(1962/FRANCE)
Director: Georges Franju
Screenplay: Francois Mauriac, Claude Mauriac and Georges Franju from the novel by Francois Mauriac
Cinematographers: Raymond Heil, Christian Matras
Music: Maurice Jarre
Lead actors: Emmanuelle Riva, Philippe Noiret
Supporting actors: Sami Frey, Edith Scob, Renee Devillers, Helene Dieudonee, Jacques Monod
As our idea of the noir landscape continues to expand, there are more intriguing discoveries from foreign lands to confirm the power of carefully crafted mise-en-scene and its ability to explore dark interior regions.
One of these discoveries is French director Georges Franju, whose directing career did not begin until his late 40s with La tete contre les murs (Head Against the Wall/1959), which almost certainly had an impact on Samuel Fuller’s 60s films Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss.
Franju is best known in American for his film Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without A Face/1960), a film pitched more toward horror than noir but, like Lewton, showing the tendon-like connections between the two narrative languages. It’s a film that deserves its own examination in the context of noir, as does Franju’s next film, Pleins feux sur l’assassin (Spotlight on a Murderer/1961).
Therese Desqueyroux, made the next year with the striking blonde star of Les yeux san visage, Edith Scob, in a secondary role, is a woman’s noir that fits squarely in the female voiceover subgenre explored by Britta Sjogren at last year’s “Into the Vortex” series at PFA.
Therese (played with remarkable sensitivity and attention to detail by the great Emmanuelle Riva, best known in America for her starring role in Hiroshima Mon Amour) is a failed murderess who suddenly finds herself imprisoned by her baffled, loutish husband (Philippe Noiret).
Via a long set of flashbacks that take up the first three-fifths of the film, we come to see Therese’s existential malaise: thwarted lesbianism, provincial puffery, and an odd, pervasive sense of entrapment by the landscape itself, tellingly repeated in a series of bridging shots that symbolize the increasing encroachment of the world on the individual.
We see how Therese longs for a freedom she cannot have--a divorce will leave her without any means of support--and how the murder impulse becomes almost an matter of aesthetics. It does not hurt her chances for sympathy that her husband is such a monstrous provincial boor, with all of the failings and blinded viewpoints that tyrants of remote lands tend to possess.
The only respite for Therese comes in a fleeting association with a young man (played by Sami Frey, shortly to become a key face in the nouvelle vague) who is the love interest of her sister-in-law (Scob). He is from an old Jewish family and as a result is disapproved of by the Desqueyroux family. As a man, his options are infinitely greater than Therese’s, and their intellectual interaction (where Therese is clearly his equal) only shows how out of place she is in the world she is forced to inhabit.
Once she is imprisoned in the family home, Therese begins to starve herself. It is a form of existential brinksmanship, and it leads to a relaxation of the harsh conditions that the husband has imposed. Eventually she is permitted to move to Paris, where she will be supported in a modest way and will only be obligated to appear at key family functions (weddings and funerals, the key symbolic events in provincial Catholicism).
There is a bracing final scene between Therese and her husband (played superbly by Noiret, who captures every feature of the character’s small-mindedness) where he attempts to draw out the reasons why she tried to kill him. Naturally, her attempts to describe the impulse in terms of an aesthetic/existential context fall on deaf, disbelieving ears.
At the film’s close, we see Therese on the streets in Paris, freed--and yet, in her thoughts, she finds herself drawn back to the imprisoning branches of the provincial forest, which dominate the final shot.
Like Mizoguchi in Japan, who created a series of dark proto-feminist melodramas over the course of the 30s and 40s, Franju explores what might best be characterized as the flip side of the femme fatale conundrum--the need for a true independence that, when thwarted, often takes a destructive turn.
Therese Desqueyroux has some interesting affinities with Yves Allegret’s seminal 1949 noir, Une se jolie petite plage: both films avail themselves of beautiful landscapes turned barren and withering, and that seem to become active agents in overpowering the will to freedom. We can only conclude that the wounded protagonists of these films will have extreme difficulty in overcoming the spirit-draining events they’ve experienced. The two lead actors in these films (Gerard Philipe and Emmanuelle Riva) give performances that fully inhabit these harrowing interior realms, providing us with a broader, more encompassing sense of what a “noir protagonist” is all about.
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