User reviews

Marie Bell is "Christine". She is recently widowed and going through her possessions when she discovers a dance card from her past. On it are the names of various men she knew - to varying degrees - back when she was a debutante attending a ball. She decides to track these men down and the film follows her as she tries to evaluate whether or not she married the right man, encountering each and considering where her (and their) future may have led had events played out differently. It also becomes apparent that these men, too, have found their lives impacted on by their relationship at the time with her. Some of their stories are tragic, some satisfying, some entertaining: we have a hen-pecked local mayor, a recluse, a priest, an hairdresser - who might not have proved to be her cup of tea, anyway. What "Christine" gradually comes to realise is that regret and wishful thinking are a two way street, and the poignancy of her journey is well encapsulated at the end when she meets a young man, much the same age as she was when her card was being filled. Bell is really effective here, she plays the role with nuance and an endearing charisma especially as she begins to realise the reciprocal effects of the characters' behaviour when they were all around sixteen years old. The dialogue is also quite well written with a degree of humour, frankness and realism that helped ensure director Julien Duvivier could sustain what might otherwise have been rather a long, and episodic, 2½ hours. This is an engaging lifetime retrospective that takes it's time and, I suspect, will leave us all with our own choice of whom she ought to have married (if anyone of them).

Newly widowed Marie Bell (Christine) is clearing out her house when she chances upon her dance-card from her first ball which she attended when she was 16. She is feeling nostalgic and determines to track down each name on the card to see how they are doing in life. Who knows, maybe a love will rekindle?

The film is a series of set pieces as Marie sets about her mission and each name on the card is given a short section. This made the film tolerable to watch as beforehand I was thinking to myself "Oh my goodness, this film is almost 2 and a half hours long!" Well, it doesn't seem like it and that is a credit to the director and the actors and actresses involved. In fact, the film is constantly entertaining even if it does focus on some downbeat situations. You can definitely relate to these people. My favourite story is the one that concerns the priest as it shows how life can move on from sadness in a positive way. I do have 1 question, though - what is that ending about!!? Is that a blossoming romance!!?

In real life, sentimental reflections just make me sad so I don't see the point but this film is worth a watch even if the topic is somewhat asking for trouble. I googled a friend when I was reminiscing of past times and found out that he had become a Hollywood stuntman and had jumped from a plane but his parachute failed to open. Miraculously, he survived as some tree branches broke his fall. He broke every bone in his body and his memory has been affected. I wish I hadn't looked him up! This film is a bit like that but more fun.

When her husband of 19 years dies at his desk in their magnificent Italian estate, Marie Bell goes in search of meaning to her life by visiting the men of her dance card from her first ball.

It's another example of Julien Duvivier's poetic realism, but from the viewpoint of the femme fatale. And here we have finally exposed what the f.f. Is thinking and it's... not much. After 19 years of married life, she concludes she never loved her husband and goes to find the men who swore they'd love her forever and find out what she's been missing.

In other words, it's another soap opera of the type that does not appeal to me. Mlle Bell has gotten everything she had bargained for, and, being unhappy, feels no need to give up anything in the exchange for happiness.

I suspect Duvivier felt the same way as I. He rarely seemed to like any of the women in his movies.

Despite that, I found this a very enjoyable movie, because of the men she goes to visit. While some of them have depressing stories, some of them have gotten on with their lives, like Raimu, Harry Baur, and in a beautiful performance, Louis Jouvet. The best of them have learned to compromise with their ambitions, and have some satisfaction. The others, not so much.

While Godard and co were still in diapers,Duvivier,Renoir and Carné were inventing the best French cinema that had ever been. I would trade you all M."A bout de soufflé" filmography for "un carnet de bal"

Leonard Maltin gives a four stars rating to this 1937 movie,and all we can do is approve of his judgment.The movie of nostalgia,of time passing by,of disenchantment,"un carnet de bal" is all this and more.

On the banks of a lake -the romantic place par excellence-,a woman is remembering her past.Her madeleine de Proust is her dance card ."Memories tumbling like sweets from a jar".But these sweets leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

She goes back in the past,in search of her long lost dance partners. She will have to delude herself:what she discovers is ruined lives,regrets,embittered characters,human wrecks.Time is a hard Master and it leaves no one unharmed.As always in Duvivier's work,the harder they fall,the better the sketches are.For it is basically a movie made up of sketches,Julien Duvivier's métier.All youth ideals have gone down the drain:the brilliant medicine student has become an abortionist;the lawyer with bright prospects now has a lousy shady cabaret;one of the woman's beaus is dead and his mother gone nuts acts as if he's still alive.Two of them have escaped from a doomed fate:but one has become a priest and the other keeps his love for something else than women .

The movie made up of sketches ,as I said, had always been Duvivier's forte.Here ,there are seven flashbacks,one prologue and one short epilogue :strange how this final resembles that of Mitchell Leisen's "to each his own" (1942),when the boy says to Olivia De Havilland:"I think it's our dance mother".Having directed with a topflight cast "tales of Manhattan" (1942) in America,Duvivier went even further in the "sketches movie":in "sous le ciel de Paris" ,he used intertwined little stories till all these subplots became a seamless whole.

Yes ,Julien Duvivier's importance in the seventh art is incalculable.

J'adore Ce film! But "Christine"? Where did that come from? I've only ever known it as Un Carnet DE Bal, with Valse Gris permanently etched into my mind.

I saw it first around 1941 when I was 14, during the war, at the long lamented Academy cinema on London's Oxford Street. It turned up there periodically, along with La Femme Du Boulanger, Le Jour SE Leve, The Strange Case of David Gray (a renamed Vampyr), La Fin Du Jour, and some other prewar classics. Great stuff for a schoolboy! Previously I've had it on a censored Korean DVD (the Marseilles sequence had been removed) but now,happily,it's available complete as a gloriously restored Bluray. Gaumont,you have our huge thanks!

It's a magnificent film, a bit wordy perhaps here and there but they're good French words. It's a lasting achievement by a superb cast and crew at the top of their game.

And with great respect let's give thought to Harry Baur and Robert Lynen (Duvivier's Poil de Carotte), both murdered by the Nazis during the occupation.

This is one of the quintessential films of the classic age of French cinema. One just has to look at the credits: directed by Duvivier, with Fernandel, Baur, Jouvet (one of his best roles), Marie Bell, Francoise Rosay... all of them at the peak of their form. And held together musically by Jaubert's haunting theme melody, which I can still hum in the nostalgia cupboard of my memory fifty years after I first heard it.

The story is slight. Actually it is a series of vignettes, strung together by the bittersweet pilgrimage of a woman who sets out to find again the men who signed her first dance card. But that is just a pretext for a marvelous set of character sketches played by a marvelous cast of character actors served by a great character director.

Labeled "Christine" in American movie houses, this French import was known as Un Carnet de Bal in France. It is a highly stylish soap that examines the fantasies of a wealthy French woman who wonders what happened to the dancing partners she had during a ball in her youth. She seeks them out one by one with various results. The cinematography and music in this film is outstanding and are the real stars of the film. Add a star if you are a fan of soap.

(1937) Un carnet de bal (In French with English subtitles) DRAMA

Co-written and directed by Julien Duvivier that has an once popular countess, Christine de Guerande (Marie Bell) burning papers as her husband had passed away. A friend, Bremont (Maurice Benard) then shows up and upon looking at some of the papers around himself, he stumbles onto Christine's dance card of all the men she had danced and professed their love to her more than 20 years ago. And because Christine has no children of her own, she would then visit each one of them to see how each of them turned out after all of those years. Out of 10 names, her confident Bremont are able to produce nine addresses of their current location starting with George Audie who she figured out had committed suicide with his mother still could not get over it. The second one she visits is Pierre Verdier (Louis Jouvet) involve into illegal activity and he blames his alter ego Jo for his criminal choices; after Alain Regnault (Harry Baur) only son dies, he then seeks refuge as a monk and is now called Father Dominique; Eric Irvin (Pierre-Richard Willm) lives in the Alps and tour guide; Francois Patusset (Raimu) is currently mayor of his town while his adopted son is a black sheep who steals from the townspeople; he is also a mayor who is marrying his maid/ cook, Cecile (Milly Mathis). Upon Christine visiting Thierry Raynal (Pierre Blanchar) to which the last time she has seen him, he was a medical student inspired to be a doctor. Except that upon her visiting him, one of his eyes was injured, and he often wears an eye patch. He also has a live in girlfriend to which both him and her abuse each other. And after Thierry experiences another panic attack, his live in girlfriend then boots Christine out of the premises and threatens her at the same time. Thierry then becomes even more enraged and pulls out a fire arm. Christine then goes and visits Fabien Coutissol (Fernandel) who is employed as a hair dresser and has many children with that person as well.

The movie has an interesting premise but as soon as Christine visits each of the men, that was when I almost dozed off as I read and see these people all the time. The ending was kind of abrupt and needed to be explained further what happened.

i saw this film for the first time 1946, and was completely spellbound. last time i saw this film beginning of March 2003. the magic was still there. i understood the film much better,enjoed it more. Who can ever forget the haunting melody of the walz or the final episode with Fernandel.

'Carnet du Bal' is a beautifully realised piece by one of the truly great directors and comes from the 'Golden Age' of French cinema. A film of elegance and grace but also of ineffable sadness and regret that deals with failure and the ravages of time. A rich widow comes across a dance card of a ball she attended at the age of sixteen. She decides to seek out the men with whom she danced to see how Life has treated them. None of them alas has realised his dreams or fulfilled his potential which will no doubt strike a chord with most viewers. The film at least ends on an upbeat as she adopts the son of the first man on the card who had committed suicide for love of her.The success of this film resulted in Julien Duvivier being invited to direct'The Great Waltz' in Hollywood. He would return to the multi-story format on more than than one occasion but not as effectively. The cast is pure gold and represents France's finest, the likes of whom are gone forever.

"Un Carnet de Bal" is a poem made movie. Like Christine, everybody had gone into his past, looking for the point of break, which decided one way, in order to rectify ours errors.

Finally, "Un Carnet de Bal" is a film for all the time.

One of the great classics of 1930's French cinema and one of cinema's great ;memory' pictures, "Un Carnet de Bal" has, sadly, fallen out of fashion in these more cynical times despite its being a surprisingly hard-nosed and often bleak movie. The plot revolves around recently widowed Christine as she tracks down the men she danced with from an old dance programme of twenty years before, (when she was sweet sixteen). Of course, each of them has changed drastically, almost to the point where they are no longer recognizable; in fact two are already dead and as Christine explores her past some harsh truths emerge.

Marie Bell is a luminous Christine, the great Francoise Rosay is magnificent as the mother of a boy who may have killed himself for love and a whole host of great French actors of the period play the survivors and potential suitors. There are flawless performances from Harry Baur, Pierre Blanchar, Fernandel, Louis Jouvet, Raimu and Pierre Richard-Willm. It also represents the high point in Julien Duvivier's career and was at one time considered among the greatest films ever made. It cries out for rediscovery.

This film is a beautiful and timeless masterpiece. I hope they can restore the film because it deserves to be viewed in a museum. Everyone in all eras can relate to the premise. Today we have social media and are able to look up people from our past and often times are met with the stunning reality; what we have in our memory is just that- a long ago dream in another realm. I recently looked up someone I hadn't spoken to in 20 years and found out the person died just 6 months prior. It would have been so nice to be able to have what christine was able to obtain at the end of this film. We often romanticize our past and this could result in the mind being "stuck" in an alternate reality as the writer so brilliantly was able to master with Christine's first meet and greet off the dance card. Christine could easily have ended up like that Mother who was so stuck in the past, she became demented to reality and ceased to move forward in life. There were deep moments in this movie and it's that depth which I long for and seek in films today. The man in the mountains story; the dialogue was rich and I was totally blown away with it. We got to know more about her in that scenario. At the start of the movie the director clearly laid out his concept, when Christine stated she wondered what the men had made of their lives to which the response to her was " or what life has made out of them". BRILLIANT.