‘Thérèse Raquin‘ (1953) (English title – ‘The Adultress‘) is Marcel Carné‘s third post-Prévert film. Connoisseur film fans consider it his latest remarkable film. It was produced by the famous Hakim brothers. Even though Jacques Prévert no longer wrote his screenplays and dialogues, Marcel Carné did not give up good literature for this film, and took as inspiration the novel ‘Thérèse Raquin‘, Émile Zola’s first great success, a story about passion, crime and punishment in France in the second half of the 19th century. From Zola’s (suspenseful in my opinion) story of guilty love and remorse, this adaptation turns into a thriller with elements of film noir. Still suspenseful, of course, but in a completely different genre. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s a different movie, different from Zola and different from other Marcel Carné movies.
We learn about Therese’s fate from dialogues, quite late in the film. The story begins when she is already unhappily married to her cousin Camille, a hypochondriac feeble man caressed by her mother (played by an exceptionally well-composed actress named Sylvie), who terrorizes his young wife. Frustrated from all points of view, Therese seeks refuge in a love affair with a trucker dressed in a leather jacket played by Raf Vallone. The passion of the two inevitably leads to murder, and the murder leads to complications when they are blackmailed by an unexpected witness. It can be said that the film is built of two distinct parts separated by the crime itself committed on the train (here we are dealing again with a change of place, in the novel the deed takes place on water): in the first we witness the suffocating atmosphere in the house the bourgeois family, which builds the premises of the violent act and in the second we follow the consequences of the act filmed in thriller style.
The production is uneven, but it has some beautiful cinematic moments. Simone Signoret is gorgeous both physically and as an actress. Most of us know her from her mature roles and after that – here she is young and fascinating, with eyes whose deep blue we ‘see’ even though it is a black and white film. The scene of the confrontation with the tyrannical mother-in-law, played only by eyesights (her mother-in-law was paralyzed) is intense and memorable. Raf Vallone, however, is not, in my opinion, up to his partner. The psychological shortcuts of the plot are not sufficiently offset by the elements of suspense in the second part of the film. Paradoxically, Marcel Carné seems more at ease when filming outside, on the streets of post-war Lyon or on the banks of the Rhône. The director, who was to be pushed aside by the younger newcomers of Nouvelle Vague and included in the category of ‘cinema du papa’, shows that he mastered a few years before them mobility of the camera, framing of the characters on the streets or in nature and direct sound recording. ‘Thérèse Raquin‘ is an interesting film that deserves to be watched or re-watched as a cinematic document, for Simone Signoret, and as a more than acceptable thriller noir. Less, perhaps, for Zola’s novel that inspired it.