Bruce Loeb on Piano Julien Duvivier's name is practically synonymous with poetic realism in French cinema in the thirties; among some sixty-five films he directed over fifty years, such titles as Poil de carotte (1932), La Belle Equipe, Pepe le Moko (both 1936) and Carnet de bal (1937) are classics. But he began his career as assistant to no lesser lights than Louis Feuillade, André Antoine and Marcel L'Herbier, and his work in the twenties deserves rediscovering. Le Reflet de Claude Mercoeur, shot in the south of France on the Cote d'Azur, is both an intrigue and a romance based on a Doppelganger theme, and the vagaries of mistaken identity. Mercoeur (Gaston Jacquet) is a government minister who is too busy to fulfill his obligations, and so hires a stand-in. His double proceeds to fall in love with Mercoeur's fiancé, Gilberte (Maud Richard). One of the two men is found shot in the heart, his face disfigured; the other will marry Gilberte.