Faisons un rêve...

I'm still shocked at how few reviews there are of Sacha Guitry's films here on IMDB, so feel duty bound to add another, even if I don't have much in the way of fresh information to contribute.

This one is really little more than a bedroom farce - very stagey and confined almost entirely to a single set, but the dialogue is so quick and witty and energetic, and the chemistry between Guitry and his ravishing real life lover Jacqueline Delubac so good, that never feels a limitation. Needless cutaways to fjords and train stations and alien landing sites would be a distraction, in fact, from what is best about it, and only slow the movie down.

As another reviewer here noted, Michel Simon appears (uncredited) very briefly in the opening scene - I was surprised at this as I was convinced Guitry had never worked with him before 1951's La Poison - he even says so (at some length) in the film itself(!)

Once again the English subtitles on every version I could find were poor, sometimes obscuring a joke or making no sense at all, so I ended up creating my own subtitle file for it by comparing the original French and using some common sense. The title, too, "Let's Make A Dream" is better as a simple straight translation than some of the other attempts.

Anyhow and regardless, this was a delight: cheeky and incisive and dazzlingly fast - one of Guitry's best. His enthusiastic touch elevates what could have been just a creaky old potboiler into something that can probably best be described as an Oscar Wilde bedroom farce.

It begins with a gypsy band playing tunes. Eventually they are joined by a party, with the camera roving lightly from one bon mot to the next, pausing only to let a waiter sneak some food. Sacha Guitry asks Jacqueline Delubac and her husband, Raimu, to come to his apartment at 3:45 the next afternoon; he wants to show them something. They arrive, discuss things amusingly, and Raimu departs for, as he says, a business appointment with a South American. Guitry emerges from the bath room, where he has been washing his hands for ten minutes and eavesdropping, to ask Mlle Delubac to be his mistress.

It's a light, frothy farce, with Guitry babbling almost non-stop for more than half an hour. Although it's essentially a three-person stage piece -- by Guitry -- the camerawork by Georges Benoît keeps things moving, and Mlle Delubac has little to do but pose smiling and occasionally say something so the camera set-up can be changed. Raimu offers a wonderfully plodding pace to his lines, and Arletty, Claude Dauphin, and Michel Simon each get a witty line at the party.

This is really a rather remarkable film.

In one sense, it is the typical boulevard comedy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the story of a man who seduces another man's wife away from him and then finds a way of getting him out of the picture. That goes back at least to Molière, and probably before. Granted, the three actors involved, Guitry as the seducer, Raimu as the husband, and Pauline Delubac as the ravishingly beautiful and beautifully clever wife, play these stereotypical roles as well as they have ever been played. And Guitry's dialogue has some magnificent lines. But the situation is not new or remarkable.

What is remarkable, however, is the delivery of the dialogue, especially by Guitry. Raimu takes his lines with the pace of a southerner, exaggerated and funny. Delubac delivers hers with astounding wit and charm. But Guitry delivers his, which after all he wrote for himself and performed nightly in the theater before making the movie, at an astounding speed. Astounding, because he also delivers them with the utmost clarity. They go flying by at a speed that would put Katherine Hepburn in "Bringing up baby" to shame, and yet you don't miss one of them. It is, among other things, a remarkable lesson in theatrical diction.

There are plenty of great lines to keep you laughing. But don't overlook the fact that you catch them all even when they are delivered at a sometimes astounding speed.