Au bonheur des dames

Early Duvivier silent adapted from a Zola novel is on its surface a French cousin to American light comedy-romances about young working girls in booming department stores, like the delightful My Best Girl and Our Blushing Brides. Accordingly, although the only version available is unsubtitled, the plot is easy enough to follow: a pretty, naive orphan (luminous Dita Parlo) comes to Paris to find work in her uncle’s small shop, but is quickly seduced by the glamorous department store across the street and the characters who work within it. Drama, romance, tragedy follow as the girl is torn between the two worlds, the corporation threatening to demolish the uncle’s property to further its expansion.

Obviously, perhaps, there’s a lot more visual flair here than in its American counterparts and certainly more than would be suggested by the social/realist meat of Zola’s story. This is the Duvivier flair of Pépé le Moko, but more reckless and experimental, and all the more exciting for it. The editing, if not as accomplished as in his later films, is arresting: particularly in two sequences, first innocuously fusing construction work and shots of the army of employees on lunch break, echoed later in a montage of escalating violence now of demolishing and various reaction shots. There’s so much visual interest in this one could easily lose sight of the story altogether, except it so engagingly illustrates the bewitching lure of consumerism, the dreamlike quality of romance, and the unthinking madness of the horde. It’s like My Best Girl and Our Blushing Brides, plus terror, enchantment, and a strangely perfect fantasy-realism.