Martin Roumagnac
Romance
•
1h 48m
Directed by Georges Lacombe • Drama • With Marlene Dietrich, Jean Gabin • 1946 • 108 minutes
This tragic postwar romance is a tale of class anxiety and classic Romantic fatalism, run through with a typically French frankness about sex and gender. Jean Gabin is the titular character, an unpretentious and proudly working class building contractor, who falls in love with Marlene Dietrich’s ravishing shopgirl Blanche, quite unaware that she comes trailing a notorious sexual history and attracts the determined ardor of every man she meets. Among her current lovers (the American title was The Room Upstairs) is a local politician who plans on marrying Blanche once his terminally ill wife dies, but Gabin’s sensible lug doesn’t care, though it’s clear that the ever-opportunistic Blanche will choose wealth over love.
Until she doesn’t. Both Lacombe’s film and Dietrich’s performance have a sphinx-like attitude toward this femme fatale, and that still-gestating film noir stereotype is subtly deepened. Blanche is not judged or made to seem amoral. The men that buzz around her are not villainized, either – they’re just following their toxic hearts, in a culture where women like Blanche have so few options. Meanwhile, as the melodrama heats up, Gabin and Dietrich radiate pure matinee charisma, in the only movie these two icons ever made together.
Up Next in Romance
-
Suzanna Andler
Directed by Benoît Jacquot • Drama • With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Niels Schneider • 2021 • 88 minutes
Accompanied by her lover, Suzanna (Charlotte Gainsbourg), 40, views a Riviera beach house for her family's summer vacation. This day, this break in her routine, in this new house, will mark a turn...
-
Le Navire Night
Directed by Marguerite Duras • Drama • With Bulle Ogier, Dominique Sanda, Mathieu Carrière • 1979 • 90 minutes
With LE NAVIRE NIGHT, writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras (L'Amant, India Song) explores the matrix of love, desire and language in her characteristically oblique and experimental sty...
-
Quantum Love
Directed by Lisa Azuelos • Drama • With Sophie Marceau, François Cluzet • 2014 • 81 minutes
A family man's encounter with a beautiful woman develops into a mutual fascination.