Le Double amour (1925)
Directed by Jean Epstein

Film Review

Of all cinema's genres, melodrama is the one that is most easily derided.  Contrived, endlessly recycled soap-style narratives inhabited by the same unconvincing archetypes have always been popular with the ordinary man or woman in the street (usually the woman), but critics have tended to look upon the genre as something low and degrading, intellectually vacuous mush for the unwashed, uneducated masses.  When Jean Epstein started directing melodramas for the company Albatros in the mid-1920s his reputation as a bright young auteur was soon lost - indeed, his avant-garde contemporaries saw this as a flagrant betrayal of everything they stood for.  Following the reappraisal of the work of Douglas Sirk in the late 1960s, melodrama has come to be judged more generously and is no longer the dirty word it once was.  Like Sirk, Epstein used this style of film subversively, to entertain the masses whilst offering up a sour yet perceptive critique of society in his time.

Epstein's two classic melodramas, L'Affiche (1924) and Le Double amour (1925), were intended primarily as vehicles for Albatros's main star, the great Russian actress Nathalia Lissenko, and whilst they follow the rules of the genre to the letter they contain within them the bitterest of social commentaries to be found in any French film of the 1920s.  Both films were scripted by Epstein's sister Marie, a lifelong collaborator who doubtless shared her brother's concerns.  Le Double amour is particularly trenchant in its condemnation of the double standards of the bourgeoisie.  The corrupting influence of money and the hypocrisies that wealth engenders are felt in virtually every scene, as tangible as a vampiric fiend lurking in the background.

Money appears to be everywhere in this film, scattered about like confetti, but it never seems to do any good.  Not once does it appear to enhance the lives of the protagonists; it merely erodes their moral core and makes them do bad or foolish things, an agent of pure destruction.  Even the high-minded heroine, an impoverished countess, becomes a slave to the power of filthy lucre and ultimately she has no option but to sell her principles to save her son from ruin and give him a chance of a decent life, immersed in yet more destructive wealth.  Money becomes a drug, a false friend, a means of ducking one's responsibilities.  Any crime, any moral faux pas, it seems, can be written off, no questions asked, if a large enough cheque is written.  Marcel L'Herbier's L'Argent (1928) goes to town with the same theme, somewhat less succinctly than Epstein's more subtle and focused film.

A recurring motif of Epstein's, the untamed ageless sea,  punctuates the narrative of Le Double amour in a way that eerily prefigures the lyrical Breton phase at the end of the director's remarkable career.  Waves rolling back and forth along a stretch of seashore provide a stark visual metaphor for the ebb and flow of time, humorously imitated by a tracking shot that goes down a line of identically dressed attendees at a gala concert and then back again.  Cosmic repetition is the film's other main theme, the notion that human beings are condemned to repeat the same pattern of behaviour, over and over again, like marionettes in the hands of some celestial influence which lacks the imagination to come up with original stories.

The second half of the film is almost a perfect mirror image of the first, the hopelessly doomed attempts by the heroine to deal with her son's gambling addiction matching her earlier experiences with her playboy lover.  Twenty years separate these two halves of the story and yet it is as if time is being re-run, the son Jacques behaving just like his father Jacques, with the same woman squandering all of her resources in the same futile effort to save the object of her love, with the same tragic result.  It's an odd coincidence that the actors who play the two Jacques - Jean Angelo and Pierre Batcheff - both died prematurely in the early 1930s, in fact within two years of each other.  Patterns are as bountiful in time as they are in nature.

Pierre Kefer's eye-catching geometric set-designs serve to emphasise the brutal symmetry of the plot.  Influenced by both Art Nouveau and Art Déco, the sets have their own unsettling duality which has the effect of exteriorising the heroine's personal inner struggle - the stylish florid elegance of one design tradition imprisoned within the imposing utilitarian character of the other, like a bird trapped in a cage.  In several shots, the ornately decorated background comes to resemble a spider's web in which the heroine appears ensnared like an insect, caught in the unforgiving web of fate.  So impressed was Epstein with Kefer's work on this film that he employed him on two subsequent films, La Glace à trois faces (1927) and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) - two films in which the design is every bit as inspired as the direction.

Even though his estrangement from the Parisian Avant-Garde was by this stage complete, Epstein had yet another critical and commercial success with Le Double amour.  By this time, however, he was longing for independence and, weary of the limitations of commercial filmmaking, he would make just one more film for Albatros, Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925).  Far from being a cynically motivated sell-out, Epstein's mainstream melodramas were a crucial stage in the development of the director's art, bringing an enriched rigour, technical competence and humanity to his craft which made Epstein's later films as a free-spirited auteur all the more dazzling and unique.

Film Synopsis

The casino at the rich man's seaside resort Saint-Blaise-de-la-mer is the venue for a gala concert for charity, the star attraction being the beautiful Countess Laure Maresco.  As the countess woos her admiring audience with her singing, her lover Jacques Prémont-Solène is busy losing the entire sum raised by the charity event at the gambling tables.  Jacques's father, a wealthy car manufacturer, not only refuses to bail his son out, he orders him to leave the country immediately and make a fresh start in America.  Jacques sets out on his new life without saying farewell to the countess, unaware that she is now virtually penniless and pregnant with his child.  Twenty years later, the countess's son, also named Jacques, has the same fatal addiction as his father.  His mother, now a successful singer, can barely cover his gambling debts with her earnings.  When the countess's former lover returns to France, he is now a fabulously wealthy oil magnate, but he refuses to acknowledge Jacques as his own son.  To prevent her son from going to prison for stealing some gambling chips the countess is prepared to do anything, even betraying the man she once loved...