Film Review
When he showed up at Pathé Brothers in 1914, eager for work after
getting himself heavily into debt, André Antoine was one of France's
most revered theatre directors. It was Antoine who, in his striving
for greater realism on the stage, revolutionised the art of theatre in the
first decade of the 20th century, introducing a modernity that others would
be quick to emulate. Prominent playwrights such as Sacha Guitry acknowledged
his part in reviving the popularity of theatre at a time when it was beginning
to come under threat from the new medium of cinema. Antoine was well-suited
to replace Albert Capellani, Pathé's star director, after he left
to work in the United States. He not only had Capellani's enthusiasm
for naturalism, he was also keen to experiment and develop his own style
of filmmaking, drawing on his years of experience in the theatre to instil
in film drama a heightened sense of realism and immediacy.
After a promising first film with Pathé,
Les Frères corses
(1915), Antoine then made his mark with his inspired adaptation of François
Coppée's 1896 novel,
Le Coupable (a popular work of French
literature that would subsequently be adapted by
Raymond Bernard in 1937 with Pierre
Blanchar in the lead role). What could so easily have ended up as a
stodgy, run-of-the-mill melodrama became, under Antoine's deft and sensitive
direction, an incredibly poignant piece of social realism. The emphatic
style of acting that we tend to associate with early silent cinema is all
but absent in this film, and instead what Antoine serves up is a riveting
slice of life that is much nearer to documentary than conventional drama
of this period.
To see how rapidly cinema was evolving in the last half of the 1910s you
only have to compare this film with Capellani's later offerings for Pathé
- for example his masterpiece
Germinal.
The close-up has now arrived and Antoine uses this device brilliantly to
humanise his characters and reveal their psychological torments. Real
locations for the exteriors not only add greatly to the film's striking realism,
they also serve to underscore the contrasting natures of the protagonists,
in particular emphasising the material and moral gulf that separates the two main characters
- both named Chrétien - who inhabit totally different social strata.
There are some inspired uses of back-lighting (Antoine's most recognisable
signature), with characters in the foreground appearing in silhouette to
perform a kind of shadow play against a bright naturalistic background.
There are even a few impressionistic touches - note the use of superimposition,
which allows the protagonists to glimpse echoes of their past. It is
hard not to notice the dynamic quality of the camerawork and editing, which
overcomes the painfully static feel of Capellani's offerings for Pathé
and endows the film with a vitality that would not become commonplace in
silent cinema until well into the next decade.
Le Coupable was a very modern film for its time but it was too near-the-knuckle
for the French censors, who insisted on several cuts, including the removal
of the sequences depicting the interior of a reformatory (a euphemism for
what is actually a prison for abandoned children and orphans). These
excised scenes were restored in 1987 by the Cinémathèque Française
using a complete print that had been unearthed in a film archive Prague.
After this remarkable second feature, André Antoine went on to make
some other notable films for Pathé, including
L'Hirondelle et la
Mésange (1920) and
La Terre (1921). He also took
on the task of completing Albert Capellani's unfinished epic
Quatre-vingt-treize
(1921), one of the most wildly ambitious French films of the silent era.
© James Travers 2017
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
France, 1914. Chrétien Forgeat, a man in his twenties, is on
trial for murder. His defence lawyer, Chrétien Lescuyer, begins
by confessing to the court that he is the accused man's father and pleads
extenuating circumstances. Twenty years ago, while he was studying
for his law degree in Paris, Lescuyer had a whirlwind romance with a pretty
young florist, Perrinette Forgeat. Unfortunately, Lescuyer's father had already
chosen a wife for his son, and so, his studies completed, Lescuyer threw
over Perrinette so that he could marry a woman from his own class.
By the time he learned that his lover was pregnant with his child Lescuyer
was unable to help her. Over the next few years, Perrinette struggled
to bring up her infant son, whom she named after her lover, and ended up
marrying a man, Prosper Aubry, who had no sympathy for the boy. The
young Chrétien was barely in his teens when his mother was carried
off by tuberculosis. Fed up of being beaten by his stepfather, Chrétien
ran away from home and got himself into mischief with another lad.
After being picked up by the police, Chrétien then spent the next
ten years in a harsh reformatory. Having gained his release, Chrétien
fell in with Grosse-Caisse, another reformatory inmate, and found work as
a stage extra. Finding a mislaid earring, Grosse-Caisse forced his
new friend to sell it to a pawnbroker. Disgusted by this small crime,
Chrétien turned his back on his one friend and his job and then realised
the only thing he had left to sell was the watch he had inherited from his
mother. Desperate for cash, the young man returned to the pawnbroker
but, in a moment of madness, he struck him and ran off, leaving his victim
for dead. It was not long before Chrétien was spotted by a former
warden of his reformatory and taken into custody. By this time, Chrétien
Lescuyer had become a prominent lawyer, devoted to his career after the untimely
death of his wife. Reading about Forgeat's arrest for murder in a newspaper
he quickly deduced that the accused man was his own son and resolved to defend
him in court, whatever the consequences for his reputation...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.