The Golden Coach (1953)

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djross
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The Golden Coach (1953)

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In the heart of a vivacious actress, love struggles to awake. She seems to be looking for the Goldilocks level of violently jealous man – not too much, not too little – only to eventually rediscover, gloriously and yet with a little melancholy, if not tragedy, that her true path consists in that infinite extraordinariness that comes out of a not-so-ordinary ordinariness grounded in the theatrical composition of truth and fiction, reality and artifice, seriousness and laughter. Strangely sad, delicately balanced, incredibly beautiful and wonderfully surprising – and an absolutely perfect ending. Vivaldi provides a great accompaniment to what must be one of the most under-appreciated cinematic masterpieces of all time.

A couple of contrasting views. On the one hand, Leslie Halliwell writes: “the story is a bore and the leading lady ill-chosen”. On the other hand, cf., Eric Rohmer, The Taste for Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 64–65:
Ever since the cinema attained the dignity of an art, I see only one great theme that it proposed to develop: the opposition of two orders – one natural, the other human; one material, the other spiritual; one mechanical, the other free; one of the appetite, the other of heroism or grace – a classical opposition, but one that our art is privileged to be able to translate so well that the intermediary of the sign is replaced by immediate evidence. A universe of relationships therefore appeared that the other arts may have illuminated or designated but could not show: the relationship between man and nature and between man and objects – directly perceptible relationships that are quite beautiful – but also, since the age of the talkies, the less visible relationship between the individual and society. It is a difficult theme, as pure convention replaces experience or instinct. One of The Golden Coach’s greatest assets is that it goes beyond satire – for which the director is still labeled – and is marked by a sort of sublime buffoonery which to my knowledge has no precedent in art, even in Shakespeare. It provides man with a sort of second nature, thereby magnifying the comedy by its perfect imitation of one of the most profound aspects of life, which is, of course, comedy. Thus, the challenge that Magnani launches at the court of Peru acquires all the more relief. It is not so much a question of denouncing the order as such – an easy and futile undertaking – as of revealing its necessary contradictions. If art is fundamentally moral, it is not because it reveals the path to abstract equality or liberty but because it glorifies the exception that is made possible only by the rule, and in a sense – as shocking as this idea may be – because it exalts the inequality of each person before destiny, or even salvation.
Perhaps, on the basis of this quotation from Rohmer, we have grounds for believing that Renoir’s 1953 masterpiece may have been an important influence on Rohmer’s own (too little seen) masterpiece, Perceval le Gallois (1978).

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