Spiel der Erinnerung

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.

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.

'Carnet du Bal' is a beautifully realised piece by one of the truly great directors and comes from the 'Golden Age' of French cinema. A film of elegance and grace but also of ineffable sadness and regret that deals with failure and the ravages of time. A rich widow comes across a dance card of a ball she attended at the age of sixteen. She decides to seek out the men with whom she danced to see how Life has treated them. None of them alas has realised his dreams or fulfilled his potential which will no doubt strike a chord with most viewers. The film at least ends on an upbeat as she adopts the son of the first man on the card who had committed suicide for love of her.The success of this film resulted in Julien Duvivier being invited to direct'The Great Waltz' in Hollywood. He would return to the multi-story format on more than than one occasion but not as effectively. The cast is pure gold and represents France's finest, the likes of whom are gone forever.

"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.

i saw this film for the first time 1946, and was completely spellbound. last time i saw this film beginning of March 2003. the magic was still there. i understood the film much better,enjoed it more. Who can ever forget the haunting melody of the walz or the final episode with Fernandel.