Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 18

This week, we celebrate the French actress Simone Signoret who’d have turned 100 on Thursday March 25. Eighty years ago this month, Signoret also experienced what she in her autobiography called her second birth, as important as her biological one: “the person I am today was born one evening in March 1941 in Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where at last I would find the world to which I really belonged.” There she was introduced to the left-wing intellectuals and artists who practically staked out their offices in the legendary bar. “I became a full-time ‘Floriste’.”

We’ve selected two of her major roles of the fifties to share with you: one of her many portrayals of a prostitute in La ronde (Max Ophüls, 1950) and her part of the scheming mistress in Les diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955). Her characters always stayed in control of their own desires, often through just a look. In Mémoires pour Simone (1986), her lifelong friend Chris Marker uses two words to describe her: wit and courage. In her own memoirs, Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be, she stated: “I would be incapable of lending my face, my eyes, my voice – in other words, myself – to an enterprise that’s contrary to my most profound convictions.” By the time of her role as resistance fighter in L’armée des ombres (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969), her physical appearance had changed drastically. In her early forties, Signoret had gained weight and aged rapidly. Chain-smoking Gauloises with a bottle of scotch a day, she let herself go but didn’t really care – “I lived,” she quipped – and her performances became all the more impressive.

Susan Hayward beautifully captured Signoret’s modern style, “marked by minimalism and restraint, relying on small gestures, her incendiary eyes, a look, a purposeful walk, and few words. She has the right touch and gestures. Her manner of speaking and gesturing has a way of leaving life in the air.” With her fullback shoulders and squarely planted stature, Signoret combines a certain vulgarity (particularly the way she holds cigarettes and stamps them out) with a sense of vulnerability, suggested by her untrained, roughening voice and lisp on the signature Signoret sound, “ch”. “Signoret felt substantial,” Hayward continues. “She had matter and could be touched but was never fixed.”1 Signoret didn’t impose a certain style to be copied and held a beauty that was never finished.

La ronde (Max Ophüls, 1950) is available on The Criterion Channel, Kanopy and LaCinetek.
Les diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) is available on The Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime, Kanopy, Arte Boutique, UniversCiné and LaCinetek.
L’armée des ombres (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) is available on Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime, UniversCiné and LaCinetek.