Without a future, a hidden masterpiece of cinema reappears

This sublime and little-known melodrama by Max Ophüls filmed in France in 1939 benefits from a theatrical release in a restored copy. A real cinema event.

“ Not bad ! » replies Max Ophüls about his Without Tomorrow to the young Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut then journalists at Cinema Notebooks came to question him. This terse response was perhaps enough to eclipse from the cinephile and collective consciousness this 1939 melodrama directed by the German Jewish filmmaker then in transit in France before joining the United States. The film is now being released in theaters in a restored version accompanied by two canonized works: Pleasure (1952) and Madam of… (1953) The idea of ​​the distributor Acacias is very relevant since Without tomorrow prefigures both through its subject (the fall of a woman prisoner of social conventions) and its complex staging suffocating the beings caught in its nets, the masterpieces to come. “ Not bad ! “, Indeed.

Nice lie

This is the story of Evelyne (Edwige Feuillère), a coach in a Parisian cabaret who sees her toddler, who has just been kicked out of his boarding school, come back to her and especially her lover left behind ten years previously. This double resurgence brings with it an unbearable existential dilemma which forces her to hide her real profession from the man she has never stopped loving. She then decides to portray an upper-middle-class existence. Evelyne temporarily abandons her shabby pension in Montmartre and rents a luxurious apartment in the beautiful districts of Paris with the help of a pimp to hide her downgrade and decline. “ Look, does it look real? » she asks her accomplice once installed. “ What ? “, ” Me » replies Evelyne, conscious of having become part of a decor. Stuck in her own lie, she advances tragically towards a destiny that we suspect is ruthless. “ Lying, that's all we do in life… » A total disillusionment which cannot be denied.

The bodies pile up

Max Ophüls filmmaker-aesthete films here a world cluttered with itself, constantly suffocated by an overflow of light, objects, confined spaces… In the first minutes, images are superimposed where the signs of a Parisian cabaret flash to better catch the eye. The camera captures Edwige Feuillère in the cramped conditions of a setting where bodies pile up and exhibit themselves without an ounce of modesty. The job of trainer resting only on illusions (of charm, tenderness, etc.), everything here has the appearance of a small theater of horrors.

The photo of the film is signed by the German Eugen Schüffftan whose name was already associated with that of Ophüls (The Tender Enemy…) but also Fritz Lang (Metropolis) or Marcel Carné (The Quay of Mists) Through a very expressionist play of shadows and light, his work makes a frame that has become increasingly fragile vibrate feverishly from within.

The deepest loneliness

“ We must never let the world come close to our happiness… » says Evelyne melancholy. It is in the suspension of time (see the wonderful flashbacks under the Canadian snow) and space (finding refuge in the darkness to hide what surrounds us) that beauty can occur.

“ I have always been attracted by the world of pimps and girls, this world where so many unknown soldiers of love lie, which forms the shameful and yet real basis of bourgeois morality… », explained Ophüls in his Memories. This “bourgeois morality” is not what decides Evelyne to become a woman of the world, it is just a way of not disappointing a lover whom she has already fooled for love and convincing herself that nothing has happened. moved.

The latter, totally blinded by his own feelings, is incapable of seeing the distress signals sent by his beloved. “ Life is funny, we think we've forgotten everything, that we're strong, free, and then there it is, it all starts again… » he says prophetically without measuring the scope of this projection. Because the most tragic thing in this affair is the full and complete demonstration that the images that each person tries to send back of themselves condemn beings to the deepest solitude while giving them the illusion of covering with an ephemeral veil the darkness of the world. Without tomorrowthe title already assumed its melancholy part.

Without Tomorrow. By Max Ophüls. With: Edwige Feuillère, George Rigaud, Daniel Lecourtois, Mady Berry… Dist. The Acacias. Currently in theaters.