Au royaume des cieux (1949)
Directed by Julien Duvivier

Film Review

For all his standing as one of the leading lights of French cinema, Julien Duvivier is not particularly known as a committed social commentator or reform-advocating polemicist, and this makes Au royaume des cieux, one of his few forays into socio-political filmmaking, all the more interesting.  Work began on the film within a year of Marcel Carné and his trusty screenwriter Jacques Prévert drawing a line under their aborted project La Fleur de l'âge, which, with its uncompromising portrait of life in a brutally administered education and reform centre for juvenile delinquents, treads virtually identical ground, and even had the same up-and-coming star Serge Reggiani cast in a leading role.  It's a great lost to cinéphiles that this earlier film was never completed, as it would doubtless have been interesting to compare it with Duvivier's offering, which saw its director taking up a similar challenge of departing from the poetic realist melodramas of the previous decade and moving onto the less familiar and far more contentious ground of contemporary social drama.

As the caption at the top of the film spells out, Au royaume des cieux was not based on a real-life story (in contrast to Carné's abandoned film) but is entirely fictitious, conceived by Duvivier after being inspired by various faits divers, and with dialogue supplied by another screenwriting legend, Henri Jeanson.  Duvivier made the film in France between two English language productions, Anna Karenina (1948) and Black Jack (1950), which had been filmed respectively in England and Spain.  At the time, the director's reputation had taken a severe knock, after the critical and public rejection of Panique (1947), an inspired Simenon adaptation which was a widely condemned for its deeply pessimistic view of human nature.

If Duvivier had taken heed of his critics he would not have gone anywhere near a subject as shockingly grim as life in a girl's brutally run reform school, and whilst the film does occasionally throw out a few shards of light (most notably in the fierce spirit of solidarity exhibited by the victimised prisoners, encouraged by the compassion of a minority of their warders) it is for the most part a gloomy affair (at times eerily evocative of much of Ingmar Bergman's subsequent oeuvre) and serves to underline, with an unsettling mix of dark humour and biting cynicism, the director's unstinting pessimism in his post-WWII years.

With its oppressively spacious sets (a nod to German expressionism) and harsh high-contrast lighting (shades of film noir), Au royaume des cieux is startlingly effective in conveying the stark brutality and crushing injustice of the regime to which wayward teenagers (most victims of parental abuse or abandonment) were routinely subjected at the time the film was made.  Suzy Prim's uncompromising portrayal of the central villain of the piece, the breathtakingly vile Mademoiselle Chamblas, is arguably French cinema's most potent indictment of a reform system that is still looked back on in shame and disgust, one that was so unspeakably bad it could very well have taught Hitler or Stalin a thing or two about the limits of subjugation of helpless captives.

Effective as the film is in getting across its central message, condemning the state-sanctioned brutalisation of rebellious or neglected teenagers for all it is worth, its impact is somewhat diminished by the inclusion of a tacky melodramatic story strand depicting the inevitably doomed romance between the principal heroine (a captivating Suzanne Cloutier) and her impeccable knight in shining armour (Serge Regianni, somewhat less convincing as the flawless preux chevalier).  Au royaume des cieux is at its most powerful in the masterfully crafted group scenes that allow us to gain access to the fluctuating moods and pent-up resentment of the far from uniform ensemble of prisoners (euphemistically referred to as students)'.  Duvivier's artful use of portrait montage and Jeanson's authentic punchy dialogue provide some grim, occasionally harrowing, insights into the corrosive impact of the monstrous abuse to which the girls are routinely subjected, to which the spirited performances from the aspiring young female ensemble (which includes a number of stars-in-the-making, notably a waif-like Juliette Greco) can only lend further notes of intense realism and pathos.

The problem, alas, is that the pudding is a tad over-egged, with dramatic incident and lazy caricature serving to undermine the film's credibility at key moments.  Mademoiselle Chamblas is the film's most blatant example of Duvivian overstatement.  It would have taken an actress far more capable than Suzy Prim (here in the premature twilight of her career after finding immense success as a comedy actress throughout the 1930s) to have made the two-dimensional monster conceived by the screenwriters into a fully rounded character.  At no point are we invited to sympathise with the hyper-prim corseted harridan, and when she does finally get her grisly comeuppance (narrowly escaping death as dog food) we are on the side of the cheering Amazonians who brought about her downfall whilst faithfully re-enacting the anarchic climax to Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite.  If this only dimly registers with the spectator it might possibly be because, just a few minutes prior to this, the protagonists are all fleeing from a flood of Biblical proportions, an event that culminates in the suicide of the film's most sympathetic character.  Not even a Dan Brown novel or Hollywood disaster movie manages to cram this much shock and awe plotting in so small a space.

Serge Reggiani may have been just about the most charismatic thing on legs in France at the time, but he is badly served by a script that fails to make his stock character anything more than the blandest and most predictable of dewy eyed good guys.  The actor would fare far better as the screen Romeo in André Cayatte's Les Amants de Vérone, which was, coincidentally, made about the same time.  If there is a single stand-out performance it is that supplied - with an abundance of understated charm and tenderness - by a dazzling ingénue, Suzanne Cloutier.  Orson Welles was so taken by the former fashion model after seeing her in this film that he immediately offered her a long-term contract and a leading role as Desdemona in his ambitious production of Othello (1952).

At the time of its first release, Au royaume des cieux did little to restore the opinion of Julien Duvivier in the eyes of his critics and the cinema-going public, and this might well explain why it remains one of his most overlooked and underrated works.  As a new decade beckoned, Duvivier was seen very much to be part of the old guard and his miserable reflections on the frailty of human nature were ill-received by an austerity-weary public that was desperately in need of cheering up.  It was only by turning to lighter fare, with Le Petit monde de Camillo (1952), that the director managed to win back his fickle audience - a final grudging concession to mainstream frivolity before the work of scorning human depravity could continue in deadly earnest.

Film Synopsis

Flanked by policemen, Maria Lambert, a 17-year-old orphan, arrives at Haute-Mère, a secure educational establishment located in an austere region of France that is at risk of flooding.  The woman who runs the centre, Madame Bardin, learns that, before coming here, Maria was in the care of various families who abused and exploited her - not an unusual occurrence.   A short while later, Madame Bardin dies and is replaced by Mademoiselle Chamblas, a sour old maid who believes that adolescents should have rebelliousness thrashed out of them.  When Chamblas learns that Marie has fallen in love with a Parisian electrician, she is incensed and immediately locks her up in the punishment cell.  Once she has been released from the cell, Maria tells her story to the other girls and assures them that Pierre will soon find a way to get her out of the centre.  Help is nearer than Maria knows.  Mademoiselle Chamblas's reign of terror is about to come to a dramatic end...