Swanvale Halt Film Club: 'Prix de Beauté' (1930)

According to the film’s director Augusto Genina, star Louise Brooks mostly spent the time making Prix de Beauté drunk. If so, it doesn’t show, and even at the time (he maintained) the crew marvelled at the fact that she could look so good given that her cure for a hangover was three swigs of gin. Brooks moves luminously through an awkward, neither flesh-nor-fowl movie: her character’s name is Lucienne, but the first time she’s addressed she’s called Lulu, the sacrificial victim she played in Pandora’s Box the year before. Genina was enspelled by her smile, and in the finished result we can see why. 

In so far as what we get is the finished result. It’s a strange, transitional film, made in 1930 as the new sound technology was stamping and smashing its way through the movie industry, and was intended to be shown in both a silent and a sound version depending on what equipment any particular theatre had available. I saw the latter, which is – I think it’s not unfair to use the word – disfigured not only by the badly post-synchronised sound but also by a score which is so mismatched to the action it feels as though composer Wilhelm Zeller must have written it without actually watching the movie. In the early 2000s a silent version was reconstructed using an Italian silent print and a French sound one, and that – apparently, it’s only ever been seen at festivals – rearranges the scenes as well as introducing some elements which aren’t there in the relatively accessible sound version. That suggests that perhaps what I saw has been mucked about with a bit.

What remains is intermittently beautiful, and not just because of Brooks’ preternatural loveliness, but because of the use of light, the naturalism, and the still-silent-style supremacy of the visual image. It concludes, famously, with Lucienne dying in a screening room, her profile filling the bottom of the frame while her recorded self carries on singing above, an unforgettable and justly renowned image. But while Brooks fans try to rave about Prix de Beauté, the jealous-husband-kills-runaway-beauty-queen story is quite silly, even if the treatment, however mangled from what it might have been, raises it above the level the narrative warrants. And even then it doesn’t always succeed: close to the beginning Lucienne sings ‘Je n’ai qu’un amour, c’est toi’ on the beach to sullen beau André in a most unlikely fashion, a weird intrusion into a naturalistic scene (there was a tale that Edith Piaf did the voice-over, and one reviewer on imdb.com states ‘I recognised the unmistakable voice of Josephine Baker’; in fact it belonged to a barely-known singer called Hélène Caron, who recorded the song).

But I find the power of the film is something that Brooks’s beauty only heightens. When André murders Lucienne, it’s just the culmination of the misogyny and male violence that swirls around her from the film’s start: as she’s lusted over by André’s colleague Antonin and their friends on the beach; as she parades around at the beauty contest; as her image is passed along a row of newspaper editors; as she’s jostled and manhandled at a fair while men stuff their faces and test their strength, and Antonin wanders off to molest a girl in a skimpy costume advertising a peepshow, who knows she can’t move and whose look of suppressed disgust is perhaps the best performance in the film; as she dies watching herself on a screen, surrounded by rich men who have bought her. Her look of rapture at her own image becomes pitiful, and not just because she doesn't know her murderer is watching too: her only choice in life, it seems, lies between the domestic drudgery and imprisonment André offers her, and the more glamorous captivity, the furs and jewellery paid for by the moguls and aristocrats who, you know full well, will discard her one day. I don’t know how much of this was really in the minds of the movie-makers in 1930, but here in 2021, Prix de Beauté seems to be not only a film for our time, but even for our week.