La Poison (1951)

Director: Sacha Guitry

Screenplay: Sacha Guitry

Cast: Michel Simon as Paul Louis Victor Braconnier, Germaine Reuver as Blandine Braconnier, Jean Debucourt as Maître Aubanel, Louis de Funès as André Chevillard, Marcelle Arnold as Germaine Chevillard, Georges Bever as Mr Gaillard

Ephemeral Waves

 

He has something of a chimera and of a clown.

A twee French comedy...about wanting to bump your spouse off their mortal coil. Even the opening credits have a whimsical politeness to them in contrast to this central premise, and that does not include the sweet natured tribute to the production team and lead actor Michel Simon from director-writer Sacha Guitry himself, letting everyone on staff out of character and job say hello to the audience before turning it into an admiration for Simon's talents. This is all in context of an incredibly misanthropic premise which makes this pleasant opening more striking with hindsight. This is pre-French New Wave cinema, a quietly spoken work from a time when the directors would be lambasted by this incoming wave as antiquated, or in the case of Guitry, gaining admiration by the likes of Francois Truffaut in his work and in his position as a director-writer with his own voice. The quaintness from the get-go is perfect for the premise, where in a quiet French village a man named Paul Braconnier (Simon) cannot stand his wife, and at fifty three, is contemplating murdering her, even consoling the local vicar on his hatred for her.

Telling the small town chemist's is busy with selling aspirin, products to help customers who cannot sleep, and seventy percent of the locals being constipated, presenting a bleak view of "harmonic" community life, especially as Blandine Braconnier (Germaine Reuver), the wife, is not an innocent either, wanting to buy rat poison in consideration to murder him too. Not a good look at "wholesomeness" in the slightest, and in context, when Guitry would pass in 1957, this belies the idea of how a director as they got older is stigmatised for getting "softer" in their attitudes and themes. Moving away from adapting his plays as he was in the early part of his career, and branching out into modern set works between historical pieces, the plays its content with a light grace, but you find yourself at a deeply miserable dinner between the central couple contrasted ironically by a love song on the radio making comparisons to being pigeons mating together despite the absurd contrast it has in the scene.

The film itself is quiet, clear filmmaking with no elaborate editing or camera set-ups. Documented is how Guitry, who admired Michel Simon, went out of his way to explicitly request the crew on the production were as efficient as possible, to only to one takes for scenes is possible, making this a short shot¹. Clear and precise in filmmaking, it is itself still loaded, its light hearted presentation bringing a barb like a beautiful spring flower which turns out to have thorns within it, like a scene where the shopkeepers, believing that having a spectacular event like someone giving birth to quadruplets would bring attention to a town from curious tourists and more customers, ask the vicar to his horror if he can perform a miracle on the spot if they bring someone's daughter to be healed by him. This constant undercutting of the tone is still, in context to a film plus fifty years old, incredible in its gleeful subversion.

The plot itself concerns when Paul, contemplating his plan, learns of a lawyer through his radio with an idiosyncratic take on murder and searches him out, even lying about having already murdered his wife to plan one which can be defended in the defendant box at court, a twisted idea of being able to reconstruct a fake murder to be innocent of self-defence. Here there is a historical context which likely influenced the content, where Sacha Guitry was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and imprisoned, which more than likely emphasised contempt for the French law system. A prolific stage actor and playwright as well, Guitry was still able to perform in the German occupation of France during World War II and, with his reputation as an artist even of interest to German soldiers, he was seen as a collaborator despite friends of his being imprisoned by the Nazis and one scenario, taking advantage of an officer's admiration of his work, to get prisoners of wars releases¹. Even without this personal context, there is a legitimate contempt, witnessed in the final scenes when even the kids ask and try to rationalise what murder and justice is, playing mock murders and trials with even a homemade guillotine stand-in built.

It is still transgressive in the modern day, and it reflects in its own way the contradictory and inadequate problems one could have with crimes being deal with legally. Trials are meant to rationalise and stick to logistical facts, something I can attest to having done jury service at least once in my life like so many readers of this potentially have, but when it comes to thinking about the reason why people would commit a crime, law as a concept has to struggle against the existentialism, alongside the fact you can bend and distort the way a trial works to win your case as this deals with. Even if in this case the justifications by Paul eventually are all extreme, not meant to be justifiable to let him get scot free but in context of a fabricated story, meant to fantasise about this taboo subject safely, let one cheer him on as he thumbs his nose at the institution. The only thing which has not aged well, or is going to be understandably challenged, is that his wife is an alcoholic shrew stereotype playing off to wife jokes. Not to defend the interpretation of the character here, but also factoring in how this broad stereotype found itself through pop culture for a long time, not just in one French film, so many are to be challenged for these stereotypes, it is also clearly part of the misanthropic edge to this entire work.

Sacha Guitry here does present how, with older films, you find works whose style and production do feel of an entirely different time in attitude, but where their content regardless of age remind one how these films were written as far as they could, as now, to shock and strike against what they felt needed mocking. The term "don't judge a book by its cover" is a cliché that is beneath the auteur, but I did come to La Poison with a sense of it being a film playfully whimsy with the subject of murder, but was not expecting how its gentle nature has a very wicked grin I also shared by its end credits.

 

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1) From On Life on Screen: Miseries and Splendor of a Monarch, a documentary by Dominique Maillet focusing on the film and its director-writer's life in connection to it which was included in the Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray release for La Poison.