a double-faced Raimu in “The Strange Monsieur Victor”

A filmmaker with a rugged career, made difficult by his tense relationship with producers, Jean Grémillon is nonetheless on par with Jean Vigo or Jean Renoir, one of the freest French directors. and poetic that can be imagined. Made in 1938, The Strange Mister Victor takes place during its most fertile period, around some masterpieces such as Mouth of love (1937), Trailers (1941) or Summer light (1942). If it cannot claim this reputation – succession of screenwriters at its bedside, bad understanding with the main actor, narrative incongruities – the film conceals so many beauties, throbs with such an atmosphere, takes charge of such prescience. history, which remains highly recommendable.

This variation on one of his first feature films, the magnificent melodrama The Little Lise (1930), also scripted by Charles Spaak, puts on the front of the stage a good-natured father, Victor Agardanne, prosperous owner of a bazaar in Toulon. Except that his prosperity is explained by another of his activities, clandestine, since Mr. Victor is the concealer of a trio of thugs who rob the houses of the surroundings. When Amédée, figurehead of this sleazy trio, threatens Agardanne with blackmail by a moonless night, the latter loses his temper, takes a punch from his pocket and disembarks the thug in a dark street where he will end up emptying himself of his blood.

From abjection to holiness

Confiscated in the hands of a child who had taken it from the shop of the shoemaker Robineau – who comes the same morning to grapple publicly with Amédée (Pierre Blanchar) who brushed his wife (Viviane Romance as a beautiful bitch) a little close – the instrument sends the innocent Robineau directly to the penal colony. When the latter, seven years later, escapes, he goes straight to Agardanne, who immediately offers him asylum. And it is as if another film begins, where it will be about love and redemption, betrayal and fatality. Who makes one wonder what exactly is this object so changing that is The Strange Monsieur Victor. A Provençal comedy coming to tickle Marcel Pagnol’s feet? A sticky pre-war thriller? A great melody of thwarted loves?

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More essentially, no doubt, a film so inhabited by duality that it stages in a shade of chiaroscuro that it ends up gently poisoning it. That of Monsieur Victor, of course, with a Raimu who excels at moving from jovial good nature to disturbing strangeness, as from abjection to holiness. But also that of the guilty and the innocent. Of the venal woman and the model wife. And a Franco-German co-production which distributes the shoot between the studios in Berlin and the exteriors of Toulon.

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