Game of memory
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Game of memory |
| Original title | Un carnet de bal |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1937 |
| length | 124 (German verse) 144 (French verse) minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Julien Duvivier |
| script | Julien Duvivier Jean Sarment Pierre Wolff Bernard Zimmer Henri Jeanson Yves Mirande based on Julien Duviviers and Leslie Bush-Fekete's story Un Carnet de Bal |
| production | Jean Lévy-Strauss |
| music | Maurice Jaubert |
| camera |
Michel Kelber Philippe Agostini Pierre Levent |
| cut | André Versein |
| occupation | |
| |
Game of Memory is a French feature film directed by Julien Duvivier from 1937 with Marie Bell in the leading role. She is accompanied by a host of other pre-war stars of French cinema, including Harry Baur , Pierre Blanchar , Fernandel , Louis Jouvet , Raimu , Françoise Rosay and Pierre Richard-Willm .
action
Christine de Guérande, a well-to-do and still young widow, finds the dance card of her first ball after her husband's death while arranging his documents. She was just 16 years old at the time. Now, over a decade later, she decides to travel back into her own past and visit every single one of her friends, admirers and former dance partners. Their names are immortalized in the ball booklet. But the melancholy return to his own youth, paved with numerous hopes, quickly turns into a single string of profound disappointments.
One of the dance partners, the young Audié, has already passed away, and Christine only meets his mother. Marked by deep grief over the early loss, the careworn woman has fled into delusional wishful thinking. She firmly believes that her boy will be home any minute. Another admirer of yesteryear, the gaunt Pierre Verdier, has become a dubious and nefarious type: As the manager of a restaurant with a highly dubious reputation, he has specialized in advising underworld thugs on legal tricks. The compact Alain Regnault, on the other hand, whose marriage proposal Christine had once rejected, could not cope with her decision and has now retired to a monastery. The Man of God no longer places any value on contact with his once adored and her world, which is determined by worldly abysses.
When Christine tries to surprise her former dance partner François Patusset, who had once aspired to a great political career, she bursts into the middle of his wedding. Life has brought him back to reality, to the bottom of the less glamorous facts. Now he bakes much smaller rolls: He has just made it to the mayor of a small town, his newlywed is his housekeeper. The new meeting with the attractive Eric Irvin, however, promises much more hope for a nice reunion. You get closer and for a moment it seems as if this game of memory could lead to a common future. But Christine finally has to realize that Eric's love for the mountains and nature is greater than for her. And so she also leaves him empty-handed.
Her reunion with another former admirer and dance partner, Thierry Raynal, turns out to be an absolute disaster. Although he has become a doctor, his life only takes place in human abysses. Raynal lives in a depraved, dark area and earns his living mostly with abortions. Her reunion with Fabien Coutissol, a decidedly cheerful person who has stayed in both hometowns and earns a living as a hairdresser, develops completely differently. He turns out to be the only admirer from the past with whom Christine still wants to attend a ball like the one back then. But her attempt to conjure up the past and her young girl existence with all the exuberant feelings of yore, must ultimately fail. Your dreams and hopes of reviving these memories of a carefree teenage life are shattered against reality, the here and now.
Christine is deeply disillusioned, her return to her previous life is like an escape from a search born out of a false longing for youth. In order to be able to finally finish, she wants to visit her last boyfriend of yore. But he has now died. In order to give a new meaning to the life that now seems so empty to her, Christine decides to take in his now orphaned son. And she wants to prepare him for his first ball ...
Production notes
The film was shot from March 20 to June 1937. The premiere of Game of Memory took place on September 8, 1937 in Paris. In Germany, the film was shown for the first time ten years later, i.e. after the war (1947). In Austria, however, the game of remembrance started in 1938, shortly before the so-called Anschluss .
Serge Pimenoff , Paul Colin and Jean Douarinou were responsible for the film construction.
In his exile in Hollywood , Duvivier filmed the story in 1941 under the title A woman's heart never forgets again. Shortly afterwards, in 1942/43, Hans H. Zerlett adapted the same material for the German audience under the title Journey into the Past .
Awards
- In August 1938, Game of Memory received the Mussolini Cup at the Venice Biennale .
- Also in 1938, the film received the NBR Award from the American National Board of Review .
- In 1939, Game of Memory was awarded the Kinema Jumpō Prize in Tokyo .
Reviews
“The film had an unusual success and popularized the episodic genre. His episodes are artistically very different. The ones with Jouvet and Blanchar probably work best, although the latter, especially in terms of the expressive picture design, is a bit out of the ordinary; but the brief encounter with the Father also has atmosphere and weight. The performance is consistently good. "
"A classic of the French pre-war film, masterfully composed, but not free from sentimentality, which lets the faded dreams of a woman emerge in an abundance of different staging styles."
"Considering its fame, this is a lumpy porridge of a picture, good in parts but often slow, pretentious and banal. Its gallery of actors is, however, unique. "
Web links
- Game of memory in the Internet Movie Database (English)