Les Feux de la chandeleur (1972)
Directed by Serge Korber

Film Review

Just when feminism was beginning to assert itself in France along comes this dreadful pile of melodramatic slush with its feeble attempt to convince women that they can have a man or they can have beliefs but they can't have both.  It's the kind of flagrant anti-feminist backlash you might have expected of a backward-looking, predominately male-dominated industry, such as mainstream French cinema was in the early 1970s, but it's hard to credit that Annie Girardot, a beacon of feminism at the time, would have had anything to do with the film, let alone take the lead role and allow herself to be presented as the most ludicrous martyr to women's lib you can imagine.  Just what was poor Annie thinking?

Mercifully for Madame Girardot's reputation, Les Feux de la Chandeleur is such an awful, hideously dated film that it has all but faded from memory and is unlikely to experience any kind of comeback, at least not unless Neanderthals make a surprise return and take over from Homo Sapiens.  Catherine Paysan's 1966 novel on which the film is based was already seriously démodé by the time the film went into production, so what might have worked as a gently ironic take on society's attitudes towards women in the mid-1960s could hardly help ending up resembling the tackiest kind of anti-feminist sound-off by 1972.

Not only is the film incredibly badly scripted (the dialogue is of the kind you would expect of the absolute worst kind of TV soap), it was directed by someone who has as much capacity to make a film that is worth watching as a snail in my garden has of composing a four movement piano concerto whilst building a life-size replica of the Eiffel Tower.  Serge Korber had, just prior to this, demonstrated his directorial ineptitude on two of Louis de Funès most execrable film comedies (that's 'comedy' in the grimly ironic sense of the word) - L'Homme orchestre (1969) and Sur un arbre perché (1972).  The rest of his output is hardly any better, a mix of brain-dead comedies such as Un idiot à Paris (1966) and shabby porn movies (made under his pseudonym John Thomas).  Putting Serge Korber at the helm of a sentimental drama is about as sane as allowing a narcissistic billionaire to run your country.  In either case, disaster is assured.

Les Feux de la Chandeleur doesn't quite rate as Serge Korber's worst film, but it does everything it can to aggravate (unless you happen to have a chronic predilection for viciously misogynistic films dressed up as fluffy, sweetly saccharine melodramas).  On the plus side it has a simple moral - if a man discovers his wife is a raving leftie he is entitled to abandon her and her children and allow her to go mad and die in the most implausible manner possible (in slow motion) - but on the down side you have to have an I.Q. in the low teens and be a woman-hating moron to appreciate the plus side.

The script is dire, the directing is terrible, but what really makes the film so utterly unbearable is that it is taken so seriously by its lead actors.  Annie Girardot and Jean Rochefort look as if they think they are performing a Molière play - every scene is played to perfection, without so much as a hint of insincerity.  How you wish they had mucked up their performances and shown the vile script up for what it is, but no - they just have to go on being the consummate pros.  Thankfully, the same cannot be said of their co-stars, all of whom have the common decency to give the film what it deserves, namely some of the lousiest performances of their career.  Claude Jade and Bernard Fresson are, it has to be said, merely under par, which is regrettable. It takes an actor of Bernard Le Coq's calibre to demolish the film's credibility (it deserves no less) with the most mannered and unconvincing turn an actor of his ability is capable of.

At least with Le Coq we have an actor who knows how bad the script and direction are, and has the guts to make this abundantly apparent to us, instead of following the example of fakers Girardot and Rochefort, who do their damnedest to hide the truth from us (not that they have any chance of succeeding).  With Michel Legrand drizzling every excruciating moment of the film which his habitual onslaught of musical schmaltz Korber's objective of delivering the worst French film of the decade is pretty well assured.  The only thing that gets in the way of this ambition is Giradot and Rochefort, who are just too committed to their art to admit defeat, even when absolutely everything is against them.

Film Synopsis

Alexandre and Marie-Louise Boursault are a married couple who are deeply in love but cannot come to terms with each other's politics.  Alexandre, a respectable lawyer, has become so disgusted by his wife's association with leftwing militants that, one day, he decides to leave her and their two young children, Jean-Paul and Laura.  That cold winter's day, Candlemas 1962, would remain etched in the memories of all four people for years to come.  Ten years on, Alexandre has started a new life with his second wife Clotilde and Jean-Paul has married and will soon become a father.  Not only has Marie-Louise lost her husband and her children, but she no longer has any enthusiasm for politics and regards her life as a complete failure. The only close male friend she has, Marc Champenois, she tries to foist on her daughter as a prospective husband.  The truth is that Marie-Louise has never stopped loving Alexandre and for the past ten years she has clung to the belief that one day he will return to her.  Jean-Paul becomes concerned that his mother is losing her mind and tries to dispel her wild illusions - with disastrous consequences...