MANON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 723, 22 May 1953, Page 16

MANON

(Clouzot-International Films) ANON first saw the light of day a little over 200 years ago. She was the brainchild of a French cleric, the Abbé Prévost, who presented her to the world in a romantic novel entitled The Story of the Chevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut-and she was, the strait-laced would affirm, no credit to the Abbé. Manon had no moral sense at all; indeed, her senses led her in quite the. opposite direction. She was a harlot, in love with a life of pleasure, and. by her own corruption she corrupted the upright young Chevalier who became her lover. The one saving grace which they shared was an abiding passion for each other which (if one is to believe the Abbé) transcended Manon’s physical infidelities and in the end purged her of her transgressions, Transported to America for her offences, she died there in the arms of her lover. But if Manon’s sins were scarlet, her story (to sneak a furtive chip off the old Belloc) was read. Stage I University students are probably still reading it, Massenet and Puccini composed operas

around it, and now Henri-Georges Clouzot, a French film director who Seems to have a Swiftian capacity for getting the worst out of people, has resuscitated the old story, given it a

modern setting, and added some up-to-date steam heating. Many filmgoers will remember The Raven, the first Clouzot film we saw here (it was so good in its delineation of evil that Hollywood made a tolerable carbon copy of it with Charles Boyer in the leading role). Manon is not so strong a film, and not quite so good a one, but where The Raven depended a great deal on the French dialogue one loses little of Manon if one is confined to the sub-titles. Here Clouzot does not merely call a spade a spade, he shows it to you. Clouzot’s Manon (played somewhat kittenishly by Cécile Aubry) is a pert little collaborationist who is about to have her head shaved when Des Grieux, a young Resistance fighter, takes her into protective custody. Infatuated by her, he deserts and they roar off down the primrose path way in a stolen jeep. The swiftness of Des Grieux’s passage from honourable fighting to the peddling of penicillin on the black market strained my credulity beyond its limits, but the picture given of the rotten half-world of the black-market operator is shockingly effective and recalls to mind the disgust expressed by Clostermann in one of the later chapters of The Big Show. Where Clouzot has gone astray, however, is not so much in the treatment of the two principal characters, but in his anxiety to find a modern equivalent for all the elements in the original story. The first Manon was transported

to America. Clouzot’s Manon has, by hook or by crook, to make a sea voyage, too. Des Grieux kills Manon’s brother, then stows away with her on a Mediterranean freighter, which happens to be running illegal immigrants to Palestine. The Jews, however, are so much more genuinely tragic characters than the lovers, and the real climax of the story -in which the hapless refugees are massacred by Arab frontier guards when within sight of the Promised Land-is handled with such ruthless cruelty and dramatic effect-that one has no tears to spare for Manon as she gasps her life out in her lover’s arms. Miss Aubry is too fluffy a type to make a good Manon, but the film falls short of the first class mainly because the director could not control his material. Manon is absorbing (it is, by the way, not a film for adolescents), but not faultless. True, it gained the Grand Prix at the Venice International Film Festival, but I doubt if that could have been a vintage year in Venice.