La fin du jour

Probably Duvivier's pre-war peak.His pessimism reaches here such unbelievable heights that we're brooding all along the movie and long after having seen it.The subject is a depressing one:some kind of "sunset boulevard" of the theater.Located in an old people's home for actors and actresses ,most of them short of the readies.Humiliating to a fault,for those who have been legendary figures of the theater,once gods for an ungrateful public.Who remembers them now?Who remembers Norma Desmond/Gloria Swanson?

Duvivier's depiction of the house is cruel and ruthless:two old residents fighting because one of them had a bigger piece of sausage,shots in close-up of the tired,wrinkled,wizened faces,spiteful gossips,wickedness...

A menace hangs over the house as a sword of Damocles:their house might close soon,because they're running out of money,and they might be dispersed.Because,if the relationships ooze hatred,contempt,jealousy and rancor ,the greatest disgrace would be to end up in a ordinary old people's home with the riffraff.

Hope against hope survives among in this God-forsaken world:An old Don Juan (Jouvet) thinks that he's always a ladykiller .An actor (Michel Simon) who was all his life an understudy tries to shine on the stage for an ultimate night,but fails dismally.Another one,( Victor FRancen,the hero of "j'accuse")whose wife has always been unfaithful (she used to sleep with Jouvet),tries to end his life with dignity.

"La fin du jour" (the end of the day") is A hard time for everybody, but particularly for those who 've been adored by the masses,downfall is unbearable.Forgetting for once his legendary pessimism,Duvivier closes this somber meditation by a funeral:during this twilight glow scene,all the actors and actresses all stand together to say goodbye to one of them.Francen delivers a speech full of nostalgia and warmth.The show must go on,long live the show.

And long live Duvivier!!!!!

Well, it might have been one of the great French classics, to stand with Les enfants du paradis, Quai des brumes, La regle du jeu and so on. Instead we have Louis Jouvet who is really inspired as the great seducer Saint Clair; he was moving as the Baron in Les bas-fonds, and as Arletty's pimp in Hotel du nord, but here he is really vicious as a washed-up actor who doesn't get curtain calls anymore. He rereads old love letters from his flames of thirty years ago; this is an agreeable way to pass time.

Michel Simon as the understudy who can never get on stage because the star is never sick gives another fine performance. Think of a Boudu with more work ethic and a sense of humour and you've got him. The third male lead is Victor Francen, playing an actor who never realized his potential because his wife died (in a suspicious manner). He was born to play Racine and Corneille, but could not rise to any heights owing to the weight of grief. I am not convinced by anything Francen does here: there seems to be a hollow man behind the well-trimmed beard and elegant clothes. Gabrielle Dorziat is a pleasure to watch in anything (how great she was in Les parents terribles). She has a very affecting scene with Jouvet, one of her old loves.

"You carry on like a child. For the last time, when will you be reasonable?" "Never! ... Being reasonable is being resigned. Which is being old. And I can't grow old. It's not in my nature."

In this film, Julien Duvivier serves up a sympathetic portrayal of growing old, especially as it relates to those whose profession was acting. There are three distinct male characters here: a callous lothario with a long trail of broken hearts behind him (Louis Jouvet), a serious guy who's been scarred personally and professionally (Victor Francen), and a playful imp who was never more than an understudy because he lacked talent (Michel Simon). There are female characters as well but they are less developed, beyond many of them having fond memories of the womanizer despite him not even remembering them, though one speaks for every ageing actress ever when she says of her roles "I began as Juliet, and ended as the nurse." There is also a delightful couple who have lived in bliss unmarried for 35 years and have a large family, something that wouldn't be possible in an American film during this period.

There is a painful connection between the first and second men which weaves some melodrama into the story: the wife of the latter ran away with the lothario, then died under mysterious circumstances. While that meant nothing to the womanizer, the other man was devastated, and he's been further scarred by how theater evolved over his career to move away from the more scholarly works he adored. Meanwhile, Jouvet's character is at it again, seducing a wide-eyed 17 year old despite a significant age gap (Madeleine Ozeray, who was actually 31). He's a maddening guy, as there are several instances where he shows he discarded women and doesn't even remember them, including a case where he remembers more about the horse he bet on in a race than a woman who's remembered him in her will (which was sad but amusing). This was a sharply drawn character, but the way his story worked out in the second half of the film felt a little contrived and overwrought, less satisfying than it could have been.

Simon's character is the one who brings the most life to the film, and who probably rounded my review score up. Early on we hear of his exploits in the old age home, including cooking herring in his room, sneaking out at night and crushing the gardener's flowers as he scales the walls, playing pranks on the more serious guy like using itching powder, and prancing around nude in the halls, which he claims the women don't mind. He's befriended a group of boy scouts over the years when he's outside the home, but then suffers when one of them tells him he's going away to get married and won't be scouting anymore, which was kind of like the pain parents feels when their children grow up and leave home. Similarly, his drafting a list of demands against the home at a time when unbeknownst to him and the others it's about to go bankrupt seemed like a mirror to a time of life when our days are numbered, and such brashness is futile.

In one of this man's pranks he gets a fake obituary printed of the serious actor, one that appears in small print well into the newspaper. There is melancholy and humiliation in having one's life summed up and shown for what it is, small in the big picture of the world, and soon to be forgotten. In a parallel to this, there is a fine eulogy at the end, which was stirring:

"Cabrissade, you never had talent! But we shall still miss you. You loved the theater, and it only rewarded you with setbacks and failure. But you remained loyal to it. Loyal to your first love, your obscure, marvelous dream. That's what moves us here today. My poor friend. Rest in peace, Cabrissade. Actors serve a noble cause, and when in the presence of something ennobling, we become noble ourselves."

As with his other films, Duvivier brings an emotional force to the film through moments like this, or when he puts together a montage of elderly faces at a wedding and a funeral, made more meaningful by the feeling of perspective in their eyes. This is one where the script wasn't perfect, but it had depth and he kept things moving with his editing, making it an enjoyable experience.

A fabulous cast of actors (Jouvet, Simon and so on) for a bitter movie, with still some tenderness in it. It is a hard story about people loosing themselves in front or THE big issue of life. Remember this movie was shot a few month before WW2 started ? Even if not connected at all with the political/social context of that period, still it reflects the uncertainties of the period, through hard and changing characters. A must.

It's been decades since I've seen this French classic, but I'm bemused by the description of it as "bitter". Like Dustin Hoffman's new "Quartet" (2012), it views aging performers both wistfully and lovingly and certainly not without humor. There is a harsher and more tragic incident at the heart of the chief conflict here, but ultimately the film is a loving portrayal of everyone from the truly great to the mediocre but devoted personalities that make up the theater. It is a homage in other words to the whole world of performing, which of course ranges from tragic to comic figures, from stars to failures, but, as stirringly presented in one speech here, is united, and set apart, by a shared passion. The climactic scene is expertly orchestrated and the words "We, the poor, the obscure" ("Nous, les pauvres, les obscures") from a classic play are re-purposed to devastating effect, so much so that they linger with me decades later. As does, not a bitter, but an uplifting sense of the nobility of living one's life in service to art, even if the rewards at "the end of the day" may be no more than bittersweet memories. -- Probably hard to find, but if you understand French (I doubt anyone's taken the trouble to sub-title this), worth the effort.