a love the lover cannot explain
by
Douglas Messerli
Charles Spaak (screenplay, based on the novel by André Beucler), Jean Grémillon (director) Gueule d’Amour (Lady Killer) / 1937
French director Jean Grémillon is perceived in his home country as one of the most respected of the pre-New Wave directors alongside with greats such as Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, and Jacques Becker. His important films during the war years such as Remorques (1941), Lumière d'été (1943), and Le ciel est à vous (1944)—brooding yet spiritually luminous works—were highly popular with the film-going audiences of their day, following in the success of his earlier works Gueule d’Amour (1937) and L'Étrange Monsieur Victor (1938). His three great works of the war years has recently been collected in a Criterion Eclipse disk, receiving significant attention when released. Yet today Grémillon still remains unknown to US audiences, particularly when compared to Renoir and Carné.
Renoir’s esteemed position given the
extraordinarily high quality of his oeuvre speaks for itself. And Carné’s works
remain international favorites, mine as well. Yet, particularly when viewed in
the context of the latter, Grémillon’s movies can
now be seen to be in touch with contemporary filmmaking, and at times in the
impulsive actions of their characters and the radical camera shifts in which,
at moments, the narrative is played out in images of light and dark or simply
revealed sans actors have far more in common with films of the New Wave
and in their sometimes obsessional and tortuous relationships between male and
female, spiced with wit, almost remind one at times of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot
le Fou or François Truffaut Jules et Jim.
The ironies of those New Wave films, if
nothing else, are played out quite beautifully in Grémillon’s Gueule d’Amour,
best translated as Lady Killer—where the dew-eyed soft-spoken Jean Gabin
as Lucien Bourrache, a popular star in his
day who could match Jean-Paul Belmondo
in sex appeal in the 1960s—plays a dashing soldier of the Don Juan mold, said
like Casanova to have a lady waiting for him in every city and village.
We certainly witness that in the city of
Orange when the military force marches through the streets, the women racing to
their windows and balconies simply to catch a glimpse of the “lady killer” who
all hope to catch his eye. He can hardly visit a café or restaurant without
every woman ogling him.
The “Gueule d'Amour” is even reprimanded, with secret admiration, by his superiors who have received complaints from males who have temporarily lost their lovers and wives as he sweeps through their towns. Yet, our hero denies that he has any interest in the woman whatsoever. As he tells his innocent friend René (René Lefèvre)—who a little like a young puppy throughout the film gently touches, almost in fond admiration, the older and experienced man—he is more interested in the camaraderie of soldier than the women he encounters along his way.
We might almost believe that, but he too
is enchanted with his own reputation, keeping a photo of himself in full
regalia in his barracks. Moreover, although he is soon to leave his service, he
finds numerous ways to sneak off on tours to nearby cities wherein he continues
to embellish his reputation as a woman slayer.
Having received a small inheritance of
10,000 francs from his aunt, he is permitted to travel overnight to speak to a
lawyer in Cannes, but once there finds himself, soon after, trying to write a
telegram to his commander to explain that he has missed his train—and probably
will continue miss his trains throughout the day.
It is at the telegram office that he
encounters the beautiful, disdainful, and rather mysterious Madeleine (Mireille
Balin) who, somewhat like Proust’s small lemon and orange-flavored cake, sends
him reeling through his memories of past and present loves; if he has been
unfilled previously in his affairs with women, he is completely obsessed with
Madeleine.
She
has come to the telegraph office to request more money, having lost everything
she had gambling at the casino, and as he attempts to wine and dine her in the
adjoining hotel, she—oblivious to or haughtily dismissive of the stares of the
dining room’s females—cautiously accepts his offer of his new-found money to
take another chance at roulette.
She loses once again. Distressed, she asks
that they leave for a leisurely walk before taking a taxi to her home where,
without even so much as a goodnight kiss, she locks him out.
So begins a painful series of events which
result in Lucien, now discharged from the military, following her to Paris.
Finding work as a printer, he runs into her again at the opera and follows her
to her villa, attempting to reconnect.
This time she is somewhat more receptive,
and they find moments to share sex, while Madeleine still keeps him at a
distance, planning dinners which she suddenly cancels, and making plans for the
cinema or simply a walk to which she fails to show up.
What quickly becomes clear is that she is
a kept woman, whose butler and mother help her to keep Lucien at bay. A bit
like Bates, Edward Everett Horton’s fastidiously correct butler in the Fred
Astaire musical Top Hat of just two years before Gueule d'Amour,
a good deal of the picture’s humor derives from le valet de chambre’s (Jean Aymé,
best known for his role in Louis Feuillade’s
1915 Les Vampires), aloof put-downs of the would-be lover as he attempts
to keep him as far away as possible from entering Madeleine’s domain uninvited.
When finally Lucien, against all decorum,
barges in, he is met with Madeleine’s mother, who while comically chowing down
an entire gourmet meal cooked up just for her by the valet, makes it quite
clear to Gabin’s character that, while her daughter’s wealthy benefactor may
permit some sexual dalliances, they can be only occasional and temporary; Madeleine
by no means can go with him on vacation in the country as he desires. Lucien
retreats, now realizing the full truth of Madeleine’s sexual commitments.
Still obsessed with her, however, he is
determined, after what he has imagined to be a shared love, to get an answer
from her directly. This time the mother calls the patron, who soon after
appears to claim his financial prize. Standing on either side of the fat
financier, Madeleine and her mother make it clear that Lucien, no longer the
handsome “lady killer” of his military days, has no real role to play in their
lives.
Quitting his job and Paris, the former
soldier returns to Orange where he opens up a small country bar, without making
an attempt to contact his former friend, René, who has since leaving the
military become a respected doctor in the city.
Through a visit to a former restaurant he
and Lucien once frequented, René discovers that his friend has returned,
joyfully meeting up with him and describing that he now has himself discovered
love in the form of an impulsive woman who has changed his entire life. He
invites his dearest friend to meet his fiancée, Madeleine, the very next
evening.
Yes, Lucien suddenly perceives, it is
his former Madeleine with whom René has fallen in love. He arrives at René’s
home early, before Madeleine. The scene that follows is almost an inverted
idyll played out with the two males, as René takes the now decimated “lady
killer” around the small villa he has been reconstructing, describing to his
friend the different flowers and gardens he has planted, his dreams for new
additions to the house, and his future dreams. He has indeed created the
perfect world in which to live with someone he deeply loves. Alas, we know what
these two heterosexual males cannot: that together they would both come to life
and love in such an ideal space. René, as Lucien had so often before, receives
a telegram saying that his lover cannot join him.
When Lucien arrives home to his bar,
Madeleine is waiting there, the camera capturing her silhouette, while her now
aged and ailing former lover is represented only through his shadow. When the
two meet, it is as if they have performed the scene over and over before and
know the lines well before they say them, she insisting that she has come to
Orange only because of her love for him and that she wants to resume their
relationship; he reprimanding her for having so taken advantage of the
childlike believer René.
Insisting he is simply jealous of her
meaningless attentions to René, she phones René telling him that he has never
meant anything to her and that their relationship has come to an end.
The Don Juan now becomes the murderer he
was always meant to be, exorcising her not for himself so much as to protect
his friend—a man with whom he cannot even explain to himself that he loves in a
way he could never have this plotting femme fatale.
Showing up at René’s door Lucien has no rational
explanation of what has just happened, putting himself entirely in his friend’s
hands—which only reminds us how earlier in this film René had so innocently yet
lovingly stroked Lucien’s knee and face.
His friend, it appears, now perfectly
understands what truly has happened, buying Lucien a ticket for Marseille and
from there an escape to Africa where he will be safe. At the train station—while
Lucien Bourrache (which means “borage,” the
blue herbaceous plant which symbolizes power and courage) stares forward awaiting
a destiny he cannot comprehend and perhaps having lost any memories through
Madeleine’s murder he may have had of the past—René kisses Lucien gently on the
cheek, not in the way another Frenchman might greet another friend or to say
goodbye, but with a shy intensity we comprehend means something far deeper.
As the train moves away with Lucien on it,
René, like the hundreds of lovers saying goodbye, runs after it until it has
sped away from his fruitless attempt to call his lover back.
Los Angeles, October 25, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (October 2020).
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