Marcel Carné (1939)

The prologue tells us what we’re going to see:

‘Un homme a tué … Enfermé, assiégé dans une chambre, il évoque les circonstances qui ont fait de lui un meurtrier.’

We know almost immediately the identity of the man who’s been shot dead and, within a few frames, the identity of the man who killed him.  The latter’s name is François.  He doesn’t instantly strike you as the murdering kind; and we learn from the chatter of his neighbours in the building where he lives that he’s a good bloke.  So, as François wonders how the crime he’s committed came about, we wonder too.  And because he’s played by Jean Gabin we’re immediately well disposed towards him.  (This would also have been true of the first audiences for Le jour se lève, released in June 1939 – after La grande illusion, La bête humaine and so on).  The film is well under halfway through when we see the murdered man again.  His name is Valentin; he’s a music hall artist whose act includes performing dogs.  I hadn’t realised that the hero of The Artist may owe his name to this character but while George Valentin is a decent chap, his namesake here is a nasty piece of work.  He mistreats his onstage assistant Clara and, off stage, a younger woman called Françoise – in other words, both the women in François’s life.  (Valentin also mistreats the dogs in order to train them).  François lives with Clara – he likes but doesn’t love her the way he loves Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent).  As their twin names imply, these two are soulmates; the relationship between François and Clara is amiable and, we assume, carnal.  Even though François, a foundry worker, isn’t predisposed towards violence, it comes as no surprise that someone wants to murder the vile Valentin – so we don’t remain baffled for long as to how on earth his death could have come about.  You might think from all this that Le jour se lève won’t have much ammunition left for its second half.  Yet the film is so relentless and concentrated that you don’t experience the lack of surprises as something disappointing – anything but.

The film is structured as a series of flashback recollections in the mind of François, interleaved with shorter sequences in the present – the morning after the night which has ended with Valentin’s death.  These sequences describe the scene in the street outside, where a crowd has gathered, and François’s interactions with them.  The people in the street are sympathetic but avid for the details of what’s happened and what might happen next.  When at one point François yells at them the effect is startling because Gabin is normally such a vocally quiet actor.  The moment is also startling because he’s such an intensely believable one – he gets over to an exceptional degree the sense of a man’s horrified realisation of how he’s wrecked his life irretrievably.  Le jour se lève – written by Jacques Prévert and based on a story by Jacques Viot – is engrossing and engaging thanks principally to the wonderful actors and Marcel Carné’s direction of them.   As well as Gabin, there’s Arletty.  Clara is a smaller role than Garance in Les enfants du paradis but, as in that film, Arletty has the quality of a used sphinx – she is beautifully present but infinitely old.  There’s also Jules Berry, extraordinary as the sadomasochistic Valentin, who’s both strongly malignant and profoundly weak.  Berry’s Valentin seems always in motion.  This drives François mad in their climactic meeting – but it’s a movement without fluidity: it has a stiff, irrational, spasmodic quality – like a puppet no one is controlling.  (There were times when Valentin reminded me of the ventriloquist’s dummy Hugo in Dead of Night – in the moment in the nightmare sequence when Hugo starts to move independently.)  Valentin makes things up, he boasts of being a dreamer – this makes him more threateningly unpredictable.  The cast are able to make the characters they play both individual and definitive and the ominous, poetic visuals and music – the cinematography is by Philippe Agostini and the score by Maurice Jaubert – give the story a compelling weight.  The people in it, François especially, seem fated to a degree way beyond the fact that we know his fate from the start.

16 May 2012