Film: La Princesse Mandane
Running time: 80 mins
Director: Germaine Dulac
Starring: Edmonde Guy, Edmond van Duren, Jacques Arnna, Mona Goya, Yvonne Legeay
Genre: Comedy/Romance
Country: France
This film was screened at the 3rd Fashion In Film Festival in December 2010. This special screening was accompanied by music on piano, keyboard and accordion by Stephen Horne, giving a musical experience approximating that of a live orchestra and choir.
Feminist director Germaine Dulac shows a more commercial and populist approach in this 1928 feature than the avant garde and experimental style for which she is better known. The film reworks Pierre Benoit’s novel, L’Oublié, but while Benoit’s novel was a more straightforward tale of adventure and derring do, Dulac transposes the film’s opening scenes to the mundane urban setting of a factory, and constructs a parable about the delights and dangers of fantasy and escapism.
The film tells the story of Etienne, a young factory foreman who, the intertitles tell us frankly at the film’s outset, is a bit smug and ambitious. While his devoted fiancée Annette thinks only of Etienne’s wellbeing, he spends his free time browsing in shops selling saucy publications, and beguiling his hours with day dreams of success and riches. Above all, he dreams of Princess Mandane imprisoned in the far away principality of Mingrelia, and of rescuing her from captivity.
The imaginations of Annette and Etienne are fired by the stories of intrepid adventure at the cinema, but each are influenced differently by these tales. When Etienne volunteers for an adventurous mission as part of a scouting party for a construction project, he envisions himself in the role of pioneering hero while Annette only has visions of Tartars poking out his eyes.
Once Etienne embarks on the expedition, a plot development of the “it was only a dream” formula ensues, in which he falls asleep and dreams – for the vast majority of the film – of the court of Mingrelia. Arriving in the guise of an ambassador, he woos the princess and attempts to inveigle himself into the trust of her sinister court of ministers, who keep her in unwilling captivity. As the dream progresses, Etienne discovers that events in his fantasy world don’t necessarily go according to plan…
Dulac’s film includes some clever and playfully self referential ideas on fantasy, romance and cinema as a means of escapism. The highlight of the week for Annette and Etienne is their Saturday night visit to the cinema, a way of forgetting the tedium of factory life, which is represented by repeated images of a clock, a steam whistle, and a reel of wire turning tirelessly round and round. Although Etienne’s daydreaming makes him ridiculous, there’s some real sympathy here for the human need to dream and fantasise which no cinema lover could be immune to.
One of the most enjoyable elements of the film is Edmond van Duren’s portrayal of the vain Etienne. Wittily, but again not unsympathetically, he shows a wonderful range of expression, gazing with limpid eyes and simpering smile upon the princess, casting his gaze afar upon imaginary horizons where he envisions his future glory, or adopting an attitude of self-conscious nobility. His poise falls flat, particularly in his scenes of attempted seduction, where he struggles not to trip over the princess’ extravagantly long sequinned train, or is upstaged by an aristocratic hound from her menagerie of pets.
The most outstanding visual effects are the repeated use of double exposures for different purposes, from the more mundane to the metaphorical. During Etienne’s journey as part of the scouting party, multiple layered shots of roads give the impression that great distances have been covered. When he departs on the train for the expedition, a shot of his fiancée and another woman, presumably his mother, waving white handkerchiefs is superimposed on the train, encapsulating the nature of departure in a single image.
In a scene displaying the more surreal tendencies of Dulac’s work, the princess and Etienne listen to a radio broadcast from France while images of Paris appear superimposed on the radio speaker. A clichéd Paris is evoked by these views of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the rolling boulevards, and when the princess sighs, and says that in Paris a woman may be free, the effect is of pure silliness. She herself is susceptible to this particular fantasy – or so she would have Etienne believe. Even more bizarrely, in the same section of the film – bearing in mind that this is in effect an extended dream sequence – there is a fantasy within the fantasy, when Etienne beholds a ghostly vision of himself, bare-chested, lifting the princess above his head in a dance of seduction.
Despite these very fun elements, and the clever self referentialism of the film, it seems that Etienne’s head is sadly not a place in which you really want to spend an extended period of time. The prolonged dream sequence does start to drag. Considering how much content is packed into the opening episodes of the film, it’s surprising that the pace dawdles so much in these later scenes. This seems to be down to the court falling, as it were, slightly flat. The princess is consistently, impressively sparkly, a motif which seems to play as a metaphor for illusory glamour. But otherwise a few oriental rugs and the odd monkey don’t really convey the necessary exoticism of Mingrelia, although we could of course blame this on Etienne’s imagination scoring pretty low on the interior design front and way too high on the time spent thinking of minxy women front.
Witty and clever, with a surprisingly modern and tongue in cheek send up of cinematic romance and heroics, it seems almost churlish to say that, like Etienne’s daydreams, La Princesse Mandane does run on a bit. Edmond van Duren is dashingly handsome and conceited, Edmonde Guy makes the role of disdainful diva look easy, and there’s a delightful visual playfulness in the film’s artfully constructed shots. With the exception of one of her more avant garde features, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), Dulac’s work is not on general DVD release, so film seasons such as this programme offered by the Fashion in Film Festival offer a rare opportunity to see another facet to this fascinating director’s work – another reason for foreign film lovers to keep an eye on special programmes and festivals such as these. KR
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