Au coeur de la ville (1960)
Directed by Pierre Gautherin

Film Review

Pierre Gautherin is not a director that is likely to get much of a mention in even the most voluminous of film biographies.  An assistant to such luminaries as Robert Vernay (Andalousie, 1951), Raymond Bernard (La Dame aux camélias, 1953) and Marc Allégret (Un drôle de dimanche, 1958), he only directed two films for cinema, the first being the documentary Au fil des ondes (1951) about the role that film and radio played in the reconstruction of a Normandy town after the Allied bombardment of the Second World War.  A decade later, Gautherin directed one further cinematic offering, the low-key social realist melodrama Au Coeur de la ville featuring the distinguished character actor Georges Chamarat.  In the 1970s, Gautherin put his name to a handful of television movies, including Le Père Noël est en prison (1971) and Le Rendez-vous des Landes (1972).

Au Coeur de la ville's release in 1960 was no doubt overshadowed by the sudden arrival of the French New Wave, but its tone, setting and subject matter have an immediate resonance with one of the Nouvelle Vague's defining films, François Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959).  Beginning with the disturbing shot of a runaway girl poised to drown herself, the film appears to pick up where Truffaut's film left off, but what at first seems to be another foray into the pangs of childhood turns into something quite different - a powerfully moving indictment of how society treats its older citizens.  The plot loosely resembles that of George Eliot's 1861 novel Silas Marner in that it involves a reclusive old man, bitterly resentful of how others have ill-used him over his lifetime, gaining a new zest for life when a strange little girl is suddenly thrown into his care.  In fact, there is a more obvious connection with Vittorio Da Sica's Umberto D (1952), which, whilst far superior to Gautherin's modest film, effectively carries the same message - no one really cares about the plight of the old, who are left to fend for themselves in a society that both neglects and resents them.
   
Au Coeur de la ville doesn't have the visual artistry and gut-wrenching impact of Vittorio Da Sica's timeless masterpiece, but it still has a great deal going for it and it deserves to be far more wildly appreciated than it is.  As the central protagonist Louis, Georges Chamarat turns in what is possibly the performance of his career, utterly convincing as the Silas Marner-like misanthrope who is spiritually and emotionally transformed through his close connection with a runaway infant.  Mistrustful of others and effectively robbed of his self-esteem and humanity through years of misfortune, Louis is a pathetic individual when we first meet him - abrupt, cantankerous and visibly anxious at the prospect of having to form a relationship with a stranger.  Yet gradually the old man begins to grow on us, and just as the girl Monique sees his innate goodness and comes to regard him as a grandfather, so we come into contact with his inner soul, and see the world through his eyes.

Most memorable is the farcical sequence in which Louis attempts to sign on at a Parisian labour exchange and ends up looking like a hapless unfortunate in a Kafka novel, constantly sent from one desk to another with little prospect of achieving his aim in this spiralling bureaucratic maze.  Perhaps the miserabilism is carried a little too far, with most of the people that Louis encounters being almost pathological in their contempt for old people - the toy seller, bric-a-brac street trader and duplicitous co-worker Albert all being too single-mindedly nasty to ring entirely true.  Only two characters - Jacques Marin's Monsieur Verdier and Jeanne Fusier-Gir's likeably dotty Marquise - appear capable of dealing with Louis in a fair and humane manner; all of the others (including some unflattering representatives of the police) just seem to regard him as human flotsam that is best swept into the ditch and forgotten.

Irène Boyer-Louba has a Shirley Temple-like elfin charm to her but it is clear throughout that her character Monique is - like the cute little dog Arthur - really no more than a plot accessory, intended to humanise the central character and galvanise him into changing his nature for the better.  It's hard to take much comfort from the film's downbeat ending, which shows us Louis in a seemingly worse state than he was in at the start of the film, and this grimly pessimistic outcome seems to jar with the mildly optimistic thrust of the story.  With its childlike simplicity, Au coeur de la ville doesn't quite have the impact it deserves as a piece of social realist drama, but as a concise statement of how the older generation is ill-used and ignored by society it is extremely effective, and it remains sadly pertinent to this day.

Film Synopsis

Louis, a solitary man in his early sixties, earns a modest crust working as a sandwich man for a small advertising firm in Paris run by Monsieur Verdier.  One evening, whilst pounding the streets with his sandwich board on his back, he notices a little girl standing on the banks of the River Seine.  It is all too clear to the old man that the distressed infant is about to throw herself into the river, so he approaches her and gains her confidence.  Louis takes the girl back to his home - a modest shack situated next to a busy railway track - and offers her a temporary place to stay until he can work out what to do with her.  It occurs to him that she is an orphan who ran away from a state-run institution, and as she seems to have taken a liking to him, he decides to let her stay a while longer.  The girl is strangely reluctantly to tell Louis anything about herself, not even her name, but she has clearly developed an affection for him and his little dog Arthur.

Louis's act of kindness causes him some difficulty with Monsieur Verdier, who berates him for having failed to carry out his sandwich man duties whilst he was befriending the little girl.  To redeem himself, Louis agrees to dress up as a Mexican as he delivers leaflets promoting a café in the area.  In this guise, Louis steals a doll for his adopted granddaughter, and ends up being arrested for shoplifting.  The police are too busy with more important matters so Louis is set free and he returns to the little girl at his hovel and hands her the doll.  After he has related a fantastic story about an Aztec emperor, the girl tells him her name: Monique.

When Verdier learns that Louis has once again let him down, the old man is dismissed and must start looking for a new job.  After a futile visit to the labour exchange, he comes across an advertisement for a job as housekeeper to an elderly eccentric Marquise, at her grand house just outside Paris.  Louis manages to get the job and he can hardly wait to tell Monique the good news.  Little does he know that the police are on his trail, convinced that he has abducted the child.  Just when things seem to be going well for Louis, he discovers the reason why Monique ran away from home.  Ashamed at having lost her mother's purse, she felt she could not go back home and thereupon made up her mind to drown herself.  Realising that the girl has a mother who is anxiously awaiting her return, Louis takes her back to her home and walks away, to resume his former solitary existence.