Review of The Widow Couderc

This film is set in 1934 in rural France. The bus we see at the beginning indicates Dijon as its destination, and indeed the credits show that the film was actually made in a place called Cheuge which is about thirty kilometres north east of the city and on a canal. The church of this village is instantly recognizeable and is seen quite often throughout the film. Dijon is in the "Côte d'Or" department (21) and forms the north part of the region of Burgundy. La Veuve Couderc lives alone in a farmhouse and is at loggerheads with her inlaws who live on the other side of the Canal. One of the inlaws spends some time with her and some time with the other side. Enter an escaped prisoner ( Delon ) under the name of Jean Lavigne who helps Couderc carry an egg hatcher to her farm. She then invites him to stay for a few days there and gives him work to do in the fields and on the farm. She also feels a certain attraction towards him. This suits him as it is a good hiding place. He also has a brief affair with a young lady from the family of the inlaws who has an illegitimate child. This annoys Veuve Couderc who is jealous. But the inlaws don't like Lavigne's presence at the farm, build up a case against him, denounce him to the local police who enter the farm at daybreak to "take him out". The film is an excellent portrait of French country life and also denounces the most abject side of the French character - that people are dishonest, hypocritical and ready to denounce you to the authorities - something we saw a lot of in Word War II when numerous French people denounced Jews and other undesirables to the authorities who treated them worse than the occupying Germans and deported them to Labour camps. Some people may well find the film slow and boring and quite honestly, if I did not live in France and know something about the country, I probably would. But I ended up liking it surprising enough. You really feel, hear and almost smell the Burgundy countryside. The theme music by Philippe Sarde is magnificent and I especially liked the music from Le Bal and the way the village dancers were filmed. As there are no comments on the film in IMDb, I assume it is totally unknown outside France or at least has not made an impression on anyone. The principal actors, Alain Delon and Simone Signoret, are nevertheless two of France's greatest actors. The final "shoot-out" also generates a certain amount of suspense. The fact that the film is slow-moving, the paucity of the dialogues etc etc probably help to explain why abroad the film is not too well-known. By today's standards, it certainly seems slow !