Pension Mimosas
| Pension Mimosas | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Jacques Feyder |
| Produced by | Société des Films Sonores Tobis Charles-Félix Tavano |
| Written by |
Charles Spaak Jacques Feyder |
| Starring |
Françoise Rosay Paul Bernard |
| Music by | Armand Bernard |
| Cinematography | Roger Hubert |
| Edited by | Jacques Brillouin |
| Distributed by | Tobis Distribution |
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Release date
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Running time
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109 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
Pension Mimosas is a 1935 French film directed by Jacques Feyder. Based on an original scenario by Feyder and Charles Spaak, it is a psychological drama set largely in a small hotel on the Côte d'Azur, and it provided Françoise Rosay with one of the most substantial acting roles of her career.
1924. Louise Noblet keeps a small hotel, the Pension Mimosas, on the Côte d'Azur in the south of France, with her husband Gaston who is also a supervisor in local casino. Many of their clientele are luckless gamblers hoping for success in the local casino. Childless themselves, Louise and Gaston have been bringing up the young Pierrot while his father serves a prison sentence, but they are dismayed when the father is released early and comes to take back his son.
1934. Pierre, now a young man, is living in Paris among gamblers and gangsters, and he still plays upon the feelings of his former adoptive parents to extract money from them. Louise makes him return to the Pension Mimosas and find a job, but she now develops an ambiguous affection for him. To please him, she even invites his mistress Nelly to join him in the hotel. The two women soon become rivals, while Pierre accumulates debts. Louise reveals Nelly's whereabouts to her old protector who comes to take her back. In despair Pierre kills himself, while Louise has gone to the casino under an assumed identity to win the money to pay his debts.
Pension Mimosas was the second of three films which Jacques Feyder made in swift succession on his return to France after his unsatisfactory experience in Hollywood. All three films were developed in conjunction with the scenarist Charles Spaak and included major roles for Feyder's wife Françoise Rosay, but each told a different kind of story and employed a distinctly different style of filming. Whereas Le Grand Jeu (1934) was a fast-moving melodrama with some exotic settings, and the later La Kermesse héroïque would be a satirical period farce, Pension Mimosas presented a more measured contemporary drama.
Filming took place from August to October 1934. The setting of the Pension Mimosas is not specifically identified in the film, but a few exterior shots show the casino at Menton as well as its gardens and swimming pool. Apart from a few other exterior shots on the Côte d'Azur and some in Paris, most of the film was shot in the studio (at the Tobis studios in Épinay). Lazare Meerson created a detailed but unobtrusive set which presented the various areas of the hotel as an integrated whole, facilitating the revelations and interactions of the drama. This enclosed setting (though spacious and brightly lit) gives much of the film the feeling of a stage play, a factor which has sometimes been held against it, but it also concentrates attention upon the interplay of character and the actors' performances.
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