UN CARNET DE BAL (1937) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Julien Duvivier
Marie Bell, Harry Baur, Pierre Blanchar, Fernandel,
Louis Jouvet, Raimu, Françoise Rosay, Alfred Adam,
Pierre-Richard Willm, Maurice Bénard, Pierre Alcover
In the wake of her husband's death, a middle-aged woman comes across her dance card from a ball she attended when she was 16. Wealthy and lost for something to do, she decides to track down the men whose names are on the card, the guys who told her they'd always love her, to see what became of them. She's chasing ghosts. The ball exists only in memory (in slow-motion flashbacks), but it haunts the woman and those long-ago suitors still. One's now a gangster. One's a priest. One's a hairdresser. One's a small-town mayor. One's a doctor on the skids, susceptible to seizures and seen only in tilt shots. One has escaped to the mountains. One's dead. She even encounters a girl who could be a ghost of herself. She finds her old partners. They all remember. And she learns something else. You can't go back to the ball.
