We are in the habit of using the word "sentimental" to describe two quite different phenomena - the simple story that brings a tear to the eye and the "false" kind that deliberately tries to sell us a version of the word that is unture often for ulterior political motives (the "American Dream:" film for instance. This second kind of sentimentality is utterly detestable - a sort of opium of the masses even more odious and more insidious than religion (with which it has much in common).
This film is absolutely of the first kind and immensely charming with it. An elderly piano accompanist is in the habit of going to the park to "charm" the birds but one day charms a poor young girl as badly in need of bread as his feathered friends. He takes care of her and she accompanies him to his work where he is accompanying on the piano an untalented older woman attempting to dance swathed in an immense veil. While she is out of the room for a moment, the urchin essays the dance herself and both the older folk realise at once that she is a born dancer.
Time passes and she has indeed become a famous dancer, a star surrounded by a crowd of admirers while the "charmer", in his bedsitter, reading of her success in he papers, feels desperately lonely.
She receives a telegram informing her that the "charmer" is dangerously ill and rushes to find him, where they first met, in the park and this time (in a sort of mirror-image of the earlier scene) it is she who takes care of him.
What makes the film particularly beautiful is the way Capellani has situated it at the confluence of two completely unconnected phenonmena of the belle époque (some ten or so years earlier than the film) - the bird charmers (ah, there really were such things) and the emergence of modern dance (associated particularly in the 1890s with the American-born Loiê Fuller). The bird-charmers were to be found principally in the Tuileries gardens. The Lumières filmed a bird charmer in 1897 and there are several accounts from around 1900 when one bird-charmer, Henri Pol, became so famous that crowds gathered to watch him feed the birds and several postcards featuring him were produced.
Loië Fuller became a celebrity dancer virtually by accident, experimenting with a dance involving a veil or drape that, when discovered and brought to France, became an absolute sensation as "The Serpentine Dance" of which there are countless filmed versions (none involving Fuller herself) in the 1890s and early 1900s. The part of the urchin/dancer is played here by Stacia Napierkowka, already a well-known dancer with the Opéra-Comique before being hired by Pathé and what she does here is in a sense re-enact the Loië Fuller story just as Duquesne plays a version of the bird-charmers of the same period.
This delicate and clever piece of double-nostalgia, for which scriptwriter, popular novelist Georges Le Faure, missing from the listings here, should also take some credit, is combined with a truly (as opposed to falsely) sentimental story in an absoluely classic little film. Not on any account to be missed.
