Radical Kindness and Patriarchal Control: On Angèle
This is the hundred-and-eightieth in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Letterboxd, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my fifth favorite 1934 film, ANGÈLE, directed by Marcel Pagnol.
I’ve seen this phrase “radical kindness” bandied about in recent years. Seeming to stem from some semi-pseudo-psychology, it’s something that’s taken root in certain very online communities. But I think there’s something useful in the pairing of those two words beyond their definition together as a purposeful bridging of some kind of divide. I find the natural practice of such radical kindness more fascinating than the concerted movement to adopt it, although of course we could all intentionally learn something from the, say, Mister Rogerses of the world. These displays of nonjudgmental acceptance from someone just emotionally “built different,” which importantly includes the correction of a bad situation rather than inaction, are at the heart of the greatness of Marcel Pagnol’s ANGÈLE. Even still, some patriarchal ugliness complicates a total feel-good scenario…part of Pagnol’s intention, I think.
However, some of that intention can’t be attributed to the film’s director, at least solely. Pagnol’s third directorial effort, still somewhat amid a very successful playwrighting career that led to the smash hit film adaptations MARIUS (1931) and FANNY (1932), is based on source material other than his own. ANGÈLE stems from the 1929 novel LOVERS ARE NEVER LOSERS (the title as changed from the French UN DE BAUMUGNES). I’ve never read the book, so I don’t know how much the movie adaptation does or does not change aspects of the story. But ANGÈLE undoubtedly carries many of the thematic and stylistic concerns of Pagnol’s work, especially from his not yet completed Marseille Trilogy.
Three particular moments demonstrate the radical kindness of three male characters. These are all in relation to the titular character, played by Orane Demazis, who had already appeared in the first two installments of Pagnol’s famed trilogy. That the men are in the position to forgive reflects the patronizing tenor of ANGÈLE, but when put into action by the extremely naturalistic actors and dialogue, easy didacticism falls away. Nevertheless, the third of those moments contains the most explicitly uncomfortable moment of control.
But why all this forgiveness and kindness? Demazis’ character is a somewhat naive country girl seduced by the “townie” Louis (Andrex). Louis is a drifter doing some work in the rural area, but he successfully spirits Angèle away to Marseille, where he immediately becomes her pimp. She gives birth to a son, perhaps the child of a “Northern sailor” who was her customer. Angèle admits she has no way of knowing, but the baby kind of looks like the man.
There is a modern and positive perception of sex work that may be problematic in assessing exactly why Angèle is “forgiven” by the men in her life. For one character, it is exactly the moral transgression of selling one’s body that is the issue. But in an era where a truly regulated and remotely safe and sanitary sex work industry did not really exist, especially in the smaller cities of France, the “transgression” is more so one of concern. In fact, it’s not exactly even fair to say that Angèle is forgiven by the two other male characters that factor into the movie’s most important scenes because they do not profess any such intent. They accept the unfortunate circumstance and move on with their love for Demazis’ character.
I suppose I should stop dancing around these unidentified men. Let’s start with Saturnin, wonderfully played by Fernandel. The elder Saturnin is technically unrelated to Angèle, but he was taken in as a child/laborer by her family, the Barbarouxes, many years ago. So he has a brotherly relationship with the only child of Clarius (Henri Poupon) and Philomène (Annie Toinon). Early in the film, he urges his found family member to dispense with the country bumpkins they all know and find a cultured city boy. Later, after Angèle has left, he speaks to a friend in the nearby town Aix, who recognized her in Marseille. This friend dances around the fact that Angèle is now a prostitute and Saturnin does not clock the implications. Fernandel imbues the character with a totally upbeat cluelessness that borders on buffoonery but never takes him into caricature. Saturnin is not stupid and the actor and his director obviously treat the character with an elevated respect.
This is most clear in the scene where Saturnin tracks down Angèle in Marseille, upon the recommendation of his friend. Even through meeting the madam of the house and finding his friend in her room, he has no clue as to the circumstances of Angèle’s profession. She has to truly spell it out for him. Upon receiving this news, he turns to a pretty understated description: essentially, “that’s unfortunate,” with a delayed processing of the information. In this moment, Fernandel’s brilliantly real performance shines as you see the cogs turning in Saturnin’s brain through his eyes. Pagnol somewhat strangely cuts away from this moment with an example of continuity editing to show the Barbaroux parents back at home, with Clarius’ broken arm and ever-present temper and Philomène’s quiet suffering. Perhaps it’s to allow for some elliptical explanation on Angèle’s part, because when we return to her conversation with Fernandel, they are in different positions in the room and their emotional state is suddenly advanced past the awkwardness of the immediate delivery of the news.
What follows is the most emotionally compelling moment of all of ANGÈLE. Using the somewhat ridiculous analogy of what he would do to help if his sister (of a kind) fell in “dung,” Saturnin simply reveals the quality of his character and radical kindness. The farmhand is certainly the purest character in the entire film, more pure even than Angèle. And I don’t mean because she is somehow sullied by her acts. Although the film is named after her, Demazis’ character does not have the kind of agency she has in, say, Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy, even with similar plot points. So Angèle’s initial naivete and the problems she undergoes after she runs away from and ultimately returns to her home don’t feel as shocking as they could be and are rendered more thinly in the narrative. Intentionally or not (and I think it is), it’s a reflection of the very real lack of agency women would have had in a similar situation in real life.
The second “scene” to highlight is actually a strangely large bulk of ANGÈLE. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, the film is certainly longer than most Hollywood films of the year/period by a large margin; like, more than an hour. And a decent chunk of that run time focuses on Amédée’s (Édouard Delmont) infiltration of the Barbaroux farm. Amédée is shown at the very beginning of the film as a friend of Albin (Jean Servais), a mountain boy who is part of the same roving worker group as the older man and Louis. Amédée and Albin commiserate about the terrible nature of Louis, and after the aforementioned sequence between Fernandel and Demazis, the two are shown to be coming into the Barbaroux family’s area in Provence again. Albin fell in love with Angèle the moment he saw her and even tried to stop her from leaving with Louis once he learned of the plan. This may be a good time to sidestep to talk about an outlier practitioner of radical kindness outside of my established triumvirate.
At first, Albin (Servais also acted with Demazis in the same year’s LES MISÉRABLES, in which the person initiating the desire is reversed) is dismissive of Angèle as “one of those girls” who succumbs to or even welcomes the advances of a man like Louis. But this is masculine bluster, as Amédée intuits, because Albin is hopelessly enamored with the farmgirl. In some ways, Albin comes off as akin to the modern “nice guy” trope; “why can’t she just pick a guy like me” and so forth. But the surface-level pining is stripped away to show a true loving desire after Amédée reveals that Angèle has a child and how the son was begotten. Albin’s reaction, after a brief pause, is essentially: “It doesn’t matter. He needs a father after all.” This example of radical kindness, due to the intent of a romantic pursuit, doesn’t exactly factor into the same pattern I’ve started to establish with Saturnin and Amédée; the former, as a near-sibling and the latter as a true stranger with a vested interest only because of his interest in the wellbeing of a friend. But it’s important to understand Albin as a character who fits into the web of non-judgement that butts against the final male character’s issues (who also has more skin in the game than Saturnin and Amédée).
Anyways, back to the matter-of-fact and drily funny career-roving farmworker played extremely convincingly by Delmont. Amédée sends Albin to the home of an old mistress of his (showing the old man as a strangely sexual being) so he can inquire about Angèle’s whereabouts at her family’s farm. Along the way, he’s informed by a pedestrian that the master of the house is crazy and points a shotgun at any stranger showing up at his door. Amédée hesitates a bit, but the fact he pushes on shows his strength of character, both as an elder with little to fear anymore and as a matter-of-fact yet deeply caring friend of a younger and lovesick man. Once he secures a job at the farm, with no shortage of threats from Clarius, Amédée demonstrates his ability to curry favor with a mistress of an estate once again, although in this case it never progresses to any kind of true affair. His charm is disarming and simple, which helps him in chatting with Saturnin and trying to discover what happened to Angèle. For their part, the title character and her brother figure suspect Amédée is a friend of Louis’ sent to track her down. That no such person, or Louis himself for that matter, appears is a demonstration of just how disposable the girl was to the scoundrel, making the film’s conclusion all the more remarkable.
Amédée discovers that Angèle and her son have been hidden away by her father in the cellar and he returns to Albin with Saturnin to bear this news. That Amédée once again returns to the farm to figure out where the girl has been hidden this time (the cellar had been flooded by a storm, allowing the old man to spot her) exemplifies his care for Albin again, but also adds a degree of investment in both the younger man and Angèle’s fate, with no kind of reward or direct benefit in sight for Amédée himself. He faces a shotgun barrel multiple times in this pursuit and Delmont’s performance is beautifully unflappable and witty, making such efforts less melodramatically heroic or self-sacrificing and more, well, radically kind in their directness.
The third male character to ultimately embrace a form, yet a different one, of radical kindness is Angèle’s father Clarius. As mentioned, her disappearance sends him into a sullen rage, only exacerbated by his arm being wounded in a farm accident. His decision to shove Angèle and her bastard into the cellar is not prevented by the accepting love of Philomène, who demonstrates her own form of radical kindness by immediately embracing her daughter and grandson without question. But Pagnol is more concerned with the male characters in ANGÈLE, for good and bad, so the crux of the finale is based on Clarius’ reaction. Albin steals Angèle away in the middle of the night, with Amédée narrowly stopping the father from shooting at his daughter/grandson/Albin; it’s the one time Amédée shows true rage in the film. Amédée seeks out the trio in the morning and convinces them to come back to get the patriarch’s permission to marry. In a tense exchange that slowly relaxes due to the young man’s forthrightness, Clarius and Albin come to an understanding and the father forgives his daughter. This is the only true moment of “forgiveness,” as it is required in the tradition of marriage-making.
Poupon’s performance is such that Clarius is a sympathetic character even as his pride and conservatism make what should have been a moment of healing and acceptance at the outset into a protracted and tortured experience. Pagnol juxtaposes this indignation with the reactions of Saturnin, Amédée, Albin, and Philomène to illustrate patriarchal control over the happiness of others, not just women. But then, that gendered difference does reveal itself. Clarius’ “forgiveness” brings things back to the status quo. Yes, he finally takes Angèle’s child into his arms, but he also starts ordering her around again, to make coffee for her husband-to-be and the other men standing around the room. It’s not the most aggressive of moments, and it doesn’t read as such when it happens in the relatively blissful moments of the beginning of ANGÈLE, but Demazis’ face registers the uncertainty of this new normal and her return to a situation that is much happier, if not any less controlled or enabled by the men in her life.
In case a viewer like myself would think this becomes some sort of morbid cautionary tale, Pagnol does depict Albin and Angèle’s still-budding relationship as sweet and untainted by negativity, which is reflected in the film’s final shot. The couple and their child (the first of many, Albin tells Clarius) climb a hill in the pastoral setting of much of ANGÈLE, striding with a new pride and romance as a sun gleams through a great tree. It’s a remarkable shot that serves as a visual representation of the naturalism of the film’s performances and dialogue, which put my attempted summaries to shame. There is a lot to read in the “plot points” of ANGÈLE, however, and so it is necessary to describe the situations to more deeply explore the characters. For reasons like this, perhaps, Pagnol was accused, especially by the French New Wave, of being too theatrical, of not being cinematic enough. That is perhaps why his name has not stuck in the craw of US cinephiles quite like some of his French peers or successors. There is certainly an attention to dialogue and performance in Pagnol’s films that is quite different from the next generation’s approach, but if anything, it’s less stagey and more “realistic” in the moment than, say, a comparable Hollywood film of the time.
ANGÈLE is not static, however, and Pagnol and his cinematographer Charly Willy-Gricha Faktorovitch keep the camera moving in great “walk and talk” scenes and lock it in a static mode in observance of rural beauty and interior conversations full of rich dialogue. Ultimately, Pagnol’s style is in service to the spoken lines (which the director himself adapted from Giono’s novel), executed like a true playwright. The man would proclaim cinema’s strengths over theater in later years and ANGÈLE is a remarkable example of a time when that opinion must have been forming. The movie is rich with meaning; there is no denying there could have been more Angèle in ANGÈLE but I just so happen to find its male dominance part of the point. The film’s characters ultimately weave a rich tapestry of radical kindness. It is their irresistible presence, and the forthrightness for which its director is known, that make ANGÈLE a special gem worthy of much more attention than it has received.
