Precious few intertitles in the silent era, and just a handful of lines of dialogue across a near-century of “talkies,” are more portentous and heartrending than this: “François, the youngest son of the Lepic family, was born after the parents stopped loving each other.”
And so we are introduced to the titular character of Julien Duvivier’s Poil de Carotte (“Carrot Top”), an earnest farm boy whose derisive nickname was coined by none other than his mother. Erasing any question at the outset about where our sympathies should lie in this “dramatic comedy in five parts,” Madame Lepic is described as “a disagreeable gossip and hypocrite.” Monsieur Lepic, meanwhile, is presented as “indifferent and self-absorbed,” which is practically a compliment by comparison.
François, played with verve and bonhomie by freckle-faced André Heuzé (the son of a screenwriter and director) in his lone principal performance, absorbs four hundred blows, give or take, from his abrasive mother. The villainy of Madame Lepic is underscored, unnecessarily to contemporary viewers, by her grotesque mustache. It may have been designed to suggest who wears the pants in the family, but the air of misogyny occasionally overwhelms the familial power dynamics.
This is the sole misstep in Poil de Carotte by Duvivier, who had already directed a dozen films and was yet to reach his thirtieth birthday. Duvivier had originally dropped out of college to become an actor, but a bad case of stage fright one night drove him to the other side of the footlights. He became experimental director André Antoine’s assistant before working under Louis Feuillade and Marcel L’Herbier. He embraced and extended his first mentor’s ideas about naturalistic acting and a strong sense of physical place when he began making his own films in 1919.
Duvivier was something of a prodigy, and his craftsmanship and talent were recognized by producers who gave him the resources to work nonstop in a wide array of genres throughout the 1920s. His output in the silent era, in fact, exceeded that of his peers Jacques Feyder, Jean Renoir, and René Clair.
Duvivier’s skill and reliability played a significant role, one presumes, in nabbing the assignment to direct a plum property like Poil de Carotte (originally intended for Jacques Feyder). Jules Renard’s autobiographical 1894 novel, based on his cruelly loveless childhood, was such a popular success that six years later the author adapted his piercingly astringent and darkly humorous tale for the stage with, coincidentally, André Antoine. To this day, Poil de Carotte remains Renard’s best-known work.
Duvivier’s contributions in translating the material to the screen are profound and apparent. He takes a series of episodes and subtly and gracefully smooths them into a seductive narrative arc. Making the very most of the picturesque countryside around Guillestre in the High Alps, Duvivier contrasts the never-ending jibes that François endures in the claustrophobic chez Lepic with the peacefulness and sun-dappled majesty of the landscape. Those foundational elements, combined with a lilting sense of time and Duvivier’s mastery of tone, helped shape and define the quintessential French style known as poetic realism.
We’ve come to view this kind of filmmaking as both classical (i.e., old-fashioned) and classic (innocent, and impossible to duplicate today). But let’s not overlook Duvivier’s innovative techniques, in particular his zeal for superimpositions, which he employs to illustrate the passage of time as well as to evoke a character’s solitary thoughts. His eagerness to try resolutely modern storytelling devices, and his ability to integrate them into a small-town tale, is extraordinary.
Duvivier possessed an alacrity and proficiency with the elements of filmmaking that enabled him to glide into the sound era without a hitch. He must have been anticipating the introduction of spoken dialogue for a while, because in 1932 he directed Poil de Carotte again, this time with his own screenplay. Perhaps, like Renard, Duvivier was persuaded by the lure of a popular success (and its pecuniary rewards) to revisit François’s bittersweet saga. More likely, he was confident that he could improve on the 1925 film. And according to historian and critic Lenny Borger, “In a rare example of a remake surpassing its memorable original, Duvivier gave definitive form to this classic chronicle of childhood.”
Duvivier made a string of critically and commercially successful films in the 1930s, among them Pépé le Moko and Un Carnet de Bal. He was one of the “Big Five”—with Renoir, Clair, Feyder, and Marcel Carné—whose works comprised the Golden Age of French cinema. Duvivier was so admired internationally that he was invited to Hollywood to make a big-budget biopic about Johann Strauss, The Great Waltz, in 1938.
One of the giants of French cinema—his admirers included Renoir, Orson Welles, and Ingmar Bergman—Duvivier is not well remembered these days, and he is infrequently revived. It’s not because he churned out flighty, disposable entertainments, however. “I know it is much easier to make films that are poetic, sweet, charming, and beautifully photographed,” he said in a 1946 interview, “but my nature pushes me towards harsh, dark and bitter material.”
Duvivier’s reputation suffered a hit at the hands of the passionate young rebels—François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, specifically—who took over the pages of the film journal Cahiers du Cinema in the early 1950s and declaimed, sometimes thoughtfully and sometimes viciously, for and against films and filmmakers they championed or reviled. As one measure of how out of favor Duvivier was with a certain strata of critics, the important film magazine Positif didn’t review any of his movies from 1952 until his last in 1967, when the director died in an automobile accident in Paris.
Nonetheless, in 1954, Duvivier proposed writing a screenplay with Truffaut, who was strategizing how to make the leap to the director’s chair. Nothing came of it, although Duvivier wrote the younger man a warm letter that ended, “Please see me as a friend who thinks highly of you and likes you.”
Coincidentally, Duvivier was a member of the Cannes jury five years later when Truffaut’s feature debut The 400 Blows premiered in competition (and Truffaut received the award for best director). In the introduction to his 1975 collection of writings, The Films in My Life, Truffaut shared an anecdote about his forebear: “When I met Julien Duvivier a little before his death, and after I had just shot my first film [the 1958 short Les Mistons], I tried to get him to admit—he was always complaining—that he had had a fine career, varied and full, and that all things considered he had achieved great success and ought to be contented. ‘Sure, I would feel happy … if there hadn’t been any reviews.’”
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius