime, all we can hear is an exuberant cacophony of dance music from the floor beneath.  The tragedy of the moment is amplified a hundredfold by the obscene joviality of the music, and no words are needed to express what is running through Victor's mind as he makes his decision to take the blame for the killing.  Here, Grémillon's use of sound fulfils a similar function to dialectic montage in silent cinema - with the power of the image magnified by a sound choice that appears to run contrary to the intended mood.

There are other ways in which the director's mise-en-scène heightens our involvement with the drama, and these include some obvious examples of Brechtian distancing (a technique popular on stage at the time).  One of the most striking aspects of the film is the paucity of close-ups, one of the most powerful devices in silent cinema.  Grémillon uses the close-up very sparingly, only when it is absolutely required, and his deliberate avoidance of reverse shots is also quite noticeable.  Most scenes are staged and shot to resemble a theatrical production, with the actors in mid-shot and the camera held static - often with one actor talking with his or her back to the lens.  The impression created is that the spectator is actually present in the scene as a silent onlooker, complicit in the drama but unable to act - like being tied to a chair in a gladiatorial arena.

Grémillon's breathtaking artistry (on a par with that of Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi) is sufficient to make La Petite Lise a great technical accomplishment for its time (few other directors overcame the immovability issue of the early sound-recording cameras so imaginatively).  But for the film to deliver the emotional wallop it deserves it requires a principal cast of exceptional calibre, and in this it certainly does not disappoint.  Most impressive is Pierre Alcover who, as Lise's father Victor, turns in a performance of heartbreaking poignancy - the actor's screen-filling bulk belied by the exquisite delicacy of his acting.  It's a very different set of emotions that Alcover arouses here from what he achieved in his previous role as the ruthless speculator Saccard in Marcel L'Herbier's L'Argent (1928).  First as the prisoner counting down the days to his release from prison at the start of the film, then to his joyful reunion with his daughter after a decade apart, Victor's tortured humanity is blisteringly apparent.  When Lise confesses her crime to him it is painfully obvious that he has only one course open to him - to sacrifice himself to save the daughter he loves.  Such is the depth of compassion that Alcover conveys in these crucial scenes, with the minimum of physical expressions, that we cannot help being moved to tears.  There is not a jot of forced pathos, no hint of phoney sentimentality, just a genuine heartfelt engagement with the plight of one decent man honouring his paternal duty.

In the title role, Nadia Sibirskaïa may not have quite the impact of her co-star Pierre Alcover but she still has a gripping presence as the tragic innocent driven to desperate situations by circumstances beyond her control (a fate shared with the protagonists of many later Grémillon films).  Like Alcover, she is at her most powerful when she is robbed of the power of speech and can only convey what needs to be said through the subtlest of gestures.  Lise's reaction to the realisation that she has killed a man (albeit by mistake, and then only for the noblest of motives) is so viscerally authentic that it slices into your gut like a fiercely lobbed javelin.  At the time, Sibirskaïa was married to Dimitri Kirsanoff, one of the leading exponents of impressionism in French cinema, and she has just as compelling a presence in his best films, including Ménilmontant (1926), Brumes d'automne (1929) and Rapt (1934).  Not only were Sibirskaïa's features strikingly handsome, they were also remarkable expressive, and it's fair to say that she acted mostly with her face - something that Grémillon (like Kirsanoff) used to great effect to connect us with her character's hyper-sensitive inner being.

Completing the impressive trio is Julien Bertheau, another prominent actor of stage and screen with a magnetic personality that earned him a highly distinguished film career.  Today, Bertheau is best remembered for his many associations with the iconoclastic director Luis Buñuel, which include such celebrated works as Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) and Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974).  La Petite Lise comes very early in the actor's screen career but he acquits himself with a performance of great charm and subtlety.  His André has neither the abject fragility of Lise nor the supreme nobility of her father Victor - in fact he is nothing more than a feeble everyman with unrealistic life aims and a hopeless inability to carry anything through.  And yet Bertheau compels us to sympathise with him by constantly stressing his devotion to Lise - his ardent desire to take her away from her sordid life in Paris and his willingness to assume responsibility for the murder of the greedy pawnbroker.

If La Petite Lise had been made just a few years later, when the conventions of sound cinema had become set in stone, it would have been just another run-of-the-mill melodrama, a film of so little merit that it would deserve its place in obscurity.  The fact that Jean Grémillon made the film when he did, just as the sound revolution was under way, meant that it could be used to explore new possibilities for cinematic expression, and this the director surely did, in spades.  La Petite Lise is a bold masterpiece of cinematic experimentation and should have been the film that made Grémillon's name, rather than the one that failed and sent him into exile.  It was only by pandering to popular tastes and accepting the filmmaking conventions of his time that this incomparable auteur would be able to make his mark on French cinema in the late 1930s, early 1940s - such is the monstrously capricious nature of the Seventh Art.

Film Synopsis

Victor Berthier's punishment for murdering his odious wife is a ten-year stretch in a crowded prison in French Guiana.  Released for good behaviour, Victor returns to Paris with one intention - to start a new life with his grown-up daughter Lise.  Little does he know that, to make ends meet, Lise has been forced into a life of prostitution, although she does everything she can to conceal this fact.  Her dream is to get married to her boyfriend André and help him to set up a new business in the country.  All that stands between their present woes and future happiness is the tidy sum of three thousand francs, but André is confident he can obtain the money somehow.  The reunion of father and daughter is a happy one, but Lise has to lie about her source of income - she admits to getting by on her modest wage as a typist.

Seeing the expensive watch that Lise has just received as a gift from her father, André immediately sees a way of obtaining the money he needs to buy his dream garage.  The couple call on the Jewish pawnbroker Monsieur Shalom and enquire what he will offer for the watch.  Lise has no choice but to accept the measly thirty francs offered, but when the pawnbroker goes to fetch the money André produces a pistol and orders him to hand over three thousand francs.  Shalom knocks the gun out of André's hand and a violent tussle ensues.  Fearing for her lover's life, Lise strikes the pawnbroker on the head with a vase.  Realisation quickly dawns on her that she has killed the old man!

Taking the incriminating pawn ticket, André accompanies Lise back to her garret apartment, where they are greeted by Lise's father with the glad news that he has succeeded in finding himself paid work.  Seeing the pawn ticket, Victor draws the obvious conclusion: his daughter is so poor that she was forced to pawn the watch he gave her.  He immediately calls on the pawnbroker and is the first person to discover the murder.  Returning to Lise and André, Victor is visibly shaken by what he has seen.  André confesses to having killed Monsieur Shalom, but so great is her love for him that Lise is driven to tell her father the truth.  Victor sees that there is only one way out of this terrible predicament.  To spare his beloved child he must go to the police and confess to the murder of the pawnbroker.