PASTORAL SYMPHONY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 479, 27 August 1948, Page 24

PASTORAL SYMPHONY

(Gibe Films-B.E.F.) LIKED almost everything about Pastoral Symphony except its title, and for that Gide and not Gibe is to blame. Like the Pastoral Symphony most of us know best, the film has a peaceful keginning-a first movement which introduces a pleasant picture of country life and quiet happiness. But the storms and tempests which follow are in the film the tempests of the human heart and from these the story. offers no release. The name Pastoral Symphony suggests a hymn to nature-something more like what I imagine Farrebique to be (and hope we will not have to wait so long for that film) than André Gide’s _ sensitive but heartbreaking study of a blind girl and her blinder guide. But the appropriateness or otherwise of the title is a matter of small importance alongside the strength of the film, its beautiful photography, the senSitive but lowkeyed acting, and the finesse of the direction. The pattern of the story is the most complex and close-woven that I have encountered on the screen for a long time. It concerns the Protestant pagtor of a French highland village who rescues a blind orphan child from destitution and takes her into the sanctuary of his own home. The child, who is little more than « helpless animal when he finds her, grows up completely dependent uopn him, but as she reaches womanhood the balance of dependence subtly alters. It is now the pastor who is-dependent and, in a sense, the pastor who is blind. Up to this point the emotional tension has built up almost imperceptibly -like the snow-wreaths outside the windows of the manse. The pastor’s praetical, prosaic and’! hardworking wife, who has looked indulgently upon his blind ‘| protégée, becomes by:slow degrees irritated and perplexed by her husband’s exclusive interest in the girl. The latter, unduly sensitive to the changing atmosphere of the home, is aware of the growing ‘antagonism of Tante Amélie without understanding its cause, while the pastor is not only unaware of these psychological cross-currents, but is incapable of analysing his own actions objectively. Into this already complex situation ‘comes the pastor’s grown-up son, who has been abroad, and from this point the tragedy moves inexorably towards its climax. The son falls in love with the adopted daughter and the whole household is sundered by suspicien and dissension. In the midst of this emotional turmoil, the girl is operated on and recovers her sight. Distracted by love both for the father and the son and tormented by the distress she has caused her foster-mother, she commits suicide. And that, of course, solves nothing at all]. With such strong emotions for plotmaterial, it would have been fatally easy for the cast to overplay their parts and blur the finer detail of Gide’s start--lingly perceptive characterisations, but

only once did I feel that an effect was overdone and only twice did it seem that probability had been. sacrificed for dramatic effect. For me much of that effect sprang from,the contrast between the strength of the emotion ‘and the restraint of the two principals, Michéle Morgan as the blind Gertrude, and Pierre Blanchar as her pastor. In its handling of detail, the film is superb and the minor effects stick in the memorythe mute eloquence of footprints in crisp, glittering snow, the blind girl’s hands fluttering like moths along a mantelpiece, her sad submissive phrase "Si tu veux," so often repeated. I thought as the film progressed that Mlle. Morgan was less sure in her portrayal of the physical fact of blindness than she was ‘in suggesting its psychological burden, that she overdid the fixed gaze and the withdrawn look. But the,force of the final climax made me revise my opinion. Ignorance of French may prevent the complete comprehension of some passages of dialogue (the English sub-titles are occasionally flat-footed), but there is fortunately no impediment to the appreciation of superb acting.