One face in one film: the woman in Un Chien Andalou who watches the impossible and does not blink. Mareuil was a working ingénue of the French silent screen for the best part of two decades, and that steadiness is most of what survives.
Fi1m perspective
Ninety seconds into Un Chien Andalou (1929) a man sharpens a razor, looks at the moon, and turns to the woman sitting beside him. The woman is Simone Mareuil, and the film's most famous image is done to her. What follows is a quarter of an hour of wardrobes, hands, a bedroom and Pierre Batcheff, and her job throughout is to react to things that make no sense. She does it with the same steady face for all of them, without flinching and without pushing. We came out shaken by the images, as everyone does, and rather more shaken by her, because she never once looks as though she has been told the joke.
That composure was not what she was hired for elsewhere. She began at Gaumont around 1921 in uncredited parts, moved into credited roles from 1924, and spent the rest of the decade as a young woman or a servant in dramas, melodramas and comedies: Céphise in Le Juif errant (1926), Rosette in La Petite Chocolatière (1927), Lucie in Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein's Peau de pêche (1929). Reviewers of the time called her fresh and gamin-like and admired her eyes. Some of the earliest notices, around Chouchou poids-plume (1925), found her timid and short on spontaneity, and thought she got better.
The interesting thing is that the two verdicts describe one quality. A stillness that reads as shyness in a boxing comedy reads as freshness in a melodrama and, in Buñuel's hands, as nerve. She worked three times each with Benoît-Lévy and Jean Kemm, twice with André Berthomieu and with Epstein, and once with Batcheff, and it is the once that anyone now remembers. She made the crossing into sound, and some accounts single out her Annette in Le Juif polonais (1931) as natural, but the parts stayed secondary and by 1939 the career was more or less over. Thirty-odd credits, one lead of any consequence, and that one seventeen minutes long.
So the recommendation is narrow and firm. See Un Chien Andalou, once, with the lights off, and when you have got past the razor, watch her rather than him. Batcheff leers and rolls his eyes and belongs to a sillier film; Mareuil stands still and belongs to this one. It is a small monument, but most careers of forty films leave nothing that anyone can still watch, and hers left the face that half of film history has been trying to look away from.
Biography
Simone Mareuil (born Marie Louise Simonne Vacher) was a French actress. She was born on 25 August 1903 in Périgueux, Dordogne, and died there on 24 October 1954.
She began appearing in films in the early 1920s and took supporting and leading roles through the 1930s. Mareuil is best known for playing the young woman in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's surrealist short Un Chien Andalou (1929). Other credits include Genêt d'Espagne (1927), Peau de pêche (1929) and Le Juif polonais (1931). She was married to actor Philippe Hersent.
