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Jun 27, 2008
« Madame du Barry » : wit, power and aphrodisiacs. (3/5)
Martine Carol is Madame du Barry. A sensuous blonde actress, she was French cinema sex goddess of the 1950s, until birth of Venus Bardot put an end to her reign.
Before Madame du Barry, Martine Carol had been Lucrèce Borgia and showed as much flesh as times permitted. One year later, she would be Max Ophüls’s « Lola Montès » : today, her most celebrated part ; then, the biggest flop in her career.
She was also « Caroline chérie », « Nana » and « Nathalie » : she and producers were partial to films named after her character.
Martine Carol was also, for a few years, in respectable « bourgeois Régime » fashion, Christian-Jaque’s wife rather than his mere « favorite », but hopefully simultaneously both.
Though she started her career on stage, Martine Carol was not the most gifted of actresses, but her Madame du Barry displays so much energy, peps, spontaneity and charms that she progressively wins us over, though not overnight like the king.
While Danielle Darrieux was given « Le bon dieu sans confession », Martine Carol embodied the seductions of the flesh and showcased a watered down version of Arletty’s street « gouaille » or cheek : Martine Carol was Madame du Barry, Arletty had been Madame sans Gêne.
« Madame du Barry » is directed by Christian-Jaque and nearly co-directed by Henri Jeanson, who wrote the film dialogues, as he had for « Un revenant » : his one-liners take so much space on the soundtrack that they nearly fill the screen.
It has been said, not unfairly, that Jeanson wrote his dialogues for the actors playing the characters rather than for the characters themselves.
In « Madame du Barry », he sometimes fails -or more likely refuses- to harness his talent and launches Louis XV, « le roué », Jeanne, into rambling monologues, which waste wit like a Hummer gas : Henri Jeanson displayed none of the ecological conscience today championed by Luc Besson, to whom wit is an endangered species he refuses to deplete further.
The dialogue writer is nevertheless excusable : the French 18th century remains known as « le siècle des lumières » and probably was the golden age of wit. Voltaire was the uncontested quipping champion of his times : Jeanson is careful not to invite him to the story.
« Madame du Barry » is one more film about the « Ancien Régime » in which wit, sex and power are words and realities that go together well : an ageing Louis XV, rejuvenated by Jeanne’s skills, demonstrates it with eloquence ; the young Dauphin and future Louis XVI proves it negatively : his slow mind -Jeanson nicknames him the « Arch-locksmith »- and inaptitude to satisfy his young wife, Austrian Arch-duchess Marie-Antoinette, in bed, foretell the French revolution better than any scholarly report.
How not to draw a parallel with Sacha Guitry’s « Si Versaillles m’était conté », released one year earlier, in which the filmmaker, wit master and serial husband played the most absolute of French absolute rulers, Louis XIV ? In an ironic twist which, if true, Sacha Guitry probably deplored but did not fail to find amusing, the playwright and filmmaker was rumoured to be sexually impotent.
How also not to think that Christian-Jaque’s film inspired Bertand Tavernier’s « Que la fête commence » (1975), which took place a few decades before, during « la Régence », right after Louis XIV’s death, when Louis XV was too young to reign in person over his kingdom ?
Tavernier scripted his film in tandem with Jean Aurenche, another successful graduate of the same « qualité française » school as Christian-Jaque and Henri Jeanson : like them, they produced a delightful tale of debauchery, sexual freedom, free-wheeling amorality, religious hypocrisy and huge fun.
The stand-up entertainer to whose stage « Madame du Barry » several times returns will one year later morph into Peter Ustinov’s « Lola Montès » master of ceremony, while the studio-shot fair sequences evoke some of the atmosphere of the similarly recreated « Les enfants du paradis » « boulevard du crime » and the deliberate artificiality of Jean Renoir’s 1952 « Le carrosse d’or ».
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