Pension Mimosas (1935)
Directed by Jacques Feyder

Film Review

Hot on the heels of his phenomenally successful legionnaire melodrama Le Grand Jeu (1934), director Jacques Feyder turned out another box officer winner, the less showy but equally worthy Pension Mimosas. This time, Feyder's wife Françoise Rosay was given top billing, excelling in a role that was clearly tailor-made for her by Feyder in collaboration with screenwriter Charles Spaak.  Now confidently back in the saddle after his Hollywood debacle, Feyder asserted his independence by venturing a contemporary melodrama that was stripped of the forced conventions, sensationalism and phoney sentimentality that were current at the time.  In Pension Mimosas, Feyder refines the poetic realist style that he had originated in Le Grand Jeu and in doing so brings a heightened sense of reality to his dark study in the ambiguous relationship between a mother and her son, one that carries more than a few echoes of Jean Racine's Phèdre.

Maternal love is a theme that Feyder had previously examined, with characteristic tenderness, in his silent masterpiece Visages d'enfants (1925), but in Pension Mimosas he delves more deeply and crosses the line into incest, a daring move for a 1930s filmmaker.  Rosay's Louise Noblet is one in a long line of Feyder characters who are either ruined or destroyed by an unsuitable love, and even when the nature of Louise's feelings for her adopted son become apparent to us she retains our sympathies.  We are moved, not shocked, by the middle-aged woman who loses her heart to a man half her age and then wrecks his life as sexual jealousy does it worst.  Whilst it may now look like a pretty ordinary 1930s melodrama, Pension Mimosas was actually groundbreaking (if not outright subversive) for its time, not only on account of its controversial subject matter, but also because of the psychological depth and maturity with which it tackles some delicate themes.

Françoise Rosay was always at her best when directed by her husband Jacques Feyder and here, in a part that was scripted especially for her (as opposed to the off-the-peg 'character roles' that would make up the bulk of her film career), she is at her absolute best.  Belying her strong physical presence (you can easily imagine her in a boxing ring, effortlessly flooring anything that came within punching distance), Rosay shows an almost infantile fragility that compels us to identify with her character as her tainted desires take control and drive her towards her tragic destiny.  The lugubrious Paul Bernard is an obvious choice for the role of Pierre and his ambiguous portrayal perfectly reflects Rosay's, a character who is outwardly tough and resilient but inwardly as vulnerable as an abandoned child.  André Alerme and Lise Delamare both make their presence felt, respectively as Rosay's dull husband and Bernard's glamorous floozy, but the most shameless interloper is Arletty, who is parachuted into the middle of the film (playing, would you believe it, a parachutist) and very nearly steals the film in one memorable scene.

For Arletty, this was to be a pivotal moment in her career.  Feyder's assistant director, someone named Marcel Carné, was enchanted by the young actress (then a virtual unknown) and would offer her major roles in the films he would subsequently direct, beginning with Hôtel du nord (1938).  Immediately after working as an assistant on Feyder's next film, La Kermesse héroïque (1936), Carné directed his first feature Jenny (1936) (starring none other than Françoise Rosay), before turning out a string of classic melodramas which he openly acknowledged as being strongly influenced by his mentor, Jacques Feyder.  In Pension Mimosas, a film that is sadly all but forgotten today, it is easy to discern the seeds of Carné's own poetic realist masterpieces.

Film Synopsis

In 1924, Louise Noblet and her husband Gaston run a small hotel, the Pension Mimosas, on the French Riviera.  Their clients are mostly small-time gamblers hoping to strike it lucky at a nearby casino.  They are both devotedly attached to their ten-year-old adopted son Pierrot, whose father is presently serving a prison sentence.  When the latter is released early he takes Pierrot back to live with him.  Ten years later, Pierrot is a grown man, living a dissolute life in Paris in the company of crooks and gamblers.  He has a mistress, Nelly, and gets by on the money he extorts from his adopted parents.  Heavily indebted, Pierrot accepts Louise's offer to stay at her Riviera hotel, but it soon becomes evident that Louise's feelings for the young man are more than just maternal.  Seeing that she has a rival in Nelly, Louise contrives to separate her and Pierre, not realising that in doing so she risks destroying the thing that is most precious to her...