Cœurs Sombres | Cycle cinéma

Editorial

In the darkness of the cinema, Cœurs Sombres enters into dialogue with the ghosts of the nineteenth century, swept away by the torments of love, war and human anguish. The great passions of the Romantic era, splendid and suffocating, unfold before our eyes. Here, people love to the point of madness, sometimes even oblivion; here, one ventures forth at one’s own risk.

“Every era has its dark periods. Consciousness always belongs to the future.” – Luchino Visconti, interview with Amelio di Sovico, Il Mondo, 1976

With Senso, Luchino Visconti abandons black and white for the brilliance of Technicolor, and neorealism for historical drama, while avoiding the trap of a static tableau by filming the Risorgimento with precision. 1866. Part of Italy rises up against Austrian occupation. Nationalists use a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore to demonstrate their opposition to the invaders. In the boxes, Prussian officer Franz Mahler, aptly named, has a decisive encounter with Countess Serpieri; a masterful scene filmed through a mirror, which Scorsese would remember when opening The Age of Innocence at the opera. When the film was released, André Bazin wrote that this adventure “is theatrical only in its harmony and its visual beauty.” There is no abandon or romanticism: Senso has the coldness of detachment, and Mahler’s cynicism poisons everything he touches. Skillfully combining the baroque and the social, Visconti creates a lyrical tragedy and confesses his love for what secretly drives him: music.

“Sometimes I have violent aspirations toward the great ideal […] sometimes I dream of a burned-out, ardent, living life.” – Adèle Hugo

Isabelle Adjani is Adèle Hugo in The Story of Adele H., giving voice and substance to a woman silenced because her family institutionalized her, following what we would interpret today as a nervous breakdown. François Truffaut was not the first of feminists, but it hardly matters, since Adjani carries the film on her own. The porcelain-faced actress, with her anachronistic charm, plays her first major role here and paves the way for a sumptuous gallery of Gothic heroines, from Nosferatu to Queen Margot, including Emily Brontë for André Téchiné. Adèle flees her omnipotent patriarch from Guernsey to Halifax, Canada, where she joins Lieutenant Pinson and his angelic face. What path leads this delicate, loquacious young woman toward the neurosis of one-sided love? Truffaut takes care not to answer, preferring to speak of ghosts: Léopoldine, of course, whose younger sister is haunted by the memory of her drowning, but also Victor, who is never shown yet whose power destroys his daughter’s life across borders. Thus, Romanticism is pushed to its limits, into its most morbid depths.

“– Tell me what it is to be in love!

– No, it is too horrible to talk about, too delicious to think about.” – Olivia by Jacqueline Audry, 1951

Jacqueline Audry succeeding François Truffaut is, so to speak, a delightful provocation. The filmmaker, erased from cinema history, made around ten films in her time, but was scorned by the Nouvelle Vague and lumped in with the “tradition of quality” cinema that young critics in the 1950s detested. In 1951, Audry swaps the English countryside of Dorothy Bussy’s book, which the author dedicated to Virginia Woolf, for the environs of Fontainebleau. Above all, Olivia is the coming of age (in costume and in 1865) of a British girl at a boarding school for well-educated French girls. However, moral prohibitions nip a first lesbian love, tinged with fascination, in the bud, as the eponymous heroine falls for her magnetic—some would say manipulative—teacher. Olivia’s chamber-film appearance is deceptive, better allowing it to sketch the muffled violence of what is unsaid, what hides in the gaps. In a Crédit national document responding to a funding application, one reads: “a film requiring great taste and tact.”

“What about the others? Why should I be different from the others? Do I not have the same desires? Am I not consumed by the same passions?” – Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 1921

Out go the gangsters: Martin Scorsese’s finest film is a superb tragic love story set in late-nineteenth-century New York high society, governed by codes that have since fallen into oblivion. The Age of Innocence provides a silky setting for the words of Edith Wharton, winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for the novel of the same name in 1921. Elaine and Saul Bass’s opening credits sum it all up through metaphor. Flowers are prevented from blooming by an overlay of writing and lace: Victorian women’s captivity, constrained by conventions and gossip, conveyed in a single image. Scorsese insists to his screenwriter Jay Cooks: once he grasps the emotional scope of the story, everything will unfold naturally. This journey through two lovesick hearts glides delicately, like one of those ballroom dances that make heads spin and dresses swirl. As the worthy heir to Douglas Sirk, the filmmaker restores the melodrama—and the melody of tears—to its power and splendor.

“He never loved another woman, did he, Mother? No one else. But I have had so many lovers, so many lovers, so many!” – The Music Lovers by Ken Russell, 1971

Love, suffering, hope and despair. All of this, and much more, is contained in the operatic fresco The Music Lovers, or The Pathetic Symphony. Ken Russell, like Visconti, is a “lover of music,” and here he exalts the scores of the illustrious Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who, by contrast, reveals himself as a pathetic man. His sad marriage of convenience, intended to conceal his homosexuality, makes a collateral victim of