Film review

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/