Critics reviews

["Un Carnet de Bal"] has aged poorly, although it was — along with the exotic crime drama "Pépé le Moko" (1937), Duvivier's greatest success — a popular hit in France and winner for best foreign film at the 1937 Venice Film Festival.

As one might expect, these men—which include a doctor, a mountain guide, a town mayor, and, most memorably, a melancholy priest played by Baur—are now of various vocational and romantic standing, and each encounter is attentively depicted by Duvivier with a delicate sense of remorse and nostalgia.

Duvivier is anticipating the late films of Max Ophuls here, with his twirling camera imitating a doomed waltz. At 130 minutes there are at least two too many vignettes – but this is a beautifully bittersweet film, anchored by Marie Bell's sensitively crestfallen performance.

Mixing comedy and drama, whimsy and realism, Un carnet de bal, inspired by Jean Giraudoux's 1924 novel Juliette au pays des hommes, is an episodic work that, with its technical craft, visual inspiration, and shifting tonal registers, shows the filmmaker at his very best.

By the time Duvivier made the longer, episodic Un carnet de bal (37), his powers as a writer of characters had caught up with his talents as a visual stylist. In a fit of nostalgia, the film's heroine, a young widow, visits past suitors—an unhappy, resigned priest (Baur), a tortured back-alley abortionist, a petty gangster, a deceptively ebullient hairstylist. The men are alternately bemusing, frightening, and hard to peg, not unlike the film they inhabit.