Word: film
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...pass at Jenny and she breaks a bottle over his head. The police pick up her husband for murder but Jenny decides to keep mum to both her husband and the police, thinking that her confession would destroy his love. Her failure to confess causes much agony, but the film has a neat solution...
This good little French film has a sentimentality that is too obvious to overlook. But Director Jacques Becker (It Happened at the Inn) has given it such virtues as a gently perceptive camera, unobtrusive realism, and, above all, genuine pathos...
This is a film that explores moral complexities. The wife is brought to her deepest ruthlessness not only by her own genuine love and her own innate weakness, but also by beginning to learn the worst about her husband, by perceiving that she may lose her lover through the best that is in him, and crucially, by her husband's most earnest efforts to face his own evil, and to be good to her. Moreover, the young lovers' sin of youthfulness is perceived with complete compassion, even by the husband...
...film has earned great acclaim in Europe. Those who prefer their movies with a nervous tempo and honeyed brightness will find it very slow and very dark. But Dreyer has used timing and lighting so artfully that his characters seldom have to speak and never waste a word; he has gone farther than most moviemakers towards solving the difficult problems of silent cinema in a talk-ridden era. Some of his close-ups are extraordinarily long, but they are brimming with substance: the subtle, beautifully acted modulations of deep moral anguish...
...much for one, unless that one is done brilliantly. This production is sound, rather than brilliant. Chunk by chunk it is patiently, intricately wrought and highly polished; but the chunks have to be shoved around like so many massive pieces of Victorian furniture. Those who made the film have taken a pretty good, but no longer very believable book a great deal too seriously. Treated with less respect, it might have been turned into a lively, believable movie...