Cinema d'Or

Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani, Casque d'Or (1952)

We watched Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or last night.

C’est une histoire d’love and death and the underground, and it’s delicious – especially photographic-wise. Toward the end we stopped it over and over, to capture shots.

The love affair of the movie, between Marie (Simone Signoret) and Manda (Serge Reggiani), is a cinema love affair you’re not attached to and you can’t figure out why. I didn’t once, throughout the movie, root for the couple's success, or feel that pang of “rightness” when they were together, as sometimes happens in other movie romances. Maybe their relationship felt mis-fitted because Manda seemed so moral and Marie didn’t; I’m not sure. For whatever reason, I didn’t crave them together, and because everything that happened to Manda happened because he wanted Marie, I always felt like shrinking from the story. Not avoiding it - just shrinking from it, like from an odd smell.

“Casque d’or” translates roughly into “the golden helmet,” although the English version of the film was titled “Golden Marie.” Marie’s hair, except when sleeping, is arranged in three to four glorious, fat loops atop her head – helmet-like; and her face is frequently framed in fifties cinematic female glow, from behind – definitely golden. Although, does the golden helmet refer to Manda? His ability in the end to be “angelic,” accepting full responsibility for his actions? His dying for his actions? His Christ-like profession as a carpenter?

Stopping now. Arrêter. It’s a beautiful film and it should be watched. It's on Criterion:

http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=270#synopsis


Interestingly, Signoret and her husband, Yves Montand, helped Reggiani launch his second career as a singer, in 1965. A full biography of the multi-talented homme, who acted as late as 1998 in The Pianist (he died in 2004) is here:

http://www.rfimusique.com/siteEn/biographie/biographie_6061.asp