Désiré: Dreams, Valets, and 1937 Social Friction

Is it worth your time?

If you like movies where people talk in rooms and say things they don't actually mean, you’ll probably get a kick out of Désiré. It’s light, it’s snappy, and it feels like a stage play that just happened to get caught on camera. If you need explosions or a plot that moves faster than a polite conversation, stay away. This is for the folks who enjoy watching 1937 social dynamics get poked with a stick.

Sacha Guitry had this way of making everything feel like a secret conversation. You watch this and you feel like you’re eavesdropping on a dinner party that’s gone slightly sideways. The whole premise—a valet whose dreams about his employer start becoming a genuine annoyance—is just a perfect setup for that kind of dry, French wit.

The dream sequences are... something else.

The way the film handles the dream stuff is weirdly charming. It’s not trying to be some big, artsy metaphor. It’s just blunt. The valet has a dream, he yells about it, and the maid hears him. It’s messy. I loved that the film doesn't try to make it all elegant. It’s just an embarrassing, human problem that happens to be happening in a very fancy house.

Arletty is, as usual, just completely magnetic. She doesn't have to try hard to make a scene work; she just stands there and the camera kind of bows to her. There’s this one moment where she’s just reacting to the absurdity of the situation, and it says more than ten pages of dialogue ever could.

• The dialogue is so fast you might miss a joke if you sneeze.
• The kitchen scenes feel way more grounded than the ones in the drawing room.
• I’m still not sure if the minister is supposed to be a villain or just a guy who’s very tired of his own life.

It reminds me a bit of the stuffy, contained chaos you see in The Phantom Fiend, though obviously in a completely different genre. Both films have this weird sense of trapped energy. Like, people are doing exactly what they’re told, but there’s this pressure building up underneath the wallpaper.

Maybe it’s just me, but the way the servants talk about their bosses felt more honest than the actual romantic subplot. It’s that thing where you’re so close to someone’s life that you know their secrets before they do. Désiré is just a guy doing his job, but he’s carrying around all this extra baggage. It’s a messy little film, but it’s definitely not boring. Sometimes you don't need a grand arc; you just need a really good valet with a wandering mind. 🍷