Film Review
The year before he began making his much vaunted
Fantômas films, the
first in a succession of enormously popular crime-thriller series,
Louis Feuillade teamed up with another prominent director at Gaumont,
Léonce Perret, to make this unusually pessimistic
melodrama.
Le Coeur et l'argent
came at a time when Gaumont was consciously trying to raise its game,
in an attempt to compete with classier productions from its rivals, in
particular the recently founded Le Film d'Art. Not only does the
film use location filming extensively (something that would become a
feature of Feuillade's subsequent serials), it also employs the rarely
used (at this time) device of 'split screen', not as a gimmick but as
an ingenious means of showing us what is in the mind of the
protagonists.
The contrast between the sunny location scenes (shot in the
rural-looking suburbs just outside Paris) and oppressive studio
interiors is striking and graphically emphasises the choice the heroine
has to make, between a life of freedom and fulfilment with the man she
really loves, or one of comfort, restraint and life-sapping boredom
with one for whom she has no feelings. The location sequences are
attractively photographed and have a similar naturalistic lyricism to
what we find in Jean Renoir's
La Fille de l'eau (1925).
There is a touching romanticism to these scenes, and
the final shot of the drowned heroine instantly calls to mind Millais'
famous painting
Orphelia.
The film's most striking innovation is its use of split screen, in its
two key scenes. In the first, trapped in a loveless marriage, the
heroine recalls her happy times with her true love, which are depicted
on the righthand side of the screen with a superimposed shot of the
happy young lovers on the river. In the second, when the heroine
and the ferryman are reunited, the cause of the latter's antipathy
towards his former lover is revealed to us with a similarly
superimposed shot on the lefthand side of the screen, showing the
heroine wooing another man. The first spit screen stresses the
brutal disconnect between dreams and reality; the second shows us the
now unbridgeable rift between the heroine and her lover. Given
how effectively the split screen technique is used here, as a device
that lends psychological depth to a simple narrative, it is surprising
that it wasn't used more widely.
In the film, the heroine is played by Suzanne Grandais, one of
Gaumont's biggest stars - an actress who was considered the Mary
Pickford of French cinema and whom Feuillade likened to Pearl
White. Grandais wasn't just an attractive and charismatic
performer, she was also a highly accomplished actress, and, even though
she was just 19 when she starred in
Le
Coeur et l'argent, her performance is both captivating and true
to life. Grandais' prominent career was tragically cut short when
she died in a road accident eight years later whilst making what was to
be her last film, Charles Burguet's
L'Essor
(1920).
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Louis Feuillade film:
Fantômas - À l'ombre de la guillotine (1913)
Film Synopsis
Suzanne Mauguiot has fallen in love with a penniless ferryman named
Raymond, but her father, a prosperous innkeeper, has decided she must
marry the wealthy Monsieur Vernier. Suzanne has no choice but to
comply with her parents' wishes but Vernier dies suddenly, not long
after the marriage. In his will, Vernier leaves his entire estate
to his wife, on condition that she never remarries. Unable to
keep this promise, Suzanne returns to her first love, but, seeing her
now as a faithless woman, Raymond drives her away...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.