by Allan Fish
(France 1958 86m) not on DVD
Aka. One Life; End of Desire
First the hunt…
p Agnès Delahaie d Alexandre Astruc w Roland Laudenbach, Alexandre Astruc novel Guy de Maupassant ph Claude Renoir ed Claudine Bouché m Roman Vlad art Paul Bertrand cos Lucille Mussini, Mayo
Marie Schell (Jeanne Dandieu), Christian Marquand (Julien de Lamare), Pascale Petit (Rosalie), Ivan Desny (de Fourcheville), Louis Arbessier (Dandieu), Marie-Hélène Dasté (Mme.Dandieu), Antonella Lualdi (Gilberte de Fourcheville), Andrée Tainsy (Ludivine), Michel de Slubicki (Paul),
“That day, as so often, I had decided to go for a walk to the sea shore. Never had the spring been so beautiful.” It sounds like the beginning to a novel. Though based on Maupassant’s 1883 classic, those weren’t the first words to the original. They seem rather to evoke the immortal opening to Jane Eyre but in a world more akin to Thomas Hardy transferred across the channel from Wessex to Normandy. Like Hardy, Maupassant has proved somewhat challenging to film-makers, with only Renoir’s Une Partie de Campagne being worthy of the original and then for reasons that had little to do with Maupassant. Read conventional film histories and that would be it, you’ll find no mention of Une Vie in the majority of film books and its rating on the IMDb is a dismissive 6.3 out of ten as I write. It’s time to stand back and take a deep breath before exclaiming that Une Vie is quite possibly the most forgotten masterpiece of the French cinema and its maker, Alexandre Astruc, a forgotten master on the basis of this single film. Wasn’t he a film theoretician, I hear some of you clamour at the back? Yes, he was, but wasn’t Cocteau a poet?
The story follows young Jeanne Dandieu, recently finished school at a convent, who falls for a rugged man, Julien, who she marries – one half expects a caption to come up reading “viewer, I married him” – and there begins her misery. Within weeks he’s seducing her friend and maid Rosalie and leaving her pregnant. Rosalie is sent away by the forgiving Jeanne to live in a remote farm, but despite having a son of their own, Paul, within a few years Julien is straying again, this time with the faithless wife of his friend, de Fourcheville.
The sad fact is that Astruc’s film came at the worst possible time, when such traditional fare was being blown out of the landscape by the oncoming flood-waters of the nouvelle vague and, like many recently rediscovered silent masterpieces that slipped by unnoticed with the onrush of sound, so Une Vie can be reclaimed as one of the great attempts at French literature on screen featuring one of her most fascinating heroines. Many at the time criticised Maria Schell’s form of winsomeness as they had in Clément’s earlier Gervaise, yet she is perfectly in keeping with the period and her casting is faultless. She seems almost saintly but with a hint of earthy passion, offering herself up on her husband’s bed after Rosalie is sent away like a sacrifice on an altar and just pleading with her eyes to be made love to as she never has before; one might call her the antithesis of Emma Bovary. Her only fault is that she is faultless – irreproachable her husband calls it – and is thus of no interest to Julien, who loves only the hunt. And just as Schell is ideal as Jeanne, Marquand was never better than as Julien, fresh from coming under the spell of those tasty French dishes Bardot and Arnoul in Vadim’s Et Dieu créa la Femme… and Sait-on Jamais respectively, he wanders about like a bear with a sore head, with a gas lamp and a hunting hound never far behind. Nice support, too, from young Pascale Petit as Rosalie, a perfectly swelling score from Roman Vlad, gorgeous exterior design and, as pièce de résistance, Claude Renoir’s photography which mixes the outdoor lighting of the Impressionists and the landscapes of the rural Normandy to stunning effect – not even for his namesake Jean did he do greater work. As for Astruc, he’d sadly be reduced to making Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for TV, as if Une Vie had been a magnificent blip and he merely returned to his books. As Jeanne says “the days resumed their course.”
“Read conventional film histories and that would be it, you’ll find no mention of Une Vie in the majority of film books and its rating on the IMDb is a dismissive 6.3 out of ten as I write. It’s time to stand back and take a deep breath before exclaiming that Une Vie is quite possibly the most forgotten masterpiece of the French cinema and its maker, Alexandre Astruc, a forgotten master on the basis of this single film.”
Passionate fans of French cinema like Tony, Jamie, Joel, Ed, Dee Dee, Samuel, Kaleem, Maurizio, Judy, Stephen, Terrill, Jason, John, Jeffrey, Drew, Marilyn, Rod, Pat, Sachin and others would be well advised to heed Allan’s call here. I just watched this film and am ready to join in on the ‘masterpiece alert’. I have a fine widescreen print courtesy of Allan, which arrived on Saturday, that I just watched now, at the expense of responding to people on the Diary (something I will absolutely do tomorrow). This 1958 film, lensed in ravishing color by Claude Renoir makes excellent use of rural locations and of the Guy de Mauppasant source material. Roman Vlad’s repetitious but pounding lyricism is a perfect aural underpinning. Allan has penned an extraordinary review here talking about why this film was unfairly dismissed at the IMDb (6.3 of 10) and how it was out of fashion in the late 50’s; Maria Schell plays a resilient and exceedingly admirable heroine, and the conclusion, though inevitable is shocking. This is one powerful and rapturous film that must be seen.
If anyone would like a copy here let me know.
Well Les Cahiers du Cinema were on the ball – their top 10 for 1958:
1…..Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger)
2…..White Nights (Luchino Visconti)
3…..Touch of Evil (Orson Welles)
4…..Dreams (Ingmar Bergman)
5…..Une Vie (Alexander Astruc)
6…..Les Girls (George Cukor)
7…..Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman)
8…..Wild is the Wind (George Cukor)
9…..Il Grido (Michelangelo Antonioni)
10…The Adventures of Hajji Baba (Don Weis)
Wooooo Tony!!! You ain’t kidding there!!!
Cahiers may well have been the true barometer here, and I’m not certain Allan realized this (he may have), but it tells you the film’s reputation was strictly in the critical circles and not yet appreciated for it’s worth among audiences.
The film has me devastated. What company it shares on that list though!
Yes Sam, in great company. The above I have since discovered was not the final rankings for 1958, which were listed in the March 1959 issue:
Great list! This may well even be more revealing than the first one, certainly it includes a few more masterworks, and UN VIE holds it’s ground! It’s telling that it is regarded higher than the Malle and Tati!
I’ve always loved how much the French love ‘The Quiet American’. In ‘Contempt’ Godard riffs on it, and I’ve read him say elsewhere how much he loves that film.
Sam, above you make the offer: I’d love a copy of this film.
Indeed Jamie, it’s on it’s way tomorrow!
You know what? I actually prefer the re-make of “The Quiet American” with Michael Caine. But I know what you say there about the French adoring the earlier film.