La Veuve Couderc (1971)
Directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre

Film Review

Even though the idea of an intergenerational love affair was hardly virgin territory by the 1970s, it was one romantic avenue that cinema tended to stay shy of in its new era of brazen permissiveness.  The furore that erupted in the French press when Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot famously got it together in Claude Autant-Lara's En cas de malheur (1958) (just a few years after Gabin had had a similar fling with Françoise Arnoul in Henri Verneuil's Des gens sans importance) may have had something to do with this.  Breaking the old sexual taboos was a sure-fire way of fueling the antagonism of the most puritanical strata of society - the actress Edwige Feuillère received death threats after she had played a woman pursuing a love affair with a teenage boy in Autant-Lara's Le Blé en herbe (1954).

The sexual revolution certainly had a far-reaching impact on cinema, bringing about a drastic relaxation of the censorship rules that allowed filmmakers to engage more honestly with subjects that had hitherto been skirted around or avoided altogether.  Same sex relationships, incest, fetishism, paedophilia and bestiality all managed to find their way onto the big screen in the 1970s (with predictable torrents of outrage in some quarters).  But the notion that a man and woman from different generations could fall in love and share the same bed was not something the mainstream was yet confidently equipped to cope with.  La Veuve Couderc was one of the few films from this era that was able to handle the subject with the delicacy and honesty it merits, and for this reason if no other it was a worthy recipient of France's most prestigious film prize at the time, the Grand prix du cinéma français.

It is interesting to note that the novel on which the film is based (one of Georges Simenon's numerous titles) was first published in 1942, when France was under Nazi occupation and run by an ultra-conservative government that was obsessed with traditional family values.  In the novel, the protagonists Tati and her young lover Jean are separated not only by age (she is 45, he is 28) but also by social class (she is from peasant stock, he the son of a rich businessman) - both demarcations were equally unacceptable to a contemporary readership.  The class issue is totally disregarded in the film, no doubt so that it can focus our attention on the real, enduring taboo - the possibility of true love between a middle-aged woman and a much younger man.  (The book and film differ in many other respects, most notably the ending - in the novel Jean beats his lover to death with a hammer.)

Pierre Granier-Deferre was well-suited to direct the film, since at the time he was married to someone who was ten years his junior (the English actress Susan Hampshire).  Granier-Deferre had already proved himself to be a very capable filmmaker (a contemporary of the French New Wave but well-distanced from that movement), his diverse output including such idiosyncratic works as the quirky comedy-thriller La Métamorphose des cloportes (1965) and a brutally harrowing depiction of a marital breakdown in Le Chat (1971), another inspired Sinemon adaptation.

It was whilst filming Le Chat that the director persuaded his leading lady on this film, Simone Signoret, to take the lead in La Veuve Couderc.  Finding an actor to play the principal male role was more of a challenge.  Initially, Alain Delon had deep reservations about the part (he hated playing the 'loser') and it was only after much soul searching that he agreed to take it on - a wise decision as it turned out because it allowed the actor to turn in what is widely considered to be among the finest performances of his career.  After this remarkable first encounter, Signoret and Delon would be reunited on screen two years later in Jean Chapot's Les Granges brûlées (1973).

Jean Tissier, another stalwart of French cinema (who seemed to crop up in just about every French film of the 1940s and '50s), was cast as Signoret's treacherous father-in-law, the kind of ambiguous, slightly sinister character in which the actor excels.  Meanwhile, the stunning Italian beauty Ottavia Piccolo was engaged to serve up a barrel-load of forbidden fruit as Signoret's sensual rival, hooking Delon with an irresistible mix of gamine innocence and predatory she-cat guile.  The picturesque village of Cheuge in the Côte-d'Or department of east France proved to be the ideal placid location for a low-key drama in which the primal emotions mostly play out beneath the surface, to devastating effect.

In the 1940s, Simone Signoret had been one of the most seductive French film stars of her generation, a femme fatale par excellence in such films as Yves Allégret's Dédée d'Anvers (1947) and Maurice Tourneur's Impasse des Deux-Anges (1948).  By the 1970s, she had acquired a completely different screen persona - rounder, hoarser, aged before her time, but still a magnetic and incredibly subtle performer.  In La Veuve Couderc, Signoret is at her most powerful.  Despite the acute paucity of dialogue, she conveys so much about her character's inner world that we soon feel we have known her intimately for years.

Delon has a similar effect, although he is famous for projecting rich and complex persona without uttering a single word - witness his astonishing performances in Le Samouraï (1967) and Monsieur Klein (1976).  An exchange of looks between the two principals is sufficient to persuade us of the power and depth of the emotional bond that draws their two characters together.  It would seem impossible that a handsome charmer with Delon's satanic good looks could fall for a dowdy and brusque old woman, and yet Signoret and Delon convince us that not only can such a thing happen, it is also a thing of inexpressible beauty when it does happen.

There are moments in the film that fleetingly evoke recollection of Signoret's most celebrated film Casque d'or (1952), in which she played a much younger woman enjoying a similar rural idyll with a tragic outcome.  As in that film - a landmark of French cinema - Signoret shows us just how powerful a force romantic love can be when it takes hold, and how impossible it is to break free, for all its apparent fragility, even when the whole of creation seems to have turned against you.  In La Veuve Couderc's most poignant scene, after a violent dispute Tati and Jean appear to have reached the point where they must separate.  Tati resents her lover's infidelity, Jean cannot bear to be confined by a woman's jealousy.  But just when the knot is about to be severed it tightens further.  The widow Couderc and her fancy man are bound to one another by something that neither can fully comprehend, an attachment that will prove to be fatal for them both.

Our abhorrence is aroused not by the film's astonishingly frank portrayal of an unlikely May-to-September romance, but by the atrocious behaviour of those who will do their damnedest to destroy it - Signoret's vicious in-laws (a ghastly brood of spiteful savages), Delon's duplicitous young mistress and the supposed custodians of order (the police and some nasty local Fascists) who are inclined to shoot first and ask questions later.  Set in the 1930s, allusions to anti-Semitism and extreme right-wing sentiment of the ugliest kind are certainly not out of place, and these are employed to great effect by screenwriter Pascal Jardin to create an atmosphere of gradually mounting oppression as the noose slowly tightens around Delon's neck, leading to a horrific denouement that feels all too predictable.

Despite its provocative subject matter, La Veuve Couderc met with critical acclaim on its release in 1971 and attracted a respectable audience of two million.  Interestingly, the same year saw the release of another film dealing with the same theme of intergenerational love - André Cayatte's Mourir d'aimer (1971) - but from a more overtly political angle.  The year's other crowd-pulling film drama, Louis Malle's Le Souffle au coeur (1971), took the same subject into even thornier territory, with an intimate portrayal of a mother-son relationship dangerously teetering on the brink of incest.  What does it say about the cinemagoing public of the time that the three most commercially successful French film dramas of 1971 should all offer casual depictions of an eligible male falling for a much older woman?

Film Synopsis

France, in the mid-1930s.  Tati Couderc is a severe-looking woman in her fifties who single-handedly manages a small farm in a remote backwater of rural France.  Ever since her husband died, some years ago, she has carried on a bitter feud with her rapacious in-laws, the Coudercs, who think of nothing but driving her from her home so they can reclaim her farm.  One day, a handsome dark-haired stranger arrives in the village.  Passing himself off as an itinerant labourer, Jean Lavigne persuades the widow Couderc to offer him work in exchange for a modest wage and a place to lay his head.  Despite the substantial difference in their ages, Tati and Jean soon develop a strong mutual understanding and affection, even though both are reluctant to talk about their past and find it hard to show their true feelings.

The news that old widow Couderc has found herself a young lover is music to the ears of her scheming in-laws, who see a golden opportunity to drive her from her land.  The relationship between Tati and Jean becomes desperately strained when the latter takes an amorous interest in the Coudercs' attractive daughter Félicie, who has already given birth to one illegitimate child.  After a heated row, Jean decides to stay and Tati accepts she must share him with her younger rival, as Félicie offers Jean something she no longer has: youth.  It isn't long before the Coudercs discover that Jean is a convicted criminal who is on the run from the police.  As a squad of armed policemen turn up and surround the farm, Jean realises that the time has come for him to bid a hasty farewell to his devoted Tati...