What's apparent in Poil de Carotte is that Duvivier, apart from his purely commercial employment, had firmly in place the major theme of his career an essentially pessimistic take on an isolated figure. Because he proceeded from an existential observation of human nature, as opposed to a social or ideological agenda, he has been dismissed as uncommitted. But nobody who studies the face of the unloved provincial redheaded boy Francois Lepic, nicknamed Carrot-Top, can fail to see the way young Andre Heuze finds his soul being more crushed each day until he views suicide as preferable to going on. At school, young Francois dips his pen in his inkwell and laboriously writes: "A family is a group of people living under the same roof who cannot stand one another." And gets his knuckles rapped for it.
His classroom punishment is light compared to his daily life at home. Today, the Lepic family would be called dysfunctional. Its alignments are out of whack. The household is ruled by Mme. Lepic's domestic tyrant. Stern, and with what could have been an almost comical mustache, she's particularly cruel because her tormenting of her younger son is deliberate, unending and planned. She favors her elder son, who's spoiled, and in a melodramatic sub-plot introduced by Duvivier's screenplay is contemplating stealing the family nest egg to run off to Paris with the local vamp, a cabaret singer whose eyes are agleam with avarice. The sister between the brothers, age-wise, is at least neutral. But Mme. Lepic (Charlotte Barbier-Krauss) is a monster of Dickensian proportions and boldness of contour, either manipulating or simply steamrolling everyone in sight, especially young Francois.
Using as an excuse the fact that he was born late in her life as an excuse, she mistreats him inexcusably, a fact of which the entire town is aware, except for M. Lepic (Henry Krauss). Although he clamps his hat on his head, his pipe in his mouth, and his jacket on his back to walk away when the noise level grows too high (usually when Mme. Lepic settles in for a malicious gossipfest with the town biddies sharing her delight in character assassination), he's essentially passive, absent. He hides behind his paper in a state of perpetual denial, abdicating his paternal prerogatives and duties. He doesn't hate Francois at all. He may even love him. He at least realizes (we see in a montage) that Francois gets stuck with doing most of the chores. But he provides no emotional backup for the poor boy at all, who might otherwise be Dickens' Oliver Twist, or Nicholas Nickleby, trying to survive Dotheboys Hall.
Francois's only allies are a little village girl and innocent playmate several years younger and the household's maid-of-all-work (Lydia Zerena), who at least bestows sympathy and friendship upon Carrot-Top, even if she doesn't have the power to change anything and risks losing her job every time she objects to the latest piece of harshness. Perhaps the most vicious piece of torment devised by the hateful mother involves her manipulating the boy into saying he loves her more than his father. Unbeknownst to Francois but not to her the old man is in earshot when he's tricked into saying it, which, it's implied, may have cost him some support from his father who does occasionally break his pattern of non-involvement, one time being when he insists the idle older brother do some of the farm chores Carrot-Top is assigned all of, and routinely. But then he backs off.
Because he behaves in a kindly if cowardly manner when he isn't ignoring Carrot-Top altogether, which is most of the time Carrot-Top's father comes across more sympathetically than his wife. But his withdrawal is no small part of the dysfunction. He's also as pointedly drawn from the bitingly critical Jules Renard novel attacking provincial bourgeois and peasant narrowness as the lonely boy, especially when as both prosperous farmer and village worthy, Lepic pere is asked to run for mayor, and does on a platform of "Unity, Equality, Morality" mocking France's proverbial Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The old man is self-deludingly hypocritical, as none of the three is to be found under his own roof, especially by his despairing younger son.
Given its subject misery and its delivery system melodrama Poil de Carotte could easily have been dragged into a 19th century heaviness. But Duvivier's was a modern temperament, and he learned well from his cinematic teachers and their teachers, Melies in the case of Feuillade. There's a surprising degree of buoyancy in his work here, and a crescendo of movement and tension. The editing is sprightly and assured. So is Duvivier's level of craft and special effects in split screens, use of mirrors for shifts within the same mise en scene, and superimposing faces to represent ghosts, dream figures, and the pervasiveness of Carrot-Top's scolding, out-of-control Mommie Dearest. Yet the big influence here is Antoine, as Duvivier visually contrasts the psychic violence of the story of an abused boy in dark, entrapping domestic spaces with the airy reaches of the Alpine surroundings and the lyrical flow of the nearby river that periodically beckons to Carrot-Top. He also knows enough to contrast the boy's dismal life with his essential sweetness. The innocence and spontaneity of Heuze's infrequent smiles seem sunbursts breaking through an ongoing storm.
Poil de Carotte is easy to love. Indeed, the French have loved it ever since Renard published his novel in 1894. Duvivier remade it as a talkie in 1932, with Harry Baur as the boy's father. In the postwar era, it gets remade every decade or so. In 1972, Philippe Noiret appeared as the paterfamilias whose awakening ends the story happily. Its last two reincarnations have been on French TV. It was said to be Duvivier's favorite among his silents. Its elegance and connection to the boy's undeserved torment does much to refute the charge of emotional remoteness often laid at Duvivier's door. The genesis of this 2007 restoration attentive to tints (blue for night, amber for interiors) -- is outlined by one of its producers, Serge Bromberg, in one of the DVD extras, as is the devising of the new musical score by Gabriel Thibodeau (emotionally and even stylistically akin to the restoration, if a bit overbearing), and a clip from Jacques Feyder's Visages d'enfants (1923). That film, about a boy's reaction to his father's remarriage after the death of the boy's mother, was a success in its time, too. It led to Feyder being hired to adapt and film Poil de Carotte, but he and the producer parted ways. Enter Duvivier, and another classic French film with a child at its center.
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by Jay Carr
