In 1941 Occupied France, Jean Grémillon found a way to get this Poetic Realism-tinged melodrama released, but if Remorques is a Poetic Realist project, the emphasis is on “poetic.” Andre Prévert’s script is theatrically artificial, and many of Grémillon’s directing decisions move Remorques in the direction of poetry rather than realism. The slightly bourgeois Jean Gabin is a Poetic Realist, hard-working captain of a salvage tug, but the script, visuals and sound all push Remorques into a world of cinematic poetry rather than a gritty confrontation of the realities of the working class.
It’s Grémillon’s camera that creates most of the poetry here. In an opening dance sequence, the camera follows Cpt. Laurent and his wife, Yvonne, as they enter the dance floor and progress through room. Arriving at the end of the room, the camera follows a server back to the other side again and there picks up the newly-wed couple as they enter and cross. It’s one of the elegant tracking shots that Grémillon is known for. Shortly afterwards, we watch a variation on the tracking shot as the messenger from the boat enters the room from the right. The camera is outside at this point, and it tracks the messenger as he makes his way along the outside of the dance floor, and the columns between us and the man create a graceful pattern. And again later, we see a similar interest in texture as Yvonne is looking in a mirror after the reception. With the camera peering over her shoulder as she puts her old bridal veil on, she moves the veil from in front of her to behind and the camera registers a series of filter effects that alternately reveal and cloud her image. More than mere narrative camera, such work stands out in its effort to create on-screen beauty.
Perhaps the most artful sequence in the film is the one when Cpt. Laurent and his rescuee, Catherine, visit a house that Laurent is considering renting. It opens on a matte painting that imitates an impossibly high crane shot of two tiny shadow figures on a beach speckled with shadow. There’s then a cut to the shadows of two people walking, and we realize it’s the couple who are strolling along the shadow-streaked beach. It’s a beautiful opening to the sequence. After some repartee which shows Catherine’s interest in Laurent as the two enter the house, Catherine goes upstairs while Laurent lags behind to follow later. When he goes up, he discovers a bedroom, and the two carry on a conversation on the balcony with gauze curtains billowing from the sea breeze and a loud soundtrack of wind blowing, cinematic correlatives to the emotions in the room. As another touch, Grémillon has had Michèle Morgan remove her coat before Laurent arrives, a suggestion of undress, and the only recognizable piece of furniture is the uncovered bed in the background. This is one of the emotional high points of the film. But Grémillon doesn’t end the sequence at this point. Instead, we again the couple’s shadows from the familiar leg-level angle that we experienced in the sequence opening, there’s a cut to a starfish (an important symbol in the sequence) and we return to that original matte that shows the shadow-speckled beach scene. None of these last three images is particularly important to the story, but they give a rhythmic lyricism to the sequence that provides an aesthetically pleasing closing. Which is to say, they’re just included because they’re beautiful.
The soundtrack is another of Remorques' poetic elements. In addition to the loud wind sounds in the bedroom which add to the drama of that moment, while the Cyclone is rescuing a freighter in a storm at sea, the soundtrack is filled with the boats’ horn sounds, which are more like long screams than horns. This produces an on-edge feeling that reinforces the danger of the moment. And at the end of the film, as Laurent leaves the bedside of his deceased wife and runs back to his tug, the eerie soundtrack is filled with the sound of a howling storm layered over with a loud reading of a requiem mass that has no mimetic place in the narrative at all but rather evokes the Laurent’s state of mind. In all these cases, the soundtrack is following an aesthetic imperative rather than a realistic one, which helps make watching Remorques a deep cinematic experience.
Grémillon also uses rich, full symbols in Remorques that won’t readily be reduced to a metaphor. As the tug
pulls out of the harbor after the initial wedding, the camera surprisingly doesn’t follow the boat and the action. Instead, as the tug sails off to the right, the camera holds on the empty harbor stairs leading down to the boat and then rises to look at a rainy streetscape with no one on it and no lights. This is perhaps the plight of those left behind or perhaps a suggestion of the danger the men are sailing into. Or perhaps it just sums up a sailor’s life in an image. In such deliberately highlighted symbolism, Grémillon realizes one aspect of the cinema as poetry by creating significance that only exists in the film. The starfish that Catherine picks up on the beach is another such irreducible symbol. When the couple pick it up out of a boat, the starfish seems to represent the moment, but the moment isn’t happy or sad as much as it is informed by a range of conflicting emotions and desires. We refocus on the starfish when the couple consummate their passion, and we see it again when Catherine leaves and gives it to a mate to use in supporting Laurent later. The starfish is the ambiguity of the nature of their relationship—a relationship that doesn’t have a good outcome for either of them—and there’s a bit of the crusty, abandoned Catherine in it, too. Like the harbor steps, the starfish can’t be reduced to a simple metaphor.
Another part of the beauty here is Andre Prévert’s script. The numerous parallels in the script have an aesthetically-pleasing effect as when Laurent upbraids a shipman for infidelity only to be unfaithful to his own wife. Likewise, Laurent is late for the Cyclone’s departure just as the shipman has previously been. There is also irony in the script like when Catherine, as her seduction of Laurent approaches fruition, expresses the same appreciation for a bedroom with a sea view and breezes that Laurent’s wife Yvonne had previously articulated. There’s a bitter irony in Yvonne’s death scene, too, as her wish to have him there saying he loves her as she dies comes true; she dies thinking he was faithful while he actually hasn’t been. All these elements are melodramatic but part of their effectiveness comes from the over-the-top melodramatic plotting.Other elements of the script are sophisticated, too. Catherine, for example, is not a standard seductress who is out to get her man and wreck his family. She has our sympathy early on as she calls out the captain of the Mirva for the scum he is, and the script is especially literary as Catherine attaches a negative connotation of powerlessness to “Catherine” and asks Laurent to call her by “Aimee,” a name connoting the love she feels she never had. While Yvonne is somewhat the stereotyped chaste wife, Catherine has a lot of richness and depth that gives complexity to all the relationships and to the tragedy that ends the film.
There’s even an indirect nod to Poetic Realism and Grémillon’s historical context. After France collapsed so quickly under German attack, some Frenchman blamed the spiritual malaise of France that characterized the period of the Popular Front. Poetic Realism was seen to contribute to this paralyzing philosophy of pessimism, and when one of the mates of the Cyclone seems to be an intellectual who ponders more than taking action, it’s not hard to see an allusion to that contemporary opinion. And indeed, Remorques has its share of pessimism.
Remorques is an underappreciated occupation era jewel. Its melodrama doesn’t play well with today’s audiences, but its frequent sparkles of genuine filmic beauty make it a worthwhile investment of 90 minutes.
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