Fanfan the tulip

I think I'm finally down to the last of the movies I recorded during TCM's tribute to Gina Lollobrigida. That movie was one of her earler foreign efforts, but not from her native Italy. Instead, it's the French film Fanfan la Tulipe.

After the opening credits, we're given a joking montage about what a wonderful country France was in the mid-18th century, and how gallant the army was in fighting war. So gallant, in fact, that they waged war with much of the rest of Europe for seven years. (What we in the US generally refer to as the French and Indian War is in fact one theater of what was the Seven Years' War, from 1756 to 1763.) It is against this backdrop that our movie is set, somewhere in a more bucolic part of France.

Fanfan (Gérard Philippe) is a peasant who has been fooling around with a young woman who is the daughter of a neighboring farmer. Apparntely, the old farmer is sick of it, so he's giving Fanfan an ultimatum to marry his daughter, or else. Fanfan, naturally, flees. Meanwhile, a military recruiter is trying to recruit people for the war effort and because he gets a finder's fee for each person recruited. Fanfan runs into the fortune-teller Adeline (Gina Lollobrigida), not realizing that she's a phony and that she's really the daughter of the military recruiter, in on Dad's act. Adeline tells Fanfan that his fortune involves joining up to fight, and ultimately winning the hand of a nobleman's daughter.

Who wouldn't want to marry a nobleman's daughter in the sort of society where the alternative is to be stuck as a peasant. So Fanfan signs up, and in short order runs across a carriage where he helps one of the women stuck in it. Wouldn't you know it, but the woman in question is the marquise de Pompadour, daughter of the King's mistress. So of course Fanfan thinks this is his destiny.

Much complicating matters is that Adeline finds herself falling in love with Fanfan and has even had a fortune-teller say things that lead her to believe she's destined to be with Fanfan, even though she really ought to know better. Fanfan gets in a series of misadventures, including one that has him winding up in the chambers of the marquise, something that's highly illegal. And Adeline decides to debase herself to try to save Fanfan's life. As you can guess from the tone of the movie, all of this is leading up to what should be a happy ending somehow. But how exactly is it going to get there?

When TCM ran Fanfan la Tulipe, Alicia Malone was presenting, and she made the comment that this was exactly the sort of movie that the young filmmakers who would pioneer what became the French New Wave railed against. In that light, it's easy to see the stodgy nature of the movie; indeed, it's the sort of thing that would fit in well with the British costume dramas of the era: they're lower-budgeted than what Hollywood could do, but clearly very competent within those budget constraints. There's really nothing particularly wrong with Fanfan la Tulipe other than it being a bit old-fashioned. But if this type of movie is your thing, it's not bad at all.