Monthly Archives: July 2018

  • First Reformed

    Paul Schrader (2017)

    Long ago, films about priests who were unequivocal heroes were mainstream Hollywood fare and occasional Oscar winners.  Boys Town (1938) and Going My Way (1944) are the two examples that immediately come to mind.  Now, of course, it’s virtually impossible to make a movie with a professional man of God at its centre unless he’s tortured by religious doubt, traumatised by his past and so on.  John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary (2014) had the nifty idea of attaching the central character’s torments to a whodunit – more precisely, a who’ll-do-it – plot.  Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is, in more ways than one, something else.  An absorbing character study and a self-sufficient drama, it also draws on or references several illustrious priest-story antecedents in cinema and literature, and, in effect, places itself in relation to them.  The film invokes too the work for which Schrader, in spite of his lengthy career, is perhaps still best known:  the screenplay of Taxi Driver (1976).  The connection of the moral crusades of Travis Bickle and this new film’s protagonist, the Reverend Ernst Toller, is a main reason why First Reformed becomes problematic.

    Toller (Ethan Hawke) is the pastor of the (Dutch) First Reformed Church in Snowbridge, New York State.  The church, about to celebrate the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its original consecration, now operates under the aegis of Abundant Life, a thriving megachurch in the neighbourhood.  Toller’s church is of largely historical interest and described by Abundant Life’s head Pastor Jeffers (Cedric Kyles) as ‘a tourist church nobody goes to’.  Toller himself refers to it as ‘the souvenir shop’.  His usual congregation is in single figures.  Two of those present at the film’s opening service are a young married couple.  Afterwards, the wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks Toller if he’ll talk with her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger):  she’s worried about Michael’s state of mind.  The handful of worshippers, the young wife’s urgent request and early indications, through Toller’s voiceover, that the priest is struggling to hold on to his faith and oppressed by the silence of God combine to evoke Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963).  As Schrader’s story develops, so does Toller’s kinship with the ailing curé in Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Robert Bresson’s adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel.  As a ‘whisky priest’, Toller also calls to mind the nameless protagonist of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory[1].

    Ernst Toller is a diarist, like Travis Bickle and Bernanos’s priest (although the latter’s ‘diary’ is actually a looser first-person narrative than a series of dated entries).  Toller is quite clear, from the outset, that he will keep the journal for one year only, before destroying it.  A diary may seem an old-fashioned storytelling mechanism and an easy short cut to the expression of the priest’s inner thoughts and feelings.  One effect of watching First Reformed is certainly to increase appreciation of Bergman’s and his lead actor Gunnar Björnstrand’s achievement in conveying so much about Pastor Ericsson in Winter Light without recourse to explanatory voiceover.  Schrader’s device works well, even so.  It situates Toller in a kind of confessional tradition, of which he’s conscious.  A great admirer of Thomas Merton, he knows that many questioning, doubt-wracked Christians before him have experienced a dark night of the soul.

    Schrader’s minister’s tragic personal backstory is specifically twenty-first century.  He used to be a military chaplain, as his father and grandfather were.  Ernst Toller is the last of the line:  his only son was killed in Iraq, after being encouraged by his father to join the armed forces.  Toller’s marriage ended in the aftermath of his son’s death, for which he continues to feel guilty.  The malaise affecting the young man whose wife seeks Toller’s help has also been modernised from the equivalent crisis in Winter Light.   Bergman’s fisherman Jonas Persson is oppressed by fears of nuclear war.   Schrader’s Michael is an environmental activist, convinced that damage to the planet through climate change is now beyond repair.  Mary (like her Bergman counterpart) is pregnant; Michael can’t accept the responsibility of bringing a new life into a world bound to disintegrate in the foreseeable future.   One element of the source materials that requires no updating is the nature of the main character’s physical illness.  The young priest in Bresson’s film has stomach cancer.  Toller, after repeatedly delaying a visit to the doctor, undergoes a series of medical tests that look set to confirm a similar diagnosis.

    Schrader presents what is, to an outsider at least, a plausible picture of present-day Christian organisation in North America.  Toller’s roles extend well beyond preaching to a diminishing flock.  Running a museum is a significant part of his job:  he shows tourists round the church (and puts up with their organ jokes); he talks to groups of local schoolkids, a more pleasurable experience.  Although there’s a verger of sorts (Bill Hoag), it seems to fall to Toller to keep the graveyard tidy and unblock the toilet in the men’s rest room.  In contrast, over at the megachurch, Pastor Jeffers appropriately wears a business suit rather than clerical garb.  The confidently evangelical Abundant Life is altogether a big deal[2].  Its operation benefits considerably from the financial support of an industrialist member of its congregation, Edward Balq (Michael Gaston), chief executive of a big chemicals company.   The forthcoming commemoration of First Reformed’s sestercentennial, to be simulcast, will be attended by local dignitaries including the mayor, the state governor and Balq, as well as Jeffers and a busload of Abundant Life regulars.  The event presents, most unusually, a space planning challenge at Toller’s church.

    Mary’s husband follows the example of Jonas Persson by shooting himself soon after the priest has counselled him but eco-activist Michael’s impact on subsequent events is more dramatic than Jonas’s – and the route into Taxi Driver territory.  The day before Michael’s suicide, Mary discovers in their garage a suicide vest and seeks Toller’s help and advice.   He agrees to counsel Michael again and to dispose quietly of the vest, without informing the police.  Michael commits a different form of suicide before Toller has the chance to talk further with him.  You immediately wonder how exactly Toller will get rid of the bomber kit and this doesn’t happen.  He also volunteers to help Mary out by clearing Michael’s laptop of any questionable material; in doing so, the priest becomes more persuaded of the urgent rightness of the dead man’s cause.  In accordance with Michael’s written wishes, Toller conducts his funeral service at a toxic waste dump and supervises the scattering of his ashes there.  Footage of the service on YouTube comes to the attention of Balq, who makes his displeasure known to Jeffers and Toller.  The latter fights his corner.  He can’t accept Balq’s argument that climate change issues are ‘complicated’; for Toller, preserving the earth is a straightforward matter of Christian stewardship.  He puts up outside his church a sign ‘Can God forgive us?’ (subtext:  ‘for wrecking the planet’).  Balq seeks assurance that Toller won’t say anything ‘political’ at the big commemoration service.  Toller gives this assurance but only because he intends to let actions speak louder than words at the occasion, wearing Michael’s suicide vest.

    Paul Schrader, born in 1946 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, received a Calvinist upbringing so strict that he didn’t see a movie until he was seventeen (and then did so without his parents’ knowledge).  His abiding obsessions with religion and pathology produce some startling juxtapositions in First Reformed.  The first indication of Toller’s illness comes in a shot of his bloody urine in the toilet bowl.  Schrader then cuts to choir practice at Abundant Life, with a chorus of ‘Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?’  As he tries on the suicide vest for size, Toller’s voiceover reads Ephesians 6:11, ‘Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil’.   At another point, Toller reads:

    ‘And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.’

    That’s from the Book of Revelation (11:18), which reinforces the apocalyptic atmosphere.

    A priest with a military background becoming a radicalised Christian holy warrior is a potent dramatic idea.  Ernst Toller, in one respect, is a more plausible avenging angel than Travis Bickle.  With his Mohawk hairstyle, sinister dark glasses and combat jacket, Robert De Niro’s Travis is a compelling image but so conspicuous that not apprehending him comes across in Taxi Driver less as a failure of the political candidate’s security men than of the film itself.   No one, however, would suspect what Ethan Hawke’s Toller is wearing beneath his cassock.  Another and more fundamental difference between Travis and Toller works to the disadvantage of First Reformed.  While both are greatly troubled souls, Travis is socially isolated and mentally unstable.  Toller, for all his anguish about his faith, his health and the state of the planet, always seems sane and self-aware, even in his cups.  How would this highly intelligent, self-questioning man not wrestle with his conscience over causing the death of people (who, unlike Edward Balq, might well be personally conscientious about the environment)?   The plot’s increasing improbability prevents the latterday Travis Bickle aspect of the story from coming fully to life – gives it an academic, compare-and-contrast quality.

    Toller has two important relationships with women, one of which is based very clearly on Winter Light.  Esther (Victoria Hill), who’s in charge of the choir at Abundant Life, is devoted to Toller.  It seems they had a very transitory physical relationship, which Toller wishes they hadn’t had.  Esther is still determined to have as much social contact with him as possible and is very concerned about his physical health.  He is as alienated by Esther’s emotional neediness as Pastor Ericsson was by the schoolteacher Märta’s in Winter Light.  At quite an early point in the extended, gruelling conversation between them, Märta says tearfully to Ericsson, ‘You sound as if you hated me’.   Schrader picks this up in the exchange between Toller and Esther in which he tells her, ‘I hate you for what you bring out of me’[3].  This frank brutality, obviously inspired by Bergman, doesn’t quite ring true of Toller, a more carefully sensitive, less selfishly saturnine individual than Ericsson.  But Victoria Hill is more naturally believable as Esther than Ingrid Thulin, in spite of her brilliant acting, is as Märta.

    The second relationship is more or less original, and crucial, to First Reformed.  Ericsson does no more than pay a call on Jonas Persson’s widow (of course, the timeframe of Winter Light is relatively very compressed – the few hours between noon and evening services on the same Sunday).   The growing mutual attraction between Toller and Mary is well done, perceptible but never telegraphed.  It moves, in every sense, to a new level, when Mary, suffering a panic attack, comes to see Toller.  She tells him that, when this happened while Michael was alive, they would smoke a joint and lie on top of each other, synchronising their breathing:  they called it the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’.  Toller asks if she’d like him to assist in the same therapy.  He realises, as soon as the question is out of his mouth, that he’s jumped the gun and given himself away but Mary, although initially surprised, takes up the offer.  Toller lies on his back and Mary on top of him.  They start to breathe together; then their bodies levitate.  Even if it wasn’t supernatural, this moment would be striking in a film whose camera movement is, for the most part, so limited – a visual affirmation of Toller’s lack of room for manoeuvre and Schrader’s uncompromising determination to grip the viewer.   It says a lot for the accumulating intensity of the narrative that the levitation, while it’s happening, doesn’t seem excessive or silly.  Unfortunately, Toller’s itinerary on the Magical Mystery Tour that follows is predictable and anti-climactic.   His mind is transported to starry skies, oceans and mountains, which then give way to images of industrial waste.

    This sequence is some sort of preparation for the film’s closing, differently transcendent scene.  Mary decides to stay with her sister in Canada in the last stages of her pregnancy but is keen to return to Snowbridge for the commemorative service.  Toller, knowing what he plans to do there, tells her to stay away.  She comes nevertheless.  He catches sight of her through a window as he’s completing his terrorist preparations, which he then feels compelled to abandon.  Instead, he decides to sacrifice himself.  He replaces the suicide vest with barbed wire that he winds round his bare flesh.  The drain cleaner he used to unblock the rest room toilet he now prepares to drink.  This speedy improvisation on Toller’s part suggests a modern Christ figure more single-minded than the original.  Pastor Jeffers was right when, in exasperation, he earlier complained to Toller, ‘you’re always in the garden’ – Gethsemane, not Eden.  ‘For you’, says Jeffers, ‘every hour is the darkest hour’.  Whereas Jesus asked his heavenly father ‘to let this cup pass from me’, Toller is ready to down the drain cleaner without hesitation.  Until Mary enters.

    Back in the church, Esther is singing a solo of ‘Leaning (On the Everlasting Arms)’ – a solo much extended, by order of Jeffers, thanks to Toller’s failure to appear for the service.    Paul Schrader’s sustained evocation of cinema’s religious obsessives and men in clerical black continues right into these closing details.  The barbed wire brings to mind the self-mutilation in John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979) of Hazel Motes, apostle of ‘the Church of Truth Without Christ’.   The persistence of ‘Leaning’ on the soundtrack inevitably echoes Robert Mitchum’s false preacher in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).  In other respects, though, the final, extended embrace between Mary and Toller seems disappointingly banal.  I don’t understand what Schrader means to say here.  I doubt it’s as simple as that true-salvation-is-the-love-between-two-human-beings.  In spite of the distinctive build-up – a mixture of severity and luridness – this is how the ending of First Reformed comes across.

    Ethan Hawke inhabits his character with a pleasantly surprising lack of strain and adroitly differentiates Toller’s manner according to whom he’s speaking to.  He builds the scene in which the minister counsels Michael especially well, from nervous, affable sociability as he accepts and drinks a mug of tea to growing intellectual excitement in the debate that develops.  The dialogue here is extremely well written – realistically credible and structured to enable the two actors to illustrate the effect on each other their words are having.  (Toller, although borne along on his increasing articulacy, is more concernedly anxious to help Michael than the coldly frank Pastor Ericsson was to reassure Jonas Persson in Winter Light.   Though Michael, who’s ‘spiritual’ but not a believer as Mary is, is less susceptible than Persson might have been to religious reassurance.)  Participating in a discussion group for teenagers and young adults at Abundant Life, Toller is asked to respond to a girl who can’t understand why her father, a diligently practising Christian, has lost his job.  Hawke conveys very well Toller’s awareness that the girl doesn’t want to be told a virtuous life is no passport to prosperity and his moral compulsion to tell her this anyway.   (His advice causes outrage elsewhere in the group.)   It’s nice to see an actor in an existential crisis role give nuanced attention to dramatically lower-key moments as well as to the in extremis highlights, which Ethan Hawke plays powerfully.   Millions more people are going to see Amanda Seyfried in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again than will see her in First Reformed; it’s good to be reminded from her portrait of Mary that Seyfried is a very capable actress.  Cedric Kyles is strong as Pastor Jeffers and Schrader’s writing of this role is far from crude.  He implies that Jeffers does have a real faith albeit one that aligns reliably with professional self-interest.

    First Reformed is being hailed by many critics as the finest achievement of Paul Schrader’s career.   It’s unarguably a kind of summation of his continuing preoccupations as a film-maker and a considerable addition to the cinematic tradition of turbulent priest dramas.  It’s impressive to look at:  Alexander Dynan’s photography infuses many of the scenes with an austerely beautiful (and entirely apt) wintry light.  Various music, including the rumbling original score by Lustmord (aka Brian Williams), is put to uniformly effective use.  Yet its flaws are too major for First Reformed to be fully successful.  The Travis Bickle reworking isn’t persuasive.  Although Schrader prepares the ground by making Toller ambivalent from the start about keeping a diary, his abandonment of it coincides too conveniently with the writer-director’s need to ignore the priest’s thoughts about the implications of his eco-terrorism.  Schrader minimises Mary’s and Toller’s reactions to their Magical-Mystery-Tour intimacy to maximise the impact of their final coming together but that scene, when it arrives and they feel the comfort of each other’s everlasting arms, functions as an eye-catching escape route out of the movie.

    To commend a film as ‘brave’ often means very little (The Happy Prince and Rupert Everett’s performance in it have recently been so described) but it’s fair enough in this case.  Schrader’s picture is commercially daring, at any rate.  Granted I saw it on a hot Friday afternoon but the turnout at Curzon Richmond was even smaller than for Ernst Toller’s services.   First Reformed isn’t in the class of Diary of a Country Priest, Winter Light or Taxi Driver but that’s hardly a disgrace.  It’s still a good film, thanks to its seriousness of purpose, and the calibre of much of the acting and writing.  It’s a grim film too, yet a pleasure to watch because Paul Schrader shows such valiant, imaginative intelligence in struggling, like his protagonist, with intractable issues.

    13 July 2018

    [1] John Ford’s The Fugitive (1947) is loosely based on Greene’s novel.  The Power and the Glory was also adapted for television in the US, in a 1959 production starring Laurence Olivier.

    [2] According to Wikipedia, the definition of a megachurch is:  ‘a Christian church having 2,000 or more people in average weekend attendance. …The concept originated in the mid 19th century, continued into the mid 20th century as a low-key phenomenon, and expanded rapidly throughout 1980s and 1990s; it is widely seen across the world as of the early 21st century’.

    [3] Or words to that effect – I may not have remembered this verbatim.

  • Les enfants du paradis

    Marcel Carné (1945)

    In the opening credits, the words ‘collaboration dans la clandestine‘ introduce the names of the set designer Alexandre Trauner and Joseph Kosma, who composed the music.  The words are a reminder of the extraordinary conditions in which Les enfants du paradis was realised, and which are essential to its legend and its cachet.  The film was made during the German Occupation of France.  Film stock was severely rationed.  Set builders were short of supplies. Financing for what had been planned as a French-Italian co-production collapsed a few weeks after shooting began in Nice, when the Allies took Sicily in the summer of 1943.  Wikipedia says that ‘Many of the 1,800 extras were Resistance agents using the film as daytime cover, who, until the Liberation, had to mingle with some collaborators or Vichy sympathisers who were imposed on the production by the authorities’.  Trauner and Kosma, both Jews, were necessarily clandestine collaborators with Marcel Carné and the rest of his team.  (Maurice Thiriet, Kosma’s orchestrator, acted as his front.)  Following the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, Carné had to recast the key part of Jéricho:  Robert Le Vigan, the actor playing him, had become a wanted man for collaboration of a different kind, with the occupying Nazi forces[1]. Les enfants du paradis eventually opened in France a few weeks before the German surrender in May 1945.

    Against this background, one of the wonders of Carné’s film is that it’s a big picture, and looks it.  Brian Eggert’s essay on the Deep Focus website[2] notes that Carné and Trauner ‘built the largest set ever erected for a French film by actually reconstructing the nineteenth century’s Boulevard du Crime’.  You wouldn’t guess from what’s on screen that food and drink were in short supply, even though, according to Pauline Kael, ‘starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed’.  It’s almost an irony of the exceptionally challenging real-life circumstances of the production that the theatre – including the artificial, make-believe aspects of theatre – is integral to Les enfants du paradis and its governing metaphor.   The titles appear against a shot of stage curtains.  The first sound heard, even before the musical overture, is a series of urgent knocks, which we come to recognise as a beginners-ready summons in the Théâtre des Funambules, a key location in the drama.  The film’s title, apt enough as a reference to the enchanted moments of the romance between the minor actress-courtesan Garance and the mime artist Baptiste Debureau, refers more definitely to the theatre audience in the cheapest seats.  The French paradis corresponds to the gallery – ‘the gods’ – in the English theatre.  (The film’s title for its North American release, The Children of Paradise, obviously misses that correspondence.  But ‘Children of the Gods’ would give the wrong impression too.)

    Garance, during an encounter with another of her lovers, the actor Frédérick Lemaître, momentarily stands back to describe what’s going on between them as ‘like a play’.   As well as onstage performances involving these two, Baptiste and others, there are several sequences of backstage (hyper)activity at the Funambules.  The style of plenty of the acting is vigorously theatrical.  Yet Les enfants du paradis is also decidedly cinematic – in the various collection of physical types, and especially the amazing faces, in evidence; and in the movement of Carné’s camera on the Boulevard du Crime, with its teeming, all-human-life-is-there quality.  (The cameramen were Marc Fossard and Roger Hubert.)  That last phrase brings to mind Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, as do the place and time in which the story is set – Paris in the 1820s and 1830s.  Jacques Prévert’s script evokes a Balzac novel in other ways too:  in the central theme of affairs that involve sharply contrasting personalities and kinds of love but are similarly ill-fated; in the clear, well-built, ample narrative; in the gallery of supporting characters.   Romantic passions are at the heart of a film that often seems the work of a romancier and is certainly a singular illustration of cinema’s capacity to hybridise other art forms.

    In the simplest terms, Les enfants du paradis is about one woman, Garance (Arletty), and four very different men who desire her.   The quartet comprises, as well as Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) and Frédérick (Pierre Brasseur), the criminal Pierre François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) and the aristocrat Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou).  The charismatic, finally elusive heroine is a fictional creation whose birth name, Claire Reine, is symbolically suggestive.  The name by which she’s known translates into English as ‘Madder’ (the plant); the sound of the word ‘Garance’ creates, of course, an utterly different impression.  The extended second syllable is a versatile instrument of expression, used by Garance’s diverse suitors to convey lust real yearning or, occasionally, cold antipathy.  Each of those suitors is based on an historical figure.   Baptiste Deburau [sic] and Frédérick Lemaître really were, respectively, a celebrated mime artist and a famous actor in the nineteenth-century Paris theatre.  Pierre François Lacenaire was a notorious criminal of the time and a would-be poet (in the film, he’s a playwright manqué).  Comte Édouard de Montray is inspired by Charles, Duc de Morny.

    Their relationships with Garance impinge on each other but these four male characters, in effect, divide into two polar opposite pairs.  Lacenaire is a thief and a murderer; his dandy-like appearance does little to conceal the fact that he relies on his criminal wits to make a living – and a killing.  (The English implication of the character’s name, suggesting ‘larceny’, is almost too good to be true.)  Édouard de Montray has an inherited fortune large enough to persuade Garance, at the halfway point of the story, to become his mistress, in order to enjoy a life far more materially comfortable than she’s ever known and even though she’s not attracted to the count.  Baptiste and Frédérick represent not only different temperaments but diametrically opposed types of theatrical performer and approaches to performance.  The upshot of this is professional success for both but contrasting fortunes in love.

    Frédérick is determined to succeed in the theatre and game for anything in order to realise that ambition.  In the second half of the film, he’s become a star.  Whether playing Othello or in a ludicrous melodrama, he’s exuberantly accomplished, shamelessly egotistical and goes down a storm.  At the start of the film, the shy, self-effacing Baptiste is treated scornfully by his father Anselme (Etienne Decroux ), an established name at the Funambules.  A chance event on the Boulevard du Crime – Lacenaire’s theft of a pocket watch – gives Baptiste the opportunity to steal the mime show that the company is performing on the street.  He thus gains a new prominence and a popularity he never subsequently loses, especially with hoi-polloi in the paradis.   Thanks to his modesty and reserve, Baptiste fails, though, to take the opportunity to consummate his relationship with Garance, who ends up spending the night with Frédérick instead.  Baptiste’s timidity proves to be a fatal error in the long run too.

    The film was originally divided into two parts – entitled Le boulevard du crime and L’homme blanc – to comply with Vichy administration rules that set ninety minutes as the maximum running time for any feature film.  As Carné had always hoped, Les enfants du paradis was screened in its entirety at the premiere on 9 March 1945.  (In its final version, it runs a little over three hours in total.)  This was how I first saw the film too; more recently, at BFI in November 2011 and at home this month, I’ve watched it in two sittings, which serve to emphasise the different dramatic structures of the two halves.  In Le boulevard du crime, the plot thickens and the cast of characters expands.  The focus in L’homme blanc is more closely on Garance and her four lovers – increasing the intensity and claustrophobia of their interactions, seeming to express the principals’ narrowing options.  Although the second film begins with an extended episode in which Frédérick make a mockery of the play in which he’s currently appearing, this comedy is very much for starters.  A melancholy main course is to come.

    In Le boulevard du crime, Garance twice performs in public.  She’s first seen as the incarnation of what a sign on the Boulevard advertises as ‘Truth in her bath’, a nude bather contemplating her reflection in a mirror.   Her second role is on the stage of the Funambules, in a commedia dell’arte-based mime piece devised by Baptiste, its storyline reflecting his earlier failure to act on his feelings for Garance and Frédérick’s taking advantage of that:  Baptiste is Pierrot, Frédérick Harlequin and Garance a classical statue that comes to life.  Garance’s stylised, idealised theatrical personas are far removed from the woman that Arletty’s fine naturalistic playing portrays elsewhere in the film.  Well into her forties at the time, the actress often looks her age.  When her smile widens enough to reveal her teeth, they’re not in great shape.  This helps to give Garance, in spite of her alluring beauty, a used quality that enriches the character.   An interval of several years separates the two halves of Les enfants du paradis.  Garance, after travelling abroad with the count, returns to Paris with him, takes a box at the Funambules and, in a disguising veil, sits alone there watching Baptiste on stage each night.  The close-ups that light Garance’s face under the veil reveal a woman who’s deeply world-weary (an impression reinforced by the veil’s patterning).  Yet in her brief reunion with Baptiste, she’s magically rejuvenated.

    Considering how boring mime is, it’s a tribute to Carné and his performers that the Funambules sequences are perfectly tolerable, even if there are plenty of them.   (According to Wikipedia, Jacques Prévert loathed mime too.)  In a story that presents the actor and the mime as entirely distinct phenomena, Jean-Louis Barrault’s achievement in being both is astonishing:  I’m obviously no expert but his mime work looks both accomplished and inventive.  Barrault is the essence of doomed romantic hope and vulnerability both in his Pierrot outfit and as Baptiste in civvies.  In his early scenes with Arletty, you wonder if he occasionally overdoes Baptiste’s poignant naivete.  What’s especially impressive about his playing in the later stages (the title of the ‘second film’ refers to his character) are the expressions of real human emotion that come through the white make-up Baptiste wears on stage.

    If he’d appeared in Les enfants du paradis only as Frédérick Lemaître playing roles in the theatre, Pierre Brasseur would still have given one of the most sheerly entertaining performances I’ve seen on a cinema screen.   His histrionic verve, vocal and gestural definition, and outrageous asides to the audience that upstage Lemaître’s fellow actors are elating.  Brasseur complements this with an economically incisive characterisation of Garance’s lover.  His shallowness may protect him from the abject despair experienced by Baptiste but Frédérick is capable of disappointment and self-doubt.  There’s a wonderful moment when Pierre Brasseur combines the professional and private sides of Frédérick to express his resentment of the man in white’s brilliance as a performer and envy of Garance’s persisting romantic attachment to Baptiste.

    A glory of the film is its eccentric supporting cast.  They really are too numerous all to mention but five stand out.  Pierre Renoir is the spiteful rags peddler Jéricho.  He does more than keep turning up like a bad penny, chanting phrases both comical and sinister (‘Here’s old Jéricho, the wild boar, the one who sleeps by himself’).  To Baptiste, he’s a peculiarly disgusting harbinger of doom and it’s a signal achievement of Pierre Renoir (Jean’s elder brother) that you can almost smell Jéricho – you certainly understand why others take a step back when he looms up towards them.  Fil de Soie, played by Gaston Modot, is a blind beggar whose disability is for professional purposes only:  ‘Outside I’m blind … incurable … in here [a drinking den] I’m cured’.  Fil de Soie, in other words, represents another kind of street theatre and Modot’s affably matter-of-fact cynicism is most appealing.  Jane Marken’s Madame Hermine runs the boarding house where Baptiste, Garance and Frédérick are all lodgers at one time or another.  At first a jolly, giggling, middle-aged flirt, Madame Hermine is a sadder, quieter figure in the closing stages.  You can still hear the music in her voice but as if from a distance.  She somehow reflects the emotional trajectory of the story as a whole.

    Strong-featured Marcel Pérès is the apoplectic manager of the Funambules, where rules of silence apply even offstage.  The manager, himself the loudest presence imaginable, fines his employees for any word out of place or accidental noise.  María Casarès plays his daughter Nathalie, another mime artist, who adores Baptiste.   Her feelings are never reciprocated but they marry, at the point at which Baptiste assumes he’ll never see Garance again, and have a son (Jean-Pierre Belmon – as Pauline Kael notes, a ‘pure Hollywood’ child).  Although the role of Nathalie is larger than any of these other smaller ones, she’s a one-note character and that’s reflected in María Casarès’s playing of her.  Yet that one note – of plaintive, stubborn devotion – has considerable impact.

    Carné and Prévert have to force the plot a bit to bring matters to a head:  it seems Garance has been watching Baptiste from her box in the theatre for a long time before attracting attention or curiosity.  But the climax is exciting and tragic, and Joseph Kosma’s various and memorable music, a major asset throughout, makes a potent contribution to this.  A series of verbal clashes involving de Montray, Lacenaire and Frédérick results not in the anticipated pistols at dawn but in Lacenaire’s killing of the count at a Turkish baths.  Carné doesn’t show the murder on screen, focusing instead on the appalled face of Lacenaire’s scruffy sidekick Avril (Fabien Loris), as he witnesses it.   The deed is in effect the end of Lacenaire too.  All passion spent, he calmly waits for the police to arrive at the baths and apprehend him.  Frédérick’s scarcely noticeable departure from the film might seem an oversight but it’s rather effective that such a flamboyant performer makes a low-key exit.

    Garance and Baptiste finally spend the night together. When Nathalie interrupts them next morning, insisting on her uxorial rights, Garance takes her leave, professing concern for the count, whom she fears may have been involved in a duel.  It’s ‘carnival day’ and the Boulevard du Crime is packed with people having a good time.  Baptiste desperately goes after Garance but loses her in the crowd, though we see her getting into a carriage, still unaware that her protector is now dead.  Finally, Baptiste too is obscured from sight, by a group in white Pierrot costumes, and vanishes into the throng.  It’s an unarguably unhappy ending.  Except that, as the curtain comes down on Les enfants du paradis, you can’t help thinking the mass of merrymakers on the Boulevard is also celebrating the Liberation of Paris.

    9/11 July 2018

    [1] The following year, one of the film’s stars, Arletty, was imprisoned for eighteen months for her wartime affair with a Luftwaffe officer.

    [2] https://deepfocusreview.com/definitives/les-enfants-du-paradis/

     

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