Plowing similar territory as Preston Sturges’
Unfaithfully Yours [review] and Pietro Germi’s
Divorce Italian Style, the writer/director’s 1951 film
La poison is a dark comedy about a married couple so sick of
each other, they’d rather see the other dead than carry on with the charade.
French superstar Michel Simon (L’Atalante [review],
The Two of Us [review]) plays Paul Bracconier, a middle-aged
husband in a small-town who has had enough of his wife of 30 years. She drinks
three bottles of wine a day and is generally unpleasant to be around. Granted,
Blandine (Germaine Reuver) is pretty sick of Paul, as well, and while he’s
complaining to his priest and anyone who will listen, she’s buying enough rat
poison to kill him seven times over. While Guitry’s sympathies clearly lie with
Paul, from the looks of things, Blandine’s going to get him long before he gets
her.
It’s certainly an amusing set-up, and one with enough comedy
to build the whole script around, but luckily for us, Guitry goes deeper than
that. La poison isn’t just about a married couple who are at
each other’s throats, but it’s also about small-town gossip, religious and
political hypocrisy, and one man’s hubris. Just as things are heating up at the
Bracconier household, their neighbors are begging the same priest to whom Paul
confessed to fake a miracle and drive tourism from Paris. Elsewhere, a defense
lawyer (Jean Debucourt, The Golden Coach) is celebrating his
100th victory by crowing about his tenuous relationship with the concept of
guilt. It’s his unique views about murder that provide Paul the morally grey
justification to head his wife off at the pass--though as we’ll see, even the
smartest barrister can’t save Paul from himself.
Michael Simon brings his usual gregariousness to the role.
An enormous screen presence whose career spanned decades, from silent films
through the Nouvelle Vague, Simon has a matter-of-fact way with the comedy of
the situation. He can talk about killing his wife as if it was the most natural
thing in the world, but he can also twist that same reasonable delivery into a
dangerous self-satisfaction. It’s hard to tell whether to love or hate him in
La poison’s finale. Part of you won’t blame him for his desires,
even as his proclamations paint a far less appealing portrait than we’ve seen
so far.
Guitry has fun with this, cutting away from Paul to show the
reaction of others. In fact, the cutaway is his most common comedic tool. What
goes on behind closed doors is often juxtaposed with what is going on outside
of them. In their way, the other townspeople are accomplices to Paul’s crimes.
Like the woman at the start of La poison who sits in the
pharmacists examining other people’s prescriptions, they concern themselves
more with the illness than the cure. They prefer the drama of the scandal to
preventing the potential consequences. This is behavior that Guitry hardly sees
as unique to rural communities; when Paul’s crime breaks wide, the filmmaker is
indicting all of French society. Paul’s lawyer even puts a fine point on it:
his job is secure as long as the press keeps promoting the crimes he defends
and the public keeps eating them up.
Here, Guitry himself is a little guilty of having his cake
and eating it, too, and I’m sure he’d be the first to admit it. In a meta
sense, he is the biggest gossip of all, and takes the most joy in the deadly
machinations of La poison. The joyous tone of the picture
never gives way to a serious scolding, not even in the final scenes when he
jumps between Paul’s testimony and the town’s impressionable children gleefully
re-enacting what they’ve overheard from their parents--who themselves head off
to Paul’s trial like tourists going to see a Broadway play. Other directors
would use this old trick to shock us, to say look how horrifying this behavior
and at who the resulting entertainment really corrupts. Not Guitry. He’s
instead undercutting our own attraction to scandal and horror by noting how
silly such base impulses can really be. In that sense, he’s not necessarily
excusing Paul Bracconier, but implicating us in his creation and setting him up
as the hero we deserve. I mean, aren’t we really rooting for him to get away
with it?
In addition to a high-definition transfer, an interview with
modern filmmaker Olivier Assayas, and a pair of documentaries about Guitry,
this Blu-ray edition of La poison also boasts an original
cover by renowned cartoonist/caricaturist Drew Friedman. If you don’t know
Friedman’s work, seek it out, beginning with his books Old Jewish Comedians and Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental.
This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.
This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.
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