Maternité clandestine (1953)
Directed by Jean Gourguet

Film Review

Director Jean Gourguet's most celebrated film, Maternité clandestine was groundbreaking for its time and courted controversy with its near-the-knuckle depiction of a teen pregnancy.  Even though he made over forty films in a career that spanned five decades (late 1920s to early 1960s), Gourguet is virtually forgotten today, and yet he deserves to be considered an important precursor to the Nouvelle Vague, a talented maverick who straddled the divide between commercial cinema and the emerging auteur trend in France during the 1950s.  It was in this, his most productive decade, that he had most success with his uncompromising portraits of youth, tackling themes that most other directors considered too hot to handle.

Gourguet was not the only French filmmaker who was profoundly concerned with the plight of disenfranchised youngsters.  Youth disaffection and rebellion was a theme that was highly current in the 1950s, not just in France but throughout much of the western world.  Even Jean Delannoy, one of high priests of 'conventional' French cinema, was driven to broach the issue in one of his films, Chiens perdus sans colliers (1955), and Marcel Carné strayed onto the subject somewhat belatedly in Terrain vague (1960).  François Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959) is the best-known film of this genre, but even this seems tame and bourgeois compared with the more authentic slices of life that Gourguet served up in his films of the early 1950s.

At a time when juvenile delinquency was one of the most pressing social concerns in France, it is revealing that Gourguet chooses to portray his young rebels in a wholly sympathetic light.  Right at the start of the film, the ragtag band of teenagers, infants and young men who live by petty pilfering are portrayed as victims of an uncaring society, robbed of one or both parents by the war or else abandoned to fend for themselves in the austere aftermath that followed.  There is a strong sense of solidarity that binds them together and makes them a model community, happy in their exclusion from the society that spurns them.  Outlaws they may be, but they are not villains.  When a young girl tries to kill herself, these dirty-faced angels waste not a second in coming to her aid, providing the family she needs to get through the crisis of child birth.  Gourguet's heart-warming film forces its audience to reappraise its prejudices and recognise that alienated youngsters are not the enemy of society, but the victims of an imperfect and far too judgemental system.

Gourguet's obvious preference for real locations over studio sets is what gives Maternité clandestine its raw authenticity and makes it a harbinger for the French New Wave.  The film's naturalism also derives from the ensemble of mostly inexperienced young actors that make up the bulk of the cast, several of whom would go on to become well-known, if not outright stars:  Dany Carrel, Michel Roux, Maurice Sarfati, Daniel Cauchy and Jean-Pierre Mocky.  Having made it as an actor, Mocky would take up the baton from Gourguet with his own iconoclastic brand of cinema.  In addition to these fresh-faced newcomers, Gourguet avails himself of the services of some well-regarded character actors: Pierre Larquey, Noël Roquevert, Dora Doll  and Jane Marken.  The latter add to the film's good-natured charm without stealing the focus from the younger cast members, who provide the film with its heart and soul.

Maternité clandestine has a acquired a certain notoriety by virtue of the two scenes in which twenty-year-old Dany Carrel bares her breasts, one of which depicts Carrel breastfeeding a newborn child.  Outré as these scenes are, they are mild transgressions compared with the film's most shocking sequence offering a graphic depiction of child birth.  Not only is Carrel seen to be visibly in agony as she goes into labour, but the birth itself is shown in gory detail.  Gourguet spares us nothing, and it's hard to think of a film prior to this in which child birth is presented in such a starkly realistic way.  (The chance is that at least half of the audience fainted at the point when the baby 'pops out'.)

These moments of shock and awe aside, Maternité clandestine is for the most part a low-key film that makes a reasonable job of combining social realism with more traditional melodrama.  The plot is admittedly something of a potpourri, and includes a scene lifted from a Marcel Pagnol film, with the upper crust grandparents of Carrel's baby refusing to accept any responsibility for the illegitimate birth.  To make up for this, the characters are well-drawn and convincingly played, the performances of Dany Carrel and Pierre Larquey being of particular note.  Gourguet's modest but engaging film touched a nerve and was enough of a success for its director to purchase a cinema (L'Escurial on the Boulevard de Port-Royal in Paris), where he could indulge his passion for cinema for the rest of his life.

Film Synopsis

In the suburbs of Paris, a gang of wayward adolescents led by Maurice survive on the spoils of their petty crimes.  Under the instructions of small-time hoodlum André, the gang must hold up a cashier on his way home one evening.  The plan goes awry when, at the moment the crime is to be committed, the gang is distracted by the spectacle of a girl throwing herself into a nearby canal.  The youngsters come to her rescue and take her back to their hideout, where they discover the reason for her suicide attempt: she is pregnant and likely to give birth at any moment...