(Twilight)
France, 1939, 102 min, b&w
Dir Julien Duvivier; Asst dir Pierre Duvivier; Prod Régina; Scr Charles Spaak; Cinematog Christian Matras; Music Maurice Jaubert; Art dir Jacques Krauss; Sound Tony Leenhardt and Antoine Archaimbaud; Edit Marthe Poncin; Act Louis Jouvet (Saint-Clair), Madeleine Ozeray (Jeannette), Victor Francen (Marny), Michel Simon (Cabrissade), Gabrielle Dorziat (Madame Chabert), Gaston Modot, François Périer, Arthur Devère, Charles Granval, and Sylvie.
Of the two surprise successes in the 1938–1939 season related to the theatrical life, Entrée des artistes (#82) and La Fin du jour, this latter is far the better film. The ensemble cast of established actors is significantly more competent than the adolescents of Entrée des artistes, whose concerns it is hard to take seriously, and Charles Spaak’s script is structured more effectively than the crude melodrama of Henri Jeanson, who was renowned for witty dialogue rather than structure, while Julien Duvivier’s control of his team leads to better pacing and more interesting technical effects.
The script originated in an idea that came to Spaak as he and Duvivier were driving past a home for aging actors. He remarked that there was a film to be made there. Duvivier agreed, and they worked out a narrative for which Spaak wrote the dialogue.163 Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet, and Raimu were foreshadowed for the lead roles, but when Raimu opted out (due to inadequate salary), Victor Francen was offered the vacant role, which does in fact seem a continuation of his preceding roles as glum cuckold. Much of the interest of the film is in the interactions among these three “monstres sacrés.” Jouvet plays Saint-Clair, an aging Don Juan desperate in old age to perpetuate his reputation as a lady-killer, and Francen plays Marny, whose wife had left him for Saint-Clair then died in mysterious circumstances, while Simon plays Cabrissade, who struggles to conceal behind inflated accounts of his theatrical career the fact that he has been a perpetual understudy.
Where Jeanson sat in on Jouvet’s classes to develop the script for Entrée des artistes, Spaak was no less attentive to Jouvet’s personality and biography in developing that of La Fin du jour. Central to the story is the sequence in which Saint-Clair steals the affections of the young waitress, Jeannette, as he had stolen the affections of Marny’s wife. Deserted by Saint-Clair, Jeannette contemplates suicide and is encouraged in this by Saint-Clair himself who sees it as a useful contribution to his reputation as a Don Juan. This would have seemed a nice touch to the contemporary audience, aware that Madeleine Ozeray, who plays Jeannette, although twenty-four years younger than Jouvet, had been his partner for the last twelve years. Indeed, Jeannette’s failed suicide recalls an incident the previous year when, to Ozeray’s disgust, Jouvet had a brief liaison with one of his young acting students, who, abandoned by Jouvet, had attempted suicide. Gossip aside, however, this representation of the theatrical life is far from the romantic myth of Art that Jouvet was allowed to perpetuate in Entrée des artistes. Certainly the myth is voiced here—“la vie, quel théâtre” (life, what a spectacle)—but only to be undercut by the egotism inherent in it. Saint-Clair, confronted with the excessive egotism of which he has been guilty in pushing Jeannette to attempt suicide, is unable to cope. His eyes glaze over, and he will be confined to a home for the bewildered. Cabrissade is scarcely better. Childish, preferring an invented past to his real lack of professional success, he too is forced to confront his inadequacy, which leads to his death. Marny, if glumly noble, is no less self-obsessed, unable to accept the fact that his wife found him inadequate and committed suicide when rejected by Saint-Clair.
As J.-P. Jeancolas says, the film “tramples underfoot the romantic myth. . . . The characters destroy one another with a malice constructed patiently out of all the bitterness, humiliation and vileness of their drab careers.”164 Michel Simon felt that Duvivier had been, if anything, too kind to the characters, managing to render them sympathetic when everything about them was odious. In their history of the cinema, René Jeanne and Charles Ford describe the film as “a bitter, painful and melancholy tableau of the life led [by actors] deprived of the spotlight. Memories, jealousy, petty squabbles, every pathetic form of baseness . . . permitted Louis Jouvet, Michel Simon, Victor Francen and Gabrielle Dorziat to show what great actors they are.”165 Indeed, Spaak’s script, though decidedly cynical about the myth of theatrical transcendence, depended on great actors to dismantle it. This ambivalence is nicely captured in the final scene when Marny is called on to read the eulogy over Cabrissade’s grave. Typically, it has been written by Cabrissade himself, but half way through it, Marny is permitted the all too conventional gesture of tearing it up and speaking “from the heart, simply and sincerely,” about Cabrissade as “un brave homme.” This is at once very moving and hopelessly inappropriate, given what we have witnessed.
Duvivier had a great affection for technique as the mark of a truly cinematic work. Competent artisan, as everyone acknowledged, he was never just an “invisible hand” behind his films. He enjoyed assembling a talented team and pushing them to extremes. This sometimes resulted in the excesses of a Gothicism bordering on expressionism, as in Le Golem, Golgotha, or his final prewar film, La Charrette fantôme. It always, however, provided material of visual and aural interest related to the central theme of his films. Here the soundtrack is repeatedly foregrounded, not just through diegetic piano and song but especially through extra-diegetic effects and Maurice Jaubert’s martial music during the revolt of the rest-home inmates. Visually, that same scene is notable for its furtive candlelit assembly, but throughout the film, the sets are dramatically lit in the careful style developed in quality French films from 1936 to 1939. Christian Matras, Duvivier’s cinematographer, had been trained by Curt Courant in the expressionist traditions that fed directly, if less extravagantly, into poetic realism. As I have written elsewhere, “Whilst a few French cinematographers concentrated on the stark contrasts of expressionism, most proclaim an aesthetic that marries this expressionist pooling and shafting of light with the molding effects of panchromatic film to produce a representation of reality which, though monochrome, has a wealth of those clues to distance and the relationship between people and objects which we obtain in real life.”166 One aspect of cinematography that can still surprise, however, is the aggressively assertive focus pull that forcibly shifts our attention from one character to another, thereby foregrounding technique arguably to the detriment of narrative credibility.
La Fin du jour was awarded the Coupe de la Biennale de Venice in 1939. After eleven weeks in the prestigious Madeleine cinema, it had just received the benediction of a week in the vast (3,500-seat) Rex when war broke out. Subsequently it ran through March 1940 and was revived several times during the war.
163. Marion, ed., Le Cinéma par ceux qui le font, 109.
164. Jeancolas, 15 ans d’années trente, 274–275.
165. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopédique du cinéma, 4:75.
166. Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 381.