Au bonheur des dames

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.

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.

The final silent film from Duvivier (of Pepe le Moko fame) is an adaptation of an Emile Zola novel starring Dita Parlo (of L'Atalante and The Grand Illusion fame). I didn't even know Parlo made any other films! She's wonderful. She plays an orphan girl who shows up to Paris to live with and work for her uncle. Unfortunately, she finds him and his tailor shop destitute, failing under the encroaching department store across the street, Au bonheur des dames (translated as "Ladies' Paradise"). She's only too happy to get a job at the fabulous store, where she attracts the attention of several different men (and the jealousies of some of her female co-workers). Meanwhile, her family across the street is going to Hell. The visuals and direction are very good, as are the performances.

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.

Zola's novel starts with Denise arriving in Paris and finishes some 500 pages later in what might be called a happy ending. In between are so much character detail and socio-economic ideas that the BBC could have made a six-hour miniseries out of it. Alas, that option was not open to Duvivier in 1929 as he was shooting this film. The young (early 30's) director had studied the Soviet artists closely; Dziga Vertov and Fritz Lang must have been familiar to him. As a result, we have some very impressive split screen work for the delusions of Baudu.

Dita Parlo keeps looking like a girl scout most of the time--she does not take direction well. Pierre de Guingand as Mouret is given little to work with; we don't know why he's so smitten with Denise. Germaine Rouer as the grasping socialite does impressive work; she's one of the few characters who is given a personal story to work with.