Aviator André Jurieux breaks the record for the fastest trans-Atlantic flight, but refuses to find joy in his accomplishment when he learns his crush Christine wasn’t waiting for him at the airport. Christine has friendly feelings for André but is married to Robert, a nobleman (who himself has a side-fling with a woman named Geneviève). You following this? There are 10 more main players and intertwined dramas, but I’ll spare you for now. Anyway, André is down in the dumps, so his friend Octave arranges for him to attend a hunting retreat at Robert’s estate along with Christine, Robert, Geneviève, and other members of the aristocracy (and their servants). At the retreat, all of our main players are aware of each other’s alternate attractions, but everyone manages to play cool until the final night of the retreat. On that night, everyone gets drunk at a party and all hell breaks loose. After a night of clapping, music, fights, kisses, eating, and gunshots, a man lays dead as the hypocrisies of French society are laid bare before the audience.
This was a really, really interesting film, and nothing like I imagined. I knew it was famous for being a large French production made right on the eve of World War II. Allegedly some of the crew began to leave mid-production to go take up arms. So when I listed its genre as “satire”, I assumed it was political satire commenting on the march to war. It took quite a bit of runtime before I realized it was a romantic comedy satirizing French society.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. Both technically and story-wise, this is a unique film. The shots are richly detailed and expansive, with a great deal of action (famously, the film used special lenses for a deep focus, to highlight action as players move front-to-back in the frame). I also loved how the camera drifted between our players during the climactic party sequence. It felt like an early pass at a Royal Tenenbaums-esque romp, where we have a ton of main players and motivations, and we float among each all at once. The tone was sort of all over the place, pivoting between drama and comedy, but this is all for effect. This is no more apparent than during the famous mid-film hunting sequence, where fast cutting and stark images of rabbits dying become a sobering palate cleanser. There was something that kept this film from being fully accessible to me, but I can’t deny that it was a fun, funny, unique picture and I generally liked it.