Têtes de femmes, femmes de tête (1916)
Directed by Jacques Feyder

Film Review

It was whilst he was working as an assistant to Gaston Ravel at Gaumont during the early years of WWI that Jacques Feyder began making his own films, although most of these were lowbrow commercial offerings foisted on him by his employers.  Têtes de femmes, femmes de tête, the first film he made, stands out from these early offerings on account of its more sophisticated narrative and some imaginative directorial touches that already reveal Feyder's future capability as an auteur filmmaker.  It is also one of the longest of Feyder's first films (running to 36 minutes) and one that has been best preserved, its near-pristine condition belying the fact that it is almost a century old.  The nuanced performances (noticeably different from the stylised, over-expressive kind of acting that was more prevalent at the time) also makes the film appear more modern than it is.

Têtes de femmes, femmes de tête is a playful social comedy with just a hint of malice - not too far removed  from the kind of amusement that Ernst Lubitsch indulged in during the early phase of his career.  A woman discovers that her husband is cheating on her and enlists the help of her enterprising sister to save her marriage.  The plot is simple to the point of banality and has no doubt serviced numerous subsequent films but it provides a sound framework for a light-hearted assault on the behaviour and attitudes of the bourgeoisie.  The most interesting character is the interfering sister, played with unrelenting verve by Suzanne Delvé.  A thoroughly modern miss, Delvé's character has an independence of spirit and barely contained contempt for the male sex that make it hard not to pin the words 'lesbian' and 'suffragette' on her.  In fact, she is probably neither of these things, just a capable woman who knows her own mind and how to use it to good effect.  She is far more deserving of the description femme de tête (strong-willed woman) than her ineffectual sister.  By contrast, Kitty Hott's cuckquean wife and André Roanne's casually unfaithful husband are pretty pathetic, lame representatives of an effete social class which looks as if it is destined to drown in its own lethargy.  If we pity the Princess Orazzi, it is not because a pestilential do-gooder puts the kibosh on her illicit romance, but because she had to fall for someone as dull, vain and stupid as André Roanne's over-lacquered man about town.

Gaston Ravel was among Gaumont's most talented film directors and, working in collaboration with him, Feyder was quick to learn from and develop his technique as he came to grips with the challenges of the new and still fairly pliant art of filmmaking.  Têtes de femmes, femmes de tête is modest compared with Feyder's subsequent great films, consisting mostly of static medium-shot portraits of two of the main protagonists.  The film has none of the ambition and visual spectacle of L'Atlantide (1921) and La Kermesse héroïque (1935), but there some inspired touches which point the way towards these greater films.  When the Princess Orazzi is introduced, we see only her face reflected in a mirror as she scrutinises her appearance, in a way that immediately reveals her true character.  When the sisters go shopping, we see only their reflection in the shop windows, and when they conspire together it is often with one or both of them seen in a mirror.

How appropriate that reflected images should play such a prominent role in a film where surface appearances count for everything and where what we think we see isn't necessarily the way things really are.  Even the title has a near mirror symmetry that suggests something cruel beneath its innocent wordplay.  As you watch the film, there is a sense that you do so as an outsider looking in on a closed world, observing but not quite understanding the strange rituals taking place within its rigid confines.  It's a similar kind of subjective experience to that which Feyder would achieve on his subsequent masterpiece, Visages d'enfants (1925), in marking the division between the separate worlds inhabited by children and adults.  Perhaps the most significant thing about the film is that it was the first occasion that Feyder directed Françoise Rosay, who appears here in just one scene, as a suitably overdressed guest at a party.  The following year, Feyder would marry Rosay and over the next two decades gave her prominent roles in some of his finest films, including Le Grand Jeu (1934) and Pension Mimosas (1935).

Film Synopsis

Distressed that her husband is having an affair with a society belle, a young woman appeals to her sister for help.  The sister's initial suspicion that nothing is amiss is quickly dispelled when, during a visit to the opera, both women witness the husband speaking on intimate terms with the Princess Orazzi in her private box.  The latter two plan to meet up at a spa resort and, to that end, the husband goes to the trouble of getting a medical note from his doctor.  The sisters soon see through the deception and act to prevent the husband meeting up with the princess at the train station as they had arranged.  It is now time to bring the second stage of the operation into action.  The wife must convince her husband that she is having an affair with another man...