New French film

When I was writing Huguette, my story set in post war France, research led me to the life of an actress, Corinne Luchaire. Obscure now but she’d been a huge movie star, began acting at fifteen and by twenty was called the ‘French Garbo’. This was during the 1930’s and into WW2. She acted in films during the Occupation and lived the high life at parties with German officials. A glamorous collaborator eating oysters, drinking Champagne while Parisians stood with ration tickets in bread lines. In 1944 she had a child with a Luftwaffe pilot then fled liberated Paris with escaping Germans and her father to a castle in Germany. Post war would find her name stripped from her movie credits, put on trial convicted of collaboration, her father executed for war crimes, writing a memoir because she was broke and at twenty eight years old dead of tuberculosis. All but forgotten.

Fascinated, I searched this era in French movies for what it would have been like for my character, Huguette, to work in a film studio during this era. Explore the time when things weren’t black and white but shades of gray, the struggle to live and what it cost. The moral choices. The ambiguity and nuances Huguette would face in trying to survive. Corinne Lelouche, who was inspired by this actress Corinne Luchaire, became a pivotal character in Huguette’s life. With the facts I’d found she found her way in the story.

But now Corinne Luchaire is back on the big screen in Rays and Shadows,

I have yet to see the film. But it feels like there’s strong tie in to HUGUETTE. 

Few films or television shows have explored this dark time. Lacombe Lucien by Louis Malle, Monsieur Klein with Alain Delon in the 1970’s and Un Village Française the more recent TV saga of a nameless village in the Dordogne. But these are fictional. Like my story, Huguette.

The film Rays and Shadows is based on real characters. The actor Jean Dujardin, who plays Jean Luchaire, the journalist and pacifist turned collaborator and his daughter Corinne Luchaire a film actress who followed her father and collaborated. In interviews Jean Dujardin says in accepting this role he had to understand this man he plays who was executed for his crimes in the war. But first he had to understand the times and why a leading journalist turned from pacifism to racism and how it corrupted him. And understand the ambiguity. In a magazine article of June 1939, recently sent to me by my friend Françoise, I saw photos of the then intact Luchaire family, a bourgeois family eating dinner together, Corinne playing piano with her mother, her sisters dancing and thought of the way this family was destroyed in ten years; Corinne would be dead of TB, with a young child from a German officer and stripped of her rights, her father executed, her mother trying to keep what remained of her family together.

The film is more than three hours long but I’ll be seeing it in April!

Thanks for reading,

Cara

www.carablack.com