Film Review
Such was the immense success of H.G. Clouzot's
Les Diaboliques (1955) that
the writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac suddenly found themselves
in great demand by film directors and producers keen to exploit their talents
in the psychological suspense genre. Before Alfred Hitchcock embarked
on his stunning adaptation of the duo's thriller novel
D'entre les morts
(retitled
Vertigo for the film), Boileau
and Narcejac worked on the screenplay to adapt another of their books,
Les
Louves. Director Georges Franju would subsequently make use of
their writing abilities on
Les
Yeux sans visage (1960) and
Pleins feux sur l'assassin
(1961), with over a dozen other screen adaptations following in later years.
Les Diaboliques and
Vertigo set a very high benchmark against
which other Boileau-Narcejac adaptations are, perhaps unfairly, measured.
Released just two years after Clouzot's spine-chilling masterpiece,
Les
Louves (a.k.a.
Demoniac) is a respectable suspense thriller in
its own right, but made on a smaller budget and by a less gifted director,
it is clearly a lesser work, its impact somewhat diminished by a plot that
feels painfully contrived and a plethora of poorly defined secondary characters
that pop in and out of the narrative with no other function than to ratchet
up the tension. The script feels needlessly repetitive in places and
you can't help feeling the film needed some judicious pruning to achieve
its full nerve-racking impact.
Les Louves is the most memorable of the half a dozen or so films directed
by the Argentinean Luis Saslavsky during his decade-long exile in France
in the 1950s. After this, Saslavsky collaborated with Yves Montand
on
Premier mai (1958), a tame
social comedy with a neo-realist sheen that now appears hopelessly dated
compared with most of his other work. By contrast,
Les Louves
is a much slicker production that has aged well, its modest production values
masked by some highly atmospheric lighting and deft camerawork which effectively
sustain the ever-increasing tension, assisted by a particularly anxiety-inducing
score from Joseph Kosma.
That the film holds the attention as well as it does in spite of a fairly
mediocre script is entirely down to the performances from the three lead
actors - an extraordinary trio consisting of François Périer,
Micheline Presle and Jeanne Moreau. François Périer's
penchant for playing complex neurotic characters had already been demonstrated
in numerous films in the 1940s and early '50s - highlights include Christian-Jaque's
Un revenant (1946) and Gilles
Grangier's
Au p'tit zouave
(1949). In
Les Louves, the actor is at his best as the fugitive
impostor who, desperate to begin a new life, ends up being caught in a particularly
nasty game of feminine intrigue. Gervais's inability to escape (suitably
mirrored by the ultimate fate of his chief tormenter) makes him such a sympathetic
character that, like him, we can barely stand the tension of his being exposed
as a fraud by his entourage of self-interested plotters.
The film's title - which translates as
She-Wolves - turns out to be
a highly appropriate one. Excepting the old crone who offers help to
the escaped prisoners at the start of the film, none of the female characters
in the film has much in the way of compassion and sympathy, and one is evil
personified (although it takes a while before the extent of her cruel venality
becomes apparent to us). In a role that has an eerie resonance with
the character she would later play for François Truffaut in
Jules et Jim (1962), Jeanne Moreau
confirms herself as one of the leading French actresses of her day.
Her portrayal of the more overtly unhinged of the two sisters is as unsettling
as it is moving, and right up until her shocking sudden ejection from the
narrative she remains a dark and fascinating enigma, so hauntingly prescient
of the rich gallery of femme fatales the actress would go on to to play in
later years.
Micheline Presle has a much more challenging job with her far more ambiguous
character Hélène. (It is interesting that the name Hélène
recurs so often in the oeuvre of thriller director
Claude Chabrol - could he perhaps
be using Presle's protagonist as a model of tactful duplicity?) At
the time, Presle would have been more strongly associated with honourable
romantic types, seldom called upon to play the archetypal 'bad woman'.
The closest she got to public censure was for her portrayal of a youth-corrupting
nurse in Claude Autant-Lara's
Le
Diable au corps (1947). In
Les Louves, Presle gets to
inhabit the role of an outright fiend in human form for the first time in
her career, and in doing so she turns in one of her greatest screen performances.
So objectionable are the other female characters - most notably the vile
opportunist portrayed with sickening realism by Madeleine Robinson - that
it is only in the last third of the film that we even begin to suspect Hélène
of being capable of malevolent self-interest. For the bulk of the film,
Gervais's anxieties about his fiancée's motives strike us more like
guilt-fuelled paranoia than well-founded fears, particularly when the film
appears to be heading down the same road as Hitchcock's deceptively similar
Suspicion (1941). We have
to wait for the very last minute of the film to appreciate the extent of
Hélène's calculating depravity, but even then we are more shocked
by the nature of her well-deserved punishment than by her moral failings.
Les Louves may not be an unqualified masterpiece, but thanks to its
utterly compelling lead performances it is just as gripping as Clouzot's
more meticulously crafted thriller, and even more depressingly bleak in its
assessment of human nature.
© James Travers 2022
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
During the Second World War, two Frenchmen - Gervais Larauch
and Bernard Pradalié - escape from the German prisoner-of-war camp
where they are being detained and head back to France. On the way,
Bernard is accidentally killed by a passing train, leaving Gervais to continue
his journey alone. Known for having murdered his wife, Gervais is keen
to start a new life, so he takes advantage of his friend's death to steal
his identity. On his arrival in Lyon, he calls on Hélène Vanaux, a young woman
who corresponded with Bernard during his time in the prison camp and who
agreed to marry him once he had regained his liberty. Since she has
fallen on hard times after her father's death, Hélène
must earn money by giving piano lessons.
Naturally, Hélène has no reason to suspect that Gervais is
not the man she is engaged to, but Bernard's fear that his deception may
be uncovered is aggravated by the strange behaviour of Hélène's
sister Agnès. Since she attempted suicide five years previously,
Agnès has been showing signs of mental derangement, evidenced by her
attendance at nocturnal gatherings where she passes herself off as a fortune
teller. Gervais finds himself drawn to the moody young woman, and she
appears to be madly in love with him. Tensions between the fugitive
and his two hosts are further heightened when Bernard's sister Julia shows
up unexpectedly and positively identifies Gervais as her brother.
It seems that Bernard is the sole beneficiary of a vast fortune left to him
by his rich uncle. By supporting Gervais's claim to be Bertrand, Julia
hopes that he will reward her with a large share of his windfall. The
plan comes to nothing, since, a short while later, Julia is gunned down by
a German patrol after a resistance strike. It isn't long after this
that Agnès also dies, apparently having succeeded in poisoning herself.
Hélène and Gervais then take up residence at a remote house
in the country, but even here Gervais's secret is not safe.
Before she died, Julia communicated her suspicions to another man, André
Vilsan, who calls on Hélène and tries to convince her that
Gervais is an impostor who killed Bernard for his money. Overhearing
the conversation, Gervais becomes convinced that Hélène knows
his secret and intends murdering him so that she can claim the whole of Bertrand's
inheritance. By the time he realises that he is being poisoned, Gervais
is too weak to escape. His last act before he dies is to lock Hélène
in a cupboard from which she will never be able to escape.
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.