Les Sept péchés capitaux (1962)
Directed by Philippe de Broca, Claude Chabrol

Film Review

In 1952, the producer Henry Deutschmeister scored a notable commercial hit with his Franco-Italian film Les Sept péchés capitaux, a portmanteau or anthology film taking a darkly comedic look at the seven deadly sins.  With contributions from such capable film directors as Yves Allégret and Claude Autant-Lara, and featuring an all-star cast led by Gérard Philipe, the film could hardly fail to appeal to critics and audiences.  A decade later, French cinema had move on apace and so Deutschmeister presumably felt justified in mounting a remake, this time drawing on the talent of a new generation of filmmakers, including some of the pillars of the French New Wave.

This kind of anthology film (known as film à sketches in France) had been a mainstay of French cinema since the 1940s and was still enormously popular in the 1960s, evidenced by the success of such multi-segment offerings as La Française et l'amour (1960) and Le Diable et les dix commandements (1962).  For such a film to work well the constituent segments must be adequately linked together, and have enough variation to maintain the spectator's interest but not so much variation to be painfully jarring.  The 1962 version of Les Sept Péchés capitaux fails on both of those counts, but mainly because the seven sketches that make it up just don't fit together.  A few (notably the contributions by Jacques Demy and Claude Chabrol) would make respectable short films in their own right; the others look as if they were churned out in a lazy afternoon with no real enthusiasm or talent.

The first thing to say about this film is that it is not a wholly New Wave enterprise.  Only two of the contributors are bona fide representatives of La Nouvelle Vague (Godard and Chabrol); the others are a mix of contemporary auteurs (Demy, Roger Vadim), commercial filmmakers (Édouard Molinaro, Philippe de Broca); The film's opening segment (La Colère) was directed by Sylvain Dhomme and Max Douy, their sole directing credit for the cinema.  Dhomme was a prominent theatre director most noted for his collaborations with the Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco, and Max Douy had had a distinguished career as an art director, on films that included Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (1939) and Claude Autant-Lara's L'Auberge rouge (1951).

Jacques Demy's segment (La Luxure) boasts the starriest cast-list (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean Desailly, Micheline Presle, Laurent Terzieff, Nicole Berger) and is easily the most watchable.  It is also the one that is most evocative of its era, beautifully shot in the same luxuriant black-and-white photography that had such an impact in the director's previous feature Lola (1961).  Chabrol's contribution (L'Avarice), which rounds off the anthology, also has a strong cast (Jean-Claude Brialy, Claude Rich, Jean-Pierre Cassel) which includes another prodigious talent Claude Berri, a man destined to be one of France's most successful film producers.

Film Synopsis

Anger: A friendly mood prevails throughout a small town one Sunday after church.  Everyone seems to like one another and not a single unpleasant word is exchanged.  But the atmosphere soon changes at lunchtime, when every man finds a fly in his soup.  Anger soon works his mischief...

Envy: A chambermaid is pursuing a happy love affair with a young man at the hotel where she works, but she is jealous of the more glamorous life that she sees others lead.  When she has what she desires, it is the old life she begins to covet...

Gluttony: A man, his wife and his mother-in-law set out to attend the funeral of a family member who died from excessive eating and drinking.  On the way, all three of them cannot stop themselves from taking refreshments, ensuring that the family tradition will continue...

Sloth: A young woman will do anything to seduce an actor but his laziness will prove stronger than her love...

Lust: Two young men have been obsessed with the idea of lust since their childhood.  But when they finally get to know what lust is, its power only manifests itself in their dreams...

Pride: A married woman has a lover but her pride prevents her from accepting that her husband has a mistress.  If she has to end her own affair to keep her husband for herself so be it...

Avarice: A party of students want to spend a night with a prostitute but they cannot afford her fee.  So they each contribute a small amount and decide that one of them should go.  In the morning, the prostitute has a pang of conscience and decides to return the money, but she only hands over the part that her client himself contributed...