Un Carnet de bal

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.

'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.

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).

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.