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Les Enfants du Paradis
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When
it comes to revisiting the canon of great films – at any rate, those movies
that get hailed, promoted and re-released as deathhless masterpieces – I tend
to wheel through a wide range of mixed emotions. The anti-authoritarian in me
kicks against canons, received
opinions and consensus evaluations. I get very suspicious when a supposed classic
is unveiled for us today – whether it’s Citizen Kane (1941) or Apocalypse Now (1979) – and reviewers fall into
line, parroting: well, yes, all of us agree that this is one of the finest, the
greatest, the richest of films!
But
we collectively know far too little about the history of film to assume that we
have naturally sifted out the best and brightest from the vast pile of regular dross.
And the process whereby something gets to be hailed as a classic over time
often has much more to do with luck, circumstance and promotion than any kind
of intrinsic merit. That’s certainly the case, to give examples, with The African Queen (1951) or Cinema Paradiso (1988) – they would
never ever get anywhere near my personal list of the one thousand favourite,
most valued or significant films ever made. I guess what this complaint comes
down to, is that I’m more taken with individual, even eccentric responses to
cinema than I am with group siftings or consensus opinions.
But,
on the other hand, it can be a surprising and positive experience to come up
against the film canon. The American scholar Dudley Andrew has written a lot
about how the movie classics – at least some of them – may be in their elevated
position for very good and valid reasons. Andrew proposes we approach these
canonical classics humbly, at a kind of double angle: we have to understand
what these films meant in their day, in their particular time and place; and
then, what they can mean to us now – that is, if they still mean anything to us
at all.
I
like this attitude, because it opens up the classics to new responses and
interpretations. I will never forget, years ago, when I was teaching a film
course at first year university level. I was trudging through a few of the
familiar, old classics; including some which I hadn’t actually seen before
screening them – I was secretly grabbing myself an education, too. I’d read a
lot about about one particular classic by Jean Vigo, Zero for Conduct from 1933 – mostly rather stuffy material about the
film’s noble sense of struggle and freedom, and its sublime cinematic art. OK,
let’s give it a whirl. The students were as shocked and as pleased as I was to
suddenly discover a film that’s a rude, anarchic, low-budget marvel – with also
what seemed a rather pronounced element of queer propaganda in it. I certainly
hadn’t been warned about that element in the literature – and I was glad.
So
I took myself off to see, once again, Marcel Carné’s celebrated Les Enfants du Paradis. Is this film an
absolute, deathless, canonical masterpiece? I’d probably dispute that claim,
most days. But then again, I’ve always approached this movie through some fog
or other, on those most days. I first saw it when I was 16, and remember feeling
restless and bored all throughout. I was already a fan of the later, more
ragged and energetic films of the Nouvelle Vague, and to me Les Enfants du Paradis was just too
conventional, too stately, too academic, too static … and too long. I still
think, after my third viewing, that it’s a bit too static and long, and that
its second half is not nearly as good as the first. But it is, all the same, a remarkable and haunting film, and I’m in a better
position to appreciate the fact of that, as well as the why of that, now.
Les Enfants du
Paradis is a deeply theatrical film, in so many ways. In the first place, it’s about
the art of theatre – theatre in its diverse forms and traditions. Set in the
19th century, it is the story of a group of actors, the rather shady Parisian
world they move in, and all the unusual characters that somehow intersect in
this world. It is a grand melodrama (quite a soap opera, in fact) – a
grandiloquent tale of love thwarted and unrequited, of honour, murder and
deceit. The centre of this melodrama is Garance (played with cool seductiveness
by the still controversial “collaborator” Arletty [1898-1992]). Many men pursue
Garance, but the one who pines over her in tormented silence is Baptiste, a
mime artist played by the incomparable Jean-Louis Barrault (1910-1994).
Les Enfants du
Paradis is one of those films based on a dizzy interchange between the melodramas
happening on-stage, and those happening off-stage. Life imitates art and vice
versa, over and over; the characters find their lives mirrored, or even frankly
fictionalised, in the plays that they inhabit or behold as spectators. This
sometimes merry and always complicated game of playing or being, acting or
looking, on-stage or off-stage, standing under the spotlight or waiting in the
wings: that has been one of the cinema’s great subjects, from Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) to Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach (1952), from Jacques
Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) to John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977).
The
directorial style adopted by Carné (1906-1996) for this story is also
theatrical – and deliberately, not accidentally or lazily so, which is
something I didn’t previously grasp. His style stresses mid-shots and ensemble
groupings of the actors (who mainly stay still). It’s a very measured and
geometric way of framing, always placing the characters in their environment of
the theatre or the street, the mansion or the Turkish baths. This film about
the theatre, which stresses the look and function of the procenium arch,
creates its own, very theatrical point-of-view for the camera. The lighting
(cinematography is in the hands of Roger Hubert), very exquisite and intricate,
is really much more crucial than any mobile mise
en scène of the actors, or agile camera work, here; the Australian French-studies
scholar Anne Freadman wrote a spectacular piece in a 1986 Framework (issue 30/31) demonstrating the superb logic of the
film’s patterns of shape and décor as sculpted by the manipulation and
arrangement of light.
Only
very rarely does Carné break this sense of distance, this front-on view. My
favourite moment comes from one such trangression, and its dramatic power
arises from its rarity in the film’s overall system. Baptiste, in his white
mime costume, is doing an act on stage with Nathalie (María Casares), the woman
who, off-stage, pines hopelessly for him. Suddenly we get a shot not from in
front of the stage, as usual, but from the wings: Baptiste is staring, alarmed,
into this off-stage space. And then we see the horible thing that he sees: the
object of his desire, Garance, speaking intimately with his male rival.
Baptiste is subtly but utterly shattered, and Nathalie knows it right away. She
cries out, on this otherwise silent stage, a single word: “Baptiste!” It’s an
incredibly thrilling, grave moment; I wish this classic film had more like it.
But
watching it today, in 1996, the hero behind Les
Enfants du Paradis turned out to be not so much its director as its
screenwriter, Jacques Prévert (1900-1977), celebrated author of Paroles in 1947 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s
English-translated selection from it is rightfully a City Lights publication
classic). What an extraordinary career this guy had! From his dalliances with
Surrealism in the 1920s to this own wacky short films, from his feature scripts
for Carné and Renoir to his later poems and songs, Prévert was one of the great
populists of this century – and Les
Enfants du Paradis is the veritable manifesto of his special, intoxicated
populism.
Prévert
wrote in one of his visionary poems: “I phonograph for the splendid idiots of
the outer boulevards”. His art (across all media and genres) was an intense
mixture of sublime, poetic realism and the socialist, Popular Front politics of
his time. He was also an artist and an intellectual, and so he probably
romanticised the unwashed masses from a safe, aesthetic distance. But who
cares, when his romantic vision attains the beauty and coherence that it does
in this script?
The
film is a giddy mixture; on the one hand, it is a celebration of the little, anonymous
people with their little, inarticulate, stunted, briefly flickering lives. On
the other hand, what incredible poetry these humble folks use when they talk
about the moon and love, about desire and fate – what grandiloquent visions
they have of themselves, like when one of Garance’s many suitors says at
crucial intervals of the story: “Paris is a small city for great lovers like
us”!
We
tend to think that debates about high, elite culture versus low, popular
culture are a modern obsession; but Les
Enfants du Paradis is utterly devoted to this debate – and that’s all because
of Prévert. Once again, there’s a giddy sort of romantic projection and
exaggeration going on. What we see of official, three-act, dramatic theatre
here is stuffy, stiff, dead. Popular theatre on the other hand, is wild and
chaotic, semi-improvised, with more than a touch of the circus about it. Prévert
suggests that this popular theatre has been censored and repressed throughout
history because it is politically scandalous.
But
it is also light and sublime, and that sublimity is captured in the
breathtaking mime performances of Barrault as Baptiste. Barrault is the soul of
this movie; he and Prévert are what make it as great and memorable as it is.
Curiously,
in this showdown of high and low culture that the film stages for us, there is
a middle term that escapes criticism – because it is sublime and spectacular,
poetic and oafish all at once. That middle term turns out to be Shakespeare,
and specifically the play Othello.
Prévert’s melodrama and Shakespeare’s melodrama become progressively entwined
in striking, imaginative ways. So, if you can arrange it, try to watch Les Enfants du Paradis in some kind of
double bill (however makeshift) with any decent screen version of Othello (such as those by Orson Welles
or Oliver Parker). It will be well worth your intertextual effort.
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