Prof. Andrew Sarris
International Film 1930-1960
December 11, 2000
Les Enfants du Paradis
The 1945 French film Les Enfants du Paradis is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest films of all time. It is often called the “Gone With the Wind of art films,” although calling it an ‘art film’ really just indicates that it is in a foreign language, since both films are sweeping three-hour epics with huge casts and the biggest stars of their day. Furthermore, both movies attempt to authentically recreate a historical era while arousing in the audience feelings of nostalgia for simpler times. Having a narrative set in the past also allows the film to illuminate or explore universal issues that affect the present. While the French film may not be as technically impressive or have as high production values as its American color counterpart, it more than compensates with its brilliant acting, charming characters, and complex themes. Although traditionally downplayed or criticized by New Wave French critics, Marcel Carné’s straightforward directing and editing techniques are the perfect cinematic strategy for successfully transforming Jacques Prévert’s brilliant screenplay into a film masterpiece.
Les Enfants du Paradis is a difficult film to describe or summarize because it encompasses such a wide range of themes and spectrum of emotions. Rather than having a simple, clear moral like many stories, this film is a collage of ideas that combine to convey a larger, more profound look at humanity. With its impressive cast of characters and multiple protagonists, several of whom are historical figures, Children of Paradise captures and explores many aspects of how people interact and function in society, using as its backdrop Paris in the 1840s. This allows the film to explore the putatively simpler era of the mid-nineteenth century while also investigating common aspects of humanity, such as what that culture has in common with Paris in the 1940s. Each character represents a different aspect of that society and each one has a unique perspective on life, love, ambition, jealousy, loneliness, and boredom. Their lives continually cross paths as their hopes and dreams complement or contradict each other.
At the center of the story is a love pentagon, with four men independently competing for the affection of the lovely but indecisive Garance, played by legendary stage and screen actress Arletty. For Baptiste Debureau, the shy and intense aspiring mime (Jean-Louis Barrault), Garance is the worship of his life, the first and only woman he has ever truly loved. His charming, happy-go-lucky actor friend Frédérick LeMaître (Pierre Brasseur), on the other hand, loves all women, and Garance is initially just one more fling in his ongoing love affair with life and beautiful women. Yet even he is transformed by her when he finally feels jealous of her love and at last finds the emotional depth he needs to be a great actor. Meanwhile, the notorious criminal and misanthrope Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) is incapable of love, although he nevertheless feels deeply possessive of Garance and considers murdering each of her other suitors. Finally, there is Édouard, Count of Monteray (Louis Sallou), who warns her against aristocratic men who would keep her only out of vanity yet becomes just such a man. He has the longest relationship with her, although she stays with him only for protection and never reciprocates his love. Complicating the love and jealousy plots even further, Baptiste marries and has a child with Nathalie (Maria Casarès), a fellow Funambules performer who has always loved him devoutly. The tension is gradually built up during the first half of the film, and it explodes into a climax when Garance returns from her long sojourn with the Count and re-ignites all the old passions and rivalries.
In addition to jealousy and unrequited love, the other major emotional theme of the film is loneliness and isolation. Set in the romantic 1840s when people were supposedly much closer and more in touch with each other, this film initially builds up this idea but then undermines it by showing us how separated the characters are from each other. In an early scene, Garance tells Frédérick that Paris is a small place for those who love each other, which becomes a mantra for him that he repeats back to her twice. But the Boulevard du Crime is more crowded and dizzying that any modern city street, and in reality Frédérick and Garance go for long periods without finding each other. Once Frédérick is a successful actor, we see him surrounded by female fans and visitors, yet he appears somewhat blasé and dissatisfied with this lifestyle. Likewise, when Garance returns to Paris, she tells Baptiste that she is totally alone. This feeling is even more poignantly shown when Nathalie slyly sends her young son up to Garance’s theater box to ask her not to interfere with their family life. Garance sits alone in the box every night, and her eyes well with tears when young Baptiste asks her if she has a little boy of her own. The bum Jéricho tells Nathalie that he is the loneliest person of all. He even wishes that he was a widower, so that at least he would have memories to keep him company. Living alone is no life at all, he tells her. At the end of the film, Nathalie begs her own husband not to abandon her. Thus, while the characters all live in a huge city, their everyday interactions are superficial and they are left emotionally isolated, a feeling which resonates well with modern audiences.
Marcel Carné uses the camera and editing masterfully to emphasize this loneliness and isolation. When Monteray and Garance have their big argument over her continuing infatuation with her former friends and lovers, the film demonstrates just how far they’ve grown apart. Although they are in the same room and only separated by a few feet, they are never framed in the same shot. Rather, Carné cuts back and forth between medium close-up shots of each of them. While we watch Garance’s reactions, we hear Monteray’s complaints coming from deep in the background, as though he were very far away. The camera holds for a long time on each of them, with only occasional cuts, making it feel as though they are each in their own world, which is exactly what the script requires at this point. Likewise, when Nathalie confronts Baptiste and Garance at the end, Carné uses a long lens so that she appears more disconnected from them, reinforcing the idea that she represents reality and responsibility intruding on their blissful fantasy of true love. Finally, the best example of Carné’s cinematic portrayal of isolation is in the film’s closing scene. As Baptiste loses Garance in the throng, the camera slowly pans across the Boulevard du Crime, which is more crowded than ever because it is Mardi Gras. The low camera angle makes the sea of people appear to stretch on forever, making it impossible for Baptiste to ever catch the fleeing Garance. Jéricho, the lonely bum who Baptiste has always detested, grabs him and laughs at his futility. Then the camera slowly moves up to a bird’s-eye angle to show that the swarm of people really does go on forever and to reinforce how small and insignificant he is. The point is ultimately driven home at the end of this shot, when a large crowd of mimes moves into the frame and surrounds him, leaving him drowning in a sea of clowns. Gone is the world’s most famous Pierrot, now just another nameless individual in a city full of millions.
The techniques Carné uses to emphasize the isolation theme are especially remarkable because the rest of the film is so devoid of fancy camera or editing effects. There are almost no close-ups or moving shots in the entire movie. Instead, nearly every shot is a relatively long take framed from a fixed, medium distance. There is also very minimal cross-cutting, and the cuts usually occur only in between whole scenes. This is done to create an almost documentary level of realism, as though the camera were just placed on a tripod and captured the story as it was actually unfolding. Critic Andrew Sarris suggests that these long, steady takes and simple editing techniques, similar to those used in films such as Max Ophüls’ Liebelei and Madame de…, help to create an authentic, inviting atmosphere, even at the expense of the cinematic tension formed by multiple camera setups and montage cutting. Sarris argues that this tension is somewhat artificial anyway, since it is created by the film medium and not inherent in the story or characters.
Like the Ophüls films, Children of Paradise tries to present the camera as an objective observer rather than an artistic interpreter in order to emphasize the situations’ natural conflict. The effect works because the point of view makes the audience feel like a real observer to the events, which not only draws us into the plot but also helps us to identify with the characters. For the same reason, the camera is usually kept near the eye-level of the protagonists, even when this means some of the actions are partly obscured. The movie audience sees the story just as a character sitting inside the audience of the Funambules theater would. Watching the film thus evokes the experience of watching a play, which is appropriate since so much of the story involves acting and miming, and so many of the scenes take place on a stage through the proscenium arch of the theater. Particularly surprising is how captivating the sequences are in which we are watching straight pantomime scenes on the Funambules stage, just as actual audiences had a hundred years earlier.
Carné’s precise direction of the actors is another crucial element for the film’s overwhelming success. All of their movements, especially the mime sequences, are carefully studied and poised. When Lacenaire or Monteray walk, they emanate tremendous confidence and disdain for others. When Garance moves, she gracefully glides across the floor, floating seductively toward whichever character she is enchanting. The actors play their characters so uniquely and distinctly that even first-time viewers are not disoriented by the large cast.
Most important to the success of Les Enfants du Paradise is its ostensibly contradictory portrayal of a romantic, stylized past while at the same time making it seem as believable as possible. The fanciful quality comes from long sequences on stage as well as the almost magical setting of the Boulevard du Crime, a giant bazaar filled with jugglers, tight-rope walkers, sideshow attractions, and hundreds of extras taking it all in. The colorful sets and the melodramatic behavior of the characters also contribute to the highly theatrical mise-en-scène. At the same time, Carné conveys a sense of historical realism and objectivity through his deceptively straightforward cinematography.
This double strategy is used throughout the film. The best examples are the scene when we first meet Baptiste and the film’s climactic sequence following Frédérick’s premiere of Othello. In the first case, we see Baptiste reenact a pickpocketing in order to prove that Garance is innocent. For the entire sequence, we watch him from the policeman’s low point of view as he pantomimes the three roles in the theft. The camera doesn’t move or cut at all. Though the cinematic presentation is not stylized, his actions are somewhat unbelievable considering the seriousness of the situation.
Likewise, in the film’s most important scene, the showdown between the characters is exciting but implausibly dramatic. This sequence is critical since it is the convergence of all the protagonists and their opposing agendas: Monteray tries to goad Frédérick into a duel while also humiliating Lacenaire, who is already planning to murder him. Meanwhile, Garance and Baptiste stand on the balcony outside, totally isolated from the group inside the lobby. As in the argument scene between Garance and Monteray, the careful framing and cutting make it feel as though they are a million miles from everyone else, reunited for the first time since their magical evening when he lost her to Frédérick because he was too shy or idealistic to seize the moment. Unlike the isolation depicted elsewhere in the film, here their separation protects them from the jealousy of the others. But this shelter is brilliantly stripped away as Lacenaire rips open the curtain looking out onto the balcony, exposing them to everyone. All the protagonists are now framed together in a single shot, caught in Lacenaire’s web.
This scene more than any other also emphasizes class distinctions and the theatricality of life, two motifs which recur throughout the film and help to elevate it beyond just a canvas of human emotions. Frédérick and Baptiste are both stage performers who want to change the world through art, while Lacenaire is an unsuccessful playwright who instead enacts his violent plots in real life. He menacingly tells Monteray that comedies, tragedies, and farces are all the same thing, depending on your perspective. Although Lacenaire considers killing Baptiste and Frédérick, he changes his mind, declaring that actors are not people since they are no one and everyone at the same time. After he murders Monteray instead, he tells his assistant Avril, “the play is over.” The script also reinforces this theatrical theme with many references to Othello, the play Frédérick dreams of performing, which he calls a sad and ridiculous story like life. Lacenaire is modeled after Iago, a misanthropic villain who is evil without any clear motive. Garance is Desdemona, the complex object of everyone’s desire. And there are a number of Othello characters, including the other men and Nathalie, who are in their own ways each jealous, irrational, and passionate. Carné ultimately establishes this theatricality by turning the movie into a play and allowing us to watch the plots unfold with only restrained cinematic intervention.
The other aspect of theatricality that is essential to this film is the relationship of art and entertainment to class. At the beginning of the film, the owner of the Funambules tells the still-aspiring Frédérick that light-hearted pantomime is low-brow art for the rowdy masses whereas legitimate theater is pretentious, boring art that hypocritical aristocrats pretend to enjoy. The happiest people are the poorest ones who sit in the cheap, very high seats of the Funambules, which gives them the nickname the “gods.” The true artists are performers such as Baptiste who can dazzle this basest part of Paris, moving them to laughter, fear, anger, and joy without even using words. Although Monteray meets Garance in the Funambules, he clearly does not belong there and he later insults it often. When he finally forces Frédérick into a duel, Frédérick dryly responds that it is highly ignoble of him to so eagerly dispatch him into the next world when he is not even a member of his class in this one. Although Monteray’s upper-class immunity protects Garance from being arrested, after his murder, the camera cuts to a rare close-up of his signet ring, showing that his class could not save him in the end.
Incidentally, by killing Monteray, Lacenaire has saved Frédérick from certain death in the duel. This is unfortunately the one structural flaw in the film. Because Frédérick is no longer in danger, the audience knows that Garance does need to leave Paris for good in order to save Frédérick, which weakens the finality of her disappearance in the closing scene. Since Monteray is dead and Lacenaire faces execution, Garance presumably can now choose to either reunite with Frédérick or Baptiste, who still has an ethical dilemma because of his wife and son. Throughout the film, Garance maintains that love is so simple, yet even her relationship with Frédérick is complex. After being together for three weeks, they are in a state of anomie, neither happy nor sad, in love nor out of love. Four men love Garance and two women love Baptiste, but they are all presented fairly and sympathetically. The film does not attempt to lighten or gloss over how people’s choices inevitably break hearts and ruin the lives of those around them. While the beginning of the film suggests a simpler, more naïve world, its unanswered dilemmas and ambiguous ending undermine this impression. The ultimate message is that love is not simple and there are no winners and no clear solutions to the problems in this story, which are the problems of real life.
Les Enfants du Paradis is a success in nearly every respect, as it is funny, exciting, charming, and thought-provoking. Made at the height of World War II, when only inexpensive propaganda films were being made, this movie is particularly remarkable for its giant sets and thousands of extras. Some critics consider it a vehement statement against totalitarianism and the Nazis. While there are certainly a few anti-fascist moments, such as when Garance tells the police officer she values her liberty above all else or when Lacenaire threatens to expose the police-informer Jéricho, Children of Paradise does not make a strong political statement. To paraphrase an anonymous Internet enthusiast, this film is really about love and all the complexities of life and art.
Many critics, particularly the French New Wave, do not like Carné’s other films and thus try to downplay his role in the success of this one. They argue that all the credit really belongs to the brilliant script, written by the popular French poet, songwriter, and scenarist Jacques Prévert, who also wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame. While the script is certainly terrific, Carné’s understated and restrained cinematography and editing, along with his brilliant direction of the actors, are what masterfully emphasize the script’s difficult themes and transform the words on the page into one of the greatest films of all time. Furthermore, Carné and Prévert formed a tremendous partnership, working together on earlier films such as Jenny and Hôtel du Nord (which also starred Arletty), where they perfected their unique style of poetic realism. Carné’s later films may not be as powerful or distinct as these famous collaborations, but this should not at all diminish the importance of films such as Les Enfants du Paradis, nor should it reduce the credit Carné deserves for his pioneering directing style.