La Poison (1951)

 Sacha Guitry's "La Poison"

After Sacha Guitry's tumultuous experiences in the war and his arrest and detainment after the war, he was in a state of disillusionment. The French government was profiting off of the misery of its citizens and providing an environment of distrust and melancholy. Once he began to make films again, he finally was able to collaborate with one of France's greatest screen performers, Michel Simon, on his 1951 film "La Poison." 

"La Poison" centers on an older couple, Paul and Blandine, who are miserable together and spend all day contemplating the other's death. One day, Paul tricks a defense lawyer into constructing the perfect situation that would yield the best defense against the murder of his wife. After killing his wife, Paul is arrested and learns that his wife had poisoned his wine. During the trial, Paul begins to get overly confident of his victory and yet is still acquitted.  

One of my first takeaway from the film is the framing of the subject matter. Guitry is one of the directors from the pre-war 'poetic realist' period of French filmmaking. Although he was not intimately associated with the movement and sort of did his own style, he was still making his films during this movement. This movement typically consisted of a story structure that consisted of external events creating the environment for a good man to end up a murder by the film's end. The entire point of the films with this structure was to examine the circumstances that led to this tragedy, which typically pointed to some sort of broken system that pushes people to extreme behaviors. However, with a decade of war separating these films from 1951's "La Poison," the central figure who ends up murdering someone does so now due to premeditated intensions that are derived from domestic dissatisfaction. It is not external circumstances which drove this man to an extremity. Rather, the man is already in a state of extremity to begin the film. The soul is already corrupted. What "La Poison" does is re-contextualize these story structure for a modern social perspective. The man now starts off corrupted and the governmental/societal structure now is simply providing his absolution. He can now successfully murder his wife thanks to a judicial system that can get murders acquitted, thus creating a quasi-reward system for corruption itself. What the 1930s French films taught us was that a murder might not really be a murderer, but a man who pushed into a corner by his social structure. They were films that created a sense of empathy for a potential murder. Now, Guitry is using that instructed empathy as a weapon against itself. Perhaps Guitry is saying through his film that, now a decade removed, the lessons taught by those films are now being turned on their head in a new post-war landscape to spread external corruption and reward internal corruption.

I think this notion is quite adequate, given Guitry's filmography. Guitry typically dives into themes regarding rewarded bad behavior. For example, his 1936 film "The Story of a Cheat," centers on a man who is constantly being rewarded for the bad and criminal things he does. Apply this to "La Poison" and you begin to see a through-line of Guitry's work. Rather than a governmental and social structure pushing people to criminal and tragic circumstances and then punishing them for it, Guitry perhaps surmises that the governmental and social structures of France were simply incompetent, and reward bad behavior and punished good behavior, thus creating a society which allowed for festering resentments, troubling actions, and general corruption.

This will be the final Sacha Guitry film I will watch and I felt as though it was a nice cherry on top of a career. I know this is not the final one of his career, and I did not watch nearly enough of his filmography to surmise an encompassing viewpoint of his work. But, the five films I did watch seem to be the five films that are the pinnacle of his success and perfectly encapsulate his notions on internal corruption, desire, and the follies of human behavior in completely comical and observational ways.