France, 1930
Directed by Jean Grémillon
With Pierre Alcover (Victor Berthier), Nadia Sibirskaïa (Lise Berthier), Julien Berthaud (André)
Customary pictures of a penal colony, in this case in French Guyana, with prisoners doing their chores and answering a roll call under a scorching sun, taken in medium long shots or medium shots, quickly give way to an unexpected sequence showing these prisoners playing at any kind of games, goofing around and suddenly starting to song a love song in the dark, shot with a camera standing at various points. The expected vision of a jail is distorted, casting the men under a funnier and more sensitive light; law and order’s harshness gets a popular and poetic edge.
Jean Grémillon clearly wishes to surprise and intents to give his story a particular visual language, though he never loses sight on the plot. The long Guyanese exposition effectively introduces us to the main character and his main issue. Victor Berthier is a prisoner condemned for his wife’s murder, now on the verge of being released, a moment he is keenly waiting for since it means coming back to Paris and his beloved daughter Lise. The expected reunion does occur, but away from us: the camera simply shoots an open door from low angle and only the voices of Victor and Lise are heard for a brief moment. So a high emotion, marking the start of a new section of the movie, is put off-screen.
This trick is repeated later. Lise is in love with André who hopes to buy a business and start a family with her. But the only thing he can imagine to make a quick buck is to steal a Jewish usurer at his office, aided and abetted by her lover, promising Lise and the Jew he would pay the fellow back later. Unsurprisingly the lender fights back but is killed by Lise as she hits him with the first object she can grab. But the camera doesn’t show the death; it just shots a window and records the shocked voice of Lisa. Another high emotion, this time fully unexpected, opens the final part of the film unsighted.
What is left to shoot for the camera between these crucial moments is the father and daughter’s slow descent from hope to despair. In a first time, after the reunion, Victor is confident his daughter has a regular occupation and is happy in her life. He is eager to settle down in his new life while Lise dares not to tell him the hardships of her life as a loose woman getting support from older men and reckons how to manage his father’s presence. In the second time, after the fateful visit to the loan shark, discomfort is creeping and the mechanics of the tragedy become impossible to stop, Victor finding out the truth by chance, confronting the young lovers and making a desperate choice. Incredibly touching is the opposition between the massive body of Pierre Alcover and the frail and embarrassed bearing of Nadia Sibirskaïa, as they try to come to terms with a changing reality, from the awkward joy of forming again a family in a small flat (too small for their gestures and feelings) to the ugly truth (the hulk moving around in anger, powerless to make sense of the waif’s actions).
A small object, a chain pocket watch with a portrait of Lise, is handled throughout the film and moves from being a beacon of hope, when Victor displays it to his fellow prisoners to show her daughter’s beauty, to being the tool of the disaster, as André brings it to the usurer as a pretext and then leaves it at the place after the killing, the disappearance of the stuff raising questions and carrying the risk of the police knocking at Lise’s door. It quietly stands as the concrete and harrowing symbol of fatherly hope betrayed by the child’s fickleness and of fate etched in time lost in errors. Its mutation gives the tragedy a poignant coherence but also a powerful and devastating impact as the stakes put on it are deftly put away from our eyes (the reunion and the killing), unfolding in the background of the tragedy the chain pocket watch stirs while under the camera’s eyes. This efficient symbolism also bring the narration a little further than the naturalistic tenets of the plot; like the exposition this part of the film becomes a realism touched by sad poetry.
The finale of “La petite Lise”, the highest and most heartbreaking emotion of this grim melodrama, is carefully showed, the camera shooting in medium long shot Victor near a police station entrance and then shooting without changing position as he moves through the depth of field to go next to a policeman and starts speaking. But his voice is unheard; his confession, which is a lie to spare Lise and André the jail, can’t be on-screen; but at this point words are useless. The vision of this fellow defeated by fate and a child is enough to move the most jaded moviegoers, it they haven’t been by the time moved by the bold, inspired and rigorous mise en scène, which lends to a simple melodramatic narrative a subtly stunning and cogent visual language.