Le Coupable (1917)
Directed by André Antoine

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.

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...