Família Exótica

'Drôle de drame' (1937 - alternative title 'Bizarre, Bizarre'), the second film by French director Marcel Carné, has over time acquired the status of a cult film. Criticized and ignored upon its premiere in the tense years before World War II, it was re-released after the war and enjoyed great success. Since then, every opportunity to re-watch it produces new praise and discoveries of new virtues. Was this film released too early? 'Drôle de drame' uses the French theatrical vaudeville style to create a savory critique of British morals and social tics and combines a parody of detective films with moments of surrealism. Perhaps the fact that Marcel Carné had released 'Les enfants du paradis' and 'Le quai des brumes' in the meantime led the audiences to re-evaluate this earlier movie in his career? Whatever the explanation, 'Drôle de drame', seen 87 years after its filming and first release, provides an opportunity to meet some names that are now legendary, but also a fresh and enjoyable cinematic experience at many moments.

The film is the adaptation of a novel by the British writer J. Storer Clouston, the adaptation being signed by Carné and the eminent poet Jacques Prévert, screenwriter or co-screenwriter of numerous famous French films. The story takes place in London, but it is more of a French version of London, or rather as it would have been represented on a French comedy stage in the first half of the 20th century. We are dealing with serial murders and not very competent detectives from Scotland Yard who solve cases in their sleep, with a Puritan minister and a mysterious crime novelist, with enigmatic disappearances and double identities, with journalists thirsty for sensational news and a milkman in love. The most improbable events follow each other at a rapid pace. Police intrigue and theatrical vaudeville meet in an original mix.

The cast is stellar. Michel Simon appears in a double role alongside Louis Jouvet. The two actors, who were among the superstars of interwar French cinema, did not really get on with each other, but perhaps it was the tension between them that contributed to the quality of some scenes that have become anthological. We can also watch Jean-Louis Barrault, who would become one of the great actors and directors of the French theatre and who was then only 27 years old and dedicated most of his artistic efforts to film, with 5 films in his filmography in each of the years 1936, 1937, 1938. Here he has a secondary, but important and not at all simple, role - a serial killer who also falls in love. Every scene in which he appears is a delight. Satirical arrows at British morals and social formalisms abound. 'Drôle de drame' was and is superb comic entertainment.

A huge international hit in the 30s, I suspect this seems a bit too labored and artificial now to quite captivate a modern audience the way, say, Children of Paradise still does. But the fan of 30s cinema (Marx Brothers and Carole Lombard division) will find lots to like in the collision of disparate styles-- screwball motivations (Barrault plays a besotted madman worthy of Mischa Auer) and Feydeau-farce complications (I won't spoil the delightful way in which Simon, having absconded from home and suspected of a nonexistent murder, is immediately forced to return to his house in disguise); a supposed proper Englishness (the mania for detective tales and the orderly reality beneath them) seen through thoroughly French eyes (which means that mad Gallic passion roils just below the surface). And if you know French cinema, the cast is its own reward-- stern Jouvet, as an increasingly irrational and surreal-acting clergyman, versus shambling Simon (reportedly they hated each other, in any case the clash of styles is perfect), Rosay (of Carnival in Flanders), the handsome Aumont and, most surprisingly, Barrault in an energetically black- comic role 180 degrees from his winsome mime in Children of Paradise. (Note on availability: So far as I know there's no good version of this on tape in the US but there is a very good subtitled French DVD, region 2 only of course.)

An absolutely wonderful Carne/Prevert jeu d'esprit that owes more to the modernist whimsy of a Rene Clair than the claustrophobic pessimism of their later works. Although acclaimed as the greatest exponents of poetic realism, films like QUAI DES BRUMES and LE JOUR SE LEVE can be seen today as flagrantly artificial, most especially in the sets and almost classical plots. Here, they let the artifice run riot, allowing plots run into strange digressions or non-sequiters. The sense of freedom absent from their more famous works is invigorating.

Set in Edwardian England, Archibald Soper is a lecherous, hypocritical, poker-faced bishop who holds sparsely attended public meetings denouncing the evils of detective fiction, apparently an English 'craze' of the time. His cousin, Irwin Molyneaux, is a timid gardener married to a splendidly imperious snob, Margaret. He writes, unknown to his family, hugely successful detective novels under the pseudonym Felix Chapel, with plots pilfered from his maid's hyperactive milkman admirer, Billy.

One day, Soper forces himself on the Molyneaux for dinner, but Margaret has exasperated her cooking staff too far, and they have vamoosed. Aghast at the potential humiliation of having no servants, she pretends to be visiting friends and cooks the meal herself. However, Irwin's ineptness at deceit leads Soper to report a murder to Scotland Yard.

The film's starting point is the English fondness for detective fiction, and much of the film's humour, its sense of the absurd, its command of farce, its playing with appearance and class, gives the film an English comic eccentricity, rarely found in the French cinema. DROLE, however, is the complete opposite of the typical English detective novel, which offers an opening chaos and enigma, with the social disruption of a crime and a series of wildly disparate clues and leads, but achieves order and social restoration through the figure of the detective who can see, interpret and control everything.

In DROLE, following Chesterton, say, rather than Conan Doyle, events start in relative order - characters are firmly set in their social positions. But as the plot proceeds, as characters are revealed to be leading double lives, as the profusion of secondary characters complicates rather than explicates the story, as events become more preposterous and unlikely, the social divisions represented by clear-cut spaces are blurred, and the film

escalates into chaos represented by the mob, that great terror of the English, spilling into the narrative, destroying the respectable middle-class home, flouting and mocking the law, making its own judgements. The resolution, such as it is, is a complete lie, because there is no crime, and yet it is brilliantly subversive because it completely disrupts the duplicitous order at the beginning, it alienates people living convenient compartmentalised lives from themselves, forcing them to confront, if only for a moment, their true desires, which contradict their public faces,

DROLE is ridiculously funny, and Prevert's arch theatricality has never been used to greater effect. Another plus is one of the most remarkable casts ever assembled - Michel Simon is immensely touching as the bemused gardener forced to abandon the comforts of his mimosa for the chaos of life on the run (private property being the conservative definition of self); Francoise Rosay is incomparable as the grande dame, besotted by social propriety, yet seething with untapped lust; the young Jean-Louis Barrault is a little callow compared to his seasoned elders, but endearingly impudent - the scene in the greenhouse pond with Rosay is a mock-classical treasure.

Standing out, though, is possibly the greatest French actor of the 1930s, Louis Jouvet, the funniest straight man in the film, keeping his gloriously calm poker-face through all kinds of humiliations and revelations, including the donning of an elaborate kilt to find an incriminating picture from an 'actress'. Best of all is Carne's style, completely unrestrained, unafraid to go for 'gag'-like effects (the mugging of dandies for buttonholes is particularly piquant), beavering through fairy-tale sets that do for London what TOP HAT did for Venice, completely at ease with the farce, yet still pulling off evocative shots that reveal the emotional reality behind the nonsense.

In the Victorian London, the botanist Irwin Molyneux (Michel Simon) and his wife Margaret Molyneux (Françoise Rosay) are bankrupted but still keeping the appearance due to the successful crime novels written by Irwin under the pseudonym of Felix Chapel. Their cook has just left the family, when Irwin's snoopy and hypocrite cousin Archibald Soper (Louis Jouvet) that is in campaign against the police stories of Felix Chapel invites himself to have dinner in Irwin's house. Margaret decides to keep the farce of their social position secretly cooking the dinner, while the clumsy Irwin justifies her absence telling the bishop Soper that she had just traveled to the country to meet some friends. However Soper suspects of Irwin and calls the Scotland Yard, assuming that his cousin had poisoned his wife. Irwin and Margaret decide to hide the truth to avoid an exposition of their financial situation, moving to a low-budget hotel in the Chinese neighborhood, getting into trouble.

"Drôle de Drame ou L'Étrange Aventure de Docteur Molyneux" is a hilarious theatrical comedy of farce and mistakes. Most of the characters are hypocrite, greedy, lazy or simply incompetent and the situations they get involved are silly, naive but very funny. In spite of having irrelevant flaws in the plot, this film is a great entertainment. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Família Exótica" ("Exotic Family")

Spoofs are generally not popular with the masses (except when Crosby/Hope or Abbott/Costello or Woody Allen are doing the spoofing) so it's no surprise to discover there exist few box-office viable spoofs of film noir. (I know people will claim Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 The Ladykillers, but this is actually a marvelous spoof of crime caper movies. Otto Heller's photographic style not only shines brightly into every nook and cranny, but the story always goes for the belly laugh rather than the jugular vein). A notable exception is the Marcel Carné 1937 Drole de Drame, in which one of the finest casts ever assembled – Jouvet, Simon, Rosay, Barrault, Aumont, and the lovely Nadine Vogel (who made only four movies, of which this is her debut) wrestle with a delightfully ridiculous plot that manages to get wilder and wilder as it progresses from pugnacious snobbery through blatant hypocrisy to the most ridiculous cop shop misinvestigation ever presented on a big-budget theatre screen. Schuftann's atmospheric, noir photography and Trauner's nightmarishly sprawling sets rival any similar creations from Berlin or Hollywood. The movie is chock full of bizarre touches, but the one that tickled me best was the sleeping journo, most amusingly played by Henri Guisol (who enjoyed quite a career in French who-dun-its and noir).