About

“Not a ‘burlesque’, nor a ‘fantasy film’: I loathe fantasy as much as the picturesque. Let’s call it a ‘madcap comedy.’” – Robert Bresson

A comedy short filled with slapstick humour and raucous pratfalls, Robert Bresson’s first film is closer in tone to Chaplin, Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct or the Marx Brothers than anything else in his own body of work.

Bresson, then a painter and occasional commercial photographer, received funding in 1934 from Roland Penrose, a major patron of the surrealist art movement, to make his first foray into cinema. Upon its release, the film met with mixed reviews and commercial disappointment, leading Bresson to trim three songs from the film in order to shorten its length. This inauspicious start hindered the filmmaker’s burgeoning directorial career – although he assisted on several screenplays in the subsequent years, it would be nearly a decade until he returned behind the camera with Angels of Sin 1943.

The film was then lost for more than half a century, before being rediscovered at the Cinémathèque française in near-complete form in 1987. Bresson spoke of his happiness to revisit the film upon its unearthing, particularly praising the score by Jean Wiener, with whom he would collaborate again on Au Hasard Balthazar 1966, Mouchette 1967 and A Gentle Woman 1969. Although its tone is far zanier and comic than his later works, the early seeds of Bresson are still visible: his rhythmic montage, his drops of wry irony, and his precise deployment of sound against image.

The plot involves two fictional neighbouring states: Crogandia and Miremia. In Crogandia, the chancellor (French clown Béby) attends four extravagant ceremonies. Meanwhile, a Miermian princess (Andrée Servilanges) in love with the chancellor attempts a solo flight across the border, all the while pursued by her father on horseback. The loose structure provides ample opportunity for an array of physical gags that poke fun at pompous political posturing in this brisk and anarchic comedy short.