Maldone (Jean Grémillon, 1928) (Patreon)

So I decided to start (admittedly a bit late) on my Grémillon odyssey with an early silent, one with a someone odd reputation. Maldone is a film that was produced by its star, Charles Dullin, someone who appears to be second-billed or lower in nearly every film he was in. Dullin had a supporting role in Clouzot's Quai des Orfèvres, and that's the most popular film in which he had any role whatsoever. Now, I haven't done the research necessary to conclusively say that Maldone was a vanity project or a failed bid to launch himself as a leading man. But that's the sense one gets from Maldone itself, a film that is often incomprehensible from a narrative standpoint and confirms Dullin as, well, a dull'un, an actor who rolled a zero in charisma and can barely walk across a room without self-consciously tensing his arms and shuffling his feet.

I see that Maldone is sometimes referred to as Misdeal, something for which I saw no reason in the film itself. After all, Dullin plays Olivier Maldone, scion of a manor home in the countryside who, we are told, abandoned that life as a young man to join the working classes. He works on the docks, and in the first part of the film we see him playing a mean accordion at a packed dancehall, seemingly beloved by everyone. When his brother dies, he inherits the manor and returns to his former life, leaving behind the "exotic" Rom girl Zita (Genica Athanasiou) on whom he has a crush.

Most of the actual meat of the story -- Maldone's abandonment of his family, his decision to rejoin them, and any real characterization of Zita -- is either ignored completely or dispensed with in time-bridging intertitles. By contrast, Maldone never met a dance sequence it didn't like, and without those two long passages the film would barely be an hour. (More on those below.) There's just a slapdash quality to Maldone's construction, and questions about the film's offscreen conditions are inevitably raised. Are there reels missing? Did Dullin run out of money? By all accounts no. 

But despite its quite obvious deficiencies as a narrative film, Maldone serves as a pretty exciting introduction to Grémillon. While many of the scenes that move the story along are negligibly shot, with Renoir-lite location exteriors and patently fake, almost German Expressionist interiors, the film zings to life in its transition shots. Grémillon employs techniques as radical as those one sees in Jean Epstein or Germaine Dulac, and at times resembles Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant its apparent willingness to try anything. Those dance sequences, for example, are little more than excuses for Grémillon to whip the camera around in both directions, superimposing the two circular pans for an effect of pure kineticism. And Grémillon's continual use of light glinting off rushing water, often layered on an otherwise unrelated image, is straight out of early Vigo, Joris Ivens' Regen, or Steiner's H2O.

The scene in which Maldone's brother Marcellin (Geymond Vital) falls off his horse and dies is a little lesson in collision montage, with the impact of the accident shown facing one way and then immediately flipped to the reverse, as though this event is warping space and time. And for no clear reason, Grémillon opens every major sequence of Maldone with a tunnel-like lens distortion, something I'd only seen in  Brakhage films and Reygadas' Post Tenebras Lux.

Given Grémillon's reputation as a link between the "French Impressionist" style of Dulac and Epstein, and the more lyrical naturalism of Renoir, I can only expect that these formal flights of fancy become more pronounced, or that Grémillon ends up finding scripts that serve as a stronger support for that experimentation. Maldone, despite its flaws, is aggressively avant-garde and genuinely strange, reminding us that even in its third decade, cinema had not entirely clamped down on expository realism. Bold visual technique was still possible, even in an otherwise undistingushed film.

Final note: Something on the copy of Maldone I downloaded amused me, because it took my mind back to the early days of cinephile piracy and tape trading. With no warning, the film is interrupted three times by a bilingual notice that the ARTE network (from which this was obviously recorded) would halt its analog broadcast signal and henceforth be available only on digital. I tried to ignore that header, but here even Zita seems bemused by it.