La Divine croisière (1929)
Directed by Julien Duvivier

Film Review

One of the quirks of Julien Duvivier's early oeuvre is a recurring preoccupation with religious themes.  Golgotha (1935) is of course his most famous dalliance with Christianity, an inspired account of the Passion of Christ that continues to outshine many other similar films by virtue of its immense visual power and stark humanity.  Religiosity is pretty well absent from Duvivier's other sound films but features prominently in his earlier silent work, notable examples including Credo ou la tragédie de Lourdes (1924), L'Abbé Constantin (1925) and La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin (1929).  La Divine Croisière, one of the last of Duvivier's silent offerings, brazenly uses the ideas of faith and divine intervention as plot drivers (deus ex machina in its most literal form) for a fairly standard 1920s melodrama - an unlikely confection for an atheistic-seeming director with a reputation as a staunch pessimist and cynic.

Even by this early stage in his career, Duvivier's own faith - in both God and human nature - was on a rapidly descending trajectory, and it is interesting so see the marked transition in his work of the late 1920s, early 1930s towards an increasingly gloomy, fatalistic view of life.  This would provide the foundation for his own poetic realistic aesthetic, culminating in his bleak noir-styled masterpieces of the mid-to-late 1930s, La Belle équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937).  From the mid-1940s, Duvivier would increasingly wallow in the depravity of his fellow man and cruelty of a godless universe, reaching agonising depths of despair in such films as Panique (1947) and Voici le temps des assassins (1956).  Set against such scathing assaults on human frailty, La Divine Croisière seems like the work of a completely different author, yet even this contains the seeds of Duvivier's future pessimism, most tellingly in the two villains of the piece, the despicably mean-spirited ship owner Ferjac and even more monstrous mutineer Mareuil.

Admirably well cast in the glamorous lead role is the Belgian actress Suzanne Christy, wife of the legendary screenwriter Charles Spaak.  With her natural saintly aura, Christy was perfect for the part of the pious heroine Simone.  She makes an effective contrast with her character's unsympathetic father, who is portrayed with a chilling blend of patrician hauteur and Scrooge-like meanness by Henry Krauss, an actor with an intimidating ogre-like bearing.  Similarly, the innate goodness of the heroic Captain Jacques, as played by popular jeune premier Jean Murat, is well counterbalanced by the naked malevolence of the mutinous sailor Mareuil - a part that allowed the actor Thomy Bourdelle to make good use of his thuggish countenance and powerful physique.

In common with all too many of Duvivier's early films, La Divine Croisière is let down by a mechanical plot that relies too heavily on contrivance and coincidence to be remotely convincing.  There is surprisingly little in the way of character depth - Duvivier is content with serving up a collection of stock melodrama archetypes, knowing that this is what cinema audiences of the time would have expected, along with a slushy formulaic plot that shows about as much creative flair as a beggar's income tax return.  Original screenwriting clearly wasn't Duvivier's forte at the time - his overriding interest was filmmaking technique, telling a story (no matter how excruciatingly banal) as imaginatively, as movingly as possible.  Whatever failings La Divine Croisière has in its so-so script, it amply makes up for on the cinematographic front.  No doubt influenced by Soviet and Scandinavian cineastes of his time (Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mauritz Stiller, Carl Dreyer), Duvivier employs novel cinematic techniques with a dazzling gusto in his attempt to draw as much dramatic power and emotional feeling from his story.

The device that Julien Duvivier uses most generously in La Divine Croisière is the massive close-up.  The camera is pushed so near to the actor's face that it literally fills the entire frame, powerfully expressing whatever emotion has taken hold of the character at this moment, be it fear, despair, anxiety, cunning, mistrust or blind fury.  It was Carl Dreyer who first showed just how incredibly revealing the big close-up could be, in such films as Leaves from Satan's Book (1920) and Master of the House (1925), and in his film Duvivier proves himself a worthy student of Dreyer, using the device with inordinate skill - so well in fact that many of the film's inter-titles become pretty well superfluous.  The sheer demonic nastiness of the treacherous Mareuil is revealed to us in a series of terrifying close-ups, effectively contrasting with other close-ups that radiate the inherent goodness of the impoverished Breton villagers.

The staggering inhumanity of the film's other villain, Ferjac, hits you like a physical punch when the camera locks onto his implacable face for what seems like an eternity - a rare moment of unbearable stillness in a film that appears to be in a feverish state of motion from start to finish.  Even in the film's quieter passages, the camera is rarely stationary - often it tracks across the field of view, most eloquently when panning along a series of faces in close-up, showing us the characters' contrasting feelings.  In the set-piece dramatic sequences - those depicting the Cordillère being caught in a hellish storm and the inferno that engulfs the sailor's island camp - camera movement and accelerated editing are used with a manic enthusiasm to propel the spectator into the vertiginous heart of the action.

Bold silhouettes, in which characters are lit from behind, provide some of the film's most striking compositions.  The most memorable of these is the one depicting a large party of villagers walking along the crest of a hill - instantly evocative of the 'dance of death' sequence in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) (perhaps not surprisingly, given that Bergman was one of Duvivier's most ardent admirers).  Lacking the narrative depth and character sophistication of the director's subsequent work, La Divine Croisière fails to be an entirely satisfying piece of silent cinema, but its abundance of tour de force visual flair makes it one of the more stylistically interesting of Duvivier's early films.  The fact that the film has many exterior scenes that were shot on location in Brittany adds to its regional authenticity.  Marcel L'Herbier's L'Homme du large (1920) and Jean Epstein's sublime Breton cine-poems (Finis terrae, L'Or des mers) provide a much richer slice of life on the Brittany coastline, but Duvivier's film is just as eloquent in expressing the indomitable spirit of the Breton soul and the precarious nature of those who lived on or by the sea in the early 20th century.

Film Synopsis

In a village on the rugged coast of Brittany the wealthy ship owner Claude Ferjac has a reputation as a mean-spirited tyrant.  Ignoring his crew's misgivings, he insists that his ship, the Cordillère, should depart at once with its latest cargo.  Even his loyal captain, Jacques de Saint-Ermont, has concerns over the vessel's seaworthiness and wonders whether he will return from this latest expedition.  Ferjac's attractive daughter Simone is equally anxious - she is passionately in love with Jacques and hopes that one day they will marry - with or without her father's blessing.  The Cordillère has been at sea for a few days before one of the more brutish sailors, Mareuil, discovers what cargo the ship is transporting - strong liquor!  Realising that he has a chance to make a fortune for himself, Mareuil goads a handful of his fellow sailors into staging a violent mutiny. The captain and those who remain loyal to him are locked up in the hold, just as the ship is caught in the fiercest of sea storms.

When the ship fails to return to port several weeks later, the families of the crew become certain that it has been lost at sea.  Simone's Christian faith is tested to the limit when news reaches her that the dead body of one of the sailors on board the ship has been found washed up on the shore.  It seems that her beloved Jacques has gone to a watery grave, so now she must submit to her father's plans to marry her to one of his business associates - a man old enough to be her father! One evening, Simone is visited by the Virgin Mary, the Star of the Sea, and is told that if she can organise a rescue expedition she will be guided to the unfortunate sailors.  After her father refuses to support her in this desperate venture, Simone turns to the villagers and with their help they equip a ship, the Maris Stella, for a rescue mission.

Sure enough, the crew of the Cordillère are still very much alive, eking out a meagre existence on a small island after running aground in the tempest.  With the crew adopting their former captain as their leader, the villainous Mareuil lives alone on another part of the island, awaiting the day when he can take his revenge.  After several weeks, Simone's rescue expedition looks certain to be a futile endeavour and the crew are ready to head back to Brittany.  In desperation, the ship owner's daughter offers a prayer to her guiding spirit, begging for a sign that will lead them to the lost sailors.  At this moment, Mareuil does his worst, setting fire to the makeshift camp housing the crew of the Cordillère.  The flames attract the attention of their rescuers and soon the Maris Stella is dropping anchor, ready to take the lost sailors back home.  As Mareuil meets his end in a thirsty quagmire, Simone and Jacques are happily reunited.  The rescue ship returns to port to receive a rapturous welcome from the villagers.  Ferjac has no choice now but to allow his daughter to marry the man her heart has chosen.