She escaped his horror plays—then discovered real life was the bigger nightmare.
Sarah, the wife of a theater director, decides to leave her mutt of a husband because she is tired of his morbid fantasies. It is true that Baptiste has a rather unstable troupe that rehearses horror plays in a dance hall. Sarah comes out of the wings for life, but it turns out to be as incongruous and phantasmagorical as her husband's plays. This is why she returns to him. "The real grand guignol is life. The other is the farce."
Acting
Cellier's exasperated eye-rolls deserve their own award.
Production
The dilapidated dance hall becomes its own character.
Director
Jean Marbœuf
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Grand Guignol was a real Parisian theater (1897-1962) famous for naturalistic horror—this film treats the entire institution as metaphor for bourgeois marriage.
Director Marbœuf was primarily a documentarian; this rare fiction outing explains the almost anthropological distance from his characters' melodrama.
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