Seeing this movie for the first time yesterday I was struck by the commanalities it shares with Philippe Lioret's L'Equipier; both share a location, Ouessant, both feature a lighthouse and both deal with outsiders coming in to close-knit communities. Indeed if Academics ever contemplated abandoning their lofty Ivory Towers temporarily and risk an attack of the Bends by putting a tentative gilded toe in the waters of Popular film they may even discover that Gremillon also made Remorques in which the sea figured prominently and that Lioret used a lighthouse motif in Mademoiselle but let's leave the Academics ensconced in their Spatial Relationships and return to the real world of craftsmen built movies. This entry came when Gremillon's career was coming to an end and it's a lovely swansong infused with delicate melancholy set in a close-knit community in which ironically no one is really happy or even content. There's a lovely moment when Marie (Micheline Presle) has toiled for hours through the night at the bedside of a sick girl who has finally, with the doctor's help, turned the corner. Her reward is more than money 'I take my hat off to you, doctor' says one of the bystanders thus sealing her acceptance at last into the community; as she walks home through the deserted streets the beam from the unseen lighthouse keeps playing over the walls and we think subconsciously of the hundreds of prison and prison-camp movies we have seen where a similar light seeks out those attempting to Escape but THIS light is celebrating Marie's acceptance INTO the community. Later she will travel in a rough sea to that same lighthouse and operate successfully on one of the keepers reinforcing her role in the community and Gremillon shoots the scene masterfully; with a camera fixed in the cabin of the lifeboat we see only what the helmsman would see and initially this is only the sea washing over the deck as the ship pitches and tosses but gradually we are able to discern the lighthouse itself moving in and out of shot and slowly growing larger. In 1954 Gremillon probably found it prudent to cut from this scene to Marie safely inside the lighthouse and climbing the stairs but some 50 years later Lioret was able to show the transition from ship to rock in detail. One of the strengths of the film is that Marie has a secondary problem to cope with in the shape of an engineer, Andre Lorenzi (Massimo Girotti), with whom she falls in love but who as a macho Italian takes it for granted that once married Marie will be happy to give up this foolish idea of work and be more than happy to devote herself to the chores of the housewife and to her shame there is a moment when she accepts this but after the exhilaration of the operation in the lighthouse Ordinary Housewife is no longer an option.
The film is rich in observation of human nature with a nod to Jeux Interdits in the sequence where two children, both of whom were loved by the spinster schoolteacher who had devoted a lifetime to the local school, ignore her funeral in favour of a sick pet sheep. This is a wonderful slightly Chekhovian film that has been unjustly neglected.
The film is rich in observation of human nature with a nod to Jeux Interdits in the sequence where two children, both of whom were loved by the spinster schoolteacher who had devoted a lifetime to the local school, ignore her funeral in favour of a sick pet sheep. This is a wonderful slightly Chekhovian film that has been unjustly neglected.