After 18 months of preparation, Grémillon was compelled to abandon Le Printemps de la liberté, a period film on 1848, and accepted to substitute the playwright Jean Anouilh at the head of Pattes blanches, a film that the latter had written but was forced to abandon for health reasons. The director moved the setting from the nineteenth century to the present and shoots the first outdoor scenes in ‘his’ Brittany, where the story centers around five characters: Odette, femme fatale that followed her lover Jock, a hotelier, in a village on the coast where there is a castle inhabited by the secluded Julien De Kériadec, nicknamed ‘pattes blanches’ (white spats) by the villagers. The man, who soon falls madly in love with Odette, is revered by the young hunchback servant Mimi and is hated by his step-brother Maurice (the young and feverish Michel Bouquet). Kériadec decides to sell the castle to win over Odette, but she chooses instead to marry Jock, thus guaranteeing her economic stability. Maurice persuades Odette to humiliate Kériadec, who, in a fit of rage, chases her through the mist and ends up strangling her and throwing her off a cliff. The dark and desperate universe of Anouilh inspires Grémillon’s imagination, as he finely crafts the features of each character, enriching them with contradictions and subtleties. In particular little Mimi, with her angelic face and a deformed body, who tries to help the wretched lord of the manor, and Odette, a more aggressive and carnal version of a femme fatale when compared to Madeleine/Mireille Balin of Gueule d’amour. The theme of degradation as a consequence of lustful passion also makes a return in Pattes blanches. The sick and sensual atmosphere that gathers around the exuberance and malice of Odette is rendered by Grémillon with an increasingly distressing and dark mood. The art direction of Léon Barsacq (who had collaborated with Grémillon on Lumière d’été) contributes to the already baroque dimension of this noir mélo. The castle with enormous yet desolate and empty rooms, which in the final sequence (when Kériadec plots to set the manor on fire and commit suicide) are filled with dry hay, is a prime example. The sequence of Odette’s murder is of particular visual beauty, especially the shot of Kériadec holding in his hand the veil of the woman he dropped among the rocks.
(Roberto Chiesi)