The Secret History

Peter Greenaway's Rembrandt mystery "Nightwatching" and 1956 tragedy "Gervaise" are now on DVD.

Rene Clement’s “Gervaise” (1956) makes far less of a show of its historical setting — based on Émile Zola’s “L’Assommoir” and so laying a gimlet eye upon the Paris of the 1800s and the conditions of Parisian poverty, the film nevertheless feels contemporary, as if in some French neighborhoods in 1956 people could and still did live like this. One of those pre-New Wave films that didn’t persist in the cultural forebrain despite a slew of awards (you’d always see it listed as a winner in Venice and an Oscar nominee, but had few chances to see it), Clement’s movie is, of course, a tragedy, following the rather mousey laundress heroine (an utterly guileless Maria Schell) from one miserable lout of a man (who leaves behind two children, sans marriage), to another (a good-hearted but illiterate drunk), to another (a unionizing blacksmith who cannot stay out of prison), only to find herself at one point saddled, in one way or another, with all three, in a story whose devious construction skewers masculine loyalty, female spite, gossip, alcoholism and what Zola saw as his era’s almost feral selfishness.

As in Zola, the film is not a matter of style so much as scandalous content — is it the first film to graphically insist on a drunk’s vomit, all over the heroine’s connubial bed, as a plot point? Sometimes hammy in that ‘50s kind of way, but deft at evoking the 1800s with just a few old sections of Paris, “Gervaise” finds its power in accumulation — Zola’s “naturalism” means that no happy ending is in sight for these people.

Or, actually, that no end is in sight at all: Zola famously told the story of these characters’ extended families through 20 novels, and thus the wounding end of Clement’s movie, in which Nana the little daughter of our lost heroine launches into the streets by herself, soon in Zola’s scheme to become a whore and then the maneating demimondaine Nana from the novel of the same name, itself filmed at least ten times over the years (but first by Jean Renoir). If you know some of this, a little blonde urchin with dirt on her cheeks skipping across the cobblestones can cut you.

“Nightwatching” (E1 Entertainment) and “Gervaise” (Criterion Collection) are now available on DVD.

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