''Pension Mimosas'' is a 1935 French
drama film
In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super-g ...
directed by
Jacques Feyder
Jacques Feyder (; 21 July 1885 – 24 May 1948) was a Belgian actor, screenwriter and film director who worked principally in France, but also in the US, Britain and Germany. He was a director of silent films during the 1920s, and in the 1930 ...
. Based on an original scenario by Feyder and
Charles Spaak
Charles Spaak (25 May 1903 – 4 March 1975) was a Belgian screenwriter who was noted particularly for his work in the French cinema during the 1930s. He was the son of the dramatist and poet Paul Spaak, the brother of the politician Paul-Henri S ...
, it is a psychological drama set largely in a small hotel on the
Côte d'Azur
The French Riviera (known in French as the ; oc, Còsta d'Azur ; literal translation " Azure Coast") is the Mediterranean coastline of the southeast corner of France. There is no official boundary, but it is usually considered to extend fro ...
, and it provided
Françoise Rosay
Françoise Rosay (; born Françoise Bandy de Nalèche; 19 April 1891 – 28 March 1974) was a French opera singer, diseuse,''Design'', Volume 9 1965 p. 24 and actress who enjoyed a film career of over sixty years and who became a legendary figure ...
with one of the most substantial acting roles of her career. It was produced by the French subsidiary of the German company
Tobis Film
Tobis Film was a German film production and film distribution company. Founded in the late 1920s as a merger of several companies involved in the switch from silent to sound films, the organisation emerged as a leading German sound studio. Tobis ...
.
Plot
1924. Louise Noblet keeps a small hotel, the Pension Mimosas, on the Côte d'Azur in the south of France, with her husband Gaston who is also a supervisor in local casino. Many of their clientele are luckless gamblers hoping for success in the local casino. Childless themselves, Louise and Gaston have been bringing up the young Pierre while his father serves a prison sentence, but they are dismayed when the father is released early and comes to take back his son.
1934. Pierre, now a young man, is living in Paris among gamblers and gangsters, and he still plays upon the feelings of his former adoptive parents to extract money from them. Louise makes him return to the Pension Mimosas and find a job, but she now develops an ambiguous affection for him. To please him, she even invites his mistress Nelly to join him in the hotel. The two women soon become rivals, while Pierre accumulates debts. Louise reveals Nelly's whereabouts to her old protector who comes to take her back. In despair Pierre kills himself, while Louise has gone to the casino under an assumed identity to win the money to pay his debts.
Cast
*
Françoise Rosay
Françoise Rosay (; born Françoise Bandy de Nalèche; 19 April 1891 – 28 March 1974) was a French opera singer, diseuse,''Design'', Volume 9 1965 p. 24 and actress who enjoyed a film career of over sixty years and who became a legendary figure ...
as Louise Noblet
*
Paul Bernard as Pierre
*
André Alerme
André Alerme (9 September 1877 – 31 January 1960) was a French actor.
Alerme was born Marie André Alerme in Dieppe, Seine-Maritime, France and died at the age of 82 in Montrichard, Loir-et-Cher, France.
Selected filmography
* ''Black and Wh ...
as Gaston Noblet
*
Lise Delamare
Lise Delamare (born Jolyse Effrey Jeanne Delamare; 9 April 1913 – 25 July 2006) was a French stage and film actress.
Partial filmography
* ''George and Georgette'' (1934)
* ''Les précieuses ridicules'' (1934)
* ''Pension Mimosas'' (1935) - ...
as Nelly
*
Arletty
Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat (15 May 1898 – 23 July 1992), known professionally as Arletty, was a French actress, singer, and fashion model. As an actress she is particularly known for classics directed by Marcel Carné, including '' Hotel du N ...
as Parasol
*
Jean-Max
Jean-Max (1895–1970) was a French film actor.Goble p.106
Selected filmography
* ''The Prosecutor Hallers'' (1930)
* ''Le cap perdu'' (1931)
* '' The Unknown Singer'' (1931)
* ''The Darling of Paris'' (1931)
* '' Suzanne'' (1932)
* '' Once Upon ...
as Romani
Background
''Pension Mimosas'' was the second of three films which Jacques Feyder made in swift succession on his return to France after his unsatisfactory experience in Hollywood. All three films were developed in conjunction with the scenarist Charles Spaak and included major roles for Feyder's wife Françoise Rosay, but each told a different kind of story and employed a distinctly different style of filming. Whereas ''
Le Grand Jeu'' (1934) was a fast-moving melodrama with some exotic settings, and the later ''
La Kermesse héroïque'' would be a satirical period farce, ''Pension Mimosas'' presented a more measured contemporary drama.
Production
Filming took place from August to October 1934. The setting of the Pension Mimosas is not specifically identified in the film, but a few exterior shots show the casino at
Menton
Menton (; , written ''Menton'' in classical norm or ''Mentan'' in Mistralian norm; it, Mentone ) is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region on the French Riviera, close to the Italian border.
Me ...
as well as its gardens and swimming pool.
[Jean A. Gili, "''Pension Mimosas'', ou l'absence de hasard dans le jeu des passions", in ''1895: revue de l'Association française de recherche sur l'histoire du cinéma''; numéro hors série, octobre 1998: "Jacques Feyder". pp.157-166.] Apart from a few other exterior shots on the Côte d'Azur and some in Paris, most of the film was shot in the studio (at the
Tobis studios in Épinay).
Lazare Meerson
Lazare Meerson (1900–1938) was a Russian-born cinema art director. After emigrating to France in the early 1920s, he worked on French films of the late silent cinema and the early 1930s, particularly those directed by René Clair and Jacques Fe ...
created a detailed but unobtrusive set which presented the various areas of the hotel as an integrated whole, facilitating the revelations and interactions of the drama.
This enclosed setting (though spacious and brightly lit) gives much of the film the feeling of a stage play, a factor which has sometimes been held against it,
but it also concentrates attention upon the interplay of character and the actors' performances.
Although gambling is continually featured in the background and the activities of the characters, frustrated love is the more central theme of the film.
Françoise Rosay dominates the action in a role which recalls aspects of Racine's
Phèdre
''Phèdre'' (; originally ''Phèdre et Hippolyte'') is a French dramatic tragedy in five acts written in alexandrine verse by Jean Racine, first performed in 1677 at the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris.
Composition and premiere
With ...
in its exploration of a mother's feelings which are also those of a lover.
[Georges Sadoul, ''Dictionnaire des films''. (Paris: Seuil, 1983.) p.238.]
Arletty
Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat (15 May 1898 – 23 July 1992), known professionally as Arletty, was a French actress, singer, and fashion model. As an actress she is particularly known for classics directed by Marcel Carné, including '' Hotel du N ...
appears in a small role (one scene only) as a parachutist living on the fringes of bad company in Paris.
Marcel Carné
Marcel Albert Carné (; 18 August 1906 – 31 October 1996) was a French film director. A key figure in the poetic realism movement, Carné's best known films include '' Port of Shadows'' (1938), ''Le Jour Se Lève'' (1939), '' The Devil's Envoys ...
worked as assistant director on the film.
Reception
The film was released in Paris in January 1935 with an exclusive run at the Cinéma Colisée. A contemporary reviewer judged that ''Pension Mimosas'' showed the real Jacques Feyder, working by and for himself, creating a powerful and moving story that was also full of delicacy and humour; the characters, which were real and directly presented, owed much to the exceptional quality of the dialogue (by Charles Spaak) and the choice of actors who were able to perform to each other rather than to the camera.
The film's sobriety of style and lack of sensational elements impressed other critics. A contemporary film historian said, "One rediscovers
n Feyder
N, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''.
History
...
.. a simplicity which benefits the often profound revelation of the psychological drama through the performance of the actors...". This view has been echoed by a more recent critic: "Without the more ostentatious virtues of ''
Le Grand Jeu'' and ''
La Kermesse héroïque'', ''Pension Mimosas'' is a film ''in intaglio'' in which Feyder finds a style of classical refinement, free from any pathos... This masterpiece of psychological analysis leaves nothing to chance, either in the precision of the screenplay or in the detail of the set-design or in the controlled performances of the actors."
When the film was shown in the United States in 1936, it was significantly cut, and the result did not find favour with the reviewer of the ''New York Times'': "...it fails to justify the accolades given it by the foreign press. ...As it emerges now it either has not been edited as severely as it merits, or has been cut too harshly. Its pace is somnolent; certain episodes are extraneous and immaterial, and it suggests it might have had a tragic meaning other than the one it now conveys." In later decades, ''Pension Mimosas'' has not enjoyed wide circulation in the English-speaking world.
What was agreed even by disappointed critics was the remarkable quality of the performance by Françoise Rosay. "Although everything may not be perfect in this film, one can say that the cinema has rarely shown us a human and living character as complex as that portrayed by Françoise Rosay, with such marvellous intelligence and art." Among the many performances that Rosay gave in films directed by her husband, none was more searching or powerful than this one, and Feyder himself, in a dedication that he wrote on a copy of the screenplay, paid tribute to the "overwhelming emotion" that she brought to the role.
The film's realism was influential upon the developing styles of
poetic realism
Poetic realism was a film movement in France of the 1930s. More a tendency than a movement, poetic realism is not strongly unified like Soviet montage or French Impressionism but were individuals who created this lyrical style. Its leading filmm ...
in French cinema (especially upon Marcel Carné who acknowledged "the invisible presence" of Feyder which was always at his side when he went on to direct his own films).
[Marcel Carné, in ''1895: revue de l'Association française de recherche sur l'histoire du cinéma''; numéro hors série, octobre 1998: "Jacques Feyder". p.176.]
References
External links
*
{{Jacques Feyder
1935 films
1935 drama films
1930s French-language films
Films directed by Jacques Feyder
French drama films
French black-and-white films
Films shot at Epinay Studios
Tobis Film films
1930s French films