A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Désiré (Sacha Guitry, 1937)

Alys Delonce, Jacques Baumer, Sacha Guitry, Arletty, and Jacqueline Delubac in Désiré
Cast: Sacha Guitry, Jacqueline Delubac, Jacques Baumer, Arletty, Pauline Carton, Saturnin Fabre, Alys Delonce. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Jean Bachelet. Production design: Jean Perrier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

Sacha Guitry's Désiré -- not to be confused with Frank Borzage's Desire (1936) or Henry Koster's Désirée (1954) -- is an upstairs-downstairs comedy about a valet and the woman he serves. It's stagy and talky -- especially when Guitry himself is onscreen, as in the scene near the start of the movie when he delivers a lengthy plea to Mme. Cléry to hire him despite a rather sensational report from his former employer, and in the scene near the end when he apologizes at length for his behavior, which he sees as inherent in the relationship between master and servant, as well as between men and women. Odette Cléry, played by Guitry's wife and frequent co-star Jacqueline Delubac, is a former actress who is the mistress of a French cabinet minister, Felix Montignac. She'd like to marry Montignac, but he's reluctant because he feels it's good for his image as a prominent government official to have a mistress. That comedy of manners premise sets up what follows when she hires a new valet, named Désiré and played by Guitry. He's clued in to the nature of the household by his fellow servants, Madeleine the maid, played by Arletty, and Adèle the cook, played by Pauline Carton. Complications ensue when Madeleine overhears Désiré, through the thin wall separating their bedrooms, talking in his sleep about his passion for Mme. Cléry, while Montignac hears Odette talking in her sleep about making love with Désiré. There's some farcical goings-on involving a book of dream interpretations, and the whole thing comes to a crisis at a dinner party for Adrien Corniche (Saturnin Fabre) and his very deaf wife, Henriette (Alys Delonce). There's some very funny, albeit cruel, comic business involving Henriette's deafness, but the whole film may be just a little too arch and loquacious for its own good. It's also a little hard to imagine Guitry as the kind of man who inspires forbidden passion in his female employers, as Désiré is said to do.