Today I read Maria Chapdelaine, the classic French-Canadian novel by Louis Hemon. This evening I watched Julian Duvivier's 1934 screen adaptation of it, with Jean Gabin and Madeleine Renaud. It's one remarkable film, folks. Often faithful to the novel, but sometimes different, when Duvivier thought of ways that only a great novelist or a great director could have used to tell his story. (Louis Hamon, the author of Maria Chapdelaine, was not a great novelist. An effective one, yes, but not a great one.)
One of the things Duvivier uses repeatedly to great effect is juxtapositions of scenes that are happening simultaneously. (Hémon presents them consecutively.) The most remarkable example of this is his depiction of Christmas, when François Paradis is wandering through the forests in a terrible snow storm (recounted by Eutrope Gagnon in Chapter X of the novel), Maria is saying her rosary 1000 times in the hope it will cause the Virgin to send FP to her (depicted in Chapter IX of the novel), and in the church, largely empty, the priest does Christmas mass for the few parishioners who show up. The minutes when the younger daughter, Alma-Rose, sits in her father's lap and sings Christmas carols with him, juxtaposed to a choir singing the same music in the church in Péribonka, is remarkably moving.
Another example of such juxtapositions is when Duvivier juxtaposes Eutrope's marriage proposal to Maria with Samuel's regrets at his wife's deathbed for the miserable life he has given her. Eutrope tries to make good the very life that Samuel realizes made his own wife miserable. Hémon makes that contrast over several chapters, but Duvivier does it with immediate juxtapositions, and it is very effective.
My only real problem with this movie comes near the end. In the novel, Maria herself comes to a realization that she would rather remain in the north Canadian outback and carry on the 300 year old Franco-Canadian culture that survives there in the wilderness. It is a very powerful realization in the novel, and probably the single thing that made it a classic of French-Canadian literature. In the movie, those ideas get preached to her and the congregation as a whole by the local minister. It comes off as FAR less effective.
But other than that, this is a wonderful movie, both as a work of art and as a documentary on the life of northern Canadian farmers and loggers in the first part of the twentieth century, at least as Hémon saw it during his six months there. Each time I watch it I enjoy it more.
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I watched Duvivier's juxtaposition of Chapters IX and X again today. It really is masterful.
