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The modalities are Chaplin and Mary Pickford, the maquette introduction of the burg reappears in The Lady Vanishes. New Year's Eve, out of the shack and into the cold for the ingénue (Catherine Hessling), meager wares on a wobbly tray. A frost-covered window pane makes for a blurry iris, boys with their snowballs are concurrent with Gance. What's a poor girl to do, "la flamme d'une allumette" sparkles in the dark and launches the hallucination, the Christmas tree turns abstract and geometric. Suddenly she's a juggler with a spring in her step, the gateway is a screenful of veils she twirls through in slow-motion. The bitter-enchanted distillate of Hans Christian Andersen's fable, viewed by Jean Renoir as a jumble of fanciful mechanisms, the camera being the most fanciful of them all. Dolls and ballerinas and toy critters in the magic rumpus room, including bears and rabbits ahead of La Règle du Jeu. Méliès cuts, lumbering wooden soldiers with painted features, cf. Rogers and Mains' Babes in Toyland. The swell who barely noticed her in the real world (Jean Storm) is here a dashing officer, the concerned policeman (Manuel Raaby) materializes as "a killjoy" with skull and crossbones on his Hussar cap. "Je suis la mort." The celestial escape is ephemeral, the heroine's date must be kept. A mournful Reaper, as Lang would have it, who turns a cross into a rose bush that promptly weeps petals. The upshot is a dainty frozen corpse, the passersby have a word for this, "sottise." The style is later reconsidered in "Le dernier réveillon" (Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir). In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |