La belle équipe

La belle equipe or They Were Five is often praised as the highest achievement of Julien Duvivier. It's French poetic realism at its finest - a style whose most remembered representatives are: L'Atalante (1934) by Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937). When Charles Spaak had just finished the screenplay of La belle equipe the master Jean Renoir got actually very interested in it and wanted to film it, but Julien Duvivier had already bought the rights for it. One can't help but wonder how different the film might have been if Renoir would've filmed it. At least it would've gained much more reputation, but no one can no whether it would have been better, because Duvivier was a very talented filmmaker as well. La belle equipe represents the French optimism (1935-36), it's also a true national film and an interesting contemporary description of the working class.

A group of five penniless workers wander around the streets of Paris. They live in a lousy block of flats, whose landlord put the light out immediately by 9 pm. One night when they are playing cards in the darkness, a pleasant message arrives: they've just won 100, 000 Francs with the lottery. After a quick enthusiasm they realize that the amount won't last through their whole life: so they decide to buy and reconstruct a small resort out of town. Eventually wealth and fortune start to rip the group apart and unpredictable events begin to occur.

Julien Duvivier first shows the miserable life of the workers: he shows them hanging in the streets, leaning on dirty walls and hiding from cops. The happy twist seems quite surreal, but the series of events it occurs is far more interesting. As I mentioned above the film represents the optimism in France during that time: is it possible for the working class to go and work on their own outside of the society? It's quite hard to know what Duvivier thought himself because he filmed two different endings: a pessimist ending for the bourgeoisie and an optimist one for the working class, which is far more well known and often the ending distributed in Europe.

No matter what Duvivier himself thought, - is it possible in this society for the working class to stand up and do what they've dreamed of, La belle equipe is a poetic description of its time. It beautifully exhales the optimism of the short era in France before the WWII, which Jean Renoir tried to prevent with his poetic masterpiece La Grande Illusion. La belle equipe is a true national film.

One for nostalgia buffs. One of a handful of movies that epitomise French cinema in the thirties. Gabin, Charles Vanel and Viviane Romance proved durable, indeed, Romance was something of a French Jeanne Crain/Linda Darnell in the forties while Vanel scored heavily in La Salaire du Peur and Les Diaboliques. Gabin, of course, proved most durable and iconic; this was made around the time of Pepe Le Moko and still to come were Quai des Brumes, Le jour se leve, and then the great post-war stuff, Touchez pas au grisbi, Le Chat, La Traversee de Paris,etc. First and last this is a Depression movie, made and released in the heart of the international slump. But it's also about comaraderie, how strong it is yet how fragile. When they don't have change of a match the 5 friends ARE strong but once they hit the numbers on the National Lottery it all begins to crumble from the inside. It's a curious mixture of the lyrical - the pastoral scenes along the Marne that would be echoed in Casque d'Or, the sentimental songs, and Gabin in full throat is something to hear - and the pragmatic - money corrupts and frailty, thy name is woman - but against the odds it works. Duvivier doesn't get too much attention today yet he remains a key player in French cinema.

But its well done, written, played. Good story line. But 75 years is a long time.

The film that became the emblem of the Popular Front does not really present its ideology, on the contrary. Duvivier asserts social determinism, cuts down on solidarity, as if any social dream were impossible. Duvivier keeps the freshness, not the ideal. It doesn't matter if he uses shortcuts that are not very credible. What remains are the shots on the Marne.

La Belle Equipe / They Were Five (1936): Brief Review -

A fairly realistic take on human greed, friendship and money, which works more with the re-shot optimistic ending than the pessimistic one. Julien Duvivier's Pepe Le Moko with Jean Jabin came the next year, but fortunately, this one realistic film was saved by the negative shades of that poetic surrealism. La Belle Equipe comes out with a funny and lighthearted film first and then turns serious. Like every other known French film of that time, it has that disastrous love angle/triangle, but is survived by the idealistic endings. So, the film has two endings: the first one is pessimistic, and it's covered with jealousy and foolish romance that didn't work for me. The second one is positive, where the femme fatale is defeated by friendship, and I liked this one better. My rating will go straight half a mark down for the negative ending and half a mark up for the optimistic one that I liked (it's final). Still, there are some flaws in the film, as it drags unnecessarily despite a short runtime of 100 minutes (including both endings). Like I said, it has that foolish romance to hurt the intelligence, and it's too annoying for a revolutionary French cinema of that time. Well, that's the case with many Jean Gabin and Jean Renoir films of that time; maybe it's just me who thinks otherwise. Anyways, the film makes a fine one-time watch to learn about French ethics of the 30s, as the storyline is very close to reality. 5 friends win a lottery, and their friendship is tested while they use the money to make themselves well-settled. The performances are decent, the screenplay is a bit problematic, and Julien Duvivier's direction is strictly okay. Actually, topics like human greed and jealousy in love triangles have become dated by the mid-30s, so I don't really think there is anything extraordinary here.

RATING - 6.5/10*

By - #samthebestest.