Les Enfants du Paradis

Jill Forbes

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838716875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Les Enfants du paradis, a magnificent picaresque saga of Parisian street life and popular culture, has been called the greatest film ever made. Completed during the Occupation, it nevertheless boasted the largest set ever to have been built in a French studio, a crowd of extras and, under the direction of Marcel Carné, some of the most accomplished technicians and actors available (including Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault as the central couple doomed to remain apart). Jill Forbes examines how, at a time of crisis, the film reimagined the history of France. Although Les Enfants du paradis is escapist, even fantastic, Forbes finds in it a radical, counter-cultural sensibility concerned with destabilising social hierarchies and prescribed sexual roles and questioning the opposition between life and art. Vibrant, joyous but also touched by melancholy, the film combines the traditions of high culture and popular theatre to remarkable effect.

CARNÉ, BARRAULT, PRÉVERT – LES VÉRITABLES AUTEURS DU CRIME

Carné's success as a film-maker was in part due to the fact that he always worked with the same small team: the writer Jacques Prévert (except for Hôtel du nord), the set designer Alexandre Trauner (except for Jenny) and the composers Joseph Kosma and Maurice Jaubert. He also tended to use the same small group of actors: Jean-Louis Barrault, Louis Jouvet, Jean Gabin, Arletty and Pierre Brasseur. Jaubert was killed in 1940; Jouvet and Gabin were absent from France for the duration of the war; but the remainder of the 'team' were all present on Les Enfants du paradis. Carné's preferred method of work was closer to that of the Hollywood studio than to the auteurist approach which we now associate with French cinema. In addition to working within a group, his attention to detail and his perfectionism, his use of an elaborate storyboard and extensive rehearsals, and his capacity to organise large groups of people in complicated and lengthy shots (an ability which is magnificently displayed in Les Enfants du paradis), all point to the extent to which Carné saw himself as the conductor of a large orchestra, the master of a grand style reminiscent of D. W. Griffith at his most flamboyant. This, of course, was one of the reasons Carné was so successful during the war years, when film stock and electricity were rationed out by the Germans on the basis of a storyboard which meant that no one could afford to change their mind or make mistakes.

However, Les Enfants du paradis was not just a team effort in the sense that it was made in accordance with the production values typical of the large studios, it was also a compendium of the personal interests and preoccupations of its three principal originators, Carné, Barrault and Prévert. The plot they hatched in their discussions in the south of France was a bold attempt to offer a conspectus of their various interests in popular entertainment as represented in painting, theatre, literature and the cinema, so that the origins and meaning of Les Enfants du paradis are to be found, in part, in the earlier careers of each of its three creators which all contributed significantly to the final shape of the film.

Carné embarked on his career as a film-maker with a short documentary he financed himself entitled Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1929). In the early 1930s he worked as assistant to René Clair on Sous les toits de Paris (1930) and to Jacques Feyder on Le Grand Jeu (1933), Pension Mimosas (1934) and La Kermesse héroïque (1935). He cast Feyder's wife, Françoise Rosay, in the leading role in his first feature Jenny (1936) in which, as the mature, worldly-wise woman disappointed in love, she played an early avatar of Garance, as well as in Drôle de drame (1937) where her comic love scene with Jean-Louis Barrault is a model for that between Arletty and Barrault in Les Enfants du paradis. There followed Hôtel du nord (1938), and the masterpieces of poetic realism, Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Le Jour se lève (1939). When the war came Carné spent a brief period under contract to Alfred Greven at Continental Films before embarking on Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), and he devoted the remainder of the war to Les Enfants du paradis which, despite its period setting, reveals many continuities of subject, character, plot and narrative with his earlier work.

Carné acknowledged two main influences which are of particular relevance here. The first is the painting of the Impressionists about whom he was still attempting to make a film as late as 1991. Indeed, as a native of the Batignolles area of northern Paris, Carné may well feel a particular sympathy for Manet, Renoir and other members of the Ecole des Batignolles who, in the 1860s and 1870s, had studios in this district of Paris. Impressionist painting undoubtedly influenced Carné because it represented a new realism, the poetry of the ordinary and what Baudelaire called the heroism of modern life, with the result that reminiscences of the Impressionist school abound in the topography of his films, their cast of characters, and the milieux they depict.

Many of the preferred locations of Impressionist painting are contained within an arc that can be described from west to east, from the newly developed boulevards in the west, with their ironwork balconies and imposing façades, across the Batignolles and Montmartre to Barbès, the Gare du Nord and the Canal St Martin, taking in the Boulevard de Clichy with its cabarets and prostitutes, home of the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères, and the great railway terminus of the Gare St Lazare, subject of Monet's celebrated series of canvases. Carné recalls the Impressionists' depiction of these districts in the panoramic opening shot of Les Portes de la nuit (1946) which sweeps across the rooftops of the northern areas of the city in a manner reminiscent of the typical Impressionist 'point of view' – 'la vue plongeante or high shot – exemplified in paintings such as Monet's La Fête, rue Montorgeuil,³³ as well as in Les Enfants du paradis where it is used most notably in the closing shots of the carnival on the Boulevard du Temple and evoked as a memory by Garance's gesture towards Ménilmontant when she is standing at the barrière.

In the same way, the population of working-class women (shop girls, flower sellers, dancers), demi-mondaines and prostitutes, and the new urban landscape of railways stations, parks and cafés, or the new leisure activities, such as boating and swimming in the Seine or the Marne, or drinking and dancing in a riverside guinguette (open-air dance hall) are Impressionist subjects deliberately recalled in Carné's films. Thus the milieu of prostitution and demi-mondaines is to be found in Jenny, Hôtel du nord and Le Jour se lève. Jenny is an entremetteuse who organises 'rencontres mondaines', using as a front a lingerie boutique situated in the rue de Paradis. Clara in Le Jour se lève is a dancer and a girl of easy virtue while Madame Raymonde in Hôtel du nord is a streetwalker. Both the latter roles were played by Arletty who had therefore acquired a reputation for playing prostitutes in her career before Les Enfants du paradis. The world of entertainment and leisure is represented in Jenny and Le Jour se lève, while the modern forms of transport, and the architecture they inspired, figure in the barges passing through the lock on the Quai de Jemmapes in Hôtel du nord, the docks of Le Havre in Le Quai des brumes, the overhead métro in Les Portes de la nuit, while Hôtel du nord contains a fascinating shot of the Pont de l'Europe, subject of one of Caillebotte's best-known canvases, but in Carné's film enveloped in steam in a shot that is imitated from King Vidor's The Crowd (1928). Well before Les Enfants du paradis, which is of course entirely set in the world of entertainment and leisure, Carné had established these topoi as central to the modernity his films depict.

However, where Impressionist paintings appear to celebrate a new freedom of movement and the exuberance of popular leisure, Carné's films often turn on the dialectic of imprisonment and freedom, and his characters frequently evoke their desire 'to get away from it all'. Many of them, one way or the other, are on the run but cannot escape, for whatever reason, or if they have done so, they are irresistibly drawn to return. The entire action of Les Enfants du paradis apparently takes place in the enclosed space of a stage, and although Garance dreams of leaving in Part One, and by Part Two has been to India and spent long years in Scotland, she inevitably and irresistibly returns to her old Parisian haunts even though they amount to a form of imprisonment in what Lacenaire calls a gilded cage.

The tone of Carné's films also seems far removed from that of Impressionist paintings. His pleasures always seem touched with melancholy. His characters speak endlessly about starting afresh in the Paradise to which they propose to transport themselves, but the trains and railway stations which, under Monet's brush, are transformed by steam into symphonies of colour and plays of light and shade, serve in Carné's films to suggest a profound sadness, while in Hôtel du nord and Le Jour se lève, the steam from trains is linked with suicide and self-immolation. The only way the characters achieve escape is through dance which is perhaps more central to Carné's pre-1946 cinema than any other activity. Whether it be kermesse, bal populaire, formal gavotte or a couple waltzing alone, it is the dance which procures the physically induced transport that allows the characters to remain where they are while imagining themselves elsewhere. The formal patterns, the changing configurations of bodies within an enclosed space, give rise to Carné's most flamboyant displays of directorial virtuosity in Les Enfants du paradis. They are prefigured in the bal populaire in the Rouge-gorge tavern in Part One, when we first hear the music of the carnival scene, and they are magisterially executed in the closing moments of the film when, accompanied by the same music which has now become much louder, the brightly lit Boulevard du Crime is filled with crowds dressed like clowns who are hideous parodies of Baptiste's most famous act, and whose riotous festivity swallows up the mime artist. It is the perfect figure for the dialectic of freedom and constraint which underpins Carné's aesthetic, the simultaneous ecstasy and misery of the carnival scene, the paradise from which Baptiste can never escape.

In using some of the topoi of Impressionism in a film ostensibly set at an earlier period but made in a later period, Carné not only inhibits precise dating, as has already been suggested, but also posits a counter-tradition of popular representation which runs from the theatre at the beginning of the 19th century to the cinema in the middle of the 20th and which is summed up in the title of the film. He also shows how the cinema inherited from Impressionist painting the task of representing the city and its inhabitants.

It is perhaps no accident that the directors Carné worked for, such as Clair and Feyder, and the American and German film-makers whose works he explored in the articles he published in Cinémagazine in the late 1920s and 1930s, all transform the modern city into an actor in the drama, and that Expressionist film-making was a second crucial influence on him. From these mentors Carné learned how to explore the visual possibilities of light and shadow, to exploit architectural features and industrial structures that form interesting shapes and patterns, and to treat the human face and body as elements in a larger, more abstract design. He has a predilection for locations such as the Pont de l'Europe or the Pont St Martin with their intricate ironwork, for ships' masts, and for docks with their jumble of cranes often wreathed in mist, for prison grilles and, quintessentially, for that masterpiece of ironwork the Barbès-Rochechouart métro station which is the setting of Les Portes de la nuit. But he also films the human body so as to render it more abstract and incorporate it into the urban environment.

Carné wrote two articles for Cinémagazine which go some way towards explaining how he conceived the function of the cinema and what he sought in Les Enfants du paradis. In 'La Caméra personnage du drame' (The camera as character in the play), written in 1929, he discusses Murnau's use of the tracking shot, a technical advance which Carné believed transformed the psychology of the cinema, changing the relationship between actors and space, allowing them to be, as it were, surprised in their environment by the inquisitive camera. This lesson is put to good effect in the opening sequence of Les Enfants du paradis and in the series of 'revelations' throughout the film, which allow the spectator to embark on a journey of discovery, peering through the 'keyhole of life'.³⁴

In 'Quand le cinéma descendra-t-il dans la rue?' (When will the cinema go out into the street?) Carné investigates how sound cinema, by forcing film-making off the streets and into the studios, has deprived film of its capacity to record reality, and divorced it from its roots in popular entertainment by persuading it to imitate the bourgeois theatre in its dialogue and mise en scène. This is why Les Enfants du paradis is profoundly nostalgic for the freedom of the silent cinema whose aesthetics are constantly evoked in the film's emphasis on gesture and mime. In this article the capacity to film the city and its people is posited as the touchstone of cinema as a popular art, and set design is seen as the means by which cinema retained that capacity in the era of sound. In this way, the set serves not merely as a substitute for authentic locations but as a form of superior reality and a means of discovery so that

one day when strolling round the outer districts of Paris we could swear we suddenly came across the streets invented by Meerson [whose] startling authenticity we find so moving – perhaps more moving than if [the film crew] had actually taken themselves off to the real scene of the action.

The manner of representing these sites is as important as the fact that they are represented. In the early part of the 19th century the combined effects of political and industrial revolution had swept away what has been called the 'transparent semiotics of the ancien régime' and destroyed the immediate legibility of the city and the people in it. Illuminated panoramas sought to restore that legibility in an attempt to display...