A husband and wife are killed with an axe by a man in a village. This leaves their two little daughters orphans. Decades later, the two sisters are grown up and now live in Paris in a poor neighborhood. One sister falls for a man. They sleep with each other, but she if left alone after she has a baby. She contemplates suicide and walks around the streets, hungry. Later, she meets her sister, who has in the meantime also fallen for the same man, and is now a prostitute. Some people then kill the man on the street.
The favorite film of film critic Pauline Keal, "Menilmontant" still holds up surprisingly well despite its unknown reputation. The director Dimitri Kirsanoff has a refined sense for dynamic, modern and energetic visual style that is established thanks to a very movable camera, in complete opposition to the static camera plans of the silent era, and thus the movie seems almost as if it was made today, just without sound and in black and white cinematography. However, his use of cinematic techniques is limited, save for a couple of exceptions (the double exposure of the sister and the flow of river overlaid on her head, as a symbol for her gloomy emotional state in which she is contemplating suicide; the montage of the sister sleeping with her lover...) whereas the story slips into the melodramatic-soap opera territory at times due to its too serious, too determined tone. The movie has a very lyric feel to it, the highlight being the emotional, but still restrained and tasteful sequence of a man eating on the street and simply leaving some bread for the hungry woman sitting next to her, without looking at her, almost as if he wants to keep up his persona. A quality film, though it will be met with split reactions: it has no subtitles or intertitles, which just aggravates the already difficult task of the viewers at trying to connect all the dots into a purposeful whole (is the first murder in the very first scene elusive until it is understood in the context of the second murder, motivated by betrayal?) from the sometimes hermetic choice of narrative.
Grade:+++
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