Les Amants de VĂ©rone (1949)

A film crew is shooting an adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in Venice. Bettina Verdi, the leading actress, visits a glass factory in Murano with her guide Raffaele. One of the glassblowers, Angelo, is mesmerized by Bettina, so much so that he joins the cast as Romeo's double just so that he can see her again. On the film set, Angelo meets Georgia, who is Juliet's double. Georgia lives in a Venetian palace with her father Ettore and brother Amedeo. Both are hiding from justice after the fall of Fascism. Raffaele is in love with Georgia and does what he can to help her family. But when he realises that Georgia loves Angelo, Raffaele is outraged and decides to have his revenge. He will choose his moment carefully.

The bombed-out ruins of post-war Italy proves to be a suitable setting for this modern re-interpretation of Shakespeare's great romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. The craters and bombsites that disfigure the landscape provide an apt metaphor for a society that has fallen into the mire of corruption and for whom the one goal in life is material advancement. The only ones not to be tainted by this stench of greed and self-interest are the young, who are tragically fated to pay for the sins of their fathers. Les Amants de VĂ©rone is a film that reaffirms the timelessness and universality of Shakespeare's most famous play and makes you wonder whether human beings are ever capable of change, or whether we are compelled to re-enact the same tragedies over and over again.

Les Amants de Vérone is the result of an unlikely partnership between a director, André Cayatte, and a screenwriter, Jacques Prévert, who represent two very different traditions in French cinema. Prévert is best known for his collaborations with director Marcel Carné, most notably their poetic realist masterpieces Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Le Jour se lève (1939). Prévert was a romantic who latched onto the ironies and injustices of contemporary life and presented them in a uniquely poetic way. By contrast, Cayatte was more of a realist who saw cinema as a means of galvanising social change; from the 1950s, he would become increasingly preoccupied with championing social causes in his films, such as the abolition of the death penalty in Nous sommes tous des assassins (1952). Cayatte and Prévert were unlikely bedfellows and the one film they made together is an uncomfortable marriage of Italian neo-realism and French poetic realism that offers the harshest social critique of its time.

Without a doubt, Les Amants de VĂ©rone is Cayatte's most visually inspired film, thanks mainly to Henri Alekan's extraordinarily expressive cinematography, which ranges from the achingly beautiful in the more romantic scenes (particularly those filmed on location in Venice) to the bleakly sinister (most of the scenes in the Maglia household). The oppressive world that threatens the future happiness of the film's modern Romeo and Juliet is powerfully evoked by the cavernous, shadow-draped interior sets (the film studio and the Maglias' decaying mansion), which carry as much foreboding and menace as any American film noir of this period. The contrast between the sun-drenched exteriors and darkened interiors could hardly be greater, a potent symbol of the two opposing forces that are at play in the drama (love versus material greed), and we know almost from the start that it is the darkness that will ultimately prevail.

Pierre Brasseur heads a distinguished cast, excelling, as he often does, in one of his tormented villainous roles. In contrast to the vile and sickeningly hypocritical Maglias (colourfully played by Marcel Dalio, Louis Salou and Solange Sicard), Brasseur's character Raffaele is not an outright villain, but someone who is almost as much a victim of his time as the ill-fated teen lovers Angelo and Georgia. It is love, not greed, that brings about Raffaele's downfall, and we have no doubt that the Maglias will find another sugar daddy to sponge off once they have buried their present benefactor. Angelo and Georgia are pure innocents, sacrificial lambs in a society that has no place for their foolish idealism. In her first important screen role, Anouk Aimée is captivating as the child-like Georgia who shines like a saint in the sour, twisted milieu she hails from. Serge Reggiani brings a James Dean-like modernity to his portrayal of Angelo - like Aimée, he seems not to belong to the world he is placed in, a world that appears completely incapable of experiencing the nobler feelings.

Rather than attempt a slavish re-enactment of Shakespeare's play, Les Amants de VĂ©rone takes the essence of the story and refashions it as a scathing piece of social commentary. The film's most lyrical passage replays the painful dawn when the two lovers are forced to part, after spending their one night of bliss together. Just as haunting are the scenes set in the ruins of Verona, where Angelo and Georgia's nascent love resembles a solitary flower growing amidst the crumbling detritus of a failed civilisation, a fragile hope for a better future. As in the original play, the most dramatic scenes are held back for the final act, an avalanche of disasters that begins when Angelo allows himself to be duped into breaking into the Maglias' house. It is not love that awaits the impulsive young man but a mock trial worthy of Mussolini's Fascists. The film ends, as it must, in abject darkness, with Georgia driven to join her lover in death, on the vault-like set of the very play that first brought them together. What makes this ending so devastatingly poignant is not that the protagonists have to die in order to be united in love, but that they should do so in a world that is totally indifferent to their passing. In the last frame of the film you are plunged into the abyss, and it feels as if the light has gone out of the world forever.

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Next André Cayatte film:
Retour Ă  la vie (1949)

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