Film Review
Hard to believe but it wasn't until they were both nearing the end of
their prolific acting careers that Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret, two
of the great icons of French cinema, appeared together in a film, the
film in question being this superlative adaptation of a Georges Simeon
novel by director Pierre Granier-Deferre. Both Gabin and Signoret
were enjoying something of a career boost in the early 1970s, each actor
consistently delivering performances of exceptional quality which
transformed quite modest films
into minor classics with immense box office appeal.
Le Chat exemplifies this - not only
do the two actors complement one another perfectly, they both play
their characters - an elderly man and woman trapped in a bittery stale
marriage - with a harrowing conviction which is at times
painful to watch. For what is arguably his
last great performance, Gabin was justly rewarded with the Best Actor
Silver Bear at the 1971 Berlin International Film Festival, one
of the surprisingly small number of awards he picked up in the course
of his monumental career.
Making only a few small tweaks to the narrative, Pierre
Granier-Deferre and his screenwriter Pascal Jardin perfectly recreate
the mood and substance of Simeon's most depressing novel, the result
being one of cinema's bleakest commentaries on married life. The
rundown old house in which the couple live, a relic standing absurdly
proud and alone amidst a landscape of busy urban development, wryly
symbolises the institution to which the two protagonists have chained
themselves, for better or for worse. Like their erstwhile love,
it has become an empty shell which offers sanctuary from a world that
is changing too quickly for them, but nothing else, least of all
solace. The cat that Julien (Gabin) adopts is the only thing in
the film that appears to be alive, but unfortunately for
Clémence (Signoret) it represents all that she has lost - the
attention and tenderness of the man she still, in her hopelessly
stubborn way, cannot stop loving.
Le Chat is a darkly ironic
film. Whilst it appears to show the cruel transience of love, it
ends by suggesting that whilst love may whither, it can never
completely die. Julien and Clémence's mutual detestation
is more a reflection of their abject disillusionment with life than a
total absence of benign feeling towards one another. Their
relationship is the one thing that has endured whilst everything else
in their lives has crumbled to dust, so naturally they grow to resent
this and, whilst they cannot bear to separate (apart from brief
intervals when Julien visits his one-time mistress), they use their
marriage as a way to inflict pain on each other, to lash out against
the life that no longer means anything. In the film's most
hauntingly poetic sequence, the two characters share a kind of
communion of transcendence, separately watching a gang of cats
frolicking contentedly in the wasteland of a building site. For a
brief moment, Julien and Clémence are as one, feeding
vicariously on the felines' zest for life, perhaps lamenting the fact
that they never had children, regretting that their lives have not been
as full as they might have hoped. But this moment of revelation
comes too late - husband and wife must part as if they were strangers,
without the slightest acknowledgement that they were once happy
together. Their hearts have failed them both.
After this collaborative tour de force, Pierre Granier-Deferre worked
with Simone Signoret on two other quite respectable Georges Simenon
adaptations -
La Veuve Couderc (1971) and
L'Étoile
du Nord (1982) - although neither of these has anything like
the poetry, fractured humanity and visceral realism that
Le Chat has in abundance.
Granier-Deferre did subsequently make some interesting, idiosyncratic
films - notably
La Cage (1975),
Une étrange affaire
(1981) and
Cours privé (1986) - but
few of these show the inspired touch that is so evident in
Le Chat, which is probably his
greatest film. Gabin would go on to appear in another five films,
the most memorable being José Giovanni's anti-death penalty
crowd-pleaser
Deux hommes dans la ville
(1973) in which he starred opposite the most cat-like of those
monstres sacrés, Alain Delon.
© James Travers 2011
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Julien and Clémence Bouin have been living together as man and wife
for over twenty-five years. He is a retired typographer, she is a former
trapeze artist who is now partly crippled after an accident. They live
in a run-down old house in Courbevoie on the outskirts of Paris, an area
that is under massive redevelopment. Like the buildings around it,
the Bouins' crumbling homestead is soon likely to be demolished, but it still
stands apart, in a hellish wilderness of dust and noise, like an abandoned
carapace, a sad emblem of a dead relationship. The couple who were
once so deeply in love have long ceased to have any tender feelings for each
other. Now they live together in an atmosphere of mutual loathing,
barely tolerating the one other, each desperately willing the other to die.
The relationship becomes even more poisonous when Julien brings home a stray
cat one day and adopts it as his pet. The affection he no longer feels
for his wife he gives willingly to the little animal, who soon becomes his
closest - and perhaps only - friend. Clémence cannot bear to
see her husband happy and it isn't long before she is consumed with a murderous
hatred for the creature that she believes has stolen the last vestiges of
Julien's feelings for her. She rails against the cat, she attacks it
and one day she succeeds in killing it. By this act she merely succeeds
in widening the gulf that exists between her and her husband. Julien
will have nothing more to do with her now. As far as he is concerned,
the woman he was once so feverishly in love with is long since dead.
There is nothing more Clémence can do to hurt him...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.