Maldone is a canal worker, happy with his life after running away from his family estate. He falls in love with Zita, a young gypsy girl, during a local fete. However, after his brother dies, Maldone is called back to manage the estate.
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Through double exposures, [Maldone’s] divided self appears on screen, the wagoner tormenting the lord trapped in “the prison of contentment.” The increasingly experimental style of the film—with blurry handheld subjective camera and rapid editing—tracks Maldone’s mental unraveling.
It’s a thrillingly inventive film, deeply marked by its French impressionist moment, that puts an arsenal of effects to work: startling compositions and changes in shot scale, free cutting, expressive camera movement (including hand-held), unexpected super-impositions, and so on. Grémillon achieves a musical dynamism by modulating between passages of contrasting rhythm.
Maldone's Gypsy heart cannot abide a life of ease and luxury. He rejects bourgeois life and the "oppression of contentment" in this exquisite Avant-Garde Narrative by Jean Grémillon, one of the greatest French filmmakers of the Silent Era (and beyond).
An uncompromising and visually arresting film which explores romance's usurpation by status but also in a sociologically astute way the constraints of one's habitus. Cinematographically, it contains lyrical shots of Maldone's (a splendid Dullin) and the gypsy nomads' pastoral milieu. Great tracking and overhead shots culminate in special effects that denote identity-crisis and recovery in a beautiful mirroring scene.
4,5. 35mm, rewatch. A Marxist variation of doppelgänger: the proletarian is the one who kills his reflection of great bourgeois in the mirror and resumes his previous life of a free bum, a kind of "Boudoux qui retourne aux eaux", libertarian, anti-bourgeois. The images follow the agony and vertigo of the protagonist, as only non-talkies cinema made it: rising it in a pictorial free composition, towards the whirlwind.
Grémillon parece ser un director influenciado por el cine de Abel Gance y Jean Epstein. Se nota en el maneja creativo de la cámara y en los pequeños encuadres que descubren un tacto por lo estético. "Maldone" es un filme sobre la naturaleza, el destino negado. Lo mejor del filme es el final, para cuando el personaje no solo retorna a sus raíces, sino que además parece estar poseído en su retornada imagen.