This French film, made under the Vichy government, clearly struck a nerve with French audiences of the time. Certainly it’s been suggested that its storyline—in which the titular nefarious envoys (Arletty and Alain Cuny) arrive to break up a Mediaeval engagement, and then the Devil (Jules Berry) personally intervenes to prevent love blossoming—has some kind of allegorical resonances to the Nazis and the steadfast spirit of France at this time. Maybe that’s true, but the non-Stygian characters are such awful boors (Fernand Ledoux’s dull Baron and his prospective son-in-law, a garrulous warlord played by Marcel Herrand), while our male love interest, Gilles (Cuny) hardly seems much more attractive, with his odd mullet-like hair and declaimed speeches. Maybe that’s what the ladies liked back then, but this is on much firmer ground with Arletty’s Dominique, a gender non-conforming minstrel at first who reveals herself to be a seductive femme fatale, while the lovely Marie Déa is Gilles’ ingenuous love interest. It all looks very grand, as in the kind of production that you’d imagine might divert minds from the political situation of the era (and Carné would follow it with the even grander Les Enfants du paradis), but its love story struck me as fairly dull. Perhaps I just don’t have the romance and melodrama in my heart that a viewer requires.
CREDITS
Director Marcel Carné; Writer Pierre Laroche and Jacques Prévert; Cinematographer Roger Hubert; Starring Arletty, Alain Cuny, Marie Déa, Jules Berry, Marcel Herrand, Fernand Ledoux; Length 121 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Thursday 25 April 2024.
filmcentric 