Quadrille (Sacha Guitry, 1938)

Georges Grey and Gaby Morlay in Quadrille

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Gaby Morlay, Jacqueline Delubac, Georges Grey, Pauline Carton, Jacques Vitry. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Robert Lefebvre. Production design: Jean Perrier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

One of Sacha Guitry's strengths as a filmmaker was that he was a prolific playwright who knew how to craft dialogue and plot. One of Sacha Guitry's weaknesses is that he was a prolific playwright who never quite mastered the difference between a play and a film -- namely, that the actors in a film have to perform without benefit of an audience, and the dialogue they're speaking shouldn't ramble on, as it tends to do without the interruptions of laughter or other unscripted responses of a live audience. The masters of film comedy -- I'm thinking here of directors like Howard Hawks and George Cukor -- knew that a continued stream of bons mots or wisecracks needed the right pacing to keep a movie theater audience from covering up the best moments. But Guitry's characters in Quadrille talk non-stop, none more so than the director-writer-star himself, never giving us a break to savor what has been so wittily said or so poignantly evoked. Quadrille is a pleasant French romantic comedy about a publisher with a mistress who's a star on the stage. She cuckolds him with a handsome American movie star, just as the publisher is about to propose marriage to her. When she learns that she has just blown the possibility of marrying him, and it looks like the movie star has decamped, she attempts suicide. But things are set right by the fourth player in this quadrille, a pretty reporter who manages to sort things out, rescuing the actress in the nick of time, sending her off with the movie star, and taking the publisher for herself. Guitry plays the publisher, with Gaby Morlay as the actress, Jacqueline Delubard as the reporter, and Georges Grey -- who had made his film debut in a small role in Guitry's The Pearls of the Crown (1937) -- as the movie star. There's a certain French insouciance about playing the actress's suicide attempt for comedy -- it doesn't work in the more American context of Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), for example.

Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952)

Pleasure, as the poets never tire of telling us, is inextricable from pain.  Le Plaisir is an anthology film dramatizing three stories by Guy de Maupassant that center on what has been called the pleasure-pain perplex. An elderly man nearly dances himself to death in an attempt to recapture his youth. The patrons of a brothel quarrel and even come to blows when they discover that it is closed. An artist marries his mistress to atone for his cruelty to her. Max Ophuls brings all of his elegant technique to the stories, including his characteristic restless camera, which prowls around the wonderful sets by Jean d'Eaubonne, who received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for art direction. It's also, like Ophuls's La Ronde (1950), an all-star production -- if your stars are French. Claude Dauphin plays the doctor who treats the youth-seeking dancer; Madeleine Renaud is the madame of the brothel, Danielle Darrieux is one of her "girls," and Jean Gabin plays the madame's brother, who invites her to bring the girls to the country for his daughter's first communion, hence the temporary closure of the brothel; Daniel Gélin is the artist, Simone Simon his model/mistress, and Jean Servais his friend who also narrates the final section. Of the three segments of the film, the middle one is the longest and I think the most successful, moving from the raucous opening scene in which the men of the small Normandy town discover the brothel closed into a comic train ride to the country, which is as fetchingly pastoral a setting as you could wish. The sequence climaxes with the filles de joie dissolving in tears at the first communion -- the little church in which it takes place is one of d'Eaubonne's most inspired sets -- then returning to town and a joyous welcome. Intriguingly, Ophuls never lets us inside the brothel: We see it only as voyeurs, through the windows. Nothing of this segment is "realistic" in the least, making the melancholy first and last segments more important in establishing the film's theme and tone. The first segment does its part to set up the course of the film as a whole, beginning with a riotous opening as tout Paris flocks to the opening of a dance hall, a pleasure palace, followed by scenes of lively dancing, then the collapse of the elderly patron, who is wearing a frozen and rather creepy mask of youth, and concluding with the bleakness of his normal existence, tended by his aging wife, who is fittingly played by Gaby Morlay, once a silent film gamine. The final segment is the bleakest of all, as the film concludes with the artist pushing his wheelchair-bound wife along the seashore, penance for having provoked her suicide attempt. The film leaves me with something like the feeling I get from the song "Plaisir D'Amour."

Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment. 
Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie. 

The pleasure of love lasts only a moment. The pain of love lasts a lifetime.

Gigi (Jacqueline Audry, 1949)

The print shown on Turner Classic Movies was not very good, the images having shifted into high contrast with little variation in the grays, so that the subtitles are often an unreadable white on white. But anyone familiar with either the Colette novella or the 1958 Lerner and Loewe musical version directed by Vincente Minnelli will have little trouble following the story. It's a movie that retains much of the charm and a little of the bite of the original, and Danièle Delorme is a fetching Gigi, the girl raised to be a grande horizontale who wins the heart and hand of the wealthy Gaston Lachaille (Frank Villard). Delorme and Villard don't erase memories of Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan in the musical, but they have their own contributions to make, especially Villard, who is particularly strong in the scenes in which Gaston comes to realize the true nature of his feelings for Gigi. You sense his rising queasiness when she accepts his proposal to become his mistress, especially in the scene in the private room at the restaurant where they are about to consummate their relationship. When she naively asks why the couches in the room have slipcovers and when she chooses his cigar by rolling it between her fingers as she has been taught, the full obscenity of the situation becomes apparent to him. It has been apparent to us from the moment at the beginning of the film when we meet his uncle, Honoré, whom Jean Tissier plays as far more a dirty old man than the elegant Maurice Chevalier did in the musical. Which is not to say that the movie's moral stance is heavy-handed: Director Audry has a very light touch, the product of a close collaboration with Colette. There are some wonderful period touches throughout the film, including Gaston's automobile, Aunt Alicia's (Gaby Morlay) telephone, and the bathing machine that is pulled by a mule into the waves at Deauville. The movie also reminded me that Gigi is a nickname for Gilberte, which is also the name of Swann's daughter and the narrator's first infatuation in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. There's also a scene in which Gigi plays hide-and-seek with other schoolgirls in the park, that echoes for me Albertine and her little band of girls in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Proust was only two years older than Colette, and the Recherche and  Gigi very much share the same milieu.