La foire aux chimères

"La foire aux chimères" is a jewel , a sparkling diamond.It would deserve one hundred comments ,and that would not be enough.

Pierre Chenal was a film noir director who made moderately successful movies before the war:"l'alibi" which featured Von Stroheim too and his first version of "the postman always rings twice ","le dernier tournant (1939).But the 1946 work is much superior ,being at once a film noir,a baroque melodrama and a fairy tale.

Frank, a disfigured man (Von Stroheim) meets at a fair a beautiful blind long-haired blonde Jeanne (Madeleine Sologne)who is a knives thrower's partner;this man,Robert, has a lover,Clara.Jeanne marries the ugly man , undergoes an operation and recovers sight.But,as says Marilou,Frank's housekeeper a proverb says "happiness is a misfortune you cannot see".

There are at least ten (and maybe more) memorable sequences;each one is actually a work of art.Even if the movie is close to the realisme poetique dear to Carné ,Chenal transcends it and makes a movie which verges on fantastic:when Jeanne appears for the first time at the fair (la foire aux chimères =the dreams fair),she looks like a fairy ,or an angel,the angel she plays in the small circus where Frank is the only spectator.The baroque house where Von Stroheim hides his beloved wife is a splendor.It's also a trompe l'oeil.

The screenplay combines harshness and elegance,and works wonders:when Jeanne awakes after the operation ,she pretends she cannot see because she has seen her husband's frightening face.It's only when she looks at herself in a mirror and bursts into tears that we get the picture.It might be the dark side of Cocteau's contemporary "Beauty and the Beast".

Stroheim outdoes himself and gives one of his greatest performances which compares more than favorably to that of Max Von Mayerling in "Sunset Boulevard" -who was yet to come in 1946!-.His character will meet the wickedness of the human race (the flies in his mashed potatoes in the canteen,the gibes when he dances with his wife at the ball)He will become a counterfeiter to spoil his Jeanne.But everything is illusion: "everything is illusion in this house,the paintings ,the furniture,your love for me!" he screams when he discovers his wife's secret.

Chenal's camera goes crazy during the stunning last minutes:a distraught Stoheim rushes in the streets to get to his enemy's house ,and it leads to a double ending (both sad and happy) that will haunt you long afterward.Chenal uses slopings with absolute skill

One should also mention the extraordinary use of the Pont Mirabeau où coule la Seine (as poet Appolinaire wrote).

"La foire aux chimères" had remained a sleeper for about forty years when it was praised to the skies during the eighties;but too many people who like French cinema do not even know its existence.Yes,there was a cinema before the nouvelle vague.

Erich von Stroheim, whose face is disfigured, is the chief engraver at a bank which produces bills for twenty-two nations. His co-workers and underlings don't like him because of his aloof manner, and women avoid him because of his scarred face. On his fiftieth birthday, he goes to a carnival, where he meets Madeleine Sologne. She has been blind since the age of five, and is the 'target' in Yves Vincent's knife-throwing act. Von Stroheim takes her home and marries her, placing her in a magnificent house, which he borrows money to finance. Eventually, he engraves plates for Louis Salou's forgeries.

Director Pierre Chenal pitches this as a dark variation of poetic realism, not quite film noir. There are many of the markers of the latter: the latticed lighting, the Dutch angles, the huge clock on the wall, and so forth. However, because the movie tells the story of von Stroheim's self-destruction at the hands of his unwitting femme fatale, it partakes of the former genre.

I would like to find this a better movie than it is, but it seems a bit tired and obvious and old-fashioned. Von Stroheim had been playing this sort of role for decades, and by this time, he had become an actor-for-hire, available for roles at a set, if large day rate. giving the producers and audiences what they expected. He lacks the dark humor he infused into his earlier parades. Chenal had begun his directorial career strongly, working with Harry Baur in CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. After the War, he turned to well-made works which offered their messages with little subtlety.

Of all the extraordinary personalities to have emerged from the world of film, one of the most extraordinary must surely be Erich von Stroheim. The son of a Jewish hatter, he reinvented himself as an Austrian aristo and officer. His uncompromising directorial career came to an abrupt end when fired from the uncompleted 'Queen Kelly'. Luckily for him and for us his forbidding exterior and military bearing made him eminently suitable for certain roles and he is in his element as a lonely, disfigured engraver in this atmospheric film of Pierre Chenal. Ironically this was released the same year as Cocteau's 'Beauty and the Beast' and represents the other side of the coin. Whereas in Cocteau's film the monster is redeemed by the beauty, here he is destroyed by her. Von Stroheim is both menacing and sympathetic and is perfectly complimented here by the elegant, enigmatic Madeleine Sologne whose character becomes a femme fatale in spite of herself. There is a marvellous turn by Louis Salou as a poetry-loving villain who quotes Haraucourt even as he is dying! The script, camerawork, production design, editing and score are superlative. The climactic sequence in the nightclub is stunning and the final shot of the smiling Jeanne unforgettable. It is not easy to categorise this film if indeed one feels the need to do so. There are various 'styles' at play here that make it so much more than just a 'Noir'. This is undoubtedly the most satisfying of Chenal's films that I have seen thus far.

Brooding, fatalistic melodrama; the material is cliched (I'm fairly sure Bette Davis and, say, Edward G. Robinson had already done similar films dealing with loneliness and blindness by that period), but the film is still interesting, especially in its frenzied climax, experimentally shot entirely with tilted camera angles. **1/2 out of 4.