Gueule d'amour is a quintessential French film from the era between the World Wars: It makes effective use of fate and fatalism; it stars French superstar Jean Gabin, and it involves an unhappy love affair. It even includes a nod to the French Foreign Legion. Gabin plays Lucien Bourrache, a member of the Legion's elite cavalry unit stationed in Orange in the South of France. Bourrache is known as "the Lady Killer" because the women find his military uniform, handsome face, male swagger, and charming manner completely irresistible. Locals complain to his superior officers because they can't keep their maids under control, while the owner of the town's best restaurant is suspicious of his wife's behavior, making dining in his establishment a tricky business for the Lady Killer. The other soldiers in the regiment, including his good friend Rene, are envious of Bourrache's conquests.
When a family member leaves Bourrache 10,000 francs in her will, the Lady Killer is allowed to go to Cannes to collect it. There he meets the cool and sophisticated Madeleine, who is completely different from the women of Orange. Smitten with her beauty and intrigued by her indifference to him, he quickly falls in love with her. Once discharged from the Legion, he moves to Paris to look for his true love. No longer the dashing cavalryman, he takes a job as a skilled laborer in a print shop. At a movie theater, he runs into the mysterious Madeleine, and their affair begins in earnest, creating heartache and pain for Bourrache. At times, she seems to genuinely care for him; at other times, she stands him up, leaving him alone at restaurants or sending a cancellation note at the last minute. When Bourrache discovers that Madeleine is the mistress of a wealthy man, he demands that she choose between them. Her choice is not what he expects.
Dejected, Bourrache returns to Orange a broken man. His unrequited love for Madeleine has stolen his handsome good looks, aging him by ten years. No longer the Lady Killer, he holes up in a small café that he operates on the outskirts of Orange. He cares only for his old friend Rene, now a doctor. Rene reveals that he has met a woman named Madeleine and he has fallen madly in love with her, forcing Bourrache to confront the love of his life one last time.
At first, the character of Bourrache does not seem to fit Gabin's star image as the melancholy, ill-fated, working-class anti-hero. The ruggedly handsome actor had just become a major star after the international success of Julien Duvivier's Pepe le Moko and Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, released in the same year as Gueule d'amour. Fans lined up to see him play the strong, silent outsider or earthy loner who is courageous and masculine but also deeply human. His ill-fated characters long to escape their circumstances or their pasts, usually through their love for a woman, but their hopes are dashed and efforts doomed to failure. Gabin embodied his star image so perfectly that film scholar Andre Bazin dubbed him "the tragic hero of contemporary cinema," while critics and reviewers referred repeatedly to "the myth of Gabin."
The introduction of the Lady Killer in Gueule d'amour depicts Lucien Bourrache as the opposite of Gabin's typical characters. Depicted in a low-angle shot as he rides into Orange with his regiment, he looks every bit the larger-than-life heroic protagonist. The town's young (and not-so-young) women throw open their shutters to swoon over Bourrache who treats their attentions and affections as routine. He swaggers through his misadventures with a bemused smile, exhibiting an eternal optimism that everything will go his way.
Once he falls in love with Madeleine, Bourrache and his circumstances completely change, and the character slips into the persona so associated with Gabin. No longer happy-go-lucky, he broods over Madeleine and is trapped in a relationship he has no control over. Instead of a dashing member of the legendary Foreign Legion, he is a skilled laborer at the mercy of his employer. His situation deteriorates further after Madeleine chooses her wealthy benefactor over her handsome lover, and he returns to Orange a shadow of his former self. Women are no longer attracted to him; men no longer want to be him. To underscore his new station, Gremillon depicts Bourrache alone in the Orange restaurant he once dominated with his charisma and charm. In a long shot, he stands in the center of the empty restaurant, isolated and alienated, as the owner's wife runs out to greet the return of her new Legionnaire.
Earlier in 1937, Mireille Balin and Jean Gabin had lit up the screen in Pepe le Moko, and the two actors eagerly reunited for Gueule d'amour. As the enigmatic Madeleine, Balin plays a character who is harder and less sympathetic than Gaby in Pepe le Moko; like poor Bourrache, the audience finds it difficult to know if she really cares for him, or not. Madeleine's glacial beauty and cool demeanor make her a match for the Lady Killer, but Balin's natural warmth in key scenes keeps her character from being completely heartless.
Jean Gabin's best remembered films are associated with poetic realism and predate World War II, but he enjoyed a long and fruitful career, appearing in almost 100 movies and working well into the 1970s. He rivals Jean-Paul Belmondo and Gerard Depardieu as France's most internationally famous film star. In contrast, Mireille Balin's life was truly tragic. The actress was the toast of Paris during the 1930s, but a love affair with a German officer during the Occupation sealed her fate. After the Normandy Invasion, Balin and her lover tried to flee France for Italy, but they were captured near the border by Resistance fighters. The Resistance was not merciful on collaborators, and members of the group beat and raped her. Her companion was likely killed, though she was never informed of his fate. Upon her return to Paris, she was forbidden to work as an actress for a year. She appeared in one more film, La derniere chevauchee (1947), before ill health forced her into seclusion. Over the next few years, she suffered from typhus, meningitis, a stroke, and a disfiguring skin disease. She died in 1968, penniless and forgotten. Pepe le Moko and Gueule d'amour represent the high point of her career as an actress.
In France, director Jean Gremillon is ranked by critics and scholars as one of that country's most gifted filmmakers, while he remains unknown in America. He had been making documentaries and feature films for about fifteen years when he experienced his first commercial success with this inspired adaptation of Andre Beucler's popular novella Gueule d'amour, published in 1926. Though well regarded in the industry, critics and audiences had been slow to appreciate his talents. Gueule d'amour was shot in Berlin in UFA's state-of-the-art studios by cinematographer Gunther Rittau. Exteriors were photographed in the South of France, taking full advantage of the area's sunny skies, swaying palms, and quaint village architecture. During the 1940s, Gremillon produced other notable dramas, including the box office hits Remorques (1941, also with Gabin) and Le ciel est a vous (1944), but he disliked feeling beholden to film studios, which pressured directors to produce box-office hits. He turned away from popular fare to direct less commercial films in the late 1940s and art-related documentaries in the 1950s. Consequently, Gremillon never achieved the lasting acclaim of such contemporaries as Renoir, Duvivier, and Marcel Carne.
Gremillon's style and themes from the late 1930s and early 1940s tend to be lumped in with poetic realism, like those of his contemporaries Duvivier and Carne. For example, Gueule d'amour was Gremillon's third and most successful collaboration with screenwriter Charles Spaak, who was a major part of that film movement. And, the melodrama is in keeping with the movement's focus on working-class life and fatalistic plots revolving around doomed romance. However, it stands apart from the poetic realism of Carne and Duvivier because it lacks the expressionistic visual stylization and heavy atmosphere. Gremillon's approach is more naturalistic, as seen in the bright, sunny exteriors shot in the South of France.
The exception is the final sequence in which Madeleine and Bourrache meet one last time in the latter's cafe. The mise-en-scene of the tiny cafe near the bridge is a tour-de-force of the expressionist techniques favored by the poetic realist directors. Madeleine sits shrouded in shadow in the cafe, which is rendered in low-key lighting. Bourrache walks over to the bar, where he leans over a stack of glasses illuminated from within, creating threatening shadows across his face. As he explodes with anger, and their encounter turns physical, bar-like shadows surround them, suggesting their entrapment in a deadly dance of betrayal and revenge.
A well-crafted melodrama starring a beloved movie star at the top of his game, Gueule d'amour deserves wider recognition as a significant example of French cinema.
Producer: Raoul Ploquin for L'Alliance Francaise Europeene
Director: Jean Gremillon
Screenplay: Charles Spaak based on the novel Gueule d'amour by Andre Beucler
Cinematography: Gunther Rittau
Editor: Jean Gremillon
Production Designer: Jean Gremillon
Music: Lothar Bruhne
Cast: Lucien Bourrache (Jean Gabin), Madeleine (Mireille Balin), Rene (Rene Lefevre), Marguerite Deval (Madame Courtois), Jean Ayme (Butler), Henri Poupon (Monsieur Cailloux, Orange restaurant owner), Jeanne Marken (Madame Cailloux), Pierre Magnier (Legionnaire Commander).
BW-94m.
by Susan Doll
