Un Carnet de Bal

Marie Bell and Raimu

Julien Duvivier's Un Carnet de Bal, his follow up to the enormously successful Pepe le Moko in 1937, is a solid entertainment done with theatrical panache. Marie Bell plays Christine, a recently bereaved widow who lives in splendid isolation in an enormous villa beside a lake in the Italian Alps. As she is, rather brusquely, clearing out her wealthy husband's knick-knacks, she finds the dance card of her first ball when she was sixteen. She comes up with the far-fetched notion that she will visit her suitors to either revisit the past or break out of her torpor. The threadbare plot concocted by Duvivier and a host of collaborators provides him an opportunity to pair Ms. Bell, revue style, with some of France's finest actors. Often, Christine is an observer in the story, as acting titans ranging from Harry Baur (Les Miserables) to Louis Jouvet (Hôtel du Nord) sum up their character's past in expansive monologues.

The film's structure yields predictably choppy results. Some of the more melodramatic episodes fall flat. Despite Duvivier's tilted angles, the depravations of a one-eyed abortionist seem more comic rather than disturbing now. An overbearingly operatic performance from former diva Francoise Rosay sinks a segment featuring her as a mother in deep denial about her son's death. A beautifully restrained performance by Harry Baur almost redeems a segment about a former admirer turned priest, but the sequence meanders too slowly down memory lane amidst numerous choral refrains. The film works best during it light comic sequences which feature Fernandel and Raimu. I also enjoyed Louis Jouvet's performance, the best in the film, as a gangster who operates a swanky nightclub. We get to watch a topless showgirl act and Jouvet's tribute to Charles Boyer's great performance in History is Made at Night. 

Duvivier unloads his cinematic trick bag during the course of the film: he uses documentary footage, wipes, superimpositions, tracking shots, lots of close-ups, and even slow motion to evoke the feathery memories of Christine's first ball. Those scenes are shot on a white set with the women wearing white gowns, an overly obvious summation of 16 year old Christine's innocence. The film conjures a far off time where men could wear capes unironically. The proletariat characters exist for comic relief or to doff their chapeaus to their betters. This tradition of quality feel and the film's lack of personal vision are why the New Wave critics and filmmakers reacted against Duvivier and his ilk after World War 2. 

Despite its flaws, Un Carnet de Bal boasts exemplary cinematic craft. The sound is excellent with an inventive use of music fading in and out of the proceedings. The set design and decoration are outstanding. I particularly admired the chapel set in the Harry Baur sequence. What one can glean from this film besides admiration of its technical prowess is dubious. Christine learns she has idealized her past and her loves. She adopts the almost grown son of a former lover in a bizarrely Oedipal finale. We see her dressed in a mannish pantsuit after wearing feminine frills and fripperies for the entire flick. A feminist salute to an at last liberated lady? Again, I am dubious. Duvivier helmed the remake of this picture during his American sojourn, 1941's Lydia, with Merle Oberon, was generally a considered subpar effort.