The Lovers of Verona

A film version of "Romeo and Juliet" is being shot in Venice and Verona, two people involved in the production fall in love, and their actual romance parallels the fictional one. But it's not all as you'd expect. It's not the actors playing Romeo and Juliet who fall in love, but their non-professional stand-ins: he's a glass-blower, she's the daughter of a well-to-do family fallen on hard times (the father was a Fascist, and is now paying the price). The two are led to the studio separately more or less by chance by Bettina Verdi, the star of the production (there's an irony here I won't mention); neither has ever acted before, and there's no evidence that either one knows anything at all about the play before filming starts.

Georgia, the Juliet, has led a life of stifling confinement and falls in love with the somewhat more experienced Romeo because he's almost the first man she's seen; their love is all youthful passion, and is ultimately destroyed by the corrupt worldliness that surrounds them on all sides. But beyond that the real-world tragedy takes a life of its own and doesn't ape (at some times it scarcely resembles) Shakespeare's plot. It would be giving too much away to even say what form the tragedy ultimately takes. The screenplay is Jacques Prévert alluding to Shakespeare, not Jacques Prévert based on Shakespeare. (I don't speak French, and had to rely on subtitles; while the subtitles aren't particularly poetic, something of the originality of the dialogue survives translation.)

It's an attractive film with an attractive cast. They almost all overact, but that's because they're playing people who themselves overact, so the effect is natural. (The French can get away with this easily; English speakers who were this impassioned would be accused, in many cases unjustly, of being melodramatic.) Cayatte draws all he can out of the shooting locations (remember that Verona had been heavily bombed just four years earlier); the ruins and antiques and so on make the film look rich without making it oppressive or glutinous. Instead, it sparkles.

I have just been gifted an old video recorder and have found a copy of the French Rene Chateau recording in black and white and in French. My daughter bought this for my late husband Norman Foley - film cameraman on Henry V - as it was his favourite film. I am absolutely blown away by the beauty of this film and the beauty of Anouk Aimee. The scenes of Venice are fantastic and my daughter has just returned from a holiday in Venice and cannot wait to get back. I note with interest Anouk Aimee is due to be given an award in May - so well deserved and she is still beautiful! I have this video on in the background all day as I love the music.

Andre Cayatte was the director of many tiresome pictures in which he took moral positions on capital punishment (Nous sommes tous des assassins), the yellow press (Il n'y a pas de fumee sans feu), and just about any other issue that came to his attention. Now, we could dismiss him as just a French Stanley Kramer if he hadn't made films like this one in his younger days. It's a very highly-colored version of Romeo and Juliet in which Jacques Prevert's script dispenses with most of the play's story to concentrate on political comment. The Maglias are a very disturbed family indeed. Not only is the head an ex-fascist but the brother, played by Dalio, is hallucinating pretty freely (he had a bad war, we are told). Only Georgia, Ettore's daughter, played by the 16-year-old Anouk Aimee, has any quality of humor and generosity. The Romeo is played by Serge Reggiani, looking somehow a lot younger than he did in Casque d'or.

When we add Pierre Brasseur to the mix, things really get wild. He's playing a sort of Satanic figure, a demon of hate and revenge, as if trying to top his portrayal of the thug in Quai des brumes. There's a wierd sado-masochistic character to his relationship with the Maglias that I can't recall seeing before in film. He won't stop at murder to have Georgia as his wife. Cayatte's direction has pace and the lighting is especially fine--Alekan's camera really caresses the lover's faces.

This is a masterpiece of a paraphrase on a great play. The film actually has nothing to do with Shakespeare. The play is being turned into a film without much of Shakespeare, while only the plot superficially is taken care of by apparently a team of amateurs or second hand actors. The only film star among them is Martine Carol who only has a minor part and speaks practically nothing. Instead the film is being taken over by the subplot, which is the relationship between two stand-ins: the Romeo actor suffers from vertigo, so he can't climb up to the balcony, and another stand-in has second superstitious thoughts because of having passed under a ladder. The two stand-ins are Serge Reggiani, who plays a simple glass-blower of Murano, but it so happens that he makes a more perfect Romeo than most, and Anouk Aimée in her first major part, and there was never a more exquisitely enchanting Juliet - Norma Shearer, Olivia Hussey - they all fade in the lustre of Anouk Aimée. The film is shot in Venice and Verona, and the scenes of Verona are particularly unforgettable, as it was heavily bombed in the war and the ruins are used for augmenting the sensitivity of the romance. The first scene when they meet each other on the balcony without ever having seen each other before is absolutely convincing as captivating the moment of truth in love at first sight, and the camera man himself admits it's the best scene of the film. Pierre Brasseur is the great actor here, as the rival fiancé he makes his usual tour de force of dominating the stage whenever he appears, and like all the others he makes a very convincing character as a business man villain like even all the crazy members of Anouk Aimée's very degenerate family do. There are exaggerations, which tend to turn the film rather theatrical, but it all happens in Italy where it is natural, since every Italian is a born actor. The music finally by Joseph Kosma adds the final touch to the multi-dimensional drama and couldn't have been more appropriate in accompanying the double tragedy. Although Romeo and Juliet here were not really acted but instead substituted by amateur greenhorns, this still remains one of the best if not The best film version of the constantly distorted original story.

But long before Truffault released his "oeuvre".And much better at that.The precedent user was absolutely right when he said that the new wave overshadowed the great French cinema that was thriving in the decade before.When he was a journalist,Truffaut panned Cayatte's movies and nevertheless,one of his movies (and one of his most famous:"day for night -la nuit américaine(1973)) came directly from a Cayatte work.

And first of all,Serge Reggiani is much more exciting an actor than the abominable Jean-Pierre Leaud.But let's forget "day for night".

With a great script by Jacques Prévert who brilliantly wrote for Carné ,and featuring some of Carné's favorite thespians (Reggiani was in "les portes de la nuit" ,Pierre Brasseur and Louis Salou,in the glorious "les enfants du paradis")along with future stars (Martine Carol and Anouk Aimée),"les amants de Verone" uses the stunning technique "the movie in the movie" .Whereas "les enfants du paradis" dealt with the connection theater/life ,"les amants de Verone" does the same for cinema/life.And Cayatte's directing is remarkable ,as is Henri Alekan's cinematography (the movie begins with a close-up on a glass object in a glass-blowers ' workshop and ends with a stagehand closing a door).Prevert's permanent features are all here:real love ,pure love ,true love (Aimée and Reggiani) against the ba****ds which do not understand it;and there's a gallery of weirdoes worthy of "quai des brumes" (1938)here:a shady con man (Brasseur) ,a mean prosecutor(Salou),two killers (with a nod at Laurel and Hardy)and a "nurse-matron- who takes care of Georgia/Juliet.Because,you get the picture,it's the story of Romeo and Juliet which they film in the movie and they live in the movie too.(check the title)

"Les amants de Verone" is the last movie of Cayatte's first era.Afterward,he began to champion all the good causes and was ironically -and unfairly- nicknamed "the lawyer of cinema"by Truffaut.With hindsight,this evolution was predictable,and there are elements in "les amants de Verone". The first scenes display social concerns but it's Louis Salou's character who probably showed the way to the director:this prosecutor used to keep,before he retired ,all the fag ends of the last cigarettes of the persons he sentenced to death in an ebony box!And one of the last scenes looks like a trial,the omen of a very long string of movies such as "justice est faite" and "avant le déluge".All these movies,mainly the works made in the fifties were not that bad,even if Cayatte peaked with "les amants de Vérone"