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*** This review may contain spoilers ***
... but in the accepted meaning of the phrase, meaning something to praise from the rooftops rather than the meaning with which Truffaut invested it, which might better be termed something to rant about, for this is exactly the kind of 'quality' film or 'film du papa' that got right up Truffaut's nose and led to his infamous vitriolic attack on traditional film-making. In many ways Clair's film complements Jean Renoir's French Can Can because both were celebrations of a world that had vanished and it is less than coincidence that both film makers had been absent from France for several years and returned to find the France of their youth gone with the wind. Their immediate response was to attempt to recapture it on film and whilst Renoir plumped for the fin-de-siecle Paris of Toulouse Lautrec, Montmartre and the Moulin Rouge Clair opted for the world of the heyday of Silent Film, the 1920s. Not surprisingly the film is replete with exquisite touches, mementos of a lost world and so authentic is the studio-created Paris that time and again it looks and feels like the real thing. Clair has concocted a soufflé of a plot around what is essentially a valentine to a time gone by and he has taken a dash of Edmund Rostand and Cyrano de Bergerac insofar as Maurice Chevalier's Emile takes under his wing the Jacques of Francois Perrier and schools him in the art of seduction whilst counselling him never to fall in love. This, of course, sets the scene for Emile to do just that when the daughter of a friend turns to him for help. Emile finds Madeleine (Marcelle Derrien) irresistible despite her being young enough to be his daughter and though she stops short of loving him in return she does develop a deep affection for him and would be quite happy to marry him until, of course, she meets Jacques. Neither has any idea of the part they play in the life of Emile and what could have been an interesting situation open to several permutations is resolved neatly and speedily by Clair since his interest in the situation is peripheral at best. He does succeed brilliantly in his evocation of a Golden Age and on that level the film is little short of a masterpiece.
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