Miquette et sa mère (1950)
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Film Review

Comedy is not a genre that we would most readily associate with the French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot.  Bleak dramas and torturously suspenseful thrillers were more Clouzot's stock in trade.  Miquette et sa mère, the film he made immediately before his two most famous films, Le Salaire de la peur (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955), is something of an oddity in Clouzot's oeuvre.  A boisterous period comedy, this distinctly un-Clouzot-esque offering is a lively adaptation of a popular turn-of-the century play of the same title by Robert de Flers and Gaston Arman de Caillavet, which had previously been adapted by Henri Diamant-Berger in 1934.  There are no gruesome deaths or twisted intrigue on offer here - just a constant stream of good-natured gags and a slightly ironic look at the life of the theatrical artiste.

Miquette et sa mère may seem to be an odd digression for a director who had come to be associated with more serious fare but it is less surprising when you discover just where Clouzot began his career.  In the early 1930s, Clouzot started out in German film studios, scripting and later directing a slew of French versions of German comedies and operettas, such as Tout pour l'amour (1933) and Caprice de princesse (1934).  It is easier to accept the myth than Clouzot began his directing career with the devious whodunit L'Assassin habite au 21 (1942) but by then he had already been cutting his teeth for almost a decade on much lighter mainstream entertainment.  For Clouzot, Miquette et sa mère may have been a nostalgia trip as much as anything else, a chance to revisit his past.  It is certainly not a film that appears to have been made by someone with an aversion to or lack of experience with comedy.  This is the film in which Clouzot reveals his human side perhaps more than any other.

A superb cast and a cracking script help to make this one of Clouzot's most entertaining films.  More than just a classic French farce, Miquette et sa mère offers a thoughtful reflection on the relationship between theatre and cinema, indeed between theatre and life.  The theatricality of some of the performances (Louis Jouvet and Saturnin Fabre are so O.T.T. that they look as if they have absconded from a madhouse) highlight the touching reality that Bourvil and Danièle Delorme bring to their portrayals.  The play-within-the-play which occupies most of the final act allows theatre to take over completely and all of the characters have, by now, become players whose world extends no further than the boundaries of their stage.  Miquette et sa mère reminds us that we are all actors, our lives contained within the roles that have been created for us and which we perform for - who knows? - some bored celestial onlooker.  If Clouzot was able to direct a comedy as deftly as this you can't help wondering why he never again made a film like it.  He seems to have preferred an altogether darker kind of theatre, in which the vile perversities of human nature are picked over for dramatic rather than comedic effect.

Film Synopsis

In 1900, 18-year-old Miquette Grandier lives in a small provincial town with her widowed mother, Madame Grandier, the owner of a tobacco shop.  She has long dreamed of a glorious career on the stage, and after seeing a play performed by a theatre company run by the ageing actor Monchablon she makes up her mind to be an actress.  This doesn't quite accord with the plans of her social-climbing mother, who is hoping that she will marry the Marquis de la Tour-Mirande, a perfect match even if he is several decades her senior.

Alas, it is not the decrepit Marquis that the flighty Miquette is drawn to her, but his lovably idiotic son Urbain.  With Urbain forced into marrying a rich heiress against his will, there is nothing to stop Miquette from moving to Paris to realise her acting dreams, pursued by her interfering mother and the over-attentive Marquis.  Her new profession suits her and within no time she has all the makings of a great stage actress.  During a tour of the provinces, Miquette and Urbain run into each other by chance and discover that the time for playacting is over...