Mulher Mascarada

A sporty swimming pool scene shows Hélène (Danielle Darrieux as the daughter) meeting her wet fiancé, to the jealousy of her friend (Jany Holt). Hélène has come of age, and the solicitor (we are no longer in the swimming pool) is now able to show her a letter from her mother, and reveal the dark circumstances of her birth. Cue flashback to twenty years before.

And here's Jany Holt again, excellent as Lily, the scheming wife of the charming and wealthy art expert Henri (Maurice Escande). She fobs off one lover (Charles Vanel) only to step straight into a carriage with another.

An over-confident Marianne (Darrieux as the mother) makes a fool of herself in front of Henri over a painting, but he is charmed and follows her to the Louvre, after Watteau, so to speak. They end up in a cabaret, a very authentic one, watching cancans, and there's a genuinely touching moment when the master of ceremonies gets them to kiss.

I wonder which scene it was that Darrieux asked to do a fourth time. According to Cinévie magazine she was so moving that even the blasé assistants, many of whom couldn't speak French, could not contain their emotion.

Anyway there's a masked ball at which all the happy (Marianne), jealous (the sculptor) or scheming (Lily) parties happen to be present. Masks and disguises usually turn out to have unpleasant consequences, and a crime is committed that will not be solved until we have returned to the present.

This is the first time Henry Decoin teamed with star Danielle Darrieux(whose career spans the whole story of the French cinema after the beginning of the talkies:think about it,she's one of the Ozon's "huit femmes" in 2002!!!)

So almost 70 years before.."le domino vert";the construction of the movie is weird indeed:a short introduction,then a very long flashback(more than an hour) ,then back to the present in search of the truth:because it's primarily a detective story mixed with melodrama elements:a young girl from a chic milieu ,raised by relatives,discovers that her father killed his wife ,and besides,that he had a lover ,Darrieux's mother.Flashback(Darrieux plays the two parts,mother and daughter).Was he guilty? A young lawyer helps the daughter ,twenty years later,to find what really happened;this last part is definitely the weakest link:their investigation lasts barely ten minutes on the screen and a ten-year old could guess the solution of the riddle.

This is mainly a curios ,but it reveals Decoin's metier:the psychological thriller.This is only a sketch but it predates his great achievements of the forties and the fifties:"les inconnus dans la maison" "non coupable" "la vérité sur Bébé Donge" (again with Darrieux )or "bonnes à tuer".One wishes that some day they will reissue "malefices"(1962) from a sensational Boileau-Narcejac (diabolique,vertigo)screenplay ,which is very hard to see.