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With this film, conceived during the occupation and released after the war, Claude Autant-Lara entered the realm of pure fantasy. Odette Joyeux stars as Sylvie, in love with a long-dead romantic figure from her family’s past. Sylvie’s father hires three actors to impersonate the ghost of her beloved, while the spirit himself (Jacques Tati, in his first feature-film role) stalks the grounds. Marrying a playful script, artful special effects, and wistful performances, Sylvie et le fantôme stages a delicate dance of enchantment.
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A charmingly playful, lyrical ghost story featuring one real ghost and three fakes, Sylvie et le fantôme was originally a stage production written and performed by Alfred Adam at the prestigious Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris in 1942. Claude Autant-Lara thought it would make a good film, in the style of whimsical ghost tales of the period like Marcel Carné’s Les visiteurs du soir and Noël Coward’s play Blithe Spirit. He also saw it as an opportunity to get back to what had drawn him to film in the first place: special effects and the movie magic of Georges Méliès. But the producers were harder to convince. Despite the fact that he had reassembled the proven team of screenwriter Jean Aurenche, cinematographer Philippe Agostini, and actor Odette Joyeux in the title role (she was already thirty but still playing sixteen!), Autant-Lara struggled to find financing. Finally, on January 29, 1945, with France freshly liberated and Hitler’s forces retreating east after their defeat in the Battle of the Bulge, the cameras began rolling on what would be his biggest success to date, a film blissfully unaware of contemporary events and a last fanciful flight away from the bitterness introduced by Douce, focusing once again on the romantic fortunes of a free-spirited young aristocrat—with the added twist that one of the rivals for her love is a genuine phantom.
The ghost in question is played by Jacques Tati, then a renowned music-hall entertainer making his first appearance on the screen. Autant-Lara had heard about Tati from his production director, Fred Orain, who had worked with Marcel Carné when he briefly considered Tati for the lead role in Children of Paradise. As the gentle ghost of an ill-fated hunter who once loved Sylvie’s grandmother, Tati is a graceful, utterly silent figure, appearing in a state of semitransparency, accompanied by the melody of a pan flute. The ghost effect was achieved by building two identical sets, one for the regular actors and one for Tati, who was reflected onto the regular set and filmed using an optical glass. Autant-Lara later described the effect as similar to that of a train window in which one sees both the landscape and the reflections of the passengers. Clearly taken with this bit of wizardry, he devoted a long, meandering sequence to watching the ghost float through Sylvie’s family’s château. While Autant-Lara’s facility for handling multiple characters across a fast-paced, constantly shifting story is still in evidence here, it occasionally yields to this more contemplative mood, well suited to depicting the emotional awakening of a young woman overenthralled by the past.
Of the three fake ghosts, two are young trespassers thrown together by chance: a highborn admirer of Sylvie’s and a professional burglar whose encounter in the night and eventual alliance across class lines foreshadow the relationship between Jean Gabin and Bourvil in Autant-Lara’s 1956 box-office smash La traversée de Paris, the coal-black comedy about the occupation that many consider his masterpiece—even François Truffaut had to concede the film was pretty good. By that time, Autant-Lara had made several films on the occupation, each more cynical than the last, as if he had to do penance for the sweetness and innocence of his wartime comedies.
Nicholas Elliott is a writer and translator living in Queens. He is the New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma and a contributing editor for film for BOMB magazine. His writing on film has also appeared in Film Comment, 4 Columns, and anthologies about the films of Chantal Akerman and Philippe Garrel. He would like to thank Bertrand Tavernier for his invaluable notes on the films of Claude Autant-Lara.
Language(s):French
Subtitles:English
