La vérité sur Bébé Donge [The Truth of Our Marriage] **** (1952, Danielle Darrieux, Jean Gabin, Jacques Castelot) = Classic Movie Review 12,306

Director Henri Decoin’s bleak, dark, doomy and rather gloomy 1952 French romantic melodrama film La vérité sur Bébé Donge [The Truth of Our Marriage] stars Danielle Darrieux and Jean Gabin, and is based on the novel by Georges Simenon.

Jean Gabin stars as wealthy, mature manufacturer François Donge, who wakes up in a clinic to be told he is suffering from food poisoning, but soon he learns that his wife Elisabeth ‘Bébé’ Donge (Danielle Darrieux) has poisoned him. That must be quite a blow, though it turns out it isn’t a great surprise.

Though adapted from Georges Simenon, there is no more to it than that. There is a crime but alas this is no thriller. The film is both the portrait of a marriage and an anatomy of a murder, which of course is plenty enough. As François lies sick in bed over a week wondering if the doctors can save him, he thinks back to how he met and married the idealistic young Bébé, and recalls what went wrong with their marriage, in a series of flashbacks.

It is all kind of simple really. He is a cynical charmer, a realist, ready to enjoy many affairs, and she is looking for pure romantic love, an idealist. They are basically in love with each other but not at all suited, a mismatch made in hell, and one that is going to take them both to hell.

This interesting situation makes for a fascinating though not fully satisfying film. It is elusive. Just as you are getting to grips with it, it slips away. The pluses are Darrieux and Gabin, who are both perfect in their roles, Gabin engrossing (moving effortless from perilously sick to prime-of-life well, and from charming to cad and abusive bounder) and the beautiful Darrieux mesmerising (especially dressed in funereal black at the end of the film), along with half a dozen other actors brightly sparking their characters, especially Jacques Castelot as the creepy clinician Docteur Jalabert, Daniel Lecourtois as François’s brother Georges Donge, who marries ‘Bébé”s older sister Françoise (Jacqueline Porel), and Gabrielle Dorziat as the canny old Madame D’Ortemont, who feels a need to comment and judge.

There are more pluses. It is a beautiful looking film. Léonce-Henri Burel’s black and white cinematography is so striking, adding a lot to atmosphere, and the film’s 2017 restoration brings out the best in it. Jean-Jacques Grünenwald’s score impresses to, and adds a lot to mood and feeling.

The minuses are these. What’s not fully satisfying is the story itself. It is somehow elusive and frustrating. And the two main characters are frankly rather irritating, borderline annoying, making sympathy at a premium.

Those looking for a Spellbound-type thriller, with a did she or didn’t she? plot are going to be very disappointed. The film quite early on tells us she tried to kill him. The only questions remain can the doctors save him, and thus save her from being arrested for murder. So far, everyone colludes in the food poisoning idea, and she is safe from jail. But, for her, life is already over, along with the marriage. Talking Hitchcock, the film is more in Rebecca mode, with its similar pluses and minuses.

However, there is a beautiful, poetic dimension to the film, and it is easy to underrated it, as, with its lack of thriller excitements, it requires a little patience. Overall, La vérité sur Bébé Donge is rather remarkable and special.

Darrieux is directed again by her ex-husband Henri Decoin, with whom she made six films.

Danielle Darrieux (May 1917 – 17 October 2017) was one of France’s great movie stars and appeared in more than 110 films in an eight-decade career.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,306

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