Pasteur (1935)
Directed by Sacha Guitry, Fernand Rivers

Film Review

When he began toying with the new medium of film early in the silent era Sacha Guitry was deeply dismissive of cinema, considering it to be massively inferior to theatre, where he devoted most of his creative energies.  With the advent of sound, Guitry was finally persuaded to make his first full-length film, prompted partly by his then wife Jacqueline Delubac, but also by the realisation that cinema has a permanency which theatre lacked.  Guitry's first film (made under the supervision of Fernand Rivers) was an obvious attempt by the writer-director to preserve the memory of his father's acclaimed stage portrayal of Louis Pasteur in a play which Guitry had written for his father in 1919.  In his time, Lucien Guitry was one of the most revered actors of the French stage but by 1935, just ten years after his death, he had all but faded from public consciousness.  By modelling his own portrayal of Pasteur on his father's, Sacha Guitry was able to secure for him the immortality he felt he was owed.

Pasteur isn't exclusively a tribute to Lucien Guitry (the director would reserve that honour for a later film, Le Comédien (1948)), it is primarily intended to honour the memory of Louis Pasteur, the French microbiologist whom Guitry clearly regards as one of the greatest men who ever lived (and if greatness is measured in terms of human lives saved from a premature death he is probably right).  In an introduction that would become one of his trademarks, Guitry appears in person to explain why he feels Pasteur deserves to be honoured with a biopic (an extremely rare genre at the time).  After this, there are five tableaux, each depicting an important episode in Pasteur's life, with Guitry bagging virtually all of the dialogue (actually, it's virtually a monologue) as he turns in one of his most magnetic screen performances.

It is to Guitry's credit that, whilst he venerates Pasteur to the point that he practically considers him a saint, he portrays him not as some immaculate marble hero, but as a being of flesh and blood, prone to self-doubt, fits of pique and sporadic bursts of affection.  The most memorable scene is the one in which the little boy (Joseph Meister) to whom Pasteur (illegally) administered an anti-rabies vaccine returns to visit him at his home.  Visibly aged since their last encounter (just three years earlier), Guitry's Pasteur is touchingly human, and you'd think that saving the life of one child was what he considered his greatest achievement.  Later on in the film, Guitry goes to town on the worldwide acclaim that Pasteur garnered for his discoveries, discoveries that would halt the spread of diseases and save millions upon millions of lives.  But to the great man of science nearing the end of his life none of this matters: it is sufficient that he saved one life, and can see the evidence of this with his own eyes.

Guitry's mise-en-scène is far less worthy of praise than his performance and for the most part the film feels awkwardly static, consisting mostly of theatrically blocked compositions.  At one point in the film, Pasteur remarks to his colleagues: "I know that I am not using the conventional style to which you are accustomed".  There's no doubt this was intended for Guitry's critics, who found little favourable to say about his stage performances, but it can also be taken as an auteur's declaration of intent.  In other words, this is how Sacha Guitry is going to make films, and if you don't like it, tough.  Fortunately, cinema audiences did not share the critics' view and Guitry became a very popular filmmaker.

Portraits of historical personages take up a fair portion of Guitry's cinematic oeuvre.  After Pasteur, he directed a number of other biopics (each more ambitious than the previous one): La Malibran (1943), Le Diable boiteux (1948) and Napoléon (1955), devoted, respectively, to the opera singer Maria Malibran, the revolutionary Talleyrand and the military leader-cum-emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.  And then there are the grand historical frescos -  Les Perles de la Couronne (1937), Le Destin fabuleux de Désirée Clary (1941), Si Versailles m'était conté... (1953) and Si Paris nous était conté (1956) - in which, with a touch of poetic licence, Guitry brings to life some of the more colourful people in the French history books.  Whilst these later films are technically more impressive, and certainly more visually enticing, they seldom do as much justice to the great historical figure they portray as Guitry's first biopic.  Pasteur is a modest film but it is perhaps the finest tribute Guitry could have come up with for his personal hero.

Film Synopsis

In 1870, Louis Pasteur confides in a group of his students the difficulties he has encountered in the course of his career.  Ten years on, Pasteur is challenged to a duel by one of his rivals, but he remains adamant that he will only fight in the domain of science.  With reluctance he accepts the Legion of Honour and his admission to the Académie française.  In 1885, Pasteur has the opportunity to test his anti-rabies vaccine on a small boy who has been bitten by a rabid dog.  The boy survives and visits the man who saved his life three years later.  In 1892, Pasteur receives a rapturous welcome as he is honoured at the Sorbonne by a gathering that includes not only the French president but also some of the greatest thinkers of the age...