Dernier amour (1949)
Directed by Jean Stelli

Film Review

With Dernier amour, director Jean Stelli makes a somewhat half-hearted attempt to subvert the kind of film with which he was most closely associated at the time - the sentimental melodrama.  Adapting a novel by Georges Ohnet, he takes a distinctly Sirkian tack, appropriating all the tried-and-tested clichés of the classic weepy or woman's picture to deliver a pretty contemptuous commentary on society's attitudes to marriage at a time when female emancipation was fast becoming a reality in France.  Lacking the subtlety, insight and compassion that Douglas Sirk would bring to his similarly motivated films across the next decade, Stelli's film now appears wooden and hollow, but it was at the time a bold move for a director who was France's leading purveyor of the traditional schmaltzy melodrama, evidenced by his greatest success Le Voile bleu (1942).

The most interesting aspect of Dernier amour is the jarring contrast between the two leading female protagonists Hélène and Michèle - played to perfection by Annabella and Jeanne Moreau, two of the greatest talents in French cinema.  Hélène is the archetypal possessive middle-class wife, the kind that allows herself to be driven half-insane by unwarranted fears that her husband may be cheating on her.  Cursory details - such as the fact that Hélène and Alain have separate bedrooms and use separate washbasins - reveal that the marriage isn't as perfect as it seems, more a union of bank balances than souls.  By contrast, Michèle is the model of the free-loving, live-for-the-moment independent young woman, the kind who appears to regard marriage as an out-dated institution and men as an optional accessory to a fulfilled female existence.

The older woman mistakes ownership for love; her younger rival is equally deluded in believing that fleeting passions amid other personal goals are all that matters.  Inevitably, the two characters end up being sent down convergent paths, both ultimately coming to realise that true love is neither possession nor a game of transitory desires, but the forging of an enduring union through a willing surrender of the self.  That it takes so much effort for two supposedly intelligent and sensitive women to arrive at this pretty obvious conclusion does strain credulity somewhat, but Françoise Giroud's over-laboured screenplay has many more egregious failings than this, so the end result cannot help but appear more like a careless send-up than a sly deconstruction of the classic weepy.

The film is at least partly redeemed by the quality of the lead performances.  On her return to France after her pretty unproductive decade in Hollywood (where she married and later divorced the star Tyrone Power), Annabella looked set to regain her standing as one of French cinema's leading lights.  In 1930s France, she had become an almost unrivalled diva of the seventh art, through her collaborations with such great cineastes as René Clair (Le Million, Quatorze juillet), Julien Duvivier (La Bandera) and Marcel Carné (Hôtel du Nord).  Alas, by the end of the 1940s, public and directorial tastes had moved on since her glory days, so three films after Dernier amour, the actress bowed out and never had the come-back she had hoped for.

As one star fades and twinkles out of existence, so another comes to take its place.  Annabella's premature swan song is also Jeanne Moreau's screen debut, a passing of the baton that is boldly underscored by the contrasting acting styles and personalities of these two remarkable artistes.  Stunning though she still is, Annabella clearly belongs to the past, whereas Moreau has modernity stamped all over her.  Already a rising star of the Comédie Française, Moreau has a screen presence and approach to her art that leaves no doubt that she will soon become a leading light of French cinema - no wonder her talents were so eagerly sought after by the iconoclastic auteurs of the New Wave era - Louis Malle (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud), Roger Vadim (Les Liaisons dangereuses), Peter Brook (Moderato cantabile) and François Truffaut (Jules et Jim).  The wonder is that it took Moreau almost a decade before her full potential could be unleashed.

The other cast member of note is Georges Marchal, one of the most popular, certainly the most photogenic, French actors of the 1950s (although many regarded him - unfairly - as a poor imitation of Jean Marais, particularly when it came to swashbucklers).  Let down somewhat by a script that has an inherently female bias (both of the main male characters come across as two-dimensional, bland and a tad effete), Marchal still manages to turn in a respectable performance, proving his worth in the scene with Moreau in which their characters finally open their hearts to each other, à la Paul Henreid and Bette Davis at the climax of Now Voyager.

Annabella and Jeanne Moreau are perfectly chosen to incarnate the two opposing slants on the female psyche represented in the film - the bourgeois materialist view of conjugal felicity shown by Hélène exposed for the fraud that it is by Michèle's more honest (but just as flawed) laissez-faire take on romantic relationships.  The perfectly formed screen icon of the 1930s was how women were expected to be portrayed in cinema before the war; the far less conventionally attractive ingénue - more barbed temptress than smoothly seductive Aphrodite - was the female form of the future.  Annabella belongs to the generation of women before they were granted the right to vote in national elections; Moreau represents the face of post-war feminism.  Between these two extremes there is another (less well-developed) character - the dowdy sister Suzanne, admirably portrayed by Suzanne Flon.  This sad wretch blithely accepts that her husband is a philandering skunk and that her marriage is nothing more than a convenient sham.  There can be no prospect of future happiness for her - like the attentistes living under the Nazi occupation, she is happy being a prisoner of her own spineless acceptance of an intolerable situation.

If there is one reason to watch Dernier amour, it is to appreciate the extent of the seismic shift in society's attitudes towards women that was just beginning to take place in the late 1940s.  What is particularly remarkable about Moreau's performance is how she manages to rise above the weakness of the script and make such a powerful cri de coeur in defence of cinema's timely acceptance of the new woman.  There is a real hard-edged poignancy to the way in which her character's coldly intellectualised view of human relationships (no doubt shaped by her mis-reading of Simone de Beauvoir) crumbles under a torrent of feeling through a spurious romantic attachment.  How much more powerful the film would have been had there been less of gulf between the homespun dialogue that Moreau seems barely able to deliver and the deep inner feeling that the actress conveys with such heart-lacerating intensity.  Audiences would have to wait until Truffaut's Jules et Jim before script and performance came perfectly into sync, allowing Moreau to perform at her most devastating and show us the abject brutality of a woman in love.

Film Synopsis

Hélène and Alain would seem to be the model of a happily married couple.  Ten years ago, they were madly in love, but Hélène was then the wife of a wealthy man who would never agree to a divorce.  It was only after her husband died and left her a fortune that Hélène could marry her ideal man.   A decade on, Hélène and Alain are still living the perfect romance - until the fateful night when the former has reason to doubt her husband's fidelity.  The merriment of a New Year's celebration ends in torment when Hélène discovers a telegram addressed to her husband by an unknown woman.  Immediately she is seized by the notion that her beloved Alain has been carrying on an extra-marital affair.  She confides her fears in her older sister Suzanne, who has long learned to live with her own husband's infidelity.

To discover the truth, Hélène engages the services of a private detective, who confirms that Alain has been paying regular visits to two women.  Visiting these two women in turn, the anxious wife discovers an honourable motive in her husband's interest in them, but still she clings to the belief that he is capable of deceiving her.  Her fears finally acquire some substance when she learns that Alain has being showing an interest in his younger cousin Michèle.  The intellectually minded, free-spirited Michèle apparently has no interest in getting married, and so repulses the advances of her ardent admirer Paul.  Can it be that she is secretly in love with Alain?

To test the strength of Alain's affections for Michèle, Hélène arranges for the four of them (Paul included) to take a skiing holiday in the Alps.  It is during this vacation that Alain and Michèle discover just what they mean to each other.  Hélène's worries over the fragility of her marriage are then transferred to her husband, who is tempted to leave his wife and start a new life with his cousin.  By now, it is clear to both Hélène and Alain that their marriage is heading for the rocks.  After a visit to the cinema to watch a slushy melodrama, Hélène crashes her car.  Regaining consciousness, she finds herself in hospital with her husband at her bedside.  Comforted that her injuries are superficial, she realises that Alain will never leave her.