★ 8 / 10
A Joy, And Everything Great About The French 'Old Wave'
MogwaiMovieReviews
I thought I'd emptied out the mine of great French directors and then just this week discovered Sacha Guitry and am both overjoyed at the riches on display in…
I thought I'd emptied out the mine of great French directors and then just this week discovered Sacha Guitry and am both overjoyed at the riches on display in this film and bewildered at its lack of recognition. It's as good as any French film I've ever seen: why have I never heard of it before?Everything about La Poison is charming, thoughtful, cheeky, brave and subversive, from the opening scene of the director walking about the set greeting and thanking everyone (literally everyone) that worked on the film to the hilariously frank courtroom scenes at the end, and every frame of Michel Simon throughout. My God, was there ever such an actor? Only the gorgeously hypnotic ugliness of Charles Laughton would seem to compare. Like the films of Max Ophuls from the same time, Le Ronde and Le Plaisir, these are grown-up films dealing with God, Sex, Death and Existence with both incontestable beauty and brutal honesty at a time when practically all American film was made for children, and feel to me almost like an alternate timeline in which cinema developed without the censorship of the Hays production code of the 30s onwards, a cinema of genuine poetry and art winning out over puritanism and commerce.The only American films I can think of from this time that are anything like comparable to La Poison are Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux and Charles Laughton's Night Of The Hunter. Verdoux, a markedly inferior work to this one, got Chaplin hounded out of America for good and Hunter assured Laughton never directed again. Whereas the French loved their great artists and celebrated them for their minds and their magic.I am reminded too, watching this, how much I prefer the savage and poetic French Old Wave to the empty faddish inanities of the Nouvelle Vague. I will happily take any 20 minutes of La Poison or La Ronde or Boudu Saved From Drowning over every single film by Truffault or Goddard. This is a practically perfect film in every respect, and the only complaint I can really offer up is that the English subtitles of the two different versions I have found are both not as good as they could be, and with as deliriously barbed dialogue as this, where every line is saying something considered and integral, that's something of a crime in itself.
Read full review
★ 8 / 10
The Chimera and The Clown
kurosawakira
One is perfectly justified to see this as social satire, but for me Guthry's "La poison" (1951) is, above all, an easygoing, darkly humorous and witty pastiche…
One is perfectly justified to see this as social satire, but for me Guthry's "La poison" (1951) is, above all, an easygoing, darkly humorous and witty pastiche on acting in all its forms – taking on roles in marriage, in society, in one's own eyes, in others' eyes, and of course, in a film. The opening introductory credit sequence sets the mood perfectly, as there we are explicitly shown that we will witness a performance that has been carefully planned, all actors, actresses and staff selected. I don't think this is just a stylistic whim of exuberance, it's an actual set-up for us. There are several references to theatre with exits and entrances through doors, and space is handled with confines, scenes as separate entities, spaces as separate entities. And then there's the central scene in the lawyer's office, where they literally create a fabrication that when inverted becomes the desired reality for Simon's character. Reconstruction, deconstruction, all of this means the same in this wonderful scene.The chimera and the clown, death and joy – that's what the film is also about. This contrast of tragedy and comedy, its light-hearted darkness, presents itself also in the title, playing with the meaning of poison ("le poison" in French, with the masculine article) and the mocking identifier "la poison" (with the feminine article) given to
well, by all means watch the film and you'll find out.
Read full review
•••
Un excellent classique, du très bon Sacha Guitry