Fan-Fan the Tulip

Fanfan is caught with a girl in the village and is told to marry. He runs. On the road a gypsy woman reads his fortune and what she says is this: he will join the army, become a hero and marry the king's daughter. Fanfan enlists at once. The fortune teller is really Adeline, an officer's daughter, and her father invented it to gather recruits. Fanfan believes the prophecy and because he believes it he leaps into danger. He saves the king's daughter from an attack, rises in the army, and nobody tells him the truth. Christian-Jaque directs. Gérard Philipe plays Fanfan and Gina Lollobrigida plays Adeline. It is a French and Italian co-production, made in 1952. The film won directing prizes at the Cannes and Berlin festivals. The narrative turns the swashbuckler into parody; heroism is displayed and mocked in the same scene. The matter it treats is the pointlessness of war; as the narrator explains the reasons for the war they all come out absurd. Gérard Philipe worked without a double and did the acrobatic scenes himself. The film was a large success in France and became Philipe's best known part. The narrative makes the king and the court ridiculous too, and for a period film it keeps its distance from authority. It was remade in 2003 but the remake did not replace the original. Its limit is age; the humour belongs to its period, the pace is quick but the jokes dated, and the women's parts are weak. Who it is for: viewers who like classical French cinema and swashbucklers. Who it is not for: it is old, the humour of its time, and the ending conventional.