Croisières sidérales [Sideral Cruises] (1942)

(On Cable TV, December 2020) Oh! Oh! As a budding Science Fiction historian, I always get a thrill whenever I discover a forgotten piece of SF history. Croisières sidérales certainly qualifies as such, considering that it’s probably the first film to tackle general relativity… and it comes from nowhere else but Vichy France. The technicalities of the film are ludicrous, as a hot-air balloon takes its passengers to Venus (!) and then back to Earth (!!) except that for them the past 15 days have been equivalent to 25 years on Earth (!!!), which makes for significant changes as they return to see their loved ones. That’s right – a full half-century before Interstellar, there’s some time dilatation used for dramatic effect. If the hot-air balloon thing hasn’t aged well, the film’s last section, in which our astronauts must compose with suddenly grown-up children and aged relatives, is quite nice in its own way. Now, I wouldn’t want the film’s cutting-edge ideas to overshadow its far more disappointing execution: the film’s production values are not good, it badly blends disparate tones from poetic realism to musical comedy, and the pacing is often very, very slow. But that’s the price to pay to discover a film that is almost entirely absent from the histories of Science Fiction film. To think it was made when Nazis controlled the French film industry is even more amazing. It’s frankly not worth a watch if you’re just a casual SF fan, but it’s essential for those who are serious about studying the field. After all, Science Fiction was nearly absent from Hollywood during the entire 1940s – this makes Croisières sidérales, almost by default, one of the best SF films of the decade.