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Georges Franju's surrealism, like Buñuel's, slides from one institution to another with ease, so that the punitive asylum and the scientist's bloody castle are here, simply, the family house. Thérèse (Emmanuelle Riva), just out of her trial and in the back of a limo headed home: "What confession do I start with?" Adolescence in the countryside is a sun-dappled mirage, a fascination with the blonde next door (Edith Scob) segues into marriage to her friend's brother (Philippe Noiret) and "the inescapable suffocation of the province." (At the ceremony, the bride flinches as the church's doors slam shut behind her.) Alone, miserable and surrounded by the Landes forests that are the bourgeois family's fortune, she figures that sometimes it takes a bit of arsenic to get through to a dreary fellow. To avoid scandal, the would-be prisoner is cloistered away in the murky wing of the manor, in bed slowly disintegrating surrounded by ashtrays. "For the sake of family, I agree to deceive my country's justice system." Madame Bovary is the basis, a slight maiden with "a deranged power inside," a hard feminist quietly stupefied by her own anarchic impulses. The filming is mercilessly lucid, with severe interiors filled with leaden furniture and Melville's rapid tracks and fades (Léon Morin, Priest). Franju adapts Mauriac's text with meticulous faithfulness, and still finds dozens of Franju images: A deaf crone ringing a bell, Scob cradling the bird she just shot down, a priest frozen mid-sermon, an off-screen death that halts a suicide. Liberation comes at last in Paris, with the husband still confounded by "the two Thérèses" and a dissolve from teeming city streets to the blasting sky above dry pine trees. Lean has the stiff upper-lip precedent in Madeleine, Fassbinder follows suit with Effi Briest. With Sami Frey, Renée Devillers, Jeanne Pérez, and Hélène Dieudonné. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |