FIEVRES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 521, 17 June 1949, Page 14

FIEVRES

(Exclusive Films) + HIS is in the main a trifling piece of confectionery about a tenor with "sex-appeal" who gets badly mauled in his feminine encounters and eventually renounces the world to enter a monastery. It was made in France during the Occupation, but anfone expecting another Enfants du Paradis will be sadly disappointed. The story is a superficial bit of. escapism, and the technique a curious mixture of imitation Hollywood and the genuine French article. Yet in spite of these limitations Fiévres (anglice "Sanctuary") does amount to something out of the usual run of pictures, partly because it creates, however sketchily, the impression of a way of life as different from ours as chalk from cheese. There is one character-Tardival, the singer’s mana-ger-a witty, long-nosed, sophisticated little comique who is as typically French as the white cap and striped jersey he wears elegantly at times. To see him in action and hear him talk is to feel the very breath of France, and he contrasts strikingly with the hero, Tino Rossi, who sings beautifully but acts with a kind of cold cardboard efficiency. Admittedly the plot doesn’t give Rossi much scope. He appears first as happily married, successful, but inexorably pursued by another woman, a kind of female vampire who is not only young and beautiful, but fabulously rich with the wealth left her by five previous husbands. When she buys up the gramophone company where he makes his records he decides to become her lover, excusing himself with the quip that after seven years of marriage one needs a change. Through this liaison, however, he inadvertently causes his wife’s death (she was tubercular) and in grief he gives up his career and disappears. He joins forces with a poor fisherman on the coast, but inevitably his new happiness is ruined by a second femme fatale. When he almost kills his fisherman friend in a quarrel over her, he decides to enter the monastery. Although all this is presented rather crudely, Fiévres creates a definite mood in the audience. At the risk of reading too much into what is after all a sec-ond-rate film, it seems unintentionally to underline something very real that happened at that time, for if Les Enfants du Paradis was primarily a drama of frustration, Fiévres (literally "Passions") deals with passion not only frus- trated but sublimated into the religious impulse. Perhaps it is just escapism with a difference, but it is interesting that the’ French are capable of fusing a theological mood with this tinsel tragedy about the disadvantage of having too much sex-appeal. It is something difficult for a tace brought up in a tradition of English puritanism to understand. The dominance of the religious mood is assured by making the film actually open and close in the monastery itself, with the story told, by an ascetic-looking monk

to a later transgressor, as a kind of interpolation while Brother Rossi sings ecstatically at the organ.