La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet)

Image credit: Wikipedia

While characters such as Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman might be outshining the menfolk in the cinema today, the whole ‘sisters are doing it for themselves’ thing is nothing new. Indeed one of the earliest celebrated works of feminist cinema and slams against the patriarchy goes back as far as 1922, with Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet).

The film tells the story of a despondent and unfulfilled provincial housewife (Germaine Dermoz) whose only escape from her monotonous existence is daydreaming. Her husband, a man with a warped sense of humour is constantly playing a prank on her in which he holds an unloaded revolver to his head and threatens to shoot. When her husband begins to intrude upon her daydreams, she decides to take the fun away from his joke by putting bullets in the gun.

The Smiling Madame Beudet proves to be an important piece in movie history for a number of reasons. First, it is one of the earliest recorded works of feminist cinema. The film is an exploration into patriarchal oppression both culturally and within the home. This is highlighted by the heroine’s lack of control in all of her daily ventures, including the straightening of the house. One particularly poignant scene, which is both humorous and heartbreaking, is the constant battle of the flower vase in which Madame Beudet will move it elegantly to the side of the table, only to have Monsieur Beudet shift it back to the centre. A simple, but powerful metaphor for the amount of control exercised by the patriarchy, it is these delicate motifs and scenes that give the film its power.

Image credit: YouTube

Alongside being one of the earliest examples of feminist cinema, the film is also celebrated as a work of experimental cinema, with Madame Beudet’s daydream sequences using an array of clever photographic tricks and filmic twists to convey the fantasy of the scenes as well as the drama, hostility, and melancholy behind them.

The film’s short duration mixed with the uncanny amount of suspense it manages to build within that time –which my or may not find satisfactory release- makes The Smiling Madame Beudet a most moving piece of cinema, even if it does leave one feeling a tad dispirited at the end.

Director: Germaine Dulac, 1922

Cast: Germaine Dermoz, Alexandre Arquilliere, Jean d’Yd, and Madeleine Guitty