remixam

The whole scene where Jenny and Orme end up shelling peas together thrills me. The comings and goings between the kitchen and the dining room are elaborated in the most efficient and simple way (though the striking close-up of Swanson's face peeping through the serving hatch is arguably an unfortunate choice that disrupts the balance of the scene) as if for the sole purpose of introducing the subsequent non-event, when the whirl of half-lies vanishes into the knowing tenderness of a blissful moment. Orme's gentle gesture when he takes a seat to join Jenny in the shelling party is striking for its surprising freshness and spontaneity. The lovely minute that follows is disarmingly simple, fading out in a murmur of awkward smiles and artless confidences with no superfluous coda. No room here to set up an effect, as if Dwan imprinted his signature through the absence of any commentary over what is shown. And it's not a piece of Americana, nor a cheap domestic satire; it's just Orme and Jenny being there together, with no before or after. We did not have to wait for the Nouvelle Vague to film a young couple talking about love and death in a kitchen as if they were in their home.

The final sequence haunts me (obviously above reason). I cannot understand how the scene could be analyzed purely in relation with spatial organization, performances, or script's expectations, as a whole or each part separately. Moreover, if there is any style here, it dissolves in pure abstraction. The scene is mainly a single medium shot of both actors sitting side by side at a table. Two glasses and a bottle of wine on the table. Two candles at both front corners, delimiting the shot's borders. That's about all. Charles Boyer was Charles Boyer, and Irene Dunne, Irene Dunne. I do not trust the additive value of the summation of all aforementioned elements. I cannot understand my astonishment but in this distinct feeling of both renunciation and uprooting, which leaves its mark on all scenes, in the short breath of the suffocating voices, in the petrified bodies that do not belong to this world, in the icy ridges of a frame with no way out. The voice is here a muffled cry in front of an unbreakable wall.