A friend and colleague, critic and teacher Nicole Brenez, says that the best film criticism consists of films critiquing one another. This may sound a mite abstract, but two very different masterpieces by the great, neglected Jean Gremillon, Lumiere d’ete and Le ciel est a vous, seem to offer a concrete example of this, as a critique of Jean-Luc Godard’s In Praise of Love, which I wrote about last week. Both are showing this week as part of an invaluable retrospective at Facets Cinematheque (how rare screenings of both are is apparent from the lack of translated titles; the first means “summer light,” the second “the sky is yours”). Godard accuses cinema of having responded inadequately to World War II in general and the German occupation of France in particular. Yet Lumiere d’ete and Le ciel est a vous were both made and released in France during the occupation, in 1943 and 1944 respectively, and they are both exceptional responses to the occupation, even to the conditions of their making.
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One also has to wonder whether Godard is being realistic in his judgments about what constitutes honorable work under such circumstances. In this country, critics of films produced under totalitarian regimes often have unrealistic expectations. For instance, some reviewers have faulted contemporary Iranian filmmakers for “playing along with the mullahs” by avoiding politically contentious material. But filmmakers from every country avoid politically contentious material, so it seems churlish to ask those living under repressive regimes to take greater risks than anyone else. Moreover, how can we evaluate decisions made in other countries? Few people who’ve seen Abbas Kiarostami’s latest feature, 10, could have anticipated that Iranian censors would ask him to delete well over half its footage. For these reasons, any moral judgments I might have about films made in occupied France around the time I was born are only tentative and speculative.
One reason Gremillon has never come fully into focus, even in France, is that he can’t be readily approached as an auteur—unlike, say, the screenwriter for Lumiere d’ete, Jacques Prevert. Ironically, it was Prevert not Gremillon who was blamed in the Vichy press for the film’s “counterproductive” attitudes (a distinction Gremillon disavowed at the time), most of these having to do with the depiction of a rural aristocrat named Patrice (Paul Bernard) who’s gradually exposed as perverted and evil—though, to be fair, the far-from-Vichyite Andre Bazin praised the film’s cinematic expressiveness while decrying “its bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings of Prevertian wit.” (It’s sad but true that auteurist traces tend to be more visible in an auteur’s lesser efforts.)
La ciel est a vous is something else again—a working-class love story that received the approval and support of collaborationists because it validated humble home values. Yet according to film historian Bernard Eisenschitz, it was also “taken by French audiences as a call to arms.” Probably this was because it celebrated soaring beyond earthbound limitations, including those of the humble home values it seemingly validated. Even the film’s title might be said to support this second reading: saying the sky is yours implies that the ground is theirs.
I should also point out that Noel Burch and Genevieve Sellier reveal in their 1996 book La drole de guerre des sexes du cinema francais, 1930-1956 (“The ‘Funny War’ of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930-1956”) that the couple’s favorite song, “The Time of Lilacs and Roses,” played by the piano teacher while they’re shopping for their daughter’s new piano, is a covert allusion to “Lilacs and Roses,” the first resistance poem written by Louis Aragon in 1940 and distributed by the French underground; the grandmother’s favorite song, the march from Aida, which the teacher mocks, was played when French troops left for the front during World War I.
Directed by Jean Gremillon
Written by Jacques Prevert and Pierre Laroche
With Madeleine Renaud, Pierre Brasseur, Madeleine Robinson, Paul Bernard, Georges Marchal, and Marcel Levesque.
Le ciel est a vous ★★★★ (Masterpiece)
Directed by Jean Gremillon
Written by Albert Valentin and Charles Spaak
With Madeleine Renaud, Charles Vanel, Jean Debucourt, Leonce Corne, Albert Remy, and Robert le Fort.
