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Wednesday, July 19, 2023

LE NOUVEAU TESTAMENT / THE NEW TESTAMENT (1936)

Prolific Paris boulevard playwright/actor/manager Sacha Guitry was 51 but still new to film, especially to directing, when he shot ('transferred' overstates things) this typical stage vehicle for wit & wisdom Guitry-style.  Charting the romantic pas de six of two middle-aged couples, a 20-something son & 20-something daughter (or is she a mistress . . . or both . . . or neither?), it casts Guitry as a doctor who’s just caught his wife canoodling in a taxi with the son of a friend.  (A friend whose wife had once been his mistress.  Wait! - is the canoodling son his son?  He’s surely not the friend’s son.)  A complicated situation that pleases Guitry since it only strengthens his arms-length relation with his wife.  If she’s looking elsewhere, it opens the way for his lovely new office assistant.  Or would if she weren’t possibly his daughter.  Sacré bleu!  Perhaps Guitry should let his wife think she’s his mistress.  Got all that?  And if you think there isn’t an overbearing valet to confuse things further, you've never seen one of these things.  Everyone talks a mile-a-minute, Guitry double that rate.  (Positive outcome: with so many subtitles, you hardly notice the lack of film technique.)  Guitry does go out for a couple of brief set ups (including a putative rendezvous at the statue of Joan D’Arc . . . but which one?, there are four in Paris), but he’s yet to either come up with (or integrate) the distinctive off-hand visual style of his later work.  And he certainly hasn’t learned to modulate the delivery of his amusingly twisted loquacious logic.  But, if not the best intro to chacun à son goût a la Guitry, it may be as close as you can get to his unadulterated sui generis boulevard manner.*  If there ever was Pre-Code French cinema to match Pre-Code Hollywood, this'd be it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *DÉSIRÉ/’37 and POISON/’51 are two of the best entry points on Guitry; the first in Ernst Lubitsch mode, the second more Marcel Pagnol. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/12/desire-1937.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/04/la-poison-1951.html

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