Douce (1943) Online

*** SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** "Douce" is one of the absolute peaks of the French cinema during the Occupation.Sixty years later,its strength is still intact ,its beauty fascinating.Probably Claude Autant-Lara 's masterpiece,it's a work every movie buff must see,particularly the ones who love Max Ophuls's or Joseph L.Mankiewicz's esthetic refinement.

Quintet could be another name for it because it deals with five characters,played by five equally brilliant actors.Meet them:

-the countess of Bonaffé: an old noble,who has not forgotten 1789,and who wants to keep the world as it is:"do not give the Poor too beautiful things because they could dream of a luxury they will never be able to afford".She reigns in her luxury home over her servants whom she despises and humiliates.Marguerite Moreno portrays this dowager with authority.

-Her son,a wash-out widower ,who lost a leg in the war of 1870 against the Prussians,a big defeat for France .And for the nobles,whose occupation has always been war ,particularly before the 1789 revolution,it's ultimate decay.Disenchanted,he's secretely in love with his daughter Douce's teacher Irène.Jean Debucourt plays this aristocrat with bonhomie and a certain naiveté.

-Her granddaughter ,Douce: a romantic young girl.she's too young to understand .She's in love with the countess's ostler,Fabien.Odette Joyeux was one of Autant-Lara 's favorite actresses.She will also star in "Sylvie et le fantôme" and "le mariage de chiffon".

-Douce's teacher,Irène .She was hired by the countess ,recommended by Fabien,because she's his lover.Madeleine Robinson really shines and is probably the stand-out of a stellar cast.She literally mesmerizes the audience.

-And finally,Fabien,loved at once by an aristocrat and a common.He's a rebel,he 's got nothing but contempt for the countess and her world of privileges.

It would take pages to depict all the richness of this work.The most famous scene remains "la visite aux pauvres"(paying a visit to the Poor):the countess bringing a tiny Xmas tree-which contrasts with the huge one in her hall- and a pot- au- feu (boiled beef with vegetables)to a needy couple:"patience and resignation" she tells to "comfort" them.Behind her back,Fabien mumbles "impatience and rebellion".

The situation is a cul -de -sac:nothing is possible;the father's love for the teacher is a misalliance the countess would never agree with.As for Douce,she tries to escape her stifling milieu :she leaves home with Fabien ,but tragedy awaits round the corner.

SPOILERSµµµµµµµµµSPOILERS The final pictures are astonishing:Irène and fabien are turned out by the countess on Xmas day;while they leave the house,which represents a crumbling and crepuscular world,more than ever,now that Douce is dead in a fire,you can hear a heavenly carol.END of Spoiler.

It would be a crime to pass over Philippe Agostini's cinematography,which enhances the muffled atmosphere of the candlelit mansion.Under this veneer,so many frustrations,so much wickedness,rottenness everywhere.

Christmas 1887. In a Parisian mansion, Douce, the bored daughter of an aristocratic family, nurtures a secret passion for Fabien, who manages the estate. But Fabien is the lover of Irène, Douce's governess, and plans to elope with her using money stolen from the family. Meanwhile, Douce's father, a widower, has also fallen in love with Irène, and his proposal of marriage sets in motion a train of events with tragic consequences...

The opening tracking shot of "Douce", across a miniature of Paris with an Eiffel Tower in construction, establishes a fin de siècle world in which new ideas are imposing themselves upon the old landscape. In the social order, too, there is evidence of change: Douce's father (Jean Debucourt) sees only good in his planned marriage to Irène (Madeleine Robinson) and in her elevation to his own social level. This elevation is depicted literally when he takes her for a ride in his newly installed lift, a symbol of his modernity in the stuffy gaslit townhouse. For him, love transcends class.

But the father's manner is too mild ("douce"). He has been wounded physically and psychologically, plagued by a sense of failure, hobbling on a wooden leg. The household is dominated by his mother the countess (Marguerite Moreno), a harridan whose starched black dresses represent her inflexible adherence to the old order and the sense of sin associated with transgression of social boundaries. As well as blocking her son's happiness, she is infusing her granddaughter Douce (Odette Joyeux) with her outdated orthodoxies, not realising that the thrill derived from breaking a taboo may become in itself a potent attraction for a modern, rebellious adolescent. The intransigence and cynicism of the crowlike old woman are the poison that saturates this house from the top down.

There's an angry polemic burning at the heart of the film, but on the surface, as in the title, all is soft and calm. "Douce" is one of the most elegant films ever made, each scene gliding smoothly into another as the characters move from room to room within the mansion. The screenplay is polished and literary, the performances intelligent and refined, the music perfectly integrated into the drama, the direction exquisitely choreographed with sumptuous camera movements to rival Ophüls. It's a drama of biting satire and of deep emotions deeply suppressed, registering only as a narrowing eyelid or a pursed lip.

And at the centre of the drama is the 17-year-old Douce herself, brilliantly played by Odette Joyeux - who was almost 30 at the time, and older than Madeleine Robinson who plays her governess. Douce is depicted on contemporary posters as a bird in a gilded cage, but her nature is more feline: playful, impulsive and by turns tender and cruel. She is experiencing love for the first time, and this makes her a vulnerable and ultimately a tragic character. As she sets out in the snow for her midnight assignation with Fabien (Roger Pigaut), her hooded cape reminds us of Little Red Riding-Hood about to meet the wolf.

"Douce" is not an anti-bourgeois film, as some have suggested. Truffaut famously remarked (in condemning films such as Autant-Lara's): "What is the value of an anti-bourgeois cinema made by the bourgeois for the bourgeois?" The countess is ridiculous and contemptible, but the servant classes, as depicted here, are little better: Irène is an opportunist, Fabien is a thief, and his haughty attitude suggests a kinship of temperament with the countess. Only the rare few such as Douce and her father, who are willing to throw aside social convention and follow their hearts, are portrayed with sympathy in this film. And that's the message of Autant-Lara the artist, not the politician.

This movie plays like a Chekov play. Unspoken emotions are amped to the top. Actions are performed without being revealed. And most importantly, nothing seems to happen. Plays can get away with nothing happening, but the milieu of cinema requires and demands action. This movie avoids it and manages to still work. By doing this, it takes the world of thirties to forties cinema where plot, story and action is king and introduces character as the harbinger of a movie to the big budget studio productions of France and thus the world. It is similar to the idea behind the French New Wave but Truffaut attacked this kind of movies and this director and particularly the writers of this movie, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, a legendary screen writing team as old farts or the old wave, thus the term the new wave. The dialog in this movie is literate almost bibliotequeish to say the least, and it does take its time to warm or move your heart. As I said, it cons you into believing nothing is happening while we are watching the destruction of an old world; one of aristocrats, barons and the meritocracy. It is 1887 and Douce the daughter of the Bonafe patriarch who also lives with her grandma, the Bonafe matriarch in a studio-set created house that seems to have yanked right out of one of Poe's tales. It is a character in itself in the movie. Light does not come from outside in this house. Only the artificial lighting of the cinematographer castigates the gloom. The patriarch wishes to marry the servant teacher Irene who is of poor class. But she is betrothed to another of working class. I know, you've read, heard and seen this plot many times before but not as expertly done as this movie. In fact, if you are a fan of Wong-Kong-Kwai, you should love this movie. It reminded me of In the mood for love. It has all the trademark pacing, irony and exotic direction of his movies. Odette Joyeux is very good but the standout is Marguerite Moreno as the matriarch. Watch it to see how an era disappears with fumes, death, anger and a carol.

DOUCE – known in the English-speaking world under the blandly generic title of LOVE STORY but, obviously bearing no relation to either the 1944 British movie or the popular 1970 American romance – inaugurated Claude Autant-Lara's great period that would end 15 years later with EN CAS DE MALHEUR (1958; see my review above) and incorporated around a dozen films. Although I have been aware from the outset of the film's renown – via Leslie Halliwell's positive capsule review and its being selected by the "Movie" magazine (published in the 1980s) as a key film of 1943 – the review that made me really prick up my ears was the ***** one in the inestimable "Films De France" website which also goes so far as to declare it Lara's best. Ostensibly a period romance, what actually unfolds is a bleak portrayal of bourgeois hypocrisy that has few peers among its contemporaries: Lara's stylish direction makes brilliant use of tracking shots on studio sets to display the immediate surroundings of the mansion owned by the noble Parisian family whose life over the Christmas 1887 period we follow throughout the course of the movie. Clever scripting and sparkling dialogue (courtesy of the ubiquitous writing duo of Jean Aurenche-Pierre Bost) are highlighted in two outstanding sequences: the opening showing a solemn Christmas mass being 'interrupted' by the socially-sensitive confession of a mysterious lady whose identity (or that of whom she is speaking) we are not sure of until much later, and the wonderfully ironic Boxing Day sequence featuring the wealthy matriarch bestowing purposefully 'small' gifts on the paupers of her community flanked by her ostensibly blissful (but actually freshly broken-up) younger companions. To top it all, we have a handful of impeccable performances from a relatively unknown cast: Odette Joyeux (portraying the fated title character, hers is easily a career-best performance; in real-life, she was Mrs. Pierre Brasseur and mother of actor Claude), Madeleine Robinson (as Douce's maid/companion, she inadvertently is the catalyst for the surge of passions that eventually brings down the family who 'adopted' her), Marguerite Moreno (delightful as the archetypal cantankerous matriarch), Jean Debucourt (as Douce's one-legged father, movingly portraying his forbidden and unrequited love for the socially inferior Robinson) and Roger Pigaut (as the other rogue dependent of the family: he loves Robinson but, impatient of her stalling and jealous of Debucourt's attentions, turns to Douce instead who, on her part, willfully gives in to her precocious impulses). The ending, then, is at once tragic and paradoxical: runaway couple Joyeux and Pigaut decide they are not made for each other after all but, while fully intent on returning into the folds of her family, Douce expires in a fire at a theater…and the original, socially acceptable couple of Robinson-Pigaut are subsequently reunited in their being simultaneously expelled from the mourning household!

Any serious French film buff is always going to have to seek this one out if only because it marked the first outing of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who went on to write all the great French films that WEREN'T written by Jacques Prevert, Charles Spaak or Henri Jeanson. They were also the two writers who got up Truffaut's nose the worst and he singled them out for special condemnation in his infamous essay in Cahiers. It's the old story, of course. If Truffaut could have written even one line half as good as these two cats he'd be well on the way to earning Amateur status. The fact is that next to these two Truffaut is illiterate. Put it this way, they're still showing 'Douce' sixty years after it was made. Will time be so good to The Four Hundred Yawns. In your dreams, Francois.

Douce is our old friend the costume drama and the fluid camera of Autant-Lara leads us gracefully into the story via the misleading (nice touch) Christmas-card setting which provides the external trappings for our main set, the well-appointed gaff of Madame de Bonafe, a gift of a role for Marguerite Moreno, who lives here with her son, Engelbert (so THAT's where Gerry Dorsey found it), who left a leg behind in one of those minor wars the French were wont to engage in, and has eyes for Irene (Madeleine Robinson) who is governess to his daughter, Douce (Odette Joyeux). Douce in turn is that way about Fabien (Roger Pigaut), a servant to Madame Bonafe (yes, it DOES sound a little like La Ronde, you got a problem with that) and stripe me pink if Fabien and Irene aren't getting it on in the servant's quarters. With basic elements such as these style is everything and Bost and Aurenche have supplied a stylish script to which Autant-Lara has added a touch of spin so that the whole thing gleams like burnished brass. Eat your heart out, Truffaut. 9/10