The most celebrated screen version is the eponymous 1934 film directed by Julien Duvivier, who later became a French expatriate himself, working in Hollywood for about ten years during the World War II era. This picture launched Duvivier's productive partnership with French actor Jean Gabin, which reached its peak in 1937 with Pépé le Moko, the poetic-realist classic about a Paris hoodlum who successfully hides out in Algiers until a Frenchwoman captures his heart and threatens his safety. Pépé le Moko made Gabin an international icon, but it was the double play of Maria Chapdelaine and Marc Allégret's musical Zouzou, released a week later, that propelled him from movie star to superstar in his own country. Gabin biographer Charles Zigman reports that Maria Chapdelaine was the first picture that had people lining up for Gabin the way fans line up today for Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, even though he was billed below top-liner Madeleine Renaud, a member of the renowned Comédie Française theatrical company.
Renaud plays Maria Chapdelaine, the fetching blonde daughter of a trapper in Péribonka, a tiny Quebec town where conditions are often harsh but villagers can divert themselves with unsophisticated amusements like singing hearty songs while paddling down scenic rivers. Maria's charms attract a number of suitors, the most avid of whom are Eutrope Gagnon, a brawny young worker, and Lorenzo Surprenant, a French financier visiting the region to acquire land there. Ironically, though, the man of Maria's dreams is one of the few who aren't scrambling after her. He's a logger and recently reformed drunkard named François Paradis, and he's acting cool, collected, and casual because he fears he'll be "tethered like a cow" if he ever falls in love. Deciding to be safe instead of sorry, he leaves Péribonka to work in a faraway lumber camp for the winter. Maria passes the time fending off Eutrope and Lorenzo, hanging around with her sweet but lunkheaded brother Tit-Bé, and saying a thousand prayers on Christmas Eve because her mother says this practically guarantees she'll get what she wants - which is, you guessed it, François's speedy return. By now François is pining for Maria as well, so instead of waiting for spring, he slides his feet into snowshoes and begins the hundred-mile trek from the logging camp back to Péribonka in the middle of a raging blizzard. The climax is surprising and a tad grotesque, and the ending is effectively bittersweet.
Duvivier shot Maria Chapdelaine partly in a studio and partly on location in Péribonka and at Lac Mistassini, the province's largest natural lake. He also hired Iroquois Indians to provide local color and liven up the action with a bit of dancing and drumming. Despite its authentic touches, however, the picture often looks artificial and even stagy. The soft-focus glamour shots are very much in the spirit of 1930s cinema, but today's viewers are likely to find that the frequent process photography detracts from the all-important atmosphere of the story; with so many characters posing in front of rear-projection scenery, you'd almost think a postmodern parodist like Guy Maddin, another great Canadian filmmaker, was behind the camera. By contrast, the film's moments of truly creative artificiality are very expressive: when a tilted, out-of-focus camera lends zest to a scene of Eutrope chopping down a tree; when a dying old woman sees comforting phantoms crowding her room; and when Maria's thoughts of spring set off a rapid-fire montage - blossoms, François's eyes, more blossoms - that's over in the blink of an eye, recalling the experimental verve of French Impressionist filmmaking in the 1920s. This is poetic realism, which Duvivier helped pioneer, at its best.
Maria Chapdelaine won the Grand Prix du Cinéma Français in 1934 and earned Duvivier a special mention at the Venice Film Festival the following year. Critics liked it too. New York Times reviewer Andre Sennwald called it a "stirring, full-bodied and tremulously beautiful" movie that "possesses the vigor, the native wit and the homely warmth" of its down-to-earth characters and "preserves the integrity of the Hémon work with a skill that gives the film the nobility of an epic poem." One critic for Variety praised Gabin's portrayal of "a fine, two-fisted trapper" and another ranked the movie with the best French pictures yet released. Considering this warm reception, it isn't surprising that other filmmakers have remade the picture. Marc Allégret directed Michèle Morgan as Maria and Philippe Lemaire as François in a 1950 version released as The Naked Heart in the United States, and Gilles Carle directed Carole Laure in two versions, a 1973 release called La Mort d'un bûcheron, or The Death of a Lumberjack, and a 1983 edition bearing the original title. I think the film's influence also extends to such Canadian movies as the 1971 drama Mon Oncle Antoine, an illustrious Quebecois production by Claude Jutra that also features a roving logger and a grim climax in the snow, and some of Maddin's antic fantasies.
Turning to the cast, Gabin makes the strongest impression by far in Maria Chapdelaine, considerably above Jean-Pierre Aumont as Lorenzo and way beyond Renaud as the heroine, whose magnetic appeal to every man in sight is a mystery to me. (Gabin biographer Zigman may have the answer when he notes that Maria appears to be the only woman in Péribonka under ninety.) Gabin made three more pictures with Duvivier over the next three decades, but this was the only one that marked a major shift in his screen image. Maria Chapdelaine was Gabin's eighteenth feature, and as Zigman observes, he had played cheerful, happy-go-lucky characters in most of the earlier films. He turned unexpectedly somber in Maria Chapdelaine, and stayed that way in many of his subsequent pictures. Admirers of Pépé le Moko, or Jean Renoir's sublime La Grande illusion (1937), or Marcel Carné's moody Le Quai de brumes (1938), or Marcel Ophüls's delicious Le Plaisir (1952), or Jacques Becker's offbeat Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), or most of Gabin's other top-flight films can remember with pleasure that the mature phase of his career started with Maria Chapdelaine.
Director: Julien Duvivier
Producers: Léon Beytout, René Pignères
Screenplay: Julien Duvivier; dialogue by Gabriel Boissy; based on the novel by Louis Hémon
Cinematographer: Kruger, Marc Fossard
Film Editing: Claude Ibéria
Production Design: Krauss
Music: Jean Wiener
With: Madeleine Renaud (Maria Chapdelaine), Jean Gabin (François Paradis), Jean-Pierre Aumont (Lorenzo Surprenant), André Bacqué (Samuel Chapdelaine), Alexandre Rignault (Eutrope Gagnon), Suzanne Després (Laura Chapdelaine), Gaby Triquet (Alma-Rose), Maximilienne Max (Azelma Larouche), Daniel Mendaille (The Parson), Robert Le Vigan (Tit-Sèbe, the bonesetter), Thomy Bourdelle (Esdras Chapdelaine), Edmond Van Daële (The Doctor), Emile Genevois (Tit-Bé Chapdelaine), Fred Barry (Nazaire Larouche), Pierre Laurel (Ephrem Surprenant), Hamilton (The Old Frenchman), Julien Clément (The Merchant Bédard), Jacques Langevin (Edwige Légaré), the inhabitants of the Village of Péribonka and the Indians of the Iroquois tribe
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by David Sterritt
