Le mariage de Chiffon

It's about 1904 in the middle of France. Lt. Colonel André Luguet has just been posted back to his old haunts on a rainy night. Walking to his hotel, he encounters Odette Joyeux, a 28-year-old woman playing a girl half her age splashing barefoot in a puddle and is enchanted. One by one, we are introduced to Odette's family: her mother, Suzanne Dantès. Her stepfather, Louis Seigner; her doting bachelor uncle-by-marriage, Jacques Demesnil, who is trying to build an airplane; and so forth. It's a sweet little romance that bounces back and forth, making fun of a France gone forty years.

It was the sort of movie approved by the authorities at the time: light, fluffy and not the sort of thing to make anyone think any deep thoughts. Director Claude Autunt-Laura was the Anti-Clouzot of directors. Clouzot showed you the seamy side of things. Autant-Lara showed you the rich drinking orangeade. Clouzot made one film during the War, LE CORBEAU, which got him banned because it annoyed the Vichy Government. Then, after the War, it still annoyed the new government, so he couldn't make another film for a few years. Meanwhile Autant-Lara made films before the War, during the War and after the War and no one seemed to notice, because they were pleasant, frothy things when that was the style. Just the amount of sex in them changed according to the current fashion.

It's a well-told story, even if Mlle. Joyeux is a bit old for her role. I'm sure the audience was pleased to think back to 1904, when La Belle France was forward-thinking and, in the words of a character here, discussing his martial defeat, "We always think we will win." I'm sure that modest, self-denigrating remark was approved by the censors, who could never approve of Clouzot, no matter whose government they represented.

Although it is a pleasant movie ,it seems like a draft, a rehearsal for Autant-Lara's next movie "douce".

Autant-Lara was mainly known for his collaborations with Lehmann (three in all, one of them "fric frac" is particularly memorable).During the Occupation he began to work on his own and he would become an important artist with such works as "douce "(1943)"le diable au corps"(1946) "l'auberge rouge" (1951)or "la traversée de Paris" (1956).

"Le marriage de chiffon" is his first real work.It casts Odette Joyeux as Chiffon (her nickname) an aristocrat offbeat young girl who finds it hard to live in a milieu full of social conventions.Her mother (Suzanne Dantès,whose strident playing seems almost unbearable today),a widow,wants her to marry a wealthy noble military man whom she met at a railway station.Although the young girl is not aware of it,she's in love with her uncle (by marriage!).But Claude Autant-Lara's dice are loaded because even if this uncle is a flying pioneer and a broke man,he's still an aristocrat.A liberal aristocrat is no misalliance.Of course she's much younger than him,and besides he's got a mistress,but it's only a question of social class.

That's why "le marriage de chiffon" does not really satisfy.Hotheaded Autant-Lara adjusted the fire the next year and it became a wholesale massacre.Casting again Odette Joyeux as an aristocrat ingenuous person,he pitted her milieu against the plebeian one.And it was his masterpiece,"douce" ,which remains today as fascinating as it was in 1943.Such is not the case of "le marriage de chiffon" which may seem old hat for a lot of people today.