User Reviews

"Lumiere d'été" comes close to some works of Grémillon's countrymen such as Renoir or Carné, but is peculiar in more than one way - for example in blending Chekhovian romantic-existential ensemble drama with an ode to common man's hard work (yet, to this viewer, in a setting that resembles rather some kind of inferno than a collectivist paradise), and grafting standard trash-romantic happy end for the most improbable couple. Some interesting music/sound escapades are to be appreciated as well as the long thrilling faux-finale (the castle ball followed by the frantic night drive).

The only flaw of the Criterion "Eclipse Series 34" package is the lack of bonus features. Never mind - it's the movie that counts.

A cynic with a little culture under his belt may be tempted to dismiss this as Idiot's Delight With Spin but to do so is to reveal a shallowness not lacking in the film. Robert E Sherwood enjoyed a success with his play, Idiot's Delight, the subsequent movie adaptation was ho hum at best and several decades later the Broadway Musical version, Dance A Little Closer, was a disaster. Sherwood focused on a disparate group of people holed up in a mountain inn on the eve of World War II. Jacques Prevert's screenplay focuses on a disparate group of people holed up in a mountain hotel smack dab in the middle (1943) of that same world war yet of hostilities there is nary a mention. This was the third movie in which Gremillon featured his favourite actress Madeleine Renaud and he would do so yet again in La Ciel est a vous - and in passing coax a career-best performance out of Charles Vanel - and it's easy to see why he was so enamoured of her. Virtually forgotten today - much like the other Madeleine (Robinson) in the film - she was among the finest of an exceptionally fine generation of French actresses and she scores heavily here as a discarded mistress running a hotel in a remote mountain region. In a role written for Michele Morgan Madeleine Robinson offers strong support as a young lover, also rejected by Pierre Brasseur's troubled artist, who represents hope for the future in her new romance with a young engineer. All the values are sound, top writer, top director, top actors (Brasseuer, Renaud, Robinson) and make this an unfairly neglected minor masterpiece.

Interesting, but it doesn't hold together. The big problem is the characterisation of the three central men- Patrice, a dissolute aristo, Roland, a dissolute artist (or pss-artist) and Julien, an heroic engineer, all in love with Michele. Both Patrice and Roland would be interesting central characters for films but we know too little about what makes them what they are to be very interested or convinced by them. Roland isn't convincing as the drunk veering between pride in his genius and fears that he has no talent. Equally, Michele, the female lead, is well-acted, but finally she is only there as an object of desire and her supposed obsessive passion for Roland doesn't have much conviction and there is something schematic about the way she is finally paired off with Julien, the "real man" of the trio. Above all, though, it is the plot, preposterous and melodramatic, which fails to convince. In Les Regles Du Jeu the plot derives logically from the characters; here, from the start- even from before the start- Patrice's murder of his wife and his installation of Cri-Cri, his mistress and accomplice, as local hotel manager- Michele and Roland going to a remote mountain hotel for no very good reason, Patrice's invitation to Roland and Michele to move into and decorate his château and Roland's acceptance are too obviously plot devices- unfortunately, because the scenes where Patrics lures Roland into drunkenness and self-destruction are well-done and effective when we accept them, convincing portraits of malice and despair and the desperate Roland at the party is at last a convincing, tragic and funny character. The end too is yet more preposterous- that the other passengers will allow the drunk and gibbering Roland to drive a car is an obvious plot-device, but then the conveniently well-timed accident ("twenty five dead") which enables Julien to do his heroic bit while Patrice sets out to shoot him with a rifle ostentatiously positioned for just that purpose right at the start of the film is an arbitrary absurdity too many.

On the credit side, there are fine performances, the early scenes between Patrice and Cri-Cri, tied together by memory, guilt and emotion are superbly done- so much so that they emphasise the absurdity of other parts of the film- the actors do their best with contradictory parts, there is fine photography- the landscape of the dam is well-depicted and the party is wonderfully shot- and the music is well-handled throughout- especially a deranged reel on a fiddle that accompanies Roland's crazed drive down the mountain which- except at the end- is very convincing for when the film was made.