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Nothing more than a story of a girl, assures the title card, "l'isolement moral" is her burden. The kitchen maid first seen as a Degas laundress, Catherine Hessling in a dress rehearsal for The Diary of a Chambermaid. (She crosses a provincial street sketched in marvelous deep space, diagonal sidewalks and a bocce ball slowly rolling forward.) She works for a local politician (Louis Gauthier) with a harsh wife (Maud Richard), the elites are summed up as a fancy recital attended with slack-jawed boredom. "Soir de carnaval" in Nice, the dark screen is lit up by fireworks, the dying spiral of the doleful scion (Albert Dieudonné) is rhymed with the revelers whirling outside in a bravura sequence. "Un jeu qui en vaut bien un autre." Dieudonné reluctantly sharing the camera with neophyte Jean Renoir, who also appears Stroheim-like as the sous-préfect, trim and monocled. The title is curiously adjacent to Pabst's The Joyless Street, dashes of expressionism dutifully adorn the melodrama. Sojourn at the fleapit with the pimp (Pierre Lestringuez), frizzy Klimt models in squalor, frenetic cutting for a scuffle. Election shenanigans are awash in patriotic flop sweat, smear campaigns ("Tartuffe!") escalate into a slapstick clash between rival posters. Out of the rain and into an abandoned streetcar for the put-upon heroine, a couple of vagabonds up to no good give it a push, toward the precipice it barrels. "Catherine accepta sa destinée," or does she? The extended kinetic finale gazes back at Gance's La Roue, ahead to Murnau's Sunrise. With Pierre Champagne, Eugénie Nau, and Georges Térof. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |