There's No Tomorrow

A French film set in Paris. Évelyne works at a nightclub. She performs and sits with the customers. She has a son. The boy is at a boarding school and does not know what his mother does. She has no money. The rent is unpaid and the debts have grown. One day she sees someone she used to know. Georges is the man she loved years ago. He had gone to Canada and has come back a doctor. He sees her and knows her. Évelyne tells a lie. She says she made a good marriage, that her husband is rich, and that she lives comfortably. From there the film becomes a story of performance. She rents a flat. She finds furniture, buys clothes, and builds a life. She takes the money from a man. A customer from the club, and he wants something in return. Georges comes to the house. Everything looks right. He sees her son. What the narrative is interested in is not love but duration: its idea is that she knows she can keep the lie up for only a few days, and goes all the way with it anyway. Georges will return to Canada. He asks her to come. Évelyne cannot accept. A lie lasts a week, not a life. Then she finds another idea. She gives him her child. Georges will take the boy to Canada. The last section is at a railway station. The narrative saves nothing. Max Ophüls made this in France, in the period after leaving Germany. It was completed just before the war and he soon had to go to America. The camera moves. Staircases, corridors and the club floor; the narrative flows constantly. The images are black and white and dark. Edwige Feuillère was among the important French actresses of the period. Edwige Feuillère, Georges Rigaud, Daniel Lecourtois and Paul Azaïs are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1930s French melodrama and Ophüls's camerawork. Who it is not for: anyone looking for something new; the narrative is in the known shape of the sacrifice melodrama and its ending can be guessed from the start.