Une si jolie petite plage

In the summer it's a handsome if undistinguished summer resort. It's winter now, and it rains all the time. Only one hotel is open, and it caters to consumptives. Gérard Philipe shows up and rents a room. He says he is a student. As the movie proceeds it becomes clear that he has been here before; he was the boy who did all the unwelcome chores and was beaten by the owner. The woman he ran away with, a famous singer, has been murdered. It's like HOTEL DU NORD, run by a sour Jane Marken.

What comes after poetic realism fails? What movie can you make when there is no G*d, no fate driving lives, because he is an old man, dying of tuberculosis? What happens, as one character remarks, there is no love, so you should take advantage of it? You get film noir, of course, but film noir is about crime and evil. How do you make a movie about love when there is no such thing, when Madeleine Robinson wants to help, when Philipe wants to help, but no one can help? This despairing movie examines that question, and it does so very well in its own, bleak way.

It seems be the lead character of this bitter film. A film about past. Remembering the play by Albert Camus. All seems a blank confession. A man. A place. The tension. And an ally . And the rain . Far by every escape.

A very dramatic story of a man who comes back to a place where he has spent his adolescence.The description of this little hotel, the beach and his guests is very good.Also the story of this strange guest is fascinating. The French critic Gerorges Sadoul wrote that "Une si jolie petite plage" is the best noir film of Yves Allégret. Gérard Philipe enjoyed very much his role in this film.The performances of Jean Servais and Madeleine Robinson are also very good.

It's 1948,the French "nouvelle vague" is yet to come,and nevertheless "une si jolie petite plage" seems to announce the era. Gerard Philippe's character might be the missing link between Carné's desperate characters of the thirties ("le jour se lève","Quai des brumes")and the mistreated rebels of the late fifties/early sixties(Truffaut's Antoine Doinel ,Franju's "la tête contre les murs" hero). The landscape has rarely been so depressing that in this Allégret's masterwork;like Poe's "Usher house",it seems to influence the characters,to rub off on the hero .These desolate shores never seem to see the sun,the inn itself is hostile .For the hero,this is the end of the road,he has become a murderer,and having lost all his illusions,he comes back to this eating-house where he used to work as a child (he was an orphan)As the rain which keeps falling down,bad luck is here to stay:a young boy ,an orphan too,is working now in this miserable place and the hero urges him not to accept this miserable life with no future in sight,but in vain.The servant (Madeleine Robinson) tries to do the same for the young man whom she loves.All in vain.In the last pictures,a breathtaking tracking out takes us faraway from this doomed place as if the director himself wanted to escape such a darkness.Gérard Philippe used to regard this film noir as one of his very best.

His sensitive performance as Prince Myshkin in L'IDIOT (1946) had brought international attention, and his performance in THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH (1947) made him a star; with his next two films, LE CHARTREUSE DE PARME (1948) and UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE (1949), Gerard Philipe's position as the premier leading man of French cinema in the post-war period was assured.

Just as PEPE LE MOKO, QUAI DES BRUMES, LA BETE HUMAINE and LE JOUR SE LEVE had established the Jean Gabin persona in the 1930s (what Andre Bazin had termed "the tragic destiny"), so these four films established the Philipe persona, the sensitive young man overwhelmed by destiny. In UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE, the small seaside resort out-of-season, with its fog, its desolation, and its ramshackle buildings, is a perfect setting for this story of lost souls seeking connection and (possible) redemption. Madeleine Robinson, as the young woman working at the inn, is Philipe's counterpart: a sullen girl battered by circumstances who nevertheless is touched by the fragility of the young man. The fact that, on a realistic level, Gerard Philipe does not project the hardened facade of a criminal is rather the point: the point of a star persona. In this case, Philipe's projection of an intensely isolated, even alienated, psyche which defined the existential dilemma that was being defined by writers such as Sartre and Camus in the post-war epoch, was really enshrined in this movie.

Philipe would prove to be a more versatile actor than initially assumed; his humor, his athletic vigor, and his exuberance can be seen in movies like FANFAN LA TULIPE and POT-BOUILLE. But UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE shows Philipe at the apex of his portrayals of tortured youth, a prototype for such stars as Montgomery Clift and James Dean.