The Smiling Madame Beudet Reviews

(YT) Experimental, feminist, vanguardist, well acted by Arquilliére, the plot of the gun is a good devise, circular; inside is the woman imagination, but a bit confusing and chaotic...

To be honest, I wasn't really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was on the '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die' list, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, it was another tricky short movie to analyse. Indeed, at first, it seemed to be about a rather lonely and depressed woman pretty much stuck at home and dealing with a rather weirdo husband. In fact, she never really smiled and looked grumpy through the whole duration. It’s only afterwards that I discovered that this movie had been directed by a woman which made the whole thing even more intriguing. In fact, it is usually considered as one of the first feminist movies ever made. It mostly due to the fact that the main character was a fairly regular woman while her husband was rather grotesque which was a really unusual approach back in the 1920’s. Anyway, I was above all intrigued by its visual aspect. Indeed, that’s the cool thing with such old movies, back then, all filmmakers had to experiment because the actual rules of film making didn’t exist yet. In this case, they came up with something so striking, mixing some hyper realism with some surreal imagery. The end-result was therefore at once very pure and simple and yet quite complex as well. Of course, you could argue that the plot was really simplistic but that’s not where lies the power of this movie. Indeed, above all, it had a strong visual aspect and I wonder if this movie could have been an inspiration for David Lynch, the master mindf*cker. Anyway, it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.