Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/08/24

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, February 8, 2024

The Smiling Madame Beudet (Germaine Dulac, 1923)

Germaine Dermoz and Alexandre Arquillière in The Smiling Madame Beudet

Cast: Germaine Dermoz, Alexandre Arquillière, Madeleine Guitty, Jean d'Yd, Yvette Grisier, Raoul Paoli, Armand Thirard. Screenplay: Germaine Dulac, André Obey, based on a play by Obey and Denys Abiel. Cinematography: Maurice Forster, A. Morrin, Paul Parguel.

Mme. Beudet (Germaine Dermoz) really doesn't have much to smile about. She's married to a gargoyle of a husband (Alexandre Arquillière) who bullies her, and when he doesn't get his way likes to pull a gun out of his desk drawer and pretend to be about to commit suicide. He mocks her interest in playing Debussy on the piano, and when he goes out to the theater with friends one night -- she has declined to accompany them -- slams down the lid on the keys and locks it. No wonder that she daydreams about a handsome tennis player she sees in a magazine and fantasizes his getting rid of her husband. She knows one secret about his familiar suicide ploy: The gun is unloaded and he keeps the bullets in a separate drawer. So she surreptitiously loads the gun. Then one day he calls her into his study to harangue her about household expenses, starts to pull his usual suicide ploy, and then points the gun at her. It goes off, missing her, and a startled Beudet runs to his wife, thinking that she loaded the gun to kill herself. He hugs her tearfully, but her expression is the usual one of glum misery. Germaine Dulac's short film is often called the first feminist movie, although that seems too superficial a label. What does distinguish it is Dulac's use of superimposed images, such as her fantasy of the tennis player, to give further insight into the characters. In the climactic scene in which Beudet hugs his wife, a picture in the background changes to what seems to be the proscenium of a puppet theater whose curtain falls. Dulac seems to suggest that The Smiling Madame Beudet is a kind of puppet show, with the squabbling Beudets as her version of Punch and Judy.