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"Une vie quotidienne" is its own comeuppance, all told, Jean Renoir captures it alfresco in the Normandy Flaubert wrote about. Charles Bovary (Pierre Renoir), the provincial doctor after "a simple love," his first wife keels over by the clotheslines and his second one wins him over by vigorously knocking back a shot of homemade liquor. Emma (Valentine Tessier) and the hobgoblin of boredom, the priest listens to her woes and wonders if it's a case of indigestion. A dash of Ophüls at the Marquis' ball, waltzing luxury bracketed by plunging and rising crane shots. (The compliment is returned in Madame de... as a memory of the lady's letter ripped and tossed out of the carriage window.) Boulanger (Fernand Fabre), Leon (Daniel Lecourtois) and Lheureux (Robert Le Vigan) around her, a distinctly Renoirian configuration going back to Nana. A recurring reverse track past sun-dappled groves gives a hint of Cézanne, interiors on the other hand are filled with doorways for vertical deep-focus frames and grousing from the crabby mother-in-law: "The collapse of morals begins at the head of the household." Distributors cut out more than an hour, the remaining torso still abounds in beauties. A Donizetti opera has the heroine enraptured while her husband complains about the music drowning out the plot, Stroheim's Greed is indicated with a tilt down from the bedroom window to the blind beggar warbling in the street. After happiness the grave, or so hopes the dreamer with a fatalistic streak, her demise from arsenic is instead an agonizing one. "You pay for everything." Later versions by Minnelli and Chabrol build on it accordingly. With Max Dearly, Pierre Larquey, Alice Tissot, Monette Dinay, Louis Florencie, and Héléna Manson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |