Manèges (1950)
Directed by Yves Allégret

Film Review

In Manèges, one of his darkest and most inspired films, director Yves Allégret paints the most depressingly cynical view of humanity imaginable.  Even bleaker and more pessimistic than Julien Duvivier's late excursions into abject despair, the film shows only the worst aspects of human nature - deceit and opportunism masquerading as love, love that becomes twisted into revulsion and hatred - and offers us not one scintilla of hope.  The film completes a remarkable cycle of three films which Allégret made with screenwriter Jacques Sigurd and which were an extension of the poetic realist style pioneered by Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert in the 1930s.  In common with Dédée d'Anvers (1948) and Une si jolie petite plage (1949), Manèges is an utterly grim study in personal entrapment, where the ill-fated protagonists are taken prisoner by a cruel set of circumstances which stifle all their hopes and from which there is not the slighest possibility of escape.

Manèges has none of the dark romanticism of Dédée d'Anvers and the haunting lyricism of Une si jolie petite plage.  It is a kind of über-film noir which seems to revel in painting each of the three main characters in the worst possible light, so that we never have the opportunity to sympathise with any of them.  They all get what they deserve - the naïve husband, the manipulative wife and the grotesque mother-in-law.  As the husband who is totally blind to his wife's faults and then grows to hate her as the truth is revealed to him, Bernard Blier gives one of the most effective performances in his long and distinguished career.  We ought to pity his character as his illusions are ripped apart by his harpy-like mother-in-law, but we do not.  He is equally deserving of our contempt, a weak and foolish man who commits the ultimate atrocity when his folly is exposed, punishing the ones who deceived him with a staggering show of heartlessness.

And who better to portray the seductive, self-interested femme fatale than Simone Signoret, an actress who specialised in playing this kind of cold, calculating venality, most famously in H.G. Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955).  Signoret's portrayal of a social-climbing parasite is one her most shocking creations, a fiend in human form who is apparently without any scruples and who has not even the meanest approximation to a human soul.  (As her character is the only one not to tell her own story, we cannot be entirely sure whether she is as bad as she is portrayed.  Is it possible that her mother has exaggerated her faults to spite her husband?)    At the time she made the film, Signoret was married to Yves Allégret and it was Allégret who gave her her first significant screen role, in Dédée d'Anvers.  This was the last occasion they worked together; in the summer of 1949 Signoret met and fell in love with a young singer named Yves Montand and walked out on Allégret, oddly mirroring what her character had sought to do in Manèges (albeit with more honest motives).

The film's other stand-out performance is supplied by Jane Marken, one of the great unsung supporting actors of French cinema who made her screen debut in the silent era and was famously the first Mrs Jules Berry.  Marken worked with some of the great cineastes of her day - Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, Sacha Guitry, Jacques Becker and  Marcel Carné.  After the war Yves Allégret gave her career a boost, casting her in her most memorable role in Manèges (off-screen, Marken and Allégret had once persued a brief amorous liaison).  As the mother-in-law from Hell, Marken turns in an extraordinary performance, as convincing a portrayal of loathsome nastiness as you are ever likely to find in any film.  Watching her character assault the helpless Blier with her vile confession is a more viscerally shocking experience than that provided by the famous shower scene in Hitchcock's Pyscho - it is a relentless, despicably cruel hatchet job and we feel nothing for her, absolutely nothing, when her world comes crashing down about her in the film's devastating last few minutes.  Some people deserve to go to Hell.

Film Synopsis

As his wife Dora lies close to death in a hospital bed after a horrific car accident, Robert looks back with guilt and tenderness on their brief life together.  The devoted husband, he can think only of the happier times, convinced that theirs was a perfect marriage.  This illusion is shattered when Dora's embittered mother tells Robert the truth about his wife.  Dora only married Robert for his money and has been bleeding him dry, to the point where he ends up having to sell his business, a riding school.  But there is worse: without him knowing, Dora has taken a secret lover whilst ruthlessly plotting her next move up the social ladder...