Valse royale (1935)
Directed by Jean Grémillon

Film Review

Such was the adverse public and critical reaction to his first sound films La Petite Lise (1930) and Daïnah la métisse (1931) that director Jean Grémillon became virtually unemployable in his native France and had no other option than to leave his country if he was to continue his filmmaking career.  Having fulfilled a commission to direct Dolorossa (1934) in Spain, he took up residence in Berlin and fell in with Raoul Ploquin, an important figure at the UFA film studios who was responsible for the production of French-language films.  It was Ploquin who gave Grémillon his first assignment at UFA, to direct Valse royale, a French version of the German film Königswalzer (1935).  The latter was directed by Herbert Maisch and featured the actor Curd Jürgens in his first screen role; it was subsequent remade (with the same title) in 1955 by Viktor Tourjansky.  Ploquin was evidently so impressed by Grémillon's work that not only did he immediately invite him to direct another comedy in the same vein, Pattes de mouches (1936), but he also went out of his way to provide him with the moral and material support to take on more ambitious projects, Gueule d'amour (1937) and L'Étrange Monsieur Victor (1937).  It was these last two films that gave Grémillon his first major commercial successes, establishing his reputation as a bankable filmmaker and buying him his return ticket back to France.

Valse royale is a rarity in Grémillon's oeuvre - a period musical comedy.  Such films were enormously popular in France and Germany in the mid-1930s, but they seem to be a world away from Grémillon's doom-laden poetic-realist melodramas, exemplified by Gueule d'amour (1937) and Remorques (1941).  Yet, given that Grémillon started out as a musician, it seems odd that he had so little affinity for the musical genre.  It was, after all, by providing accompaniment to silent films in his youth that Grémillon first developed his interest in cinema.  Whilst Valse royale is competently directed and has many appealing qualities, it lacks the auteur signature that is so readily apparent in Grémillon's other great films.  No wonder the film is all but forgotten, little more than a curiosity piece for the most ardent of cinephiles.

Valse royale's one main virtue (after Grémillon's intermittent stylistic flourishes) is its distinguished cast, which is headed by two of the most well-known French actors of the period - Henri Garat and Renée Saint-Cyr.  Both Garat and Saint-Cyr had immense public appeal around this time, and the former's talents as a popular chansonnier are exploited (perhaps a little too eagerly) by this film with its slightly incongruous musical numbers.  Garat may not have been the greatest actor of his era, but what he lacks in acting prowess he more than makes up for in screen presence, and it is not hard to see why he was such a popular performer in his day.  By contrast, Renée Saint-Cyr not only had star quality, she was also a supremely capable actress, as she admirably demonstrates in this film, playing against the rather forced comedy to give a convincing portrayal of a proud young woman who is torn between her misguided sense of duty and her amorous desires.

The supporting cast includes some equally capable (albeit less well-known) performers.  In one of her first roles, Mila Parély positively shines as Saint-Cyr's troublesome younger sister - you can see why this vivacious young actress would soon be receiving offers of work from the likes of Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir and Julien Duvivier.  Most of the other performances are of a more vaudevillian hue, some enjoyably so, others outrageously over the top.  Adrien Le Gallo is one of the few cast members to strike the right balance between sobriety and outright whimsy as the mercurial King of Bavaria; Gustave Gallet, by contrast, tries just a little too hard to outstage all and sundry as the self-important royal caterer Tomasoni, although he does deliver the biggest laughs.

Whilst Grémillon shows a visible lack of engagement with the subject of the film (a lightweight farce set on the eve of the wedding of Franz Joseph of Austria and Elisabeth of Bavria), he does manage to bring his own visual flair to the grand set-pieces, which are far more interesting than the homespun plot and faintly absurd characters.  The royal ball which forms the centrepiece of the film is photographed with Grémillon's customary visual bravura, the slick montage of ceiling shots, elegant tracking shots and use of low and high camera angles recreating something of the intoxicating vitality of the famous dance sequence in the director's earlier Maldone (1928). 

As in many of Jean Grémillon's films, it is the exterior sequences which are most striking, and here they carry something of the raw impressionistic quality that we find in Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne (1936).  By contrast, the interior scenes feel airless and stagy, an impression that is reinforced by the excessive theatricality of some of the performances.  Jean Grémillon may have been grateful for the work but you can sense that his heart isn't in this one - the film has something of the dead, strained feeling that pervades Hitchcock's Waltzes from Vienna (1934), a comparable sorry mismatch of director and genre.  It  is probably correct to regard Valse royale as one of Jean Grémillon's lesser films, but that does not mean it deserves to be forgotten.  A minor film it may be, but without it Grémillon would not have been able to go on to make the great masterpieces for which he is now remembered.  It was his passport to posterity.

Film Synopsis

In 1852, the young Austrian emperor Franz Joseph persuades his friend, Count Michel de Thalberg, to act as a go-between in his love affair with the Bavarian duchess Elisabeth.  Not long after his arrival in Munch, Thalberg has an embarrassing encounter in a public garden with an attractive young woman.  The innocent incident is misinterpreted by a passer-by who, recognising the woman as the youngest daughter of Ludwig Tomasini, a highly respected caterer, persuades her father that she should marry the man who flirted with her to avoid a scandal.  As luck would have it, Thalberg meets up with Tomasini's older daughter, Thérèse, at a state ball hosted by King Max of Bavaria.  Thérèse is reluctant to dance, but joins in the festivities once she has secured a promise from the king to find the man who has disgraced her sister.  Her spirits lightened, Thérèse dances with Thalberg, and within no time the two realise that they are in love.  How will Thérèse react when she discovers that the man she has lost her heart to is none other than the scoundrel who robbed her younger sister of her virtue?