Lucrèce Borgia (Abel Gance, 1935)

Talking about his absurd Tour de Nesles released in 1954, the film which marked his return to directing after twelve years of exile and unemployment, Abel Gance, with the exaggerated style that characterized him, said that he had made this film not to live, but "to not die". It's funny, and the nuance is subtle. But frankly, it had been a while since something was wrong, and certainly if The Tower of Nesles was absolutely unworthy, an uneasy mix of silly melodramatic adventures, overt nudity and bad taste innuendos, there had been a forerunner. The most widely available print of Lucrèce Borgia starts ... with a visa from th board of National Education. I guess the production company wanted to look respectable, and imply that this film would provide a lesson in history. It finally reminds us of this mania borrowed by Gance from Griffith, of peddling (in Napoleon, he constantly does) the worst rumors of history and of giving them a respectable stamp by putting the word "Historical" on a title...

We thus witness a series of episodes in the life of the Borgias, whose father Alexander VI, a mercenary become pope, is interpreted with some restraint by Roger Karl. The eldest child, Giovanni (Maurice Escande), is a friend of the arts, and of course, from there on, the undertones to make him a homosexual abound. Caesar Borgia is, to my knowledge, the worst rôle ever by Gabriel Gabrio: my absolute favorite passage (?)of the film sees him seated at a table eating like Séverin-Mars in J'accuse, that is to say, in a dirty and brutal fashion. Suddenly, a woman is brought to him He quickly rips her dress, opening on her nude bosom, and he raises his bulging eyes while rasping "Beautiful" ... all the rest is in this mode. Finally, Lucrece, interpreted by Edwige Feuillère, gives its title to the film, and one can better understand the finality of the film for Gance, noting that she was made up so as to resemble Claudette Colbert.  Colbert took an infamous milk bath in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, and we know that the young Gance loved the cinema of DeMille... So Lucrèce Borgia is his take on "Sign of the Cross", his answer to all the folklore of scandal that surrounds the film of 1932, and as such, it is particularly impressive.

And so, in a mise-en-scène that is certainly good, but not revolutionary, Gance allows himself to have a go at all the bad taste: a bath of Edwige Feuillère, immersed to the waist only, so that the spectators can get an eyeful. A fight between two hairy and muscled guys, to be enjoyed by the ladies, both the spectators and the female members of the cast. Many orgies, to which Caesar Borgia participates regularly, it goes without saying. Various figurative rapes. Meals in which one eats with fingers wallowing in fruit crushed by bodies of the topless female extras ! Naughty dancing:there is a bosom obsession with Gance, we see it at work here...

(Ok, we get the point !!!)

what's the lesson in all this? Well, on the one hand, Gance, who could not really pretend he was on an educational mission with this film, did everything on a grand scale here, but we still do not know much at the end of this film (Vaguely narrated by Nicolas Machiavelli) about Lucrece Borgia. To the popular belief, which made of her an intriguing and poisonous, the director responds by making her a ravishing idiot, a bit sensual, eager to experience love, but who is too fickle to be satisfied with one husband at a time ; And she's also a friend of the arts, anxious in the last scene to leave a trace in history that would be positive

...Well, she didn't.

Speaking about History, precisely, the film enlightens us a little more on what Gance had retained: History advances. For example, when the Borgias intrigue, rape, eat, plot, assassinate, e tutti quanti, the monk Savonarola travels Italy and sows doubt and revolt. Of course, he will be burned at the stake (By the way he's played by Antonin Artaud, and his rôle is similar to his part in The end of the world, another particularly unwillingly funny film by Gance), but his views would in the long run put a little order in the Vatican ... In short, it reminds me of the character of Violine who wanted to assassinate Saint-Just and Robespierre in Napoleon, who are we to meddle with history? "They're too big for us," she concluded before changing her mind. Gance shows us people, like Lucrèce, who live on the edge of history, who will have only a tiny incidence, and shows us once again that his cinema is often an ode to... man's powerlessness in front of history. Look at Jean Diaz and his useless poems to prevent the war (J'accuse), or Norma who fails to save his brother and attends, stunned, his fatal fall (La Roue), Max Linder unable to win a bet that simply required of him to stay one night in a castle (Au secours). The heroes of Gance all have a sort of sublime tendency to fail. It's troubling.

And this acceptance of failure is good news for Gance, because, except for the performance of Mrs. Feuillère who, although not hampered by too many costumes, is absolutely excellent, this silly film is a failure from the first to the last frame.