why not?
by Douglas Messerli
Made during the Nazi occupation of
France, Jean Grémillon’s beautiful film, Lumière
d”Été, uses what superficially seems to be a kind of melodrama to speak of
deeper issues of the Vichy rule. In a sense the director and authors hide their
story in plain site by seeming to focus on a kind of soap opera-like ménage a cinq, pretending to have little
but sex on their minds.
But the film begins with a clue to its exploding message, with the
trumpeted warning of the controlled explosion that is about to occur in the
Provencal mountains by workers who are engaged in building a dam. Soon after a
bus is seen winding its way through the mountain highway only to stop and
release a young woman, Michèle (Madeleine Robinson), who is on her way to a
glass fronted hotel, the Guardian Angel where she plans to meet her artist
lover, Roland (Pierre Brasseur).
The hotel is owned by a local aristocrat, Patrice (Paul Bernard) and is
run by Cri-Cri (Madeleine Renaud), Patrice’s long-time lover, to whom, we
perceive almost immediately, Patrice is no longer very attentive. Michèle,
nervous and expectant for Roland’s arrival, immediately catches Patrice eye
after he has conveyed her in his passing cart to the hotel, and Cri-Cri,
jealously observant of her lover, quickly perceives Patrice’s interest in the
girl.
Later that night another guest arrives, the handsome Julien (Georges
Marachal), the foreman of the workers nearby. Presuming he is the young man who
Michéle awaits, the desk clerk, Tonton, whose favorite expression throughout is
“Why not?” sends him to Michéle’s room, where in the dark, Julien is surprised
by a woman in his bed who quickly kisses him, thinking he is Roland. When the
lights come on, she perceives that he is a stranger, and he, seeing her as a
kind of angel in a dream, somewhat distractedly leaves to procure another room.
When Roland finally does show up, a few days later, he is drunk, his
“opera,” for which he has designed the set and written the libretto having been
a complete failure. Roland, penniless so we discover, is selfish and pathetic,
not at all like the man Michéle has described to Cri-Cri and others. Indeed, in
his drunken self-pity, Roland demands that if Michéle truly loves him, she
should leave him before he does her further harm.
So does the director, lay out his story, so to speak, setting up what is
less a narrative than a kind of tableau vivant (not unlike Renoir’s Rules of the Game) in which each
character represents a social-sexual
position—Michéle symbolizing the present heart of France, Cri-Cri suggests the
joys of the past (she was once a noted ballerina, and like the past in Vichy
France, she is locked in the “Guardian Angel” just as her birds are locked away
in their cages), Roland expresses the failures of the current artistic
expression, Patrice demonstrates the emptiness of the aristocracy, and Julien
reveals the vitality of the working class. For the rest of this film these
figures do not act out a story as much as they “circle” one other in a long
waiting pattern in an attempt to regain and to express their beliefs and
desires. Except for Michéle and Julien, whom we recognize almost immediately
belong to the present and belong with one
other, the world in which they wait is empty and dying. Cri-Cri has, in fact,
saved all of Patrice’s letters, mementos, and other material of their
relationship, including the news of his wife’s death in an accidental shooting—the
shooter, we soon discover, having been Patrice himself.
Without money, Roland cannot pay their hotel bill, in response to which
Patrice invites the couple to his castle, pretending to be in search of the
artist to paint one of his halls, but in actuality to bring Michéle into his
lair. When Julien hears of their change of venue, he rushes to the castle, uninvited,
to convince her to decamp and to reveal his previously unexpressed love.
When Cri-Cri hears of the situation, she also rushes to Michéle to tell
her what a perverse and evil man Patrice truly is. Up until that point there
has been little evidence of any evil in Patrice’s behavior; he has spent most
of his time with Roland and has convinced Michéle that he trying to help him to
stop drinking. In fact, we soon discover, he is plying whisky in large
quantities to the painter, only biding his time to pounce upon the beautiful
girl. We also begin to suspect that his wife’s accidental death has been
purposeful. For while Julien is visiting, Patrice takes up a gun (he is an
expert marksman) pointing it at the young worker for a second before aiming and
shooting at a nearby toy arcade, set up in his game room, admitting that with a
single shot there would be “not more boy, no more gardener, no one.”
Meanwhile Roland gets a brainstorm: he will paint the entire room in
white, while composing a small landscape only in a locked closet, a metaphor
clearly for what Grémillon himself has done in this brightly-lit film,
white-washing the story while hiding his narrative within.
Finally perceiving the truth, Michéle becomes determined to return to
Paris and find any job she can. But when Julien hears of her decision, he
suggests she stay just a few more days until he too will return to Paris.
Patrice also argues that she should stay at least through his birthday for
which he is throwing a masked-ball. But this time we do know his intentions,
himself admitting to her that he was spoiled as a child, getting always what he
asked for. “I’ll throw myself out the window if you don’t give me what I ask.”
The penultimate scene of this film is the
long, stunningly filmed masquerade, the celebrants all dressed as figures that
represent the extremes of this now very frightening house of horrors. Patrice,
truly revealing himself, dresses as the Marquis de Sade, Roland, mostly drunk
throughout, comes as Hamlet (repeating again and again “There is something
rotten in Denmark,” read France), and Michéle “masquerades” as the innocent
suicide, Ophelia.
Cri-cri, attending to Patrice’s action, accuses the
young girl as lying and attempting carry on a relationship with Patrice; her accusations
awaken Michéle to her mistakes. And when Patrice makes one more attempt to
entrap Michéle, she again resists, removing her costume—and in so doing ridding
herself of Ophelia’s passivity—insisting that she be returned to the hotel.
Patrice is only too ready to do so, but others of the hotel guests insist upon
joining them, and finally Roland, stumbling out of the castle to declare “Poor
Hamlet, the party is over,” demands the driver’s seat. Patrice seems to fumble
with the steering wheel, but given Roland’s drunkenness, we almost feel it
doesn’t matter, for we know the inevitable result: the car crashes, and Roland,
soon after, dies. Patrice is hurt, but the others have been spared.
The miners, including Julien come to their rescue, sending for a doctor,
and taking them into their office-shack. The doctor and others have hurried
into the mine lift, but as they rise, a cable slips, a second in danger of
snapping. Julien shimmies up the cable to fix it, while at the same time
Patrice takes up his gun with the intention of shooting the young hero. The
workers, having followed Patrice, recognize his actions and move en masse toward him, as he, backing away,
finally falls to his death from a cliff. The workers have made things right,
the old order having been crushed. The “heart” of France, Michèle, is now free
to join up with the beautiful representative the French working class. As
Julien has expressed it earlier, it is all like a dream. And given the year,
one of the worst of Vichy history, Grémillon’s film is an hallucinated dream.
Indirectly, Grémillon has
answered Tonton’s insistent question, “Why not?” in both its negative and
positive meanings. Certain things are simply morally wrong, that’s why not; but
then why not imagine an alternative universe? Certainly the audiences of the
day, if not the officials who had approved the film, could read Grémillon’s
metaphors quite clearly, and the Vichy government quickly removed the film from
circulation. Grémillon would make only one other feature film, the equally
masterful La Ciel est á vous of the
following year.
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