Cinema
Happy Birthday
By ISABEL QUIGLY The Case of 'Dr. Laurent. (Academy.) IT is no sentimental fancy to say that the moment she gives birth to a child should be the climax of a woman's life : the climax of her destiny as a woman, and, if the child is conceived with love, the climax of love as well : a moment of (quite literally) indescribable glory, ful- filment and happiness, for nothing afterwards can ever repeat or compare with it—no other experi- ence can ever come near it, no one who has not known it can ever, even remotely, know what it means. And so it is the most absurd of the anoma- lies of modern life—of medicine and science and biological progress—that what should be so splen- did is looked on by most women (at least in coun- tries like ours : and the more sophisticated the country, the truer this becomes) with dread : as something terrible that leads to happiness later, but not as something happy in itself. In fact, an aston- ishing number of women ask for nothing better than to be safely anaesthetised, as if it were simply an operation to be got through as anonymously and unco-operatively as possible.
And so 'natural childbirth'—the result of a physical and mental training that prepares a woman for the birth, and seeks to eliminate all pain—can, where successful, be called one of the medical wonders of our time : paradoxically, for it is not so much medical as what it seeks to be : 'natural,' a return to the state of mind—and therefore of body—in which the bearing of child- ren is felt as the joyful sequel to the act of love. At the moment it is limited, not so much by the mental attitudes imposed by the pressure of thou- sands of years, as by the, practical fact that a woman needs a great deal of attention during labour : not so much complicated attendance as the friendly, urderstanding company of someone who understailus the system. And there are not enough of these neople to go round.
A film seems to me the perfect way of explain- ing its methods and possibilities. You can read about it, but it means very little compared with the sight of a woman's face, with the fantastic sight of the new child. Some weeks ago an Italian film on the subject, Luciano Emmer's The Most Wonderful Moment, came to London, but al- though its theory was attractive it was spoilt by a banal and sentimental handling of the love story involved : it just was not good enough for such a subject. Now we have a film that is: The Case of Dr. Laurent (director : Jean-Paul de Chanois; 'X' certificate). There is no love story in it: the child, conceived in love, is illegitimate, the father, a weak creature, being finally rejected when he suggests marriage by the quietly self-confident mother. Yet it is a story based wholly on love : the love of a mother for her child, of a doctor for human life, of all women for all children (the village chorus of helpful friends). Jean Gabin, a guarantee of honesty and a certain toughness of attitude and idiom, is the doctor: Nicole Courcel, a round- faced girl with exactly the right attributes of simplicity and normality, and the unemphatic good looks that seem quite natural in a country village and can turn to beauty when aroused, is the farm girl he trains for the great experiment that will justify or damn him in the eyes of the suspicious local countryside. While he is being tried by his local medical council for alleged contravention of medical etiquette, Francine's labour begins and she offers to have her child be- fore the astounded council, to show them just how it ought to be. And we, like them and her village friends who have borrowed a bus to get there, watch the perfect birth, half acted by Nicole Courcel's ardent, active, understanding face, half documentary in the shots of the birth itself : and no film that I can remember ever moved me more.
From every point of view this film seems to me exactly right: from the human point of view, from the mother's, in its views of love and life in general. It is entirely 'committed,' it knows exactly what is right and good and says so; yet it gives the opposition voice, and most interestingly, in that strange original, Sylvia MontfOrt, who plays the part of a sensitive, highly-strung woman whose agonising sufferings in childbirth have turned her against her husband. As Dr. Laurent arrives in the village to take over from an ageing local doctor, the shrieks of this woman in labour echo round the streets till people move their animals for fear of scaring them. In her unplacid face—the modern, photogenic face, in exact contrast to Francine's calm and regular and rather unphoto- genic features—in every movement she makes, you see the instinctive opposition of the over- civilised, inhibited, educated woman to a manlike Laurent and a system like that he advocates. Yet the film has—and this is, I think, its best triumph —what you might call (if the words were not so inadequate as to sound absurd) perfect taste: it entirely lacks any of the jolly uninhibitedness some people associate with a 'back to nature' move- mein, which natural childbirth, in the best sense, is. In fact, it is a modest film, as well as being adult and definite: you could take Aunt Edna to see it, and do her good, for I defy anyone to be shocked.
It is a humorous, cheerful, exciting film as well: the preliminaries to the grand climax, when the busload of village women go bowling along the mountain roads, singing at the tops of their voices, is full of suspense and laughter. Its two hotirs flash by without a single heavy moment. Nor is it, I would say, a 'woman's film.' A woman, of course, can see it more personally, if she has children more reminiscently, but the point about natural childbirth, about the film and its attitude, is that the birth of a child is not just the woman's business, but the active business of the father, and, in a sense, of all the world. The suffering woman at the beginning refuses to let her husband see her, even for a moment (I can't bear him to see me like this'): the radiant mother at the end has no husband, but to her the child's father would have been part of the experience, had he been there. This is a whole new attitude to life, to love, and to the relationship between the sexes; it takes the horror out of birth, which is as important as taking the snigger out of sex. This makes it a film for everyone, an experience of great common joy.
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