Spiel der Erinnerung

"Un Carnet de Bal" is a poem made movie. Like Christine, everybody had gone into his past, looking for the point of break, which decided one way, in order to rectify ours errors.

Finally, "Un Carnet de Bal" is a film for all the time.

J'adore Ce film! But "Christine"? Where did that come from? I've only ever known it as Un Carnet DE Bal, with Valse Gris permanently etched into my mind.

I saw it first around 1941 when I was 14, during the war, at the long lamented Academy cinema on London's Oxford Street. It turned up there periodically, along with La Femme Du Boulanger, Le Jour SE Leve, The Strange Case of David Gray (a renamed Vampyr), La Fin Du Jour, and some other prewar classics. Great stuff for a schoolboy! Previously I've had it on a censored Korean DVD (the Marseilles sequence had been removed) but now,happily,it's available complete as a gloriously restored Bluray. Gaumont,you have our huge thanks!

It's a magnificent film, a bit wordy perhaps here and there but they're good French words. It's a lasting achievement by a superb cast and crew at the top of their game.

And with great respect let's give thought to Harry Baur and Robert Lynen (Duvivier's Poil de Carotte), both murdered by the Nazis during the occupation.

One of the great classics of 1930's French cinema and one of cinema's great ;memory' pictures, "Un Carnet de Bal" has, sadly, fallen out of fashion in these more cynical times despite its being a surprisingly hard-nosed and often bleak movie. The plot revolves around recently widowed Christine as she tracks down the men she danced with from an old dance programme of twenty years before, (when she was sweet sixteen). Of course, each of them has changed drastically, almost to the point where they are no longer recognizable; in fact two are already dead and as Christine explores her past some harsh truths emerge.

Marie Bell is a luminous Christine, the great Francoise Rosay is magnificent as the mother of a boy who may have killed himself for love and a whole host of great French actors of the period play the survivors and potential suitors. There are flawless performances from Harry Baur, Pierre Blanchar, Fernandel, Louis Jouvet, Raimu and Pierre Richard-Willm. It also represents the high point in Julien Duvivier's career and was at one time considered among the greatest films ever made. It cries out for rediscovery.

This is one of the quintessential films of the classic age of French cinema. One just has to look at the credits: directed by Duvivier, with Fernandel, Baur, Jouvet (one of his best roles), Marie Bell, Francoise Rosay... all of them at the peak of their form. And held together musically by Jaubert's haunting theme melody, which I can still hum in the nostalgia cupboard of my memory fifty years after I first heard it.

The story is slight. Actually it is a series of vignettes, strung together by the bittersweet pilgrimage of a woman who sets out to find again the men who signed her first dance card. But that is just a pretext for a marvelous set of character sketches played by a marvelous cast of character actors served by a great character director.

While Godard and co were still in diapers,Duvivier,Renoir and Carné were inventing the best French cinema that had ever been. I would trade you all M."A bout de soufflé" filmography for "un carnet de bal"

Leonard Maltin gives a four stars rating to this 1937 movie,and all we can do is approve of his judgment.The movie of nostalgia,of time passing by,of disenchantment,"un carnet de bal" is all this and more.

On the banks of a lake -the romantic place par excellence-,a woman is remembering her past.Her madeleine de Proust is her dance card ."Memories tumbling like sweets from a jar".But these sweets leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

She goes back in the past,in search of her long lost dance partners. She will have to delude herself:what she discovers is ruined lives,regrets,embittered characters,human wrecks.Time is a hard Master and it leaves no one unharmed.As always in Duvivier's work,the harder they fall,the better the sketches are.For it is basically a movie made up of sketches,Julien Duvivier's métier.All youth ideals have gone down the drain:the brilliant medicine student has become an abortionist;the lawyer with bright prospects now has a lousy shady cabaret;one of the woman's beaus is dead and his mother gone nuts acts as if he's still alive.Two of them have escaped from a doomed fate:but one has become a priest and the other keeps his love for something else than women .

The movie made up of sketches ,as I said, had always been Duvivier's forte.Here ,there are seven flashbacks,one prologue and one short epilogue :strange how this final resembles that of Mitchell Leisen's "to each his own" (1942),when the boy says to Olivia De Havilland:"I think it's our dance mother".Having directed with a topflight cast "tales of Manhattan" (1942) in America,Duvivier went even further in the "sketches movie":in "sous le ciel de Paris" ,he used intertwined little stories till all these subplots became a seamless whole.

Yes ,Julien Duvivier's importance in the seventh art is incalculable.