Faces of Children

In a village in the Swiss Alps the mayor’s wife dies, leaving ten-year-old Jean and his little sister Pierrette behind. The father remarries before long, and a new mother arrives in the house together with a stepsister. Jean refuses the arrangement and resists it with every tool a child has, and the film neither blames him nor makes him charming; it simply watches. Jacques Feyder wrote the screenplay himself with Françoise Rosay, taking a view of unhappy childhood that is remarkably unsentimental for its date and psychologically exact about everyone in the house. Feyder and Rosay had found Jean Forest, who plays the boy, on the streets of Montmartre. This French-Swiss silent uses the mountain village itself almost as a character. The historian Jean Mitry wrote that if he had to pick one French film of the 1920s, it would be this one.