French
master of suspense Henri-Georges Clouzot just returned from a two-year exile
from filmmaking after his 1943 noir masterwork Le Corbeau landed him in
hot water for accepting funding from Continental Films, a German film company
established by the Nazi occupation in France.
Shortly after making Quai des Orfèvres, his first feature since banishment from the director’s
chair, in an almost reactionary move Clouzot turned over the 1949 Golden Lion Winner
Manon, a loose adaptation of Antoine Prévost’s controversial 1731 French
novel Manon Lescaut. Told in
countless languages and forms from dramas to operas and ballets, the story
tells the doomed romance of Dégrieux (Michel Auclair) who runs away with his lover
Manon Lescaut (Cécile Aubry) whose thirst for living luxuriously sends the hapless
couple down a dark path including but not limited to promiscuity, prostitution and
eventually murder.
One of seven cinematic adaptations
of Prévost’s tale of doomed 18th century romance, Clouzot’s version
is unique in the ways it addresses the controversies generated by Le Corbeau
by updating the time to 20th Century France during WWII and reshaping
the character of Manon as being suspected her fellow village neighbors of
being a Nazi collaborationist. Co-starring
Serge Reggiani as the titular Manon’s brother Leon, Clouzot’s
relentlessly and uncompromisingly bleak vision of Prévost’s novel remains an incomparable
outlier in the director’s filmography ordinarily characterized by suspense
thrills. Functioning as both a departure
from genre trappings as well as a form of self-examination for Mr. Clouzot, Manon
the film is racy and raw for the ways in which it tackles the subjects of
greed and prostitution generated by postwar France while also serving up a
frank examination of the gulf between spiritual and physical love.
While Clouzot is almost entirely a
filmmaker of painstaking technical precision, the key to his Manon lies
with the crucial casting of Cécile Aubry who imbues the French woman with childlike
purity and voluptuous sexuality, often tightrope walking between the two
extremes. Though Aubry would go on to
become a formidable Hollywood actress, her first big break into the mainstream
came with Manon. Playing her
doomed beau is Michel Auclair who was already a major film star after appearing
in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and he makes Dégrieux into a
sympathetic, tragic character with more bad luck than he can keep up with. The presence of Serge Reggiani as Manon’s
brother Leon will no doubt cause Clouzot fans to further ponder what might have
been had Reggiani and the filmmaker finished out Inferno together.
A large factor in Manon’s
carefully composed visual modernity was the director’s frequent collaboration with
French cinematographer Armand Thirard.
Also having lensed Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at Number 21 and Diabolique,
Thirard’s stark black and white cinematography turns a sterile lens onto increasingly
messy settings including but not limited to an unforgettable crescendo in the
Arabian desert landscape. Much like
Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, the terrain depicted appears suffocating in
heat and humidity with the human characters at times appearing as tiny dots in
the grand scheme of things. Thirard’s
use of the crane shot is especially striking on a tense sequence where Manon
struggles to find a spot on a departing train, with the actors in the
boxcar writhing around like packed sardines.
Among the few straightforward
dramatic offerings from the French master of suspense, Manon in addition
to copping the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion went on to become a great
financial success in France and reaffirmed the director’s reputation as one of
French cinema’s finest master craftsmen.
While dismal, oppressive and even nihilistic, in the time-honored tradition
of Clouzot, the film follows its characters and situations down whichever
logical path the story takes them whether we the audience are left feeling good
about it in the end or not.
Daring for its frank exploration of
prostitution, greed and the unattainability of true happiness existing outside
of materialism, Clouzot’s Manon remains a sharp-edged downer which simultaneously
works as a straight adaptation of Prévost while also using the story to examine
the social implications of postwar France in microcosm. Most importantly for Clouzot, it answers the
many questions posed by his former exile from the cinema scene. Not unlike Dégrieux’s hopeless eloping with Manon,
it answers for Clouzot whether or not embarking on Le Corbeau was such a
good idea for him in the first place. In
the filmgoer’s ongoing mission to decode the mystery of Clouzot’s cinema, Manon
remains an essential piece of the puzzle!
--Andrew Kotwicki
