Au bonheur des dames

Duvivier's AU BONHEUR DES DAMES is a gorgeous surprise, since along with SUNRISE, METROPOLIS, and a few other of the masterpieces of the period, it taps into so many key movements and concerns of the 1920s. It's a faithful adaptation of Zola's novel by the same name, part of his sweeping "Rougon-Macquart" series that casts a panoramic look on 19th century French society. The story, banally put, is a proto- "You've Got Mail." But instead of the giant bookseller edging out the human-scale bookstore in the neighborhood, it's a small fabric merchant vs. the huge department store. (The department store was a new phenomenon in the mid-to-late 19th century.) Like SUNRISE, this movie shows the seduction of the fast pace of the modern city, mass consumption and revolution of our desires--and the insults that modernity hurls at older ways of thinking about community and "values" such as honesty, family, and propriety.

AU BONHEUR is now available on DVD, with a very good musical score. It is an exquisite example of what silent-era cinematic "Impressionism" was all about--including fantastic experiments with conveying sound, emotion, speed, and confusion through images and their editing. In sum, this is an important film and a beautiful one. Wacky ending, but let's not spoil it... With not only Dita Parlo (cf. Vigo's L'ATALANTE and Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION), but Nadia Sbirskaya (Renoir's CRIME OF M. LANGE).

This silent version of Zola's classic was impossible to see for a long time.Zola's heirs (concerning a novel from the 19Th century) were suing Duvivier's (video cassettes and DVDs) producer René Château ,reportedly.That may account for the disappearance of such other great Duvivier movies as "la fête à Henriette" or "Au Royaume des Cieux" (the latter was available on cassette a long time ago).

In the Rougon-Macquart saga ,"Au Bonheur des Dames" is far from being one of my favorites.The depictions are impressive,but the story is melodramatic ,particularly the ending .Duvivier has transposed the action to his time ,the early thirties.It's not a big problem,since the director introduces ,in the first sequences ,sandwich men and advertising leaflets coming down from the sky.And the neons as well.

That said,"Au Bonheur des Dames" displays a director who hadn't found himself yet.As every French cine buff knows,Duvivier was the film noir master,the poet of evil.He was also a past master when it came to depicting a place ,the Halles de Paris or Bastille Day.Actually,the true Duvivier would appear in his next effort "David Golder" (1931)

Best sequences: Genevieve 's fiancé ,telling the old shopkeeper Baudu how seedy his place is :the cobwebs ,the old furniture and the dilapidated walls speak louder than words;Baudu ,becoming mad as he hears the noises of the walls falling down; A giant worker with a pick destroying everything;and finally Denise's face ,in the last sequences ,who tends to to show that far from being an ingenue,she is a potential business woman and the story does not tell if she will show compassion for people who fall by the wayside.

Mouret's fête by the river will become a Duvivier's permanent feature too.Even at his nastiest,at his darkest,there will always be a cause for celebration: the Guinguettes in "La Belle Equipe" and "Voici le Temps des Assassins" ,the ball in "la fête à Henriette" or the fair in "Boulevard" .

But Duvivier was still searching for an identity at the time and there are weaknesses in his film:the relationship Denis/Mouret is as bland as that in Cayatte's talkie (1943).Blame it on the actor,Pierre de Guingand ,because Dita Parlo's talent is incontestable.Ditto for Armand Bour whose performance would be dwarfed by Michel Simon's (who else?)a decade later.

I will not make ,anyway,any comparison between the silent and the talkie.Today's audience will fatally favor the latter over the former. Every cine buff has got to see both and make up his mind.

NB.In Zola's saga ,"Au Bonheur des Dames" is the follow -up to "Pot-Bouille" (Octave Mouret is featured in both books).In 1957,Duvivier transferred to the screen that book,with only fair results .The movie was slagged off by Truffaut who (for once) was not wrong.Gerard Philippe was cast as Mouret.

The story of mom and pop shops being run out of business by the behemoth Amazon, run by Jeff Bezos, er I mean Au Bonheur Des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise), run by Octave Mouret (Pierre de Guingand). As the pendulum in the real world has swung back towards robber barons and giant corporate entities, the concept behind the film is certainly still relevant, and with Duvivier in the director seat it also feels dynamic and almost modern, despite being a silent film.

Visually this film is stunning, with camera work that's alive, Expressionistic montage sequences, and fantastic levels of activity packed into shots in the busy streets, opulent department store, and construction sites. Dita Parlo is stunning in her cloche hat too, and so expressive with her eyes, including during a creepy scene where the bosses eye the models in their undergarments in their dressing room, and when she narrowly fends off an attempted rape from one of them.

The film gets a little unfocused with the melodrama of a love triangle (a clerk at the mom and pop shop engaged to the daughter there, but being tempted by one of the models at Au Bonheur Des Dames across the street. A much bigger sin was how it was bungled at the end, which I won't completely spoil, except to say the problem all along is it chalks up the human misery to "progress" and not "greed" or "ravenous capitalism." So instead of this aggressive department store undercutting the smaller stores around it being a real issue, ultimately leading to monopolies, an obscene wealth gap, and the unfair treatment of labor, the film essentially says we just need to get through the change and the future will be bright. To have the romance pivot as well was frankly nauseating. Let's just say I loved the film's poetry more than I loved its realism.

This needs to be considered among the preeminent achievements of silent film, and pending more exposure I'm sure it will, up and above anything Murnau did, and in the lofty company of visual epics La Roue and L'Argent.

My theory is that the French revolutionized the cinematic eye, the subjective eye in motion, at around the same time but quite independently from the Soviets, by studying the same DW Griffith scenes. Since then exists a deep fraternity between the two schools, up to Godard and beyond, and of course well before; it was Parisians who realized the first modern commune after all.

Insofar as that revolutionary eye is concerned, you'll be hard pressed to find a better resume; just the stunning array of technique used is the equal of Kane, 10 years early.

But there is a lot more than virtuoso display here, channeled from the French notion of noir at the time when it was still a fluid and new impulse for a certain type of story, and not yet melded with the detective film and solidified as a category of its own. The Germans going back to Caligari and Mabuse and reflecting the overall daze of the Weimar period, had posited an early noir blueprint in metaphysical terms; forces of some calculating darkness devising narratives to control dazed minds. The French were more clear-eyed and pragmatic, no doubt influenced by Marx and going all the way back to that commune.

This compares favorably to L'Argent from two years before. Both are adapted from Zola, both are highly asymphonic looks of modern life in motion, both demystify Weimar film's evil masterminds to be nothing but scheming business men in service to their capital. Both nevertheless assert profound forces mobilizing for control of a multi-layered world.

The central character is a plucky young girl fresh to Paris from we presume a slice of innocent countryside, for her wide-eyed introduction to big city life she is layered through wheels, chains, trains, streets bustling with automobiles, visually rendered transparent as another cog in the huge machinery. Life does not simply happen here but is actually engineered, has staccato sound, urgency. Her haberdasher uncle at the brink of foreclosure owns a shop opposite the new dazzling mega-plex, a real palace of commerce called Au Bonheur des Dames. Ordinarily, this would unfold a trite David/Goliath plot, progress starving out the little guy plus a forlorn denouement. Not so here.

The genius of the thing is all in the rhythm of shifts between opposing pairs of characters saturating the world to reveal some part of the machinery. There is no solid anchor, and the film can be read simultaneously from multiple overlapping points.

On one hand we have the engineers, the nerve center from where they hatch their plans for control is above the throng of consumers excitedly cavorting in the huge halls of the department store, and later on a balcony overlooking nothing short of the entire city. When the owner proclaims on a whim during a company trip that the first in a bathing suit wins a pay rise, the entire crowd of employees is seized in a paroxysm.

The women on the other hand, our orphaned heroine and as counterpart the haughty daughter of a multimillionaire funding the enterprise, already living the dream the other aspires to, lavished by a father the other has been deprived of. The manager of the store is between them, love is at stake.

A third pair, the haberdasher uncle stubbornly clinging to his small property and his young clerk who eventually gives in to the seductive dream on the other side of the street. The manager is once again layered in between, arriving at the scene too late to note dire repercussions of his business. The clerk's wife is in her last throes, and we presume this is going to translate as a karma where he loses love, final and irrevocable punishment for hubris.

At this point, the film pulls an amazing coup. Faced with eviction notes, the uncle has gone stark raving mad, the scene is rendered with tremendous rapid-fire montage as nearby construction workers on the Bonheur payroll demolishing the walls of his mind. This would have been the Soviet notion only a few years back, workers crushed by the capital and spliced together in a way that arms the eye. Now I don't know if this is found in Zola or is Duvivier's contribution..

..but in the finale the manager is contrite and about to call off his involvement with Bonheur, except is stayed at the last moment by the young girl proclaiming her love and devotion to him and the incandescent dream. This is the anti-Strike, the anti-Potemkin.

(I believe this small scene, just these two minutes, explains away the entire difference in French and Soviet worldviews. The French would have clearly seen around them the same motifs as workers did in Petrograd, no doubt, but this system had already succeeded to provide a good enough life. 1936 would see the first paid vacations.)

And this is the genius for me, because it's a really trite finale at face value, this sudden change of heart, almost immoral, but we can read it through many different pairs of eyes, starting with the manager.

Another layer on top of all this; the neon-lit mega-plex as a sumptuous movie house, named the same as the movie no less, the young girl enticed to star in a dream that has reserved a place for her, the whole movie daydreamed somewhere as a movie, probably back in the countryside or during a boring day on the job.

Hollywood stories and films about women working as clerks in stores were done by the dozens in the 1930s; it was a staple of characterizations of the time period. However, this is not a Hollywood film; it is a French production, and one of the finest foreign films of that decade. Even the commonplace storyline is given a twist that was rarely seen in American films. A poor girl gets a job in a relative's small shop in Paris, but through a stroke of luck eventually lands a job in the biggest and most famous woman's store in Paris. Will the young woman abandon her values for those found in her new environment? Watch the film and find out for yourself.