Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde (1948)
Directed by Henri Decoin

Film Review

Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde provides a welcome interlude between the noirish thrillers and dark criminal intrigues (Les Inconnus dans la maison, Non coupable, La Vérité sur Bébé Donge) that director Henri Decoin seemed committed to serving up throughout the 1940s.  A classic melodrama, very much in the Hollywood mould (you can easily imagine Joan Crawford in the role taken by Renée Devillers), it reveals a far more sensitive and romantic side to Decoin than we would ever discern in his other films.  Boasting an impeccable screenplay by Henri Jeanson and a cast of exceptional ability, this could hardly fail to be one of Decoin's better films - a compassionate hymn to the tragedy of love, tinged with that peculiar mellow bitterness which impinges on most of Decoin's work.

The film begins with one of the more memorably beautiful opening sequences in the oeuvre of this underrated director, one that harks back to the delicate romanticism of the poetic realist films of the 1930s.  Louis Jouvet and Renée Devillers meet, apparently for the first time, in a provincial bar.  Although their encounter appears frosty, their body language tells us they are already intimately acquainted.  The playacting over, they are revealed to be a couple who have been happily married for twenty years, and it seems that nothing will get in the way of their perfect romance.  Then Dany Robin enters the frame and an all to familiar tragedy unfolds before our eyes.  The triangular plot is hardly original but Jeanson and Decoin give it a freshness and poignancy that makes the final shot - a flagrant homage to that of Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) - utterly heartbreaking.   Immediately after this, Jouvet, Jeanson and Decoin would team up for an altogether different kind of film, the seductively stylish thriller Entre onze heures et minuit (1948).

Film Synopsis

Gérard Favier is a famous composer who has been married to the charming Sylvia for almost 20 years.  Still deeply in love, they walk the streets of Paris and, one day, they hear a sonata that Gérard once wrote, played on a piano in a house.  Gérard is surprised to find that the piano player is a 20 year-old girl named Monelle.  Impressed by her talent, Gérard decides to adopt Monelle as his protégé, but very soon his interest in her takes a less paternalistic turn.   It is through a gossip magazine that Sylvia learns about her husband's infidelity but she is uncertain how to react.  After all, he did write a new song for her, "Lovers are alone in the world..."