Gervaise

Gervaise (1956) is a French drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by René Clément and based on Émile Zola's 1877 novel L'Assommoir. Maria Schell plays the title character — a laundress in working-class Paris.

Gervaise has two children by a man who abandoned her. She remarries a roofer named Coupeau, saves carefully, and nearly opens her own small business. Then Coupeau falls off a roof, the money goes toward his recovery, and the downward slope that Zola mapped so precisely begins. The film does not spare her.

Clément keeps the camera close to the work, the tiredness, the cramped rooms — none of Zola's social anger gets lost in the adaptation. Maria Schell, a German actress playing a French laborer, took the Best Actress prize at Venice in 1956 for this performance. Stream Gervaise (1956) online on iFILM.