La Proie pour l'ombre (1961)
Directed by Alexandre Astruc

Film Review

After the lavish period piece Une vie (1958), a conventional but pretty solid adaptation of a well-known Guy de Maupassant novella, director Alexandre Astruc returned to the flimsy modernist form of his earlier Les Mauvaises rencontres (1955), the film that won him both critical acclaim and a prize at the Venice Film Festival.  By now, the Nouvelle Vague had taken its toll (for good or ill) on French cinema and Astruc obviously felt he had to move with the times.  La Proie pour l'ombre is a film with some merit but it suffers from being a tad too self-conscious attempt to imitate the style of the director's New Wave contemporaries, with sequences that look as if they have been lifted wholesale from similar films by Alain Resnais, Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard.  Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but Astruc devalues sincerity greatly by being so flagrant in his stylistic mimicry.

At least La Proie pour l'ombre has more directorial restraint and substance to it than the painfully vacuous, over-directed Les Mauvaises rencontres.  It makes a serious, albeit somewhat ambiguous, attempt to engage with the then highly topical themes of female emancipation and the worth of marriage.  The fraught nature of male-female relationships in the midst of the sexual revolution is palpably expressed, although no sensible answers are given and the film's conclusion - which implies a woman can never be fulfilled as a wife - is more than mildly depressing.  It's a film that provokes thought but leads you nowhere and in the end the protagonists appear as shallow and idealistic as any that the New Wave directors foisted upon us.  It's not life but a vague, ill-defined imitation of life, of the kind you would expect to be posited by a cynic or emotional inadequate who cannot come to grips with the complexities and contradictions of human desire.

Although La Proie pour l'ombre was far less well-received than Astruc's earlier modernist offering, it is much easier to engage with, partly because it is better directed (with far less of the off-putting pretentiousness), but mainly because of its compelling central performance from Annie Girardot, whose career was well and truly on the up after her breakthrough role in Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1960).  For the remainder of her career, Giradot would become pretty well typecast as the tough, independently minded modern woman, a beacon of feminism in later years, and she is perfectly suited for the role of Anna, a woman who feels impelled to give up romantic love for some indefinable, inexpressible notion of freedom.  (The film's title derives from the French expression lâcher la proie pour l'ombre, which means to give up something tangible for something illusory).

Fine actors though they are, Daniel Gélin and Christian Marquand struggle to make their characters - both conventional macho types who believe a woman should be subordinated to their will (as society expects) - sympathetic or even convincing.  Of the three main characters, only Giradot's rings true, and even though her behaviour is at times hard to fathom, we are forced to sympathise with Anna's dilemma and her frustration at finding the kind of life that suits her, one in which she has both a career and a man willing to respect her need for freedom and independence.  The fact that both Gélin and Marquand's characters turn out to be Alpha Males cut from the same cloth, both willing to strike a woman or bawl in her ears if she refuses to submit to their masculine superiority, is disappointing and you are left with the depressing thought that Anna has only two options open to her: solitude or slavery.  Solitude looks preferable.

Film Synopsis

Anna, 27, has been married to Eric, a successful architect, for five years.  She wants to have a life of her own rather than being completely dependent on her husband, so she takes over the management of an art gallery bought for her by Eric.  Even this does not satisfy her, though.  One day, she meets a handsome young man Bruno, who works for a record company, and the two embark on a passionate love affair.  Encouraged by Bruno, Anna finally makes up her mind to leave her husband, and after threatening to take her gallery away from her, Eric finally gives in to her request for a separation.  It is only once she had found her freedom that Anna realises that she is falling into the same trap with Bruno.  She cannot bring herself to make the same mistake again...