Yvette (1928)
Director:
Alberto Cavalcanti
Writer:
Guy de Maupassant (story)
Stars:
Blanche Bernis, Thomy Bourdelle, Pauline Carton, Catherine Hessling, Jean-François Martial, Michel Duran
Dame Yvette (Dame Catherine Hessling more Hessling than ever ) is a dissipated girl, who lives accordingly a dissipated life together with her mother (Dame Ica von Lenkeffy ). It's a kind of false bourgeois life in which economic interests ,undertaken to achieve a social position, are the principal subject, especially for Yvette’s mother who will try to make her daughter understand those particular principles when Yvette begin questioning that way of life when she finds true love. “Yvette” was one of the first silent films directed by Herr Alberto Cavalcanti in his French period and is based on a Herr Guy de Maupassant story. This film adaptation is uneven; basically nothing much happens and the story seems very padded out. The original story by Herr Maupassant is a satire full of incisive social criticism but Herr Cavalcanti doesn't know how to take advantage of its richness. Herr Cavalcanti chooses to ignore the story's more profound aspects and concentrates instead on a rather superficial love story that doesn't even seem to interest the lovers themselves. Nevertheless the film can be appreciated for its minor criticism of the hedonist life, stressing the prejudices of the main characters and even the dubious origins of the social position that Dame Yvette and her mother enjoy ( in the original Herr Maupasant story, Yvette is an illegitimate daughter).