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.....the painted woman will go....

In his absorbing "Voyage A Travers Le cinema Français ",Bertrand Tavernier devoted a whole chapter to Edmond T GReville whose work is not very known in France ;with the exceptions of "Menaces" and "L'Envers Du Paradis" ,none of the works I've seen ("brief ecstasy" "secret life" "Le Port Du Désir" "Les Menteurs" "L'accident") really filled me with enthusiasm.But Tavernier talks about two very attracting movies : "Le Diable Souffle " and " Remous "

Both are really worthwhile and their restoration is cause for celebration.

Most of the action takes place on a tiny island ,in the middle of a river ,in the Basque Country ;one side of the river is French,the other one is Spanish.A voice over presents the main characters: Laurent,a misanthropist who has seen it all before;Louvaine ,a failed piano player who wanted to play Chopin and ended up in a seedy nightclub,;Diego ,a surgeon from Madrid hospitals ,imprisoned by Franco's dictatorship.

But the main character is Tramontana ,the wind which blows through the Pyrénées ;and here we cannot help but feel the influence of Victor Vjöström's "the wind" ,a silent movie from 1928.

This is studio cinema and ,in spite of an obvious lack of means ,we are carried uaway by the director' imaginative skill.In these scenes in which the wind becomes a true character, Greville cuts loose all the visual and sound effects at his command and lets the gusts surge and flow around Louvaine .

The atmosphere easily makes up for the triteness of the plot ;something threatening seems to be hidden in the house :it may be the devil,as Louvaine plays a somewhat religious tune on her harmonium,under the servant's son gazes at her with a lustful eye.And as the surgeon performs the operation with makeshift means, he looks almost scary under his mask:hence this unexpected nightmarish scene when he tells he was not able to save her patient before bursting out laughing .

If the wind is one of the main characters,so are the muddy waters of the torrent which cut off the island from the world;perhaps ,with the storm raging and the waters sweeping everything along,the denouement may seem a little disappointing.It is a relatively minor point and considered at a longer view,an almost irrelevant one.At the time,no other director was able to use the forces of nature so efficiently.

Like this ? try these ....

"The wind" Victor Vjöström',1928

"Pattes Blanches " ,Jean Grémillon, 1948

"Noz W Wodzie "and "Cul De sac" ,Roman Polanski ,1962 and 1966