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CRICKET IN A CAGE
Lumière d'été -
dir. Jean Grémillon, 1943
By: Ali Mehraban Ramirez
Gremillon’s direction anchors a web of romantic fallout to the labor process of a dam construction (a destructo-production) in the mountains of Provence. An airy hotel, named “The Guardian Angel”, from which we see and hear this construction, has the quality of a curio cabinet. Tucked away in this valley, the characters collecting dust within are shaken out of arrangement by the explosive conjuncture of an incoming dynamite specialist, a fashion illustrator, and a tortured artist - all in for a brief summer stint away from Paris. These characters breach the stillness of the quiet hotel, opening it up for a brief moment to the concrete world it’s kept buried in memories - nostalgic and nightmarish alike.
Dynamite explosions and the machinic churning of the expressionist work site lay down the rhythmic division of the film’s three acts, becoming the bass for some of the most beautiful and dramatic moments of the film (including montage that could have come straight out of Man with a Movie Camera). The “creative destruction” of the dam’s production, as an object of the film, illuminates different parts of the film as a field: Internally, the willingness to kill for unrequited love (and secure the impossibility of this love), or to destroy oneself when faced with the loyal love of another. Externally, the wartime context of the film’s production itself - right in the midst of the Nazi occupation of France, a few years from Liberation Day and the ensuing reconstruction of Europe which was capitalized upon by the American Marshall Plan. (For a more contemporary version of this dynamic, see this dispatch from comrades in the midst of the current war in Iran.)
As soon as we are settled into our stay at the glass house of a hotel, the fuse is lit. In one scene, the working class heart-throb (Julien), guided by the mistaken and fateful direction of the caged and diminished hotel manager (Cri Cri), enters the room already occupied by the chronically sitting duck and wounded prey (Michèle), and gropes around blindly in the dark, finding first: the arrangement of sunflowers sent up to her by the chronically hunting aristocrat and uber-predator (Patrice Le Verdier), and second: the desperate kiss missing its expected target of the emotional-contortionist firebrand (Roland) who enters and exits the film by crashing against the mountain with spontaneous self-combustion.
This encounter is a perfect exposition of the film. In it, Roland is replaced by his volatile unavailability, and Patrice by his poison gestures of love, and we get through this contretemps scene an arrangement around which the union of Michèle and Julien will be both interrupted and inevitable. This dream-like (or even sleepwalking) first kiss is a moment of becoming-necessary, a surplus of contingency, and their reaction to it perfectly attests to this,
“It’s not my fault.”
“It’s not mine either.”
In this parapraxical moment, we see chance/fate intertwine with intention/desire in the complexity that lends this film its charge.
One of the many beautiful shots comes together when Julien just barely saves the suicidal Michèle from being blown to bits at the site of the dam. (Roland told her “If you really love me, you should leave me”.) He whisks her to safety, sheltering inside a large steel cylinder as rocks rain down from the explosions. The couple sitting there, as if in the barrel of a gun aimed at the plein-air landscape behind them. They are in the crossfire of everything within the film’s narrative terrain, and also in the extra-filmic level where the actors are being “shot” into characters, stuck in the frame, dealing with the roles written from above.
Just after this scene we can see Roland experiencing a similar extra-filmic lucidity. Having awoken from his drunken entrance the night before, he strolls into the hotel bar, ordering a drink as he steps into frame, and taking a look around the inside of the frame itself he says, “ Beautiful light, mmh?” as if referring to the magic of photography, the exposure of light onto film which has captured him faithfully. There in the hotel, with all its glass and metal elements, we peer in and see the drama of summer light refracted through its elements.
The minor characters are perfect caricatures; Monsieur Louis, the easily disturbed classicist and his jolly companion Louise, Tonton the waiter with his along-for-the-ride refrain “Why not?”, Vincent and Ernest the proud laborers who are always already heroes, even in their simplest moments. Beyond their comedic relief, these characters also illustrate the outer coordinates of the high classes and the low classes, just as the blunt geography does with the luxurious estate of Patrice up the mountain, and the workers down in the valley.
Alongside this layer of class stratification, is the texture of the war and occupation that the Vichy censors couldn’t snuff out. The sadistic Patrice absorbs much of the film’s latent hatred towards the fascists, with Cri Cri as the faithful collaborationist, hiding the truth about his murderous past. In the end, however, Patrice and his reign of terror are defeated.
Ernest, the worker, has been trying to shoot down an evil eagle throughout the film, at one point describing the perched creature like a “weathervane”. Audiences at the time were surely being prompted to imagine the iconographic eagle of the Nazi regime. Patrice steals Ernest’s hunting rifle after another failed attempt at downing the eagle, and takes it out to shoot Julien who is climbing wires high up over the valley, in the midst of a suspenseful rescue attempt. Before pulling the trigger on our daring hero, Ernest wrestles him to the ground. Patrice recovers the rifle once again and is now facing off with the swelling crowd of workers. As he threatens to shoot them, they remain fearless and steadily approach him, driving him off the edge of the cliff behind him and falling to his death. Another intensely Soviet styled scene follows: Michèle and Julien, arm in arm, boldly march into their liberated future, against the wind and towards the whole earth.
Raymond Aimos, the actor who played Ernest, was a resistance fighter and died in combat during the liberation of Paris, only one year after the film’s release. Watching these scenes in light of this historical trajectory, only adds to the careful depth of this film. Lumière d'été concisely navigates a multi-polar love story of epic proportions while letting the residue of time be exposed, much like the lives spent within the hotel Guardian Angel, set against dust clouds and caught in the mystified glow of the summer light.
March 24th, 2026