La Roue

La Roue (2008 DVD)
Directed by Abel Gance
France, 1922
Silent with English intertitles

• Sisif: "There are no flowers amid the rails for us, son. You realize that, don't you? And if by some miracle one should blossom some day, we can be forgiven for reaching out for it."

Visually impressive, narratively underwhelming silent film effort from '20s legend Abel Gance. The lumbering pace of this four and a half hour "modern tragedy" only starts to pick up steam halfway into the movie, so take me off of the list of those tearing their hair out over the loss of the missing two and half hours of footage. Sure, it'd be nice to have that film back for historic purposes, but Gance has more than enough time to dwell on his characters' various beatdowns by the wheel of fortune. With an approach somewhat reminiscent of Zola re:the suffering of the working classes, Gance basically spends the film version of an eternity mapping out the story of Norma, a young orphaned survivor of a train wreck, who gets illicitly "adopted" by soot-faced master engineer Sisif (Séverin-Mars). Brought up as a baby sister alongside fellow motherless baby Elie, the adult Norma (Miss Ivy Close) eventually grows up both pretty and carefree--a bit of a problem since she and the sensitive, violin-making Elie (Gabriel de Gravone) begin to develop an "unhealthy" affection for each other. Others interested in Norma's charms include both the man she knows as Papa and a wealthy rail magnate named Monsieur de Hersan (Pierre Magnier), who uses the family's extreme poverty as an excuse to try to buy his way into Norma's affection. While a wealth of literary quotations (and a translator's misspelling of Baudelaire, tsk tsk!) help Gance hammer his heavyhanded points home in a manner much less worthy of praise than Léonce-Henry Burel's inventive cinematography and special effects, I must admit that I eventually warmed to the characters in a sort of cinematic Stockholm Syndrome. Rating: 3/5 freedom stars. (http://www.flickeralley.com/)

Norma, Sisif, and Toby the dog