Germaine Dulac | La Princess Mandane / 1928 [Difficult to obtain]

the abdication

by Douglas Messerli

 

Germaine Dulac (screenwriter, based on the fiction by Pierre Benoît, and director) La Princess Mandane / 1928 [Difficult to obtain]

 

The creator of this fascinating upending of masculine expectation was born in France in 1882 and educated in a traditional Roman Catholic boarding school, which later made her rebel against religious orthodoxy.

      She first drew attention as a columnist in leftist newspapers and journals, writing essays with an obvious feminist perspective while still proselytizing for contemporary theater, opera, dance, music and, later, film. Although she had begun making films as early as 1915 with her husband’s help, it wasn’t until she divorced Louis-Albert Dulac in 1920 and began a lesbian relationship with Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville—one that lasted to the end of her life—that she began her more radical career, producing such surrealist-like works as La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet) in 1922/23, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) of 1928, that she gained renown.

       Perhaps her most notable work is the one I write about here, Princess Mandane, also of 1928. On the surface, at least for much of this film, the plot sounds almost like a turn-of-the-century romance, but her images reveal something quite different, and by the end of the story, we realize just how radical this work truly is.

     A princess (Edmonde Guy) living deep in the land of the Tartars, is turned into a prisoner in her own palace. Although she governs the small kingdom of Mingrelia, her Council of Ministers have taken her captive when she declared her intention of abdicating.

      Coincidentally, in France an ordinary factory worker, Étienne (Ernest Van Duren), living unhappily with his beloved fiancée Annette, has volunteered to help his company by installing the wires to electrify Mingrelia. A dreamer who imaginings are far more exciting life, he sees the voyage as a trip into an exotic new world, and when he hears of the Princess’ dilemma, even imagines that he might be able to rescue the seeming “damsel in distress.”

         Having long forgotten the woman he left behind, Étienne determines to save the princess. Disguising himself as a diplomat, he is granted entry into her presence, immediately declaring his loyalty to her, and explaining that he hopes to find a way to help her escape. The dream-like princess seems more interested in his home city of Paris than the man himself, responding, ““Ah! Paris! It’s there that a woman can be a queen.”

         She finally explains that he first needs to help her retrieve her diamonds and crown hidden away in the safe that her Ministers have forbidden her to open.

         Étienne creates a series of events that distract her guards and allow the two and her maid to escape.

         By auto the three race through the countryside, followed by others in cars with a grand shootout, finally reaching the border. But here, instead of the typical romantic ending where she might fall into her savior’s arms in appreciation, Dulac has her central character behave quite peculiarly. As critic Michael Koresky wrote in his 2018 in Film Comment in “Queer & Now & Then: 1928”:

 

“Mandane does not romantically embrace Étienne: there is no expected lip-lock, nor is there any profession of love or devotion. Instead she graciously bows to the common man in an explicitly masculine gesture that also functions as a sudden, almost mocking, power reversal, thanks him for his service, and offers him her crown as a “token of her gratitude.” Judging by his look of almost horrified disappointment, he quickly realizes this is a mere consolation prize—the Princess is not his to claim. She and her female servant, glimpsed with their arms happily around each other, are clearly the intended romantic pair, with Étienne the dupe who has helped them reach safe distance, liberating them yet not with the desired outcome. The chauvinist dream has become a nightmare of rejection.”

    

     Soon after Étienne, realizing it has all been a dream, is happy to have his Annette to a true lover given his imaginary lover of his dream. In short, by seeming to challenge the conclusions of her own cinema, Duluc has, as Koresky reiterates, allows her mainstream audience to take heart in the heterosexual cinematic reality without either of them being more “true” than the other.   

      Accordingly, how can we discover the truth through cinema, a question which Duluc puts to the viewer by ending with Étienne and Annette attending an adventure film, Victor Tourjansky’s 1926 version of Jules Verne’s Michel Strogoff. Koresky describes the scene: “Dulac shows a line of moviegoers walking into the screening room, figures at a distance, superimposed over a wide beam of projector light, like they’re being lost in its fog. They become small, ghostlike, as though trudging towards the afterlife.”

       But of what, we have to ask does that “afterlife” consist? Does the cinemagoer return home with her film’s original adventure story about a woman who has found a way to escape with her female lover with the mere help of man, or does it tell us of the survival of a heterosexual relationship despite the dangerous fantasies of one of its partners? Has the male conjured up a lesbian reality or has the lesbian reality simply determined that the man has no choice but to return his rather humdrum life from which he was hoping to escape? We can wonder, hasn’t he, in reverse, abdicated the wonderment of his dreams, allowing himself to be locked away in the castle of normative life?

     That little light beamed from the projector can open our minds up to vast new experiences if only we let them or they can merely retell the realistic tales we already know and are destined to live out. To which should the cinema devote itself? the director seems to ask.

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).