Film Review
Of all cinema's genres, melodrama is the one that is most easily
derided. Contrived, endlessly recycled soap-style narratives
inhabited by the same unconvincing archetypes have always been popular
with the ordinary man or woman in the street (usually the woman), but
critics have tended to look upon the genre as something low and
degrading, intellectually vacuous mush for the unwashed, uneducated
masses. When Jean Epstein started directing melodramas for the
company Albatros in the mid-1920s his reputation as a bright young
auteur was soon lost - indeed, his avant-garde contemporaries saw this
as a flagrant betrayal of everything they stood for. Following
the reappraisal of the work of Douglas Sirk in the late 1960s,
melodrama has come to be judged more generously and is no longer the
dirty word it once was. Like Sirk, Epstein used this style of
film subversively, to entertain the masses whilst offering up a sour
yet perceptive critique of society in his time.
Epstein's two classic melodramas,
L'Affiche
(1924) and
Le Double amour
(1925), were intended primarily as vehicles for Albatros's main star,
the great Russian actress Nathalia Lissenko, and whilst they follow the
rules of the genre to the letter they contain within them the bitterest
of social commentaries to be found in any French film of the
1920s. Both films were scripted by Epstein's sister Marie, a
lifelong collaborator who doubtless shared her brother's
concerns.
Le Double amour
is particularly trenchant in its condemnation of the double standards
of the bourgeoisie. The corrupting influence of money and the
hypocrisies that wealth engenders are felt in virtually every scene, as
tangible as a vampiric fiend lurking in the background.
Money appears to be everywhere in this film, scattered about like
confetti, but it never seems to do any good. Not once does it appear
to enhance the lives of the protagonists; it merely erodes their moral
core and makes them do bad or foolish things, an agent of pure
destruction. Even the high-minded heroine, an impoverished
countess, becomes a slave to the power of filthy lucre and ultimately
she has no option but to sell her principles to save her son from ruin
and give him a chance of a decent life, immersed in yet more
destructive wealth. Money becomes a drug, a false friend, a means
of ducking one's responsibilities. Any crime, any moral
faux pas, it seems, can be written
off, no questions asked, if a large enough cheque is written.
Marcel L'Herbier's
L'Argent (1928) goes to town
with the same theme, somewhat less succinctly than Epstein's more
subtle and focused film.
A recurring motif of Epstein's, the untamed ageless sea,
punctuates the narrative of
Le
Double amour in a way that eerily prefigures the lyrical Breton
phase at the end of the director's remarkable career. Waves
rolling back and forth along a stretch of seashore provide a stark
visual metaphor for the ebb and flow of time, humorously imitated by a
tracking shot that goes down a line of identically dressed attendees at
a gala concert and then back again. Cosmic repetition is the
film's other main theme, the notion that human beings are condemned to
repeat the same pattern of behaviour, over and over again, like
marionettes in the hands of some celestial influence which lacks the
imagination to come up with original stories.
The second half of the film is almost a perfect mirror image of the
first, the hopelessly doomed attempts by the heroine to deal with her
son's gambling addiction matching her earlier experiences with her
playboy lover. Twenty years separate these two halves of the
story and yet it is as if time is being re-run, the son Jacques
behaving just like his father Jacques, with the same woman squandering
all of her resources in the same futile effort to save the object of
her love, with the same tragic result. It's an odd coincidence
that the actors who play the two Jacques - Jean Angelo and Pierre
Batcheff - both died prematurely in the early 1930s, in fact within two
years of each other. Patterns are as bountiful in time as they
are in nature.
Pierre Kefer's eye-catching geometric set-designs serve to emphasise
the brutal symmetry of the plot. Influenced by both Art Nouveau
and Art Déco, the sets have their own unsettling duality which
has the effect of exteriorising the heroine's personal inner struggle -
the stylish florid elegance of one design tradition imprisoned within
the imposing utilitarian character of the other, like a bird trapped in
a cage. In several shots, the ornately decorated background comes
to resemble a spider's web in which the heroine appears ensnared like an
insect, caught in the unforgiving web of fate. So impressed was
Epstein with Kefer's work on this film that he employed him on two
subsequent films,
La Glace à trois faces (1927)
and
La Chute de la maison Usher
(1928) - two films in which the design is every bit as inspired as the
direction.
Even though his estrangement from the Parisian Avant-Garde was by this
stage complete, Epstein had yet another critical and commercial success
with
Le Double amour.
By this time, however, he was longing for independence and, weary of
the limitations of commercial filmmaking, he would make just one more
film for Albatros,
Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925).
Far from being a cynically motivated sell-out, Epstein's mainstream
melodramas were a crucial stage in the development of the director's
art, bringing an enriched rigour, technical competence and humanity to
his craft which made Epstein's later films as a free-spirited auteur
all the more dazzling and unique.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Jean Epstein film:
Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925)
Film Synopsis
The casino at the rich man's seaside resort Saint-Blaise-de-la-mer is
the venue for a gala concert for charity, the star attraction being the
beautiful Countess Laure Maresco. As the countess woos her
admiring audience with her singing, her lover Jacques
Prémont-Solène is busy losing the entire sum raised by
the charity event at the gambling tables. Jacques's father, a
wealthy car manufacturer, not only refuses to bail his son out, he
orders him to leave the country immediately and make a fresh start
in America. Jacques sets out on his new life without saying
farewell to the countess, unaware that she is now virtually penniless
and pregnant with his child. Twenty years later, the countess's
son, also named Jacques, has the same fatal addiction as his
father. His mother, now a successful singer, can barely cover his
gambling debts with her earnings. When the countess's former
lover returns to France, he is now a fabulously wealthy oil magnate,
but he refuses to acknowledge Jacques as his own son. To prevent
her son from going to prison for stealing some gambling chips the
countess is prepared to do anything, even betraying the man she once
loved...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.