The Smiling Madame Beudet

This surreal silent film is one of the earliest supposed 'feminist' films. It remains influential for its sympathetic female lead and her less than appealing husband, subversive dark humour, and a rather downbeat and unexpected ending. Director Germaine Dulac (what is it with feminists and the name 'Germaine'?) plays with the visual boundaries of what could be achieved in film during the early 1920s to push her film into fantasist realms of psychological impulses, achieving a heady mix between standard storytelling and open-ended artistry that would come to be recognised by film historians as 'French impressionist cinema' and one of the earliest examples of avant garde film-making.

The Madame Beudet (Germaine Dermoz - another Germaine!) of the title is anything but smiling. She is the reserved housewife of Mr. Beudet, a boorish grime-toothed man who delights in frequently joking about commiting suicide by placing an empty revolver aginst his head and laughing in an uproarious manner. She finds him repugnant and takes solace in the beauty of music and literature. One day, she grows so weary of him that she places a real bullet in his gun, but is soon wracked with guilt as she waits for the horrific moment to arrive.

Madame Beudet's actions are extreme to say the least, her husband doesn't actually do anything to her other than behave in an obnoxious manner that irritates her. It's hardly justification for pre-meditated murder, but I think you have to look at this film as a work of far-fetched black humour. Even though the bullet seems like an extreme measure our sympathy remains firmly on the woman's side as her husband is such an awful cartoon of a man that he's hard to take seriously. Simply put, Madame Beudet is a woman who hates her husband - and the film's greatest strength (and feminist message) is that her feelings are never depicted in an exagerrated or unjustified fashion. Germaine Dermoz never comes across as vindictive or hateful, she's just sad and trapped in a loveless marriage of 'habitude' (as the film puts it).

The psychological depth of Madame Beudet's motivations are achieved through several visually arresting techniques. Various camera tricks are used to convey the guilts, waverings, feints and fancies of the mind... whether it's the image of her husband's soul being dragged off by a tennis-playing version of himself or a hyponotic slow motion vision of him cackling and leaping through a window, the ambiguity of such asides help create a more 'open' story to perhaps assuage our judgment. The film also occasionally takes on an eerie atmosphere of clarity as it focuses on singular images - a man playing the trombone, a gun being loaded, or Mr Beudet's grotesque face stretched out of proportion. You might not always immediately understand what the message being conveyed is, but the end result is quite an intriguing little film and easily taken as an important cornerstone of cinema that thinks 'outside the box'.

DIRECTOR: Germaine Dulac
WRITER/SOURCE: Andre Obey, based on a play by Denys Amiel.
KEY ACTORS: Germaine Dermoz, Alexandre Aquilliare, Jean d'Yd

RELATED TEXTS:
- The Smiling Madame Beudet originated as a play written by Denys Amiel in 1920.
- Germaine Dulac's other major film was The Seashell and the Clergyman, a further foray into the realm of cinematic surrealism made five years after The Smiling Madame Beudet. She also continued her exploration of cinema in Invitation to a Journey.
- For more early avante-garde cinema see also An Andalusian Dog