This wonderful 1925 film by the Belgian-born French master Jacques Feyder (best known for Carnival in Flanders, 1935) is set in an insular, devoutly Catholic Swiss village, where the young wife of the mayor (Victor Vina) has just died. The man’s very young daughter, Pierrette (Pierrette Houyer) is too innocent to comprehend the loss, but his somewhat older son, Jean (played by the remarkable Jean Forest) understands all too well, and is devastated.
As months go by, Jean’s grief seems only to grow, to the point where he begins to fetishize objects associated with his late mother -- a portrait, a broach, a dress she once wore. He is thus understandably distressed to learn of his father’s plan to marry an amiable local widow (Rachel Devirys) with a daughter of her own named Arlette (Arlette Peyran). Being a decent boy, he resolves to make the best of the situation, but he can’t conquer the sense that to accept this mother would be to betray his “real” one. He reacts to his confused and contradictory feelings by conceiving a violent dislike for his new stepsister.
There follows a comedy of bad manners that any parent (or any child, for that matter) will instantly recognize as authentic. Jean and Arlette torment each other over innumerable matters great and small, and their mother and father, distracted by their responsibilities and by the necessary adjustments of a new marriage, cannot cope with the children’s growing enmity. As the war between the boy and girl escalates, the movie veers suddenly from dark domestic comedy to melodrama, with not one but two climaxes reminiscent of Griffith at his ripest.
Feyder impressively manages to pull off this radical change of tone. The filmmaker carries the audience with him because of his unsentimental honesty in the treatment of all the characters, but especially the children, with their petty spitefulness and sudden rages, as well as their equally unexpected moments of tenderness and loyalty. This very truthfulness may well have doomed the film during its initial run. But in its loving evocation of place and atmosphere (the film was shot largely on location in the mountainous Haut-Valais region of Switzerland), its scrupulous attention to detail and its psychological acuity, Faces of Children is a forerunner (and worthy peer) of the masterpieces of French poetic realism of the 1930s. Beautifully photographed by the great Léonce-Henry Burel, who would later work with Bresson, the picture includes a particularly startling shot of an avalanche… from the avalanche’s point-of-view. Available on DVD through Homevision (part of Rediscover Jacques Feyder: French Film Master). Silent, with English intertitles; orchestral score by A. Coppola. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faces_of_Children
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