Ciboulette (1933) User Reviews

Nous Avons Fait Un Beau Voyage...

[dbdumonteil · 5/10 · 10 August 2007]

"Ciboulette" is primarily an operetta so if your cup of tea is ,say,Mozart,Miles Davis or the Beatles ,this might possibly bore you. For they sing every five minutes.To my ears ,the only tune I find palatable is the lovely "Nous Avons Fait un Beau Voyage" .

The story: Ciboulette is a market gardener in love with an idle noble man,Antonin.She's got eight fiancés and her uncle urges her to marry one of them as soon as possible.

The director:Claude Autant-Lara who was first a set designer and it shows in "Ciboulette" .Autant-Lara would become one of the masters of the Cinema de Studio which the New Wavelet despised (they did not know what they were missing) and which produced masterpieces such as "Douce" (1943) or "L'Auberge Rouge" (1951).The film begins with a long travelling on the sleepy city which ends up at a lamplighter .The settings and the costumes are dazzling.The "handkerchief scene" is filmed with delicacy : we see her reflection on a pond before a duck comes and blurs the picture.

But it's strictly for Autant-Lara's completists.If you do not like operetta,you must move on.

Lara's Theme

[writers_reign · 8/10 · 1 June 2009]

You could easily file this under 'curio' if you were of a mind to do so. An early screenplay by Jacques Prevert who also appeared briefly, an early Sound film by a director who was still calling himself Claude Lara and 'bits' by the likes of Viviane Romance, Ginette Leclerc and Raymond Bussieres, the whole an 'operette' starring a Jeannette MacDonald sound-alike at a time when the genre was on its last legs - Warners released 42nd Street in the same year and revitalised the Musical. On the other hand neither Prevert nor Autant-Lara was exactly chopped liver and Autant-Lara opens the proceedings with a long tracking shot that moves from Left to Right at the end of which we have established a complete town - he would do something very similar exactly ten years later with Douce when he tracked from Right to Left.The story would barely tax the mental ability of an amoeba with learning difficulties but even if there's no substance there is Style.