Jean Renoir | Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment) / 1959

queer by definition

by Douglas Messerli

Jean Renoir (screenplay, based on Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Lewis Stevenson, and director) Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment) / 1959

 

Jean Renoir’s exploration of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story takes the previous Hollywood motion picture route of creating his Hyde, named Opale, and his Jekyll, Dr. Cordelier, to be heterosexual fiends. His is not, as I see it, a LGBTQ movie.

     There is a moment in his film, Le Testament du docteur Cordelier, when the mother of a young man brings his case before the famous psychiatrist—just after Cordelier (John-Louis Barrault) has narratively admitted his “immoral” attraction to his young nurse—explaining that her 18-year-old son has been behaving perversely because he has been sleeping with their maid, in which we wonder whether or not the doctor, in fact, is toying with the possibility of finding a way to further corrupt the boy through his own sexual involvement. The “crime” seems so absolutely ridiculous, even by 1959 standards of moral rectitude, that when the doctor arranges for a time to meet with the boy we have to wonder what he might be planning, particularly given his own backroom activities. Why arrange to see a boy who seems to be a perfectly healthy heterosexual kid?

       But it comes to nothing. We never find out what happens or even if he actually meets with this “patient.” Does the good doctor actually believe he needs “curing?” That his actions are indeed “perverse?”

       In fact, Cordelier’s problems seems to be that he is so psychologically confused that he has mixed up normal heterosexual desire with perverse desires that must be kept under control, despite the fact that the nurse is far more ready to have of sex with him than he with her gives us some idea of the delusions which lead to his attempt to develop of a formula for releasing all feelings of transgression.

       The crimes this Jekyl, Cordelier commits as Opale, are so truly monstrous that they make that the S&M-like scratches and whip-marks of the Hyde of the 1931 and 1941 US films seem almost benign. Even the murders of Hyde in the Hollywood films are far more logical representing as they do women and men that stand in Hyde’s way or may possibly expose him.

      Except for the case of his psychiatric competitor Docteur Séverin (Michel Vitold), a man nearly as possessed as Opale, Opale kills seemingly a random men or women, even in the terrifying early scene in this film, attacking a young child—a scene that could never be realized in a US film of the period, not even perhaps in 1959.

       But perhaps, just for that very reason, because Opale is so absolutely wild and uncontrollable, he is, particularly as Barrault performs him, almost comic. If in the US films there is an odd sense, left over perhaps from the Stevenson work, of Hyde being a still compelling being—even if he appears as a hairy monster—in Renoir’s work Opale is not all “attractive,” but somehow charming and oddly appealing, nonetheless.      

      In his complete “freedom” from all sense of moral duty he stands almost a healthy alternative to the people around him, the ordinary street people who gang up for moral retribution and Cordelier’s circle of friends whose views are so narrow that they seek to protect each other from even seeming to be involved with the real world, particularly working to keep their friend Cordelier’s name from in any way being connected with Opale, to whom his lawyer Maître Joly (Teddy Bilis) fully knows Cordelier has left his entire estate.

     If nothing else Opale serves as a wonderful counterbalance to a world in which everything is a sin and all behavior must be controlled.

     Opale, in Renoir’s hands, is almost a Beckettian fool, behaving so very bizarrely that all normal people naturally avoid him; it is he who comes after them just because they are so absolutely terrified of anything out of their narrow limits of defined normality.

      It appears that most critics read this work as a sincere lecture by Renoir of the disaster when the natural is separated from the intellect, when raw desire is segregated from rational decision-making.

 

     From this perspective it is understandable why these critics might perceive Barrault’s performance as being extreme and “lacking balance” as film commentator Tom Milne ends his otherwise quite perceptive description of Barrault as “prancing, twitching, moving with the animal grace of a dancer...creating an extraordinary, chimerical figure whose intrusion into the real Paris streets lends them a bizarre, unsettling air of menace.” For him and others, Barrault takes those qualities, however, beyond characterization. But for me that is just the point. Opale is outside the limits and definitions of the world in which he discovers himself. He is so far beyond rationality, that no one can even begin to make sense of his actions, let alone explain his possible whereabouts, or even remember what he looked like.

      Moreover, except for the physical pain Opale seems to suffer, this variation of a wolfman seems perfect happy in his perfidious behavior, almost pleased with himself, a bit cocky in his seeming imperviousness. Barrault looks truly more pained with the suave smile of Cordelier at his dinner party than he is walking like a mad Charlie Chaplin down the city street, ready to knock the first person he encounters over the head as many times as possible with his cane.

      In short, his behavior almost seems to be justified by the tightly restricted beings who surround him, forever attempting to impede his motions.

      In that sense, finally, although this Hyde, Opale and his Jekyll-like creator Cordelier seem to be locked into normative heterosexuality, we can certainly agree that Cordelier is closeted and Opale is the figure he has released. The closets of Cordelier’s own studio are constantly being open and closed, just like the doors to various rooms of Séverin’s clinic. Trucks and cars arrive en masse upon which the doors are opened to show policeman exiting and entering. Clearly, this is a world in which things are kept behind doors, and letting them out generally represents danger.

       Whereas the friends and staff in all of the English-American variations of Stevenson’s tale behave with incredible restraint and rational behavior, here people gang up in groups demanding justice, the police are called the moment danger is sensed, and even while their master suffers locked away in his laboratory, his servants all seem to be having their own mental breakdowns, unable to simply stand up and do something about the screams and shouts they hear emanating from the outbuilding. Everyone in this work appears to be suffering from a kind of hysteria, certainly Docteur Séverin and, at times, Joly. Only Opale, despite his utter unpredictably, seems slightly sane, able to carry through with action. 

      If there is no question that his actions go beyond social, political, and cultural bounds they are at least actions, not the gestures of individuals unable to imagine even how to move or proceed. They are certainly queer, but liberating by that very sense of being apart from all normality.

      In short, if Renoir’s version of Hyde is not sexually queer he is in every other sense. And, in that fact, he at least is interesting. Joly’s final insistence that Cordelier, lost in the body of Opale, must suffer his fate in punishment for his deeds speaks volumes for the society that has forced Cordelier to seek out such an alternative in the first place. And even the would-be obedient Docteur defies Joly’s dictum, destroying Opale so that he will die looking at least like the man he desires to be even if that version of himself could never live up to what was expected of him.

     And in that sense only, Cordelier “gets away” with all of his crimes. He has freed himself from the consequence of having attempted to escape. 

     In the end, we have to wonder whether the “horrible experiments” to which the English refers were not less horrific than the terrible restrictions the society itself has put upon its own existence. Even before Opale’s manifestation, Cordelier’s world was one where nearly every kind of variance in behavior was queer by definition.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).