La Souriante Madame Beudet; silent short drama, France, 1923; D: Germaine Dulac, S: Germaine Dermoz, Alexandre Arquillière, Jean d'Yd
Mrs. Beudet is married to a slob of a husband, Mr. Bedeut. While she enjoys playing a piano and is sensitive, he is crude, vulgar and vile, often playing a "suicide practical joke" in which he takes a pistol from his desk drawer and pulls the trigger while aimed at his head. He invites her to a play of Faust, but she refuses. She imagines having a better looking husband than him. She goes to his room, puts bullets into the pistol and hopes he will accidentally kill himself while playing his suicide practical joke next time. She gets bad conscious. He takes the pistol and shoots at her as a joke, but hits the wall. He mistakenly thinks she placed the bullets because she wanted to kill herself.
Germaine Dulac's drama on marriage problems, "The Smiling Madame Beudet" is a rightfully forgotten film from the silent era. It is a good, somber, realistic and unglamorous essay on a deterioration of marital lives, yet it does not stand out from a mass of other films from its era. The closest the film came to that is when Mrs. Beudet has a hallucination of a much more "athletic" man coming to her room (filmed through double exposure), compared to her overweight husband whose ugly photo stares at her from the wall. The plot point in which her husband jokingly plays pulling a trigger of an empty pistol at his head is a contrived set-up aimed to, of course, create a convenient situation in which she places bullets in his pistol, hoping he will kill himself and she will be free of this routine life. A convoluted storyline, yet it has some interesting early observations about quiet, taboo topics of people who are frustrated by their "underwhelming" existence, offering a bitter commentary on society.
Grade:++
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