L'hallali

A sylvan tableau ruptures at dawn: hounds, brass-throated and slavering, unloose a chorale that ricochets off moss-caked oaks while a lone stag—antlered like a displaced myth—vaults across the frame, its flanks already flecked with scarlet. Jean Liézer’s beatific gamekeeper, half-woodsprite half-seraph, looms in the middle distance, clutching a flintlock that glints like a Eucharistic wafer; opposite him, Cécile May’s orphaned heiress, veiled in widow’s black, rides sidesaddle on a mare the colour of old parchment. Between them pulses a triangular doom: the animal they pursue is the girl’s childhood totem, the keeper’s promised bounty, and the emblem of a landholding gentry whose deeds are inked in peasant blood. Alfred Machin’s scenario—laconic on paper—becomes, in the actual flicker of celluloid, a haemoglobin-streaked meditation on possession: of forests, of bodies, of images themselves. Cross-cut close-ups of canine fangs, human irises, and trembling foliage braid into a single, predatory breath; when the final shot reverses the hunt—man cornered by beast, woman astride the stag like some pre-Christian Diana—the film flips the imperial myth of dominion into a chthonic verdict. No intertitle intervenes to moralise; the montage alone decrees that every heartbeat is borrowed and every horn thrusts toward reciprocal wound.