“The announcement made to Marie”: rediscovering Paul Claudel in the eyes of Alain Cuny

The Annunciation made to Mary is the story of a thwarted love in the 15th century. Violaine, betrothed to Jacques, puts her marriage in danger by kissing the leper Pierre out of compassion, the builder of cathedrals who once loved him. Mara, her jealous sister, ends up marrying Jacques when Violaine contracts leprosy.

Great theater actor and known for his role in Evening visitors by Marcel Carné, Alain Cuny, is haunted all his life by the theater of Paul Claudel which he will play frequently until adapting to the cinema The announcement made to Mary, a “mystery”, (theatrical genre of the Middle Ages featuring religious subjects) written by Claudel in four acts, was performed on stage for the first time in 1912. Taking up the title of the Claudelian drama, it was the first production by Alain Cuny – then 82 years old – when the film was released in theaters in 1991.

From this first late attempt at the cinema hatches an atypical cinematographic object. More than a movie The announcement made to Mary has the effect of an incongruous work, which gives the viewer the impression of opening a precious medieval reliquary. A feeling of strangeness born from the post-synchronized voices and the pure acting of the non-professional actors carried by a splendid photograph – certain shots are breathtaking, like that of Violaine in the middle of the apple trees.

Medieval or futuristic tale

The announcement made to Mary is a mystical object belonging to a distant time. Far in the past or in the future, we don’t really know. The costumes with abstract designs imagined by the painter Pierre Tal Coat, such as those of the riders in metallic mirror-effect clothes and the avant-garde music of François-Bernard Mâche (minimal synth music, Georgian songs, or N’goni, traditional guitar Malian) give the film a look of science fiction. Medieval or futuristic tale, The announcement made to Mary is actually a story out of time, a time of myth that we can see in Maya Deren or Pasolini: we think of the central sequence of the frozen lake on which vestals in long black clothes walk slowly.

“Everything is divine”

In its great formal freedom, the film flirts with experimental cinema, Violaine’s story is for example interspersed with a visual parenthesis where we see shots of African and Asian villagers, as if out of a documentary, then a viper , a field, a fruit eaten by an insect. The parenthesis ends with Violaine’s “Amen” and we understand that Cuny is staging a form of spirituality that extends to all terrestrial creatures, from the microscopic (we do not count the insert shots on insects ) to gigantic.

Like an ode to life, to nature, to man on earth and to small beings, to “this little soul that sings”, as the bird Violaine calls it. “I answer that everything is divine and untouchable: and more sacred than all other things are the springs, the clouds, the forests and their little inhabitants. And man must live happily with these other systems of intelligence and peace, alongside these celestial forces” said the Italian poet Anna Maria Ortese.

The Annunciation made to Mary is currently in theaters with a 4K restoration that gives it back all its visual power. The film is also available on DVD and Blu-ray (Potemkine editions).