On the Heights of Despair By AiméeFor his collaboration with the Continental during the Occupation when he made Le Corbeau (1943), Henri-Georges Clouzot was barred from filmmaking for four years. After the sanctions were lifted, Clouzot returned with a dazzling piece of comedie humaine: Quai des Orfèvres (1947). The film features an ambitious chanteuse Jenny and her hapless pianist-accompanist husband Maurice who find themselves involved in the murder of a lecherous admirer of Jenny’s. Eventually, a minor character Paolo is found guilty of the crime. After Maurice is released from prison to return home, the couple celebrates a happy Christmas together. If one takes Quai des Orfèvres at face value, the film can be read as a conventional Christmas tale with an unsurprising ending. However, a closer look at the film’s characterization and aesthetic choices suggests otherwise. The multi-layered, self-reflective film essentially resists the sentimental optimism that its Hollywood counterparts persist to promote and calls into question the fetishism of glamour and style. Clouzot further directs the spectator’s gaze onto a disenchanting world of desires and despair, and places the cinematic apparatus that produces the desires under examination. The film presents the spectator with a study of man and women, of their desires and despair. The arriviste torch singer Jenny is constructed as the center of desires. The first time the spectator encounters Jenny is through Maurice’s surveillant yet lustful gaze. In a point of view shot, the viewer discovers Jenny sitting confidently on the table with her legs half-covered by a luxurious fur coat while she is practicing her Belle époque-reviving risqué songs on the side of a flirtatious music producer. Maurice desires Jenny but is often overshadowed by her other more resourceful admirers. Imbued with jealousy and despair, Maurice eventually resorts to his murderous impulse. In the following shots bridged by Jenny’s alluring delivery of the voluptuous song “Avec son tra-la-la”, the viewer soon discovers another admirer Dora, who is smoking and fixatedly gazes at Jenny. It later becomes explicit that Dora has feelings for Jenny but her love is without hope and will never be requited. In the subsequent shot from Dora’s point of view, the viewer finds Jenny practicing the song in a three-way mirror and stares at the fragmented, multiplied images of herself, as if she desires her own images. The accumulation of desires finally reaches its peak as Jenny performs on the stage, exciting her audience with bubbly lines and apt body dynamics. Jenny actively seeks others’ gazes and derives pleasure in being looked at, for she believes her sexual energy and desirability will help her secure fame and money. But eventually her desire for becoming a movie star is unrealized. In one way or another, Jenny, Maurice, and Dora all become involved in the murder of Brignon because of their desires for something, whether it is love, sex, fame, or capital. Clouzot’s camera articulates the play of desires. As the film progresses, the desires create immense troubles for his characters.It may seem that Clouzot is recycling the most widely used tropes and unimaginatively uses cinematic devices that belong to the inventory of classical Hollywood cinema from the early-to-mid century. However, while sharing some basis in narrative and aesthetics, Quai des Orfèvres differs from its Hollywood counterparts at a fundamental level for its subversive practice that aims to negate pleasure and casts ridicule on the fetishism itself. Such subversion is evidenced by Clouzot’s malicious choice of casting Simone Renant as a lesbian in plaid knit sweater, thick wool trousers, and other airtight unattractive plain clothes – a character that resists fetishistic gazes. Apart from two close-up shots that glamorize Renant’s face, Clouzot’s camera does not give the spectator access to fetishizing the body of the “highly elegant, blond and pink apparition, who at the time was regarded as the most beautiful actress in Paris” . Moreover, Renant with her eye-catching blondness and dress in American style functions as a stand-in for Hollywood fetish stars. However, by denying access to her body and glamor, Clouzot inverts her role and uses her images precisely to resist “the very objectification she appears to embody.” Another example is Jenny’s photograph that Dora takes for an American magazine. In the well-lit room where everything radiates glamour, Jenny fakes to cover her chest with her hand and strikes a mawkish lover-girl pose when Dora presses the shutter. The saccharine image is more idiotic than attractive. By framing Jenny, the supposedly most attractive and alluring female in the film, in an unattractive manner, Clouzot pokes fun at the fetishism of style. In the same scene, Clouzot further raises awareness of existence of the invisible cinematic apparatus that projects glamour and desire on the screen. The scene begins with a disorienting shot in washed-out whiteness. The light bulb on the upper left corner of the screen becomes discernable as Dora wields her lighting equipment to another direction away from the camera. These images are reminiscent of cinematographic projection and the experience of watching a movie, as traditionally the viewers would be sitting in a dark theatre and watching optically constructed images on the screen by virtue of a shaft of light from the projector. As the camera pans to track Dora as she approaches Jenny, Clouzot deliberates shows the several small pieces of lighting equipment positioned around Jenny. Evidently, the few small pieces of light equipment essentially are not capable of producing the abundant lighting that illuminates Jenny’s face and body. In a semi-revealing-of-device manner, Clouzot directs the attention of the viewer to the technology and the very process of mechanical production of images. With Jenny’s sickly-sweet photograph dietetically produced and overly sweet sentimentality spreads over the screen, it seems that the camera suggests to the viewer that the other glamorous images produced through the history of cinema are ultimately illusionary.The composition of the shot where Dora stands by her lighting equipment also resonates with the opening scene, in which lights burst through the window of a smoky, dark cell from the upper left corner, spawning a sense of hopelessness and entrapment. The prison images not only function diegetically to create a dank atmosphere for the forthcoming crime and to foreshadow the fate of the murderer. Furthermore, invoking Plato’s allegory of the cave, the static images of dark cell become a metaphor for the film. As Jean-Louis Baudry maintains, “Plato’s prisoner is the victim of an illusion reality…h(huán)e is the prey of an impression, of an impression of reality”. In this sense, a credulous spectator is the prisoner. Fascinated by the glamorous images, he or she embraces the romance between Jenny and Maurice and the engrossing policier in its totality. Quai des Orfèvres itself is producing an impression of reality, a mysterious dark underground world readily to be consumed by the viewer. However, Clouzot's self-conscious camera is also creating counter-images that bring the apparatus capable of fabricating such an impression reality to the forefront, to visualize the invisible and remind the spectator of the images’ illusionary nature. In another place, self-reflectively, Clouzot has a police officer shout out “not in the river!” in surprise as Maurice tells the policemen his gun, which is considered as the gun Maurice uses that kills Brignon, is at home. Referring to the common trope, it is as if Clouzot almost intended to have someone shout out that this was only a movie.As one scrutinizes the film, it is also not difficult to discern the two-faced, complex natur。

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