IMDb plot summary: Denise, an orphaned girl, moves to Paris where she hopes to find work at her uncle's store. But the glamorous department store 'Aux Bonheur des Dames' across the street crunches all the little businesses around. She finds a position there.
Directed by Julien Duvivier. Starring Dita Parlo, Ginette Maddie, and Andree Brabant.
Au Bonheur des Dames follows a ladies' department store that is growing and putting smaller stores out of business. I think. I'll be honest, I feel awful reviewing this movie because despite one or two visually and cinematically interesting moments, I found this story SO boring that I could barely pay attention to it. There were so many women who all looked and were styled exactly the same that I found it difficult to track any one character, and characters appeared and disappeared without me being able to lock in how they connected to this story. That being said, there were a couple of really interesting cinematic choices. In one scene, an operatic aria plays over a silent scene, at one moment matching up perfectly so that the female lead lip-syncs one of the lines to the other person in the scene. In a later scene, there are some wonderfully chaotic edits conveying a character losing their grasp on reality, and it suddenly drew my attention in a way the rest of the movie hadn't. But those moments are few and far between in a tedious narrative I just couldn't get into.
How it entered my Flickchart:
Au bonheur des dames < Camp
Au bonheur des dames < The Man with One Red Shoe
Au bonheur des dames > Table 19
Au bonheur des dames > 101 Dalmatians (1996)
Au bonheur des dames > The Duel
Au bonheur des dames < The Professional
Au bonheur des dames > The Goonies
Au bonheur des dames > The Cheap Detective
Au bonheur des dames < The Name of the Rose
Final spot: #2845 out of 3697, or 23%.
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