Le Diable au corps (1947)
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara

Film Review

Claude Autant-Lara's inspired adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's scandalous 1923 book Le Diable au corps proved to be every bit as controversial as the novel itself.  Despite his reputation as one of the standard bearers of the quality tradition in French cinema, Autant-Lara became something of an agent provocateur in the mid-1940s, his films often bringing him into conflict with the institutions (notably the Church) whilst painting a deeply unflattering picture of French society in general.

This film's stark and intimate portrayal of an illicit romance between a sexually precocious teenage boy and a married woman would have been enough to offend bourgeois sensibilities of the time, but Autant-Lara goes even further and uses the film to mock the nationalistic fervour that was sweeping his country in the immediate aftermath of WWII.  The director could hardly have created more of a stir if he had made a film in which the Pope was portrayed as a money-grabbing Lucifer (although he came very close to doing just this in his subsequent L'Auberge rouge (1951)).

Whilst Le Diable au corps no longer has the power to shock in the way it did on its initial release, it is obviously a daring film for its time.  The love scenes are arguably the most explicit and sensual ever seen in a film up until this time and the spectacle of a married woman pursuing a torrid love affair with a teenage boy was certainly an unprecedented cinematic event.   Rather than paint the affair in a sordid light, Autant-Lara and his screenwriters (the legendary team Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost) make it a thing of exquisite and tragic beauty - and this is probably what most incensed the film's vociferous detractors. 

Controversial as the film was, it succeeded in establishing Gérard Philipe as one of the leading lights in French cinema.  Although he is clearly older than the character he plays (he was in fact 24, the same age as his co-star Micheline Presle), Philipe is the perfect embodiment of Radiguet's hero, a selfish romantic who feels completely out of place in the time he lives in.  Philipe and Presle make such an effective screen couple that you wonder why they seldom worked together again.  Their only subsequent appearance together was in the pretty inconsequential comedy Tous les chemins mènent à Rome (1949).

Raymond Radiguet was just 19 when he wrote his novel Le Diable au corps.  (He completed only one other novel, Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel, before he died from typhus, aged 20.)   As a consequence, there is a touching naivety and raw honesty to Radiguet's writing which Aurenche and Bost somehow manage to retain in their screenplay.  The characters François and Marthe are seen to have a childlike innocence, each almost oblivious to the social taboos that they are ripping asunder through their illicit romance. 

Michel Kelber's cinematography subtly emphasises this schism between the two central characters and the world they inhabit by creating a darkly oppressive mood that evokes the harshly repressive nature of contemporary bourgeois attitudes.  A masterwork of its time, the film is one of French cinema's finest evocations of the conflict between our natural impulses and the constraints imposed on us by society, the hideous irreconcilable conflict between desire and duty.

Film Synopsis

Marthe Grangier, a nurse in a military hospital during the First World War, is pressurised into getting married by her parents.  She has a relationship with a 17-year old student, François Jaubert, but passes him over when she grows tired of his selfishness and immaturity.  Instead, she allows herself to be drawn into a loveless marriage with an army officer.  Some time later, François re-enters Marthe's life.  Now, Marthe cannot resist falling in love with François, although he hardly seems to have changed for the better...