Marcel Carné (1953)

Zola’s novel updated and transposed (from Paris) to 1950s Lyon – and with plenty of other changes too.  It’s mostly entertaining and occasionally startling but the relationship between Thérèse and her lover Laurent is far from the heart of the matter here.  In this respect, the film compares unfavourably with both television versions of the story that I know, the BBC serial of 1980 (with Kate Nelligan and Brian Cox) and The Russian Bride in 2002 (with Lia Williams and Douglas Hodge).  This is, to some extent, an inevitable consequence of the way in which Marcel Carné and Charles Spaak have reworked the material.  They turn Thérèse’s adultery from a passion which is biologically driven and ineluctable into an attempt to escape from her unhappy marriage and the hopeless, unending routine of working in her mother-in-law’s haberdashery; the killing of her husband Camille into an act which is hardly premeditated; and the psychological misery that Thérèse then experiences into something engineered by a soi-disant witness of the events surrounding Camille’s death (a character invented by Carné and Spaak) – instead of by the corrosive guilt which destroys the lovers’ relationship in the novel.

The loss of primacy of that relationship is also partly a consequence of Raf Vallone’s weakness as Laurent.  (It’s baffling – given how much else has been altered and that the character has been turned into an Italian, presumably to accommodate Vallone – that he retains the name from the novel.)  The physical contrast between Vallone’s Laurent and Jacques Duby as the sickly mother’s boy Camille is drawn very broadly and, although it’s amusing at first, Vallone’s beefcake presence soon becomes pretty bovine.  You never feel that the affair between Thérèse and Laurent is a matter of life and death.  As a result, the moment when Laurent pushes Camille to his death from a moving train isn’t pivotal in the way it needs to be – isn’t, in other words, the moment which both removes the obstacle to the lovers being together and sows the seeds of the destruction of their love.

It’s hardly surprising that Simone Signoret, as Thérèse, doesn’t convince you that she’s crazy about Vallone’s Laurent but she gives a fine, daringly internalised performance – a good example of the eloquence of reserve and of apparently minor physical details (the way she handles a roll of fabric in old Mme Raquin’s store or puts out plates and napkins for supper with her husband and his mother).   Signoret’s Thérèse, in the glum, cramped décor of the shop, seems to be in mourning from the start.  Yet she’s subtly watchful and she communicates a potential for a different life:  you see it in her beautiful broad features, her hair, her gestures – but these all seem impregnated with a kind of melancholy stillness.  The contrast with the busy performances around her – Camille, his mother, the elderly gentlemen who come to the apartment for weekly parlour games that Camille has to win (these are well done) – is powerful.  As Camille, Jacques Duby has a ratty alertness, which matches up well with that of Sylvie, as his mother.  She, however, is so bug-eyed from such an early stage that, when Madame Raquin has a stroke, at the news of Camille’s death, which strikes her dumb but leaves her staring unblinkingly into Thérèse’s soul, the impact is not what it might be.   Signoret’s weighted quality clearly can’t work so well in her scenes with the inadvertently inert Vallone.

The introduction of Riton, the sailor who shares a compartment with Thérèse and Camille on their fateful, never completed train journey to Paris – and who puts two and two together and sees an opportunity for blackmail – shifts the balance of Thérèse Raquin in more ways than one.  The intervention of the character reorients the story from the psychological towards a form of suspense dictated by more external forces; and Roland Lesaffre, the actor playing Riton, runs away with the picture.  From the moment you get a proper look at him, waking up in the railway carriage and talking rather insolently to the ticket collector, you half expect Thérèse to decide to have an affair with Riton instead of Laurent.  Perhaps Lessafre (whom I’d not seen before – it turns out that he died, aged eighty-one, earlier this month) rather overdoes the strutting, smiling menace when he first turns up, on his motor bike, in Lyon, to pester Thérèse for money. But he’s brilliant – charismatic and increasingly complex (you find yourself rooting for him) – in all his subsequent scenes, especially an encounter with Thérèse and Laurent in a bar and when he collects his unjust desserts from them.

This isn’t one of Marcel Carné’s best-known films and I was surprised, although the source material and the star are so famous, that there was a packed house even in NFT2.   Great excitement in the moments before the lights went down, as a woman a couple of rows ahead was clambering around to communicate something (it was never quite clear what – something to do with a package she’d picked up by mistake) to one of the ushers.  ‘I don’t know what she’s on’, said one of the men in front of us, ‘but she needs to take less of it’.   His companion added, once the woman had got back to her seat, ‘The film’s going to be a complete anti-climax after this’.  It wasn’t – thanks to Signoret and Lesaffre – even if Carné’s and Spaak’s adaptation does seem to reduce Zola’s themes.   As we were leaving the BFI, I heard someone else say that Carné had borrowed from Hitchcock.  I don’t know enough about Hitchcock to know if that’s right – and certainly not enough to be able to spot references – but the ironic ending certainly sealed the picture as an accomplished murder mystery, not much more.

But there is a good human detail in the last scene.  Riton has asked Georgette, a chamber maid at the cheap hotel where he’s been staying, to post a letter if he doesn’t return by five o’clock.   When she accepts this assignment, Georgette, who’s clearly taken with Riton, has given him a look that suggests she hopes she might get more from him than the money for a pair of shoes he’s promised her for carrying out this errand.   As the clock strikes five and a postman (Bernard Véron) empties the box, Georgette arrives and hands over the letter.  Maria Pia Casilio has a great combination of innocent charm and incipient brazenness as Georgette and, when she looks at the postman, you can see she likes the look of him too, and will probably forget about Riton, whether she sees him again or not (which she won’t).   She goes on her way and the postman goes on his.  Carné’s camera (the director of photography was Roger Hubert) pulls back upwards from the street to reprise the shot of Lyon rooftops with which the film opened.

25 February 2009