In 1904, on a dark Paris street, a 16-year old girl named Corysande, known as Chiffon by her family, loses a shoe while dashing about in the rain. The Duc d'Aubières, a colonel considerably older than Chiffon, is taken with her and, in a nod to the Cinderella story, grabs her shoe out of the street, apparently intending to return it and begin a relationship. He begins courting her, much to the delight of her mother, as he is an aristocrat, but Chiffon is taken with the younger De Bray, a head-in-the-clouds dreamer who is trying to build his own biplane, and who is her uncle (by marriage, as is constantly pointed out, as he is the brother of Chiffon's stepfather). This turns into a mildly risqué romantic comedy of manners where, despite the proto-feminist feelings of Chiffon and much talk of immorality (Chiffon playfully confesses to an "affair" with the Colonel, though nothing untoward actually happens between them), things remain fairly traditional and the ending is never in doubt. Directed by Claude Autant-Lara during the German occupation, this is high-class escapist fare, set in what was the recent past and untroubled by the shadows of the war. It's competently made with some mild stylistic touches here and there—perhaps inspired by the comedies of Ernst Lubitsch. Odette Joueux, who was almost 30, plays Chiffon and does a nice job, though perhaps thankfully she's nothing like a teenager; that might be too creepy for today's viewers. I enjoyed the performance of Jacques Dumesnil as De Bray—he comes off as clueless and sort of accidentally charming. André Luguet is fine as the Colonel. I saw this on a Saturday afternoon and by Sunday evening, it had largely left my mind, but that's what we sometimes want on a Saturday afternoon. Pictured are Joyeux and Dumesnil. [DVD]
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