[...] Dulac’s film was shot quickly on a shoestring budget (by Paul Guichard), with minor actors in rather tacky studio decors. [...] L’INVITATION AU VOYAGE is a free, visual adaptation of the Baudelaire poem of the same title, especially the lines, “Mon enfant, ma soeur,/ Songe à la douceur / D’aller vivre ensemble…”
Yet the film’s narrative as well as its discourseactually owes almost nothing to Baudelaire. Leaving her husband and child one evening, a married I woman (Emma Gynt) adventures into a rather stylized cabaret (the locale is not specified) frequented by marine officers and chic young women. There she catches the eye of a young officer (Raymond Dubreil); and after they dance together, he tells her of his tropical sea voyages. Just as they are about to go off together, he notices that she is married. Another woman leads him off to dance, and the married woman – her dreams dashed –returns stealthily home. [...]
Partly out of budgetary limitations and partly out of Dulac’s own interests in montage, L’lNVITATION AU VOYAGE relies heavily on a visual orchestration of looks, gestures, and objects, in relatively close shots, with few intertitles. That orchestration apparently once depended on a musical accompaniment, which the cabaret provided diegetically – a sailor singing and playing an accordion, a violinist, a small jazz combo. [...] As in Dulac’s previous films, L'INVITATION AU VOYAGE gives special emphasis to the representation of subjective moments. None of these, at least initially and separately, is particularly original. A flashback early on briefly defines the woman’s position in marriage – her husband goes out each evening on a business appointment; much like Madame Beudet […] she sits knitting in her chair, listens to the clock, and looks out of the window. The sequence of dancing, although geared to the jazz combo more than io her, follows a well-established model of intoxication – accelerating montage, superimpositions, quick pans and tracks, out-of-focus shots, and fast motion. From this comes a dream sequence in which the officer opens a porthole in an imaginary space, a miniature ship “comes to life” in the surf, and she joins him on board. Her look [...] alternates briefly between the surf and what has now become “refuse” in the cabaret. Finally, as the violinist comes to play by their table, the real and the imaginary interweave to produce a double trajectory of desire – she sees the surf, the blurred sails, and clouds; he reaches out to caress her hand.[...]
Richard Abel, French Cinema. The First Wave, 1915–1929, Princeton (NJ): PrincetonUniversity Press, 1984, pp. 413–14