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His death can be directly attributed to, one might claim, the process of modernization taking place in France. Instead, the figure of Max, a newly retired gangster pictured in cardigans and spectacles played by Jean Gabin, can be seen to figuratively embody France at this time. The parallel is all the more interesting given that the films of poetic realism, as we have seen, employed the film noir and crime genre with overtly political ambitions. Nevertheless, fictional storytelling encompassing the notions of mythos and fabula is undeniably, by its very nature, characterized by the imaginary and the untrue.
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As we will see with reference to Moi, un noir , Rouch also employs fictional elements to narrate truths as he saw them, but also to foreground the very processes of eliciting truth. Moi, un noir is a film about the lives of young exiled Nigerians who have come to live in the Abidjan suburb of Treichville. As we will see, it differs from earlier films Rouch had made in Africa in a number of key respects.
Rouch did, however, collaborate extensively with the New Wave producer, Pierre Braunberger. On showing the film at festivals, Rouch discovered that his voiceover narration offended both African and French audiences.
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As Rouch explains at the beginning of the film: Robinson is unemployed and single, and spends his days looking for work and doing handyman jobs for cash. Constantine, on the other hand, is relatively successful, both with women and financially. However, while celebrating his victory he becomes inebriated, and is arrested for fighting. The single most striking aspect of his voiceover pertains to the substantial influence of American cultural iconography on the young Africans living in Treichville. Ganda takes great pleasure in his chosen pseudo-identity, the actor Edward G.
In spite of the fictional element, one is easily convinced that there is an irrefutable grain of truth in this representation. Bazin and Phenomenological Realism As previously discussed, the Cahiers critics and Bazin in particular were enticed by the notion that cinema, whether fictional or documentary, could mimetically represent life and in doing so transcend the medium of film, capturing reality itself. In this regard, the critics looked, not to American cinema, but to Italian neorealism.
Italian neorealism was certainly the most important school of realism in postwar European cinema, and as such a major center of interest for the Cahiers critics in the s. For instance, Robinson was in actual fact narrating events which occurred to him some years previously and that he is representing his experience of life in Treichville as he remembered it.
Sam DiLorio offers this explanation: Indeed, the neorealist approach to realism differs fundamentally from that endorsed by the Cahiers critics and future filmmakers. The Actuality Aesthetic in New Wave Cinema Fundamentally, the actuality aesthetic refers to film works that purport to represent life mimetically, objectivity and truthfully. In the avant-propos, Barthes wrote: In artistic representation, this led to an increased occurrence of representing personal scenes from everyday life, as opposed to the universal or sublime. Many theorists have argued that artistic representations of the everyday scene are intrinsically imbued with political purport.
There are many examples of movements across the arts whose representations of everyday life have been deemed to be political. The New Wave can be seen to be most tangibly influenced by the nineteenth-century literary realists, who pioneered the subtle integration of political subject matter into their narratives about the everyday lives of Frenchmen and women, while purporting to be objective. My analyses in the remainder of this chapter focus on five New Wave films that I believe to be particularly illustrative of the New Wave actuality aesthetic, made in consecutive years from between and In June , Charles de Gaulle had been granted emergency powers by the National Assembly specifically to deal with the Algerian crisis, but two years later no resolution was in sight.
By the conflict in Algeria was in its sixth year. Algeria, moreover, was a difficult subject to broach in film, not least because any direct representation of the conflict automatically incurred censorship. First, we will see that one of the favored means for representing the war in Algeria was as an awkward dinnertime topic of conversation. We will also see how filming conversation and open debate cultivated the illusion of presenting the matter both neutrally and objectively, and as such, is the first device that conforms to the principles of the actuality aesthetic.
The idea of broaching the conflict in Algeria through dinner table discussion could at first appear to be more of a literary device than a cinematic one. As discussed, Flaubert and the other realists made use of the dinner table situation in their portraitures of nineteenth-century France in order to present authorial commentary in a seemingly objective manner.
In works of cinematic realism, we have already seen how realist filmmakers such as Jean Vigo and Jules Dassin filmed not only outdoors, but also domestic interior spaces in order to critique the social conditions in which their protagonists lived. The New Wave goes further still in elaborating a critique both of contemporary living conditions and issues of national political importance by penetrating the doors and walls of family foyers. As a work of fiction, the film employs a variety of different means to critique the conflict.
However, it is important to stress that the film scrupulously avoids any direct or dramatic treatment of the Algerian war, alluding to the conflict directly on a handful of occasions. Indeed, the sequence that achieves the most forthright critique of the war is a dinnertime scenario in which Algeria only alluded to indirectly. His presence among lower middle-class Frenchmen and women of the older generation is celebrated for its apparent significance; he is alive and well.
The conflict in Algeria is thus represented as being an issue that is too painful for open discussion, yet one that permeates and poisons everyday life in typical French households. The other references to Algeria occur earlier in the film. The news bulletin features a second news items concerning Algeria, notably the news that the Commandant Robin, who had participated in an uprising in Algiers on 22 April, had been sentenced to six years in prison.
While on face value the radio broadcast could appear inconsequential, this sequence in fact employs rather sophisticated strategies for critiquing the war. The fact that this broadcast pertained to the war in Algeria, by all accounts so rarely discussed in public, would indeed have had a shock effect on contemporary audiences. As the newscaster begins his bulletin, the taxi turns onto the Rue de Vaugirard and the French Senate, a clear icon of French government and political power, becomes visible on the left. It is the passersby outside the Jardin de Luxembourg, however, who catch our attention.
We see them fleetingly, walking along the sidewalk and going about their daily business; many of whom smartly dressed and demure. At the start of the sequence, Marceline provocatively says that she is not sexually attracted to black men, and the conversation turns to racial stereotyping and political unrest in Africa.
When Landry talks about African solidarity in the face of colonial oppression, Marceline makes an analogy with treatment of Jews in different countries. After some jesting as to what the number could represent, Marceline informs the Africans that she has the tattoo because she was deported to a concentration camp during the war. Rouch asks the visibly shocked Africans if they know what a concentration camp is, and Raymond replies that he had seen a film about it. In the following sequence, Marceline is seen alone on an almost deserted Place de la Concorde.
It eventually becomes clear that she is recounting the memory of her deportation. I love you so much This sequence is the first instance in my consideration where the influence of the film noir aesthetic and strategies for mapping the urban landscape are clearly visible.
Indeed, the image of Marceline is strikingly evocative of film noir chiaroscuro, and comparable images can be found in a great many films noir denouements when protagonists meet their ends. The spectator does not know if Marceline specifically remembers La Place de la Concorde or Les Halles as being the site of her deportation, or even if these specific sites were historically significant. Marceline was a young girl at the 62 One might invoke, for instance, the famed denouement in The Big Combo, when the sadistic Mr. Brown is cornered in a deserted warehouse. During the filming in Les Halles, Coutant attached a microphone to Marceline and connected it via a long wire to a sound recorder, which was synchronized with the camera.
Furthermore, this is one of the first instances of synchronized sound in s French filmmaking, and the beginnings of a technique that would be used extensively in New Wave films from onwards. We have already seen examples of this in two films previously analyzed. In chapter two, I considered how A bout de souffle is imbued with a tangible criticism of the rising influence of American culture on French society. In her analysis of this sequence, Kristen Ross highlights a contemporary cartoon in which a soldier is bathing a torture victim with detergent, alongside the caption: Le Signe du lion is, moreover, a key transitional film bridging American film noir and the semidocumentary, in particular the films of Jules Dassin, and the New Wave.
On first appearance, Le Signe du lion might appear entirely reliant on its plot and characters to achieve its critique. Wesselrin is a bon vivant and musician, who has cultivated wealthy playboy-type friends who fuel his epicurean lifestyle despite himself having limited wealth. At the beginning of the film, he receives a telegram saying that a rich aunt in Austria has died, so he throws a party and invites all his friends. The film now skips to a few weeks later, to July Wesselrin has vanished, and his friends are curious as to his whereabouts.
It transpires that his rich aunt had disinherited him, and he has been forced out of his apartment into second-rate hotels, which he has no money to pay for. As his friends are away for the summer he is forced to wander the streets in search food, money and respite, to sleep rough and finally to beg.
Wesselrin feels abandoned by his jet-setting friends, and by society at large. In the final sequence, he rants and rails: It is interesting that it is often difficult to distinguish between Americans and Parisians in the film. Wesselrin himself is both American and European. Wesselrin is an embarrassment to all those who have embraced the new models for prosperity, including the young American tourists he encounters on the riverbank.
There can be little doubting that the Americanization of Paris represents a dystopia for Rohmer. However, in common with later New Wave films, Rohmer goes to considerable lengths to present his point of view as objective truth. He does this, primarily, by virtue of his extraordinary use of on-location filming. Indeed, Le Signe du lion rivals all subsequent New Wave film as regards outdoor photography in Paris, with approximately seventy five minutes of the film shot on location outdoors. Outside of the fictional story, Rohmer employs other strategies to narrate these images of Paris and to infuse them with his subjective point of view.
One way that he does this is by inviting the spectator to subtlety eavesdrops on the conversations overheard by Pierre Wesselrin. Tu gagnes combien, cinquante milles? In common with Du Rififi chez les hommes, however, Rohmer does not provide a direct authorial voiceover narration, endeavoring to anchor and to elicit his critique primarily through cinematographic images of the city. It should nonetheless be noted that these segments were recorded in a studio and appended to the outdoors sequences at the editing stage. The True Pain of Youth I have established thus far that one of the central actualities of New Wave cinema pertains to a profound malaise that the auteurs perceived to blight the lives of French youth.
While this malaise is in part existential, engendered by perennial difficulties encountered during the transition to adulthood, it can also be seen to be caused by the very real, political circumstances of late s and s France. In Le Signe du lion, we have seen how Pierre Wesselrin encounters absolute apathy on the part of Parisian mothers, office employees, lovers and tourists alike, and how this speaks of a critique of the Americanization of the Parisian landscape. Her anxiety is borne out in her gaze, as well as in the gaze of the others upon her. As the film progresses, there is a palpable increase in the tension experienced by Michel and those around him.
This is especially evident in the final part of the film set in Corsica, when Michel consummates his relationship with Juliette and Liliane. In claiming to represent the world as it is, the directors faced the initial challenge of justifying their use of professional actors to interpret their actualities.
In this regard, it is interesting that the 71 This sequence directly precedes the radio news broadcast regarding Algeria. If the students are not protesting the war, one might ask why they are not doing so. In Le Signe du lion, Rohmer developed the character of Pierre Wesselrin by drawing upon various aspects of the life of the actor Jess Hahn, an American who had become a French citizen after the war. This is certainly the case with the young men profiled, Angelo, Jean-Pierre and Landry, and in particular Marilou, who is a twenty-seven year old Italian who left her petit-bourgeois existence in Northern Italy to come to Paris in At work, Marilou is pictured in an extreme close-up appearing pensive and serious, before cutting to Morin and the interview which takes place in her apartment.
Morin informs us that Marilou lives in a chambre de bonne without running water, and then Marilou begins by recounting her passage from Italy to France. Pictured in close-up with a cigarette and her head clasped in her hand, Marilou recounts her experience of living through cold winters without heating, telling Morin that she is sick of these living conditions. She finishes by saying: Rouch and Morin were very satisfied with this interview, in spite of the distress caused to Marilou.
They felt they had realized their ambition, announced at the outset of 74 In the transcript of a sequence cut from the film, we learn that Marilou met Morin in at a public debate on Stalinism. Marilou had been involved with left-wing political activism. First and foremost, it reveals a fundamental reality pertaining to the unhappiness of a young woman. Marilou is not an actress pretending to be sad, and there is apparently nothing staged or phony about her anxiety.
In common with other New Wave films, Vivre sa vie also depicts the malaise and anxiety experienced by a generation of young men and women, presenting this as an incontestable actuality. It does this, initially, by grounding an auspiciously fictional story about a young actress who has to turn to prostitution in order to pay her rent, in detailed, factual research. Sacotte was presented as an expert, having dealt with two thousand cases of prostitution since In fact, he displayed an almost obsessive interest in the subject, publishing at least two other such studies in the s Both Godard and Dassin were inspired by the visual aesthetics of their source material.
Anna, who accounts for sixty per cent of the film, was a little unhappy because she never really knew beforehand what she would have to do. Between us we brought it off Working with her is different Ultimately the result is just as spontaneous and natural. Godard , 80 Godard will frequently equate capitalism and film production with prostitution in later films. Godard insists that most of the film was largely improvised, with Coutard filming Karina as she stood before the camera and spoke her lines, as if she were auditioning for the part, as indeed Nana auditions for film roles.
Parenthetically, Nana bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Marilou. Both women are framed, moreover, almost perpetually in close-up and both convey high levels of anguish and distress. The film itself becomes a record Je ne sais pas. On va au Luxembourg ne rien faire? We are then treated to a reading of the Oval Portrait, not by the young man, but by Godard himself, who begins: At this point in the reading, Godard stops to comment: Tu veux que je continue?
Placemat - Table linen - Le Jacquard Français
Godard thus maintains a layer of fictional artifice in his portraiture, which can be interpreted as a concession that the reality represented in this sequence is, ultimately, that of Godard filming Karina in her role as an actress in Vivre sa vie. Godard does not discount the idea that fiction can tell truth. However, in Vivre sa vie Godard is no longer contemplating the idea hypothesized in Le Petit soldat that photography and cinema are uncomplicated mediums of truth.
Indeed, in his second feature film Godard will briefly embrace documentary aesthetics, characterized by the direct fictional dramatization of political events. Le Petit soldat, we recall, is the story of Bruno Forestier, a French army deserter living in Geneva who is commissioned by the French government to assassinate an FLN intellectual yet who falls in love with Veronica, an FLN agent who is captured and killed by the French. The sequence, lasting fourteen minutes, comprises a detailed reenactment of the techniques used to procure information and a long voiceover narration by Forestier.
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Forestier is seen handcuffed to a bath, where his hands are burned with a flame and he is electrocuted until he passes out. However, in electing to directly represent issues related to the war in Algeria, Godard encountered a number of problems. First, Le Petit soldat did not gain general release until due to censorship, at which point it was a box-office failure. Second, it was widely seen as a 85 This is one of the only representations of torture in a film made at the time of the conflict. I believe this attention and critique of the political issues of their generation to be one of the key findings to emerge from my research.
While film noir developed an existential critique of its times, the specificity of New Wave cinema was to directly attribute the malaise experienced by French youth to the political situation of its era, and events such as the conflict in Algeria and the new capitalism transforming the Parisian landscape. I believe the actuality aesthetic to be a central and defining aspect of New Wave cinema. Sam DiLorio writes of the s: New Wave filmmakers can be seen to engage increasingly with montage throughout the s.
I have already discussed the importance of the innovative editing techniques used in A bout de souffle. These works adopt a very different approach to representing actuality than the one I have outlined in this chapter. As such, their status as New Wave films can be called into question. Chapter 3 Dangerous Games: Sellier has argued, moreover, that the New Wave auteurs were essentially conservative, moralizing and deeply skeptical about sexual liberation, in some instances manifesting a reactionary resentment towards the impending revolution.
I have previously considered how evolving relations between men and women at the heart of A bout de souffle. The real news story, however, is Patricia, whom Michel has traveled from Marseille to see and to convince her to come to Rome with him. While Godard goes to considerable lengths to authenticate his representations of the couple as truthful and objective, there is no disguising the fact his treatment of this subject is both subjective and imbued with a pronounced authorial point of view.
In chapter two, I considered how Patricia fulfills the role of the femme fatale by betraying Michel Poiccard to the police.
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In this chapter, I will show how a range of female characters in a wide variety of New Wave films share the essential generic attributes of the film noir femme fatale. In the American genre film this is presented as a vice and deviancy, and in the New Wave this is presented as a profoundly dystopian situation and a negative consequence of sexual liberation. This study is therefore a key element of the crossover between these two national cinemas.
Numerous inferences can be drawn, therefore, from her sudden appearance in French New Wave cinema. First, scholars such as E. Ann Kaplan and Mary Ann Doane have indentified the femme fatale in American film noir as a being revealing of a deep- rooted male psychological anxiety and paranoia. I will thus be challenging the general perception that the New Wave eschewed psychology in its representations. I will also be evaluating the role of the collaboration between the directors and their actors. In spite of their aspiration to impart an authorial vision, the New Wave filmmakers often sought the complicity and the approval of their stars, whose characters became emblematic of the New Wave and whose performances were often seen by critics as defining the film.
Defining beauty and eroticism is a high priority for the Cahiers critics and articles are replete with quotations from Racine and Stendhal. I will then show how the characters in these films, as well as elements of their narrative and visual aesthetics, exert a tangible and highly significant influence on New Wave representations of masculinity and femininity.
The figure appears extensively in pre-Raphaelite, symbolist and decadent art and literature, and metamorphosizes into the femme fatale in German expressionism. I have previously discussed the influence of expressionism on the formation of film noir, and as film noir developed its generic repertoire, the femme fatale arguably became its most distinctive feature.
I Wake Up Screaming is generally cited as the first film noir to feature a femme fatale; Vicky Lynn Carole Landis , an aspiring model whose murder leads to her innocent former partner being framed for the crime. By the time the femme fatale emerges as an established character, she will almost without fail cause the demise of the male protagonist. There is also a fundamental ambiguity and mystery surrounding the femme fatale.
In her book Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, Mary Ann Doane affirms that the femme fatale is more revealing about male psychological anxiety than female, tracing the origins of the femme fatale to the hinterland of male paranoia. The B-movie femme fatale, however, can be seen as a distinct entity from the mainstream film noir and is worthy of consideration in her own right.
The specificity of the B-movie might be seen as its predilection for accounting for the motives of the femme fatale by providing details about her social and economic background. You know what that is She is quite clearly driven by a material desire to get rich and her desperation can be accounted for by the abject poverty in which she lives. Her need for money, however, is not merely in order to live a life of luxury.
Having learned through life experiences that she cannot trust men, she pursues money in order to live independently of them. In this respect, the B-movie femme fatale can be seen as something of an icon of feminist rebellion. This is all the more flagrant in B-movies, where actors benefitted from much more creative freedom than in the larger Hollywood studios and indeed where actors were encouraged to use all the means at their disposal to give remarkable performances.
I am arguing that this is a particular trait of the B-movie noir. The basic premise of the B-movie was to reach the widest audience with the smallest possible studio investment. Thus, in her scheme to seduce Doctor Craig, she speaks this impassioned monologue: Do you remember the first time I came to see you in your office?
Your dingy, gloomy office in that dingy dirty street, the rotten smell of the factory chimneys pressing down on the shabby little houses, the slovenly old women, the gray-faced dirty little children starting out with everything against them. I remember that street I remember every little thing about it I know because that's the street I came from six thousand miles from here in a little English mill town.
But it's the same rotten street, the same factories, the same people, and the same little gray-faced children. In this sequence, Shelby is flagrantly deploying the female masquerade in order to seduce Doctor Craig. During the exchange, Shelby nevertheless insinuates that money is her true objective, and the doctor is merely a means for getting it. Frankie Olins had it Four hundred thousand dollars.
In common with Vera, there is a Freudian dimension to Shelby, whose extraordinary ruthlessness and sadism cannot be attributed to poverty alone. This information imbues the narrative with the realist dimension characteristic of the B-movie noir. As she lies dying on a sofa having been shot by Doctor Craig, Shelby desperately screams for the box: Give it to me! Certainly, Shelby has not reached adulthood as a balanced woman, and in her dying moments she is at once a little girl in need of comforting and a highly dangerous and eroticized woman.
Her infantile dialogue is at odds with her appearance, that of a sexually attractive woman experiencing pleasure and pain on her deathbed. In Decoy, it is not just Jo-Jo who is reduced to being a boyish figure. She acts, therefore, as a trigger that 14 After being shot by Shelby in the woods, he summons the strength to ride back into town and to kill her. However, he too perishes from his injuries, which are indirectly brought about by his child-like naivety.
Bruno then tracks Miriam to an amusement park, where she is frivolously entertaining two suitors. Moments later, however, the excitement gives way to real fear as Guy wraps his hands around her neck and strangles her; an incident that is pictured in the reflection of her fallen glasses. The film also ends in the amusement park, where Bruno and Guy fight one another in between the wooden horses of the carousel, which spins out of control after the police accidentally shoot the operator. At one point, a little boy is embroiled in the fight, and is thrown off the horse.
Through a combination of montage and camera trickery although a real carousel was used , the camera records the vertiginous movement of the carousel, as well as the excitement and fear in the faces of the women and children on the ride, until the carousel crashes and is destroyed to the sound of screams and explosions. Indeed, beyond being a murderer, it is more than intimated that that Bruno is homosexual. Guy, on the other hand, is a playboy who has not learned to assume his responsibilities, and whose life choices are entirely dictated by women.
Bart shows himself, however, to be the more accomplished shooter, and he is employed by the carnival owner. As Bart and Laurie begin a relationship, however, they arouse the jealousy of the owner and are dismissed. Finding themselves penniless after a honeymoon in Las Vegas, Laurie pressures Bart into beginning a crime spree of holdups and bank robberies. After a particularly audacious hold-up of a payroll office, they become the subjects of a nationwide manhunt, and they are eventually tracked down and killed in the Sierra mountain range where Bart had spent his boyhood.
There are instances when Bart and Laurie appear to be in a living an idyllic adventure. However, the early presence of the carnival as well as a later sequence on the Santa Monica amusement pier, unambiguously signal their forthcoming tribulations. Alone in their hotel room, Bart tells Laurie he has just made a deal to secure their passage to Mexico, and they talk briefly about buying a ranch and raising children. Lewis was a veteran director for Monogram Pictures, who were expected to distribute the film.
However, Universal was impressed by the film and took charge of distribution, ensuring that it reached a wider audience than most B-movies. On the one hand, a fatherless Bart is shown as a child to have an obsession with guns, although shooting a chick he subsequently develops a morbid fear of killing. Bart, I want things. I want a lot of things, big things I want a guy with spirit and guts, a guy who can laugh at anything, do anything, who can kick over the Tracies and win the world for me.
We have seen Bart as both a child and adolescent, and know him to be a good-natured boy who is the victim of circumstance and an unyielding judge. Bart naively confounds feminine beauty with virtue, but the spectator is under no illusion that Bart is making a fatal error of judgment. Dressed in black, Laurie tells him candidly: By way of justifying their interest in the genre, Bazin invited Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout, a historian with expertise on the American West, to contribute to Cahiers.
The posse tracks Vienna, Johnny and the Dancing Kid to a hideaway in the mountains, and in a final shoot-out the Dancing Kid is killed by Emma Small, who is in turn shot dead by Vienna. One critic for the New York Herald Tribune began his review by stating: Moreover, they exhibit decidedly unusual characteristics compared to the generic male leads in westerns. True to his name, the Dancing Kid is in fact a child- man. We learn that he was formally Johnny Logan the ace gun-fighter, but he has traded this identity for Johnny Guitar. He is handsome and blond, and willingly secedes the role of decision-maker, and that of central protagonist, to Vienna.
Moreover he does not enjoy drinking, and when he first comes into contact with the angry posse, he is drinking tea from a small blue-flowered china cup. It goes without saying that the scenario of a woman entertaining two suitors is essentially unheard of in the western genre. When the posse arrives at the saloon, Vienna stands on the mezzanine level of the saloon, towering over her would-be assailants. This is because Vienna enacts a masquerade that hides, not her masculinity, but her femininity and foregrounds her manliness and possession of power.
Most posters feature her caricature alongside a picture of the angry townspeople but without Johnny Guitar.
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There then follows what might be described as a perverse reversal of the classic reconciliatory moment. Vienna then angrily smashes her glass, and for a brief moment the charade is disrupted and Johnny and Vienna resume their traditional gender roles. Johnny pleads with Vienna to rekindle their love: What took you so long? There is no disputing the nightmarish and profoundly dystopian atmosphere that prevails in the film.
There is little denying, however, that the games played in Johnny Guitar are decidedly dangerous and indicative of a profound fear and anxiety about masculinity and the state of relations between the sexes. The process was refined many times throughout the s. At first she is irritated by Bernard, but unable sleep later that night, she encounters him in the grounds of her house and the two begin a night of passion. When dawn breaks, Jeanne and Bernard astonish everyone by taking off together to begin a new life.
Having abandoned the charge of her child to the nanny, Jeanne and Maggy spent days idly watching society polo matches, a game Jeanne admits to not understanding. In one scene Maggy is shown waking at midday, and the pair remain in bed feeding breakfast to their dog and talking frivolously about Raoul. She is pictured on numerous occasions looking into a vanity mirror, and in one Parisian evening, she is seen to be wearing a girlish frock, hair band and a white veil, like a child who has dressed up.
The men, too, in Les Amants are for the most part playboys. They are competitive in all things, especially love, and are petulant or get drunk when they do not get their way. In one of his first sequences in the film, he is greatly amused by a game played by the provincial mechanics, who play a practical joke on Jeanne by pretending to be deaf.
Moreover, Jeanne compares Henri to a bear throughout the film. I will resist the temptation to explore a potential sexual attraction between Jeanne and Maggy, as Maggy is in essence a one-dimensional character emblematic of haute bourgeois vacuity. The couple visibly enjoys the ride, although they are constantly looking behind them and Jeanne clings to Raoul for support.
Jeanne and Raoul are noticeably incongruous in their evening dress at this popular entertainment venue; they are thrill-seekers, and while their fun is frivolous and decadent, it cannot be seen as innocuous or without danger. As Sean Homer explains: The identification is crucial, as without For instance, in the opening sequence Jeanne tells Maggy she knows nothing about the game of polo, telling her: Elle y accompanait son ami Maggy.
However, it should not be forgotten that, as we have seen in Detour and Decoy, film noir protagonists frequently narrate and provide interior dialogue for their own characters. By film noir convention, the voiceover narration by a protagonist generally signifies that they are dead, or else that their demise is imminent. When Jeanne arrives home, Henri initially inquires about her trip. She then talks banally about the house and garden.
At the end of the sequence, Henri remarks that Jeanne looks sad. When she denies this, he asks her pointedly: Listening to Brahms while smoking a pipe, Henri condescends to listen to his wife talking about hairstyles, to which he replies in a grave manner: However, given that Jeanne is no longer attracted by her husband or her lover, Jeanne discovers that she has been performing a masquerade for no apparent purpose.
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