Film Review
In 1952, the producer Henry Deutschmeister scored a notable commercial hit
with his Franco-Italian film
Les Sept péchés
capitaux, a portmanteau or anthology film taking a darkly comedic
look at the seven deadly sins. With contributions from such capable
film directors as Yves Allégret and Claude Autant-Lara, and featuring
an all-star cast led by Gérard Philipe, the film could hardly fail
to appeal to critics and audiences. A decade later, French cinema had
move on apace and so Deutschmeister presumably felt justified in mounting
a remake, this time drawing on the talent of a new generation of filmmakers,
including some of the pillars of the French New Wave.
This kind of anthology film (known as
film à sketches in France)
had been a mainstay of French cinema since the 1940s and was still enormously
popular in the 1960s, evidenced by the success of such multi-segment offerings
as
La Française et
l'amour (1960) and
Le Diable et les
dix commandements (1962). For such a film to work well the
constituent segments must be adequately linked together, and have enough
variation to maintain the spectator's interest but not so much variation
to be painfully jarring. The 1962 version of
Les Sept Péchés
capitaux fails on both of those counts, but mainly because the seven
sketches that make it up just don't fit together. A few (notably the
contributions by Jacques Demy and Claude Chabrol) would make respectable
short films in their own right; the others look as if they were churned out
in a lazy afternoon with no real enthusiasm or talent.
The first thing to say about this film is that it is
not a wholly
New Wave enterprise. Only two of the contributors are bona fide representatives
of La Nouvelle Vague (Godard and Chabrol); the others are a mix of contemporary
auteurs (Demy, Roger Vadim), commercial filmmakers (Édouard Molinaro, Philippe
de Broca); The film's opening segment
(
La Colère) was directed by Sylvain Dhomme and Max Douy, their
sole directing credit for the cinema. Dhomme was a prominent theatre
director most noted for his collaborations with the Romanian playwright Eugene
Ionesco, and Max Douy had had a distinguished career as an art director,
on films that included Jean Renoir's
La
Règle du jeu (1939) and Claude Autant-Lara's
L'Auberge rouge (1951).
Jacques Demy's segment (
La Luxure) boasts the starriest cast-list
(Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean Desailly, Micheline Presle, Laurent Terzieff,
Nicole Berger) and is easily the most watchable. It is also the one
that is most evocative of its era, beautifully shot in the same luxuriant
black-and-white photography that had such an impact in the director's previous
feature
Lola (1961). Chabrol's
contribution (
L'Avarice), which rounds off the anthology, also has
a strong cast (Jean-Claude Brialy, Claude Rich, Jean-Pierre Cassel) which
includes another prodigious talent Claude Berri, a man destined to be one
of France's most successful film producers.
© James Travers 2003
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Next Philippe de Broca film:
Les Veinards (1962)
Film Synopsis
Anger: A friendly mood
prevails throughout a small town one Sunday after church.
Everyone seems to like one another and not a single unpleasant word is
exchanged. But the atmosphere soon changes at lunchtime, when
every man finds a fly in his soup. Anger soon works his
mischief...
Envy: A chambermaid is
pursuing a happy love affair with a young man at the hotel where she
works, but she is jealous of the more glamorous life that she sees
others lead. When she has what she desires, it is the old life
she begins to covet...
Gluttony: A man, his wife and
his mother-in-law set out to attend the funeral of a family member who
died from excessive eating and drinking. On the way, all three of
them cannot stop themselves from taking refreshments, ensuring that the
family tradition will continue...
Sloth: A young woman will do
anything to seduce an actor but his laziness will prove stronger than
her love...
Lust: Two young men have been
obsessed with the idea of lust since their childhood. But when
they finally get to know what lust is, its power only manifests itself
in their dreams...
Pride: A married woman has a
lover but her pride prevents her from accepting that her husband has a
mistress. If she has to end her own affair to keep her husband
for herself so be it...
Avarice: A party of students
want to spend a night with a prostitute but they cannot afford her
fee. So they each contribute a small amount and decide that one
of them should go. In the morning, the prostitute has a pang of
conscience and decides to return the money, but she only hands over the
part that her client himself contributed...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.