La tour de Nesle

Alexander Dumas was the great soap opera manufacturer of the 19th century for pulp fiction novels, and this film actually succeeds in transmitting the 14th century soap opera element to the screen making it surprisingly boring and ridiculous for all its elaborate costumes (all wrong) and romantic schmalz music, which tries to save the film but doesn't. I have often been disappointed by Abel Gance's film before, but this one struck the very bottom. Pierre Brasseur is magnificently overacting as usual in pompous eloquence and dashing theatrical exaggerations, while the others are typical soap opera figures, like 14th century barbie dolls. Alexander Dumas usually had a knack for rewriting history to make it more sensually interesting and populistic, he was never afraid of getting all the facts wrong, which he generally did, and here he distorts everything indeed, romanticising rather sinister cruel events and intrigues of medieval politics. It's not a bad film, the masses liked this kind of swashbuckling balderdash of cheap superficiality, there will always be audiences for affected romantic drivel like "Angelique" and Dumas' cloak-and-dagger novels of gory intrigues, but this film will reach no higher than a possible status as a pastime just to get it over with. I will probably never watch any more films by Abel Gance - they all made me yawn and sleep, unless they angered me enough to keep me fuming.

Pierre Brasseur was a great French actor and this movie is a good occasion to discover him directed by Abel Gance in 1955 in a story loosely inspired by real fact from 14th Century.

Not much to say in favor of this. If you expect anything near the greatness of, say, Napoléon or Le Capitaine Fracasse or even Un grand Amour de Beethoven, you will be sorry for your move. Costumes and sets are ugly-looking, ridiculous and historically inaccurate (one of the quality you would expect at least of a soap historic melodrama), direction is quite pedestrian, color photography a failure to capture anything but a sorry-looking page in three colors of our grand-parents' illustrated albums. A fact to be mentioned in a picture by Abel Gance : it provides neither a single image nor a single sequence to be remembered. While you watch it, you will yawn, start to do something else while checking occasionally that nothing interesting happens on the screen and go back to it with the satisfaction that you're not losing anything, or you will absorb it like a sleeping drug. And the acting is poor. Even the great Pierre Brasseur and the already fine Michel Bouquet try their best with their cretinous parts but don't manage to convey anything if a reflection of the silliness of the whole piece. And indeed, the other reviewers have at least a point, the film is true to its origin, the French 19th century historic (even more pretentious) melodrama, in that the picture is as bad, far-fetched and feeble-minded as its dramatic ancestor from the paternity of which we must exonerate Alexandre Dumas. You remember Les Enfants du paradis and the awful play, L'Auberge des Adrets. This melodrama is exactly contemporary with La Tour de Nesle. The great actor Frédérick Lemaître (oddly it is also played by Pierre Brasseur) makes a success out of this incredible shambles by making fun of each situation and tuning the melodrama into a comedic contrapuntal masterpiece. It is not what is intended by Gance or Pierre Brasseur, and it is not achieved. By the way, melodramas and movies often turned out right. Not this time. One of the very worst pictures directed by one of the world's most acclaimed and legendary filmmakers (hand in hand with Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Jean Renoir for the same reason). A piece for amateurs of old-fashioned pieces of trash. Anger as high as were my expectations from that director. Really, a turkey of a movie.

This is a very rare movie,very rare on the screens and it deserves to be brought out of oblivion.Adapting Alexandre Dumas,Abel Gance did fifty years ago what Patrice Chéreau would do -with questionable results- in the nineties with "la reine Margot" itself a remake of a Jean Dreville film ,which was released at the same time as Gance's "la tour de Nesle".Do not forget that that director was a pioneer ,a visionary whose most famous works ("Napoleon" "j'accuse" ) are as important as Griffith's for American cinema.

First thing to bear in mind is that THAT Marguerite,heroine of Gance's work, is not Marguerite de Navarre who married HENRI IV ,but another one ,who lived in the 14th century,Marguerite de Bourgogne.As for the historical events ,well, see at the end of the review.

"La tour de Nesles " is a color movie,which was rare in the French fifties.The settings are minimal but splendid and Gance lovingly films reflections of the lugubrious tower and its horrors in the blue-green waters of the Seine.This tower where the Queen waits for her young lovers who are killed by her henchmen afterwards solves the equation of paradise and hell:this scene when the three gentlemen enter a sumptuous room -actually three bedrooms - where three gorgeous naked ladies are eagerly waiting for them, was very risqué for the time (nudities were extremely rare or they were furtive).Here Gance is really going for broke;and that's not all:this place of all delights suddenly becomes some kind of cage .

Abel Gance used to say that a melodrama was a failed tragedy:but personally I prefer a glorious melodrama to a boring tragedy;and "la tour de Nesles has everything that makes a melodrama worthwhile: orgies,treason,blood,love,adultery,humor,vividness -Pierre Brasseur is the stand-out - and even incest;it's also a swashbuckler ,a genre that will dominate the commercial French cinema in the wake of Gance's film in the 1955-1965 era .

The last lines of the movie are François Villon's immortal lines from his poem "ballade des dames du temps jadis"(second half of the fifteenth century).

Historical facts:this Queen who was doing away with her one -night lovers by throwing them into the Seine is probably pure legend.Marguerite de bourgogne was Philippe le Bel's daughter-in -law and that king was not quite a joker -neither was his son,here portrayed by Michel Bouquet as an idiot-.When he discovered that Marguerite was having a love affair with a gentleman,Philippe d'Aulnay -a character featured in the movie-,while her sister -in law ,Blanche was in love with his brother Gauthier (also featured)he was merciless;the two brothers were -ouch!- flayed alive and Marguerite was strangled in her dungeon.It's interesting to compare the brothers' real fate with their role in Dumas's play.As for Buridan (Pierre Brasseur),they say he was a professor at university who had an affair with the queen ,actually the starting point of the bloody legend.