Anne Chevalier makes the slight romance of Tabu worth caring about. Her brief screen career gave her few chances to move beyond South Seas roles, but that debut is enough to warrant our attention.
Fi1m perspective
Anne Chevalier remains interesting in Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) even when the story has little for her to do. Credited as The Girl, opposite Matahi’s The Boy, she gives a broadly written lover enough individual feeling to make the label seem inadequate. We were moved by their attachment because both performances make the need to be together feel urgent. The plot is slight, and some passages are less convincing than others, but the pair keep us interested without much help from it.
She came to F. W. Murnau’s film without formal acting training; it was her screen debut. It is tempting to call her presence natural and leave it there, as though that settled the question of what she contributes. What matters is that she and Matahi sustain the romance through its quieter passages, when there is little happening to hold our attention. Floyd Crosby’s photography is a considerable pleasure, but it does not account for our concern for the lovers. Chevalier deserves credit for keeping us interested in someone the script has barely described.
The films that followed offered little chance to build on that beginning. In the Polish romantic drama Czarna perła (Black Pearl) (1934), she played Moana opposite Eugeniusz Bodo, with song and dance among her duties. A brief, uncredited appearance in John Ford’s The Hurricane (1937) brought her screen career to a close. The recurring South Seas roles make it difficult to judge what she might have done with less restricted material. There is too little here to make confident claims about the parts she never played.
We would not ask her performance to excuse everything around it. Tabu gives island life little attention, and its narrow interest in the lovers leaves much unexplored. That is a weakness an appealing lead cannot put right, though Chevalier gives us a good reason to stay with the romance. Start with Tabu, and be patient with its uneven opening.
Biography
Anne Chevalier, also known as Reri, was a French Polynesian actress and dancer. Born in Papeete, Tahiti, in 1912, she was the seventh child of a French father and a Polynesian mother, and received her education at a Catholic girls' school in Papeete.
She was discovered at the age of 16 by director F. W. Murnau and cast as the lead in his film Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931). After the film's release she promoted it in the United States, appearing in the 1931 Ziegfeld Follies, and later performed in dance shows in Europe. Her other screen credits include Black Pearl (1934) and an uncredited role in The Hurricane (1937). She died in Tahiti in 1977.
