Le quai des brumes
Marcel Carné (1938)
Watching Le quai des brumes (in a packed NFT1), I didn’t understand why the tragedy of the story was so predetermined. Then I read the BFI note, an extract from Child of Paradise (presumably a biography/study of the works of Marcel Carné) by Edward Baron Turk, which explained the film in terms of the profound political defeatism that prevailed in France in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II. I’d known when the film was made but not expected it to be informed by a sense of hopelessness in the way that Baron Turk suggests.
The main character is Jean – a soldier and evidently a deserter from the army, although this is never made explicit. At the start of the film, he hitches a lift to Le Havre with a truck driver. On the way they talk about the weather – ‘le brouillard’, in particular. The passenger says something about the fog inside – he taps his head – as well as outside, an immediate indication of the psychological meaning of the dark sea-misted place that Jean is heading for. (The English translation of the title makes the point rather more obviously than the French ‘brumes’.) Jean and the truck driver nearly come to blows when Jean grabs the wheel, swerving to avoid a stray dog in the road. The dog, a white mongrel with a lot of Jack Russell in him, attaches himself to Jean and doesn’t leave his side in Le Havre, where Jean is looking to find a means of escape from France.
To cut a not long (89 minutes) but exceedingly gloomy story short, Jean – on board a ship about to leave for Venezuela – feels impelled to disembark to return to Nelly, the girl with whom he’s fallen in love. He kills Zabel, her psychotically possessive guardian (the act is a startling fusion of self-defence and self-assertion). Jean then is himself shot, as he’s leaving Zabel’s shop, by Lucien Lagardier, a local hood whom Jean has previously humiliated. As Jean dies in Nelly’s arms, the little dog, waiting in a ship’s cabin for Jean’s return, breaks free from his leash, scampers back to shore, out of Le Havre and back into the darkness of the road from which he, and Jean, emerged in the first place. Unhappy or fatal events have also overtaken other characters along the way.
Le quai des brumes raises the question of how much an audience needs – or should be expected – to understand the historical context of a film in order fully to appreciate it. Even if one accepts that a work of art is inherently likely to express something of the circumstances in which it came into being, this doesn’t mean that it’s a pure, involuntary emanation of its original time and place – or that the artist hasn’t consciously exploited the zeitgeist in order to strengthen themes and messages on which he may have chosen – without being predestined – to focus. Carne’s direction and Jacques Prévert’s screenplay (based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan) have a clarity and concentration tha give the film the authority of a classic. Eugen Schüfftan’s photography and lighting are richly expressive. Maurice Jaubert’s highly effective score has a martial rhythm weighed down by a trudging quality – it suggests that Jean has been on the march for years, looking for a place of greater safety. But I still found myself resisting the preconceived misery of Le quai des brumes – and thinking it unlikely that Carné and Prévert weren’t personally predisposed to what Pauline Kael calls the ‘poetic fatalism’ that is essential not just to this film but also to the same pair’s Les enfants du paradis. (The latter, although it was made during the latter stages of the Nazi occupation of France, is based in what was surely a new era in terms of national morale.)
There’s at least one salient feature of this picture that has its roots in theatrical convention rather than in the psychic-political weather of the late 1930s in Western Europe. Nearly all the minor characters are eccentric and the histrionically accomplished playing of these roles becomes not just tiresome but also, because the element of performance is so dominant, gets in the way of believing that these characters represent some kind of human truth. (This kind of eccentricity is also an element of Les enfants du paradis – but the theatrical metaphors of that film are so thoroughly woven into the material that the effect is very different and infinitely more satisfying.)
This isn’t true, however, of any of the four principal performers. Jean Gabin, as Jean, epitomises the film’s doomed sense of futile struggle against an implacable force of destiny, and he is magnificent. Gabin must be one of the most effulgently ordinary stars in cinema history – the strength and simplicity of his technique, as well as his looks, make him seem both like everyman and like no one else. He’s deeply convincing here as a man whose taciturnity is as much about keeping secrets as about not feeling the need to say more. He is marvellous in the love scenes with Michèle Morgan, as Nelly, not just in what he expresses but in how he animates her extraordinary but, up to this point, rather inscrutable beauty. Morgan is impressive in the remaining scenes. (Now in her eighty-ninth year, it’s remarkable that she actually was only seventeen – the age Nelly claims to be – when she made this film.) Pierre Brasseur, as Jean’s nemesis Lagardier, is well cast, not least because he’s a very different kind of actor from Gabin. Brasseur’s portrait of a petty (in every sense) criminal is very fine. His natural theatricality gives a lift to his scenes but it has depth too – it’s a splendid rendering of both the physical and the emotional sides of cowardice. And Michel Simon is powerfully disturbing as Zabel. His humpbacked ugliness is used expressionistically, as the look of a warped, resentful spirit.
14 February 2009
