CHILDREN OF PARADISE (1945)

As Roger Ebert began in his review, “All discussions of Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise begin with the miracle of its making.” Its creation, well, has enough of its own mythologised intrigue to cover an entire book. How, during its wartime production, those from the French Underground Resistance had their scenes shot just under the Nazis’ noses; how collaborationist actor Robert Le Vigan vanished without a trace when the Resistance “sentenced” him to death (the actor who replaced him was Pierre Renoir, older brother of filmmaker Jean Renoir); how the crew, led by production designer Alexandre Trauner (The Apartment), built the Boulevard du Crime sets that stretched “over a quarter of a mile”, occupying an entire block of Paris in Occupied France, with next to nothing in funds and resources; how “it is said that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed”.

How director Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert hid sensitive reels from the occupied authorities, stalled production on and off for two years, cut the staggering 190-minute feast in two, counting on the day when it saw the light of dawn in a liberated France; how, in its extraordinary run of 54 weeks, it “is said to play somewhere in Paris every day”; how actress Arletty, having had an affair with a Luftwaffe officer, was shamed, arrested, charged with treason, and jailed right when she was at the peak of her popularity—as the face of a Free France, the very country that had her punished for her forbidden love, in this 1945 romantic masterpiece. When Arletty allegedly said in retrospect “My heart is French but my ass is international”, it’s hard not to see in it a vindication for women who for the same “crime” had had their heads shaved publicly after the war, and this film’s moral—that life mirrors theatre, and theatre imitates and seeps back into life—becomes a cruel irony, with a reddish pigmentation and the smell of iron.

The real miracle, of course, is the film itself. Ostensibly the French’s answer to Gone With the Wind (1939), it’s a pipe dream vision of the theatre world, a moving and sumptuous poem to love and the craft of acting in all their nuances and varieties, to the lives of actors and the experience of us watching them act, of sharing their orgiastic rapture in every hand floating in the air reaching for the nimbuses, in every trill and crescendo in their bodies’ movement, every flat, eighth note, and sixteenth rest in their lines, every crest and trough in their inflexions, every slight twitch of the brow, and every shriek of excitement, crack of laughter, inhaling of the air, the suspense of the breath, and tear of remorse in and around our existence. It’s about those on stage giving themselves over to us, and those of us off stage giving ourselves back over to them, letting the energy and beauty of this push-and-pull wash over the entire stadium—an act of pure love.

Which was the source of disdain for the acting art in conservative aesthetics. Like in front of the cinema screens, the nature of our involvement has always been more as well as less than sensual, and only the best performers make you realise just how much they are stripping naked of themselves to move us, to touch us, to our tacit desire to give back their touch. To the world above, it’s rather degrading to let strangers, those voyeurs in the dark, prey upon your likeness and emotions, and too manipulative in the ingenuous exhibitionism and calculated façades, as if you’re literally in the same business as the stripper down on mean streets.

Perhaps it’s why works of, by, and for the bourgeoisie had been, almost without exception, worthless, self-important, drearily “intellectual”, and, faute de mieux, purged of sex. As penned by the famed Surrealist poet Jacques Prévert (“Les feuilles mortes”), himself once a part of the agitprop theatre company Groupe Octobre, Children of Paradise didn’t cave in to “class” and “high art.” The spirit of the theatre for Prévert was that of popular art, of pantomimes and swashbucklers, of a sophistication that’s built on the greatness and immediacy of feeling. DeWitt Bodeen, screenwriter of several Val Lewton pictures, wrote:

In French, “paradis” is the colloquial name for the gallery or second balcony in a theater, where common people sat and viewed a play, responding to it honestly and boisterously. The actors played to these gallery gods, hoping to win their favor, the actor himself thus being elevated to an Olympian status. 

The French theatre at the time was as Dumas knew it, and as Balzac subsequently wrote about it. It was a theatre for the people, catering to their romantic and extravagant tastes. Mountebanks, clowns, and courtesans quickened its rich blood. 

By film critic Pauline Kael’s count, there were at least five different styles of acting here, and they all work around the classic “beauty conquers all and wins none” plot contraption and the historical fiction framework. At the heart of the whole affair is the impoverished, unearthly Garance, with her pockets full of aphorisms, blooming in an unassuming lush in a sea of mediocrity, mingling the fates of the four heroes who pursued after her, whose love for her manifest all in their own ways. As Garance, Arletty’s control and lustrous pale face effortlessly rival Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Almost everything expressive is left to her mellifluous voice and that big, bright splendent smiles of hers, as her body moves only with the grace of thistledowns. She doesn’t need to snap her fingers; men just fly into her trap. She’s the least pushy of all ‘beauty incarnates’ that have ever pushed. “Love is such a simple thing”, so she said, in a life of fleeting pleasures. Alas, little did she know the tune: “Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’on moment; Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie.”

The way Count Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou) sees it, such an enchanting “creature” is just not proper for the consumption of a lowly multitude. He offers her to leave the theater life and become his mistress, if not his wife. As the blandest and richest of Garance’s suitors, Salou doesn’t have much of a role, but it was not about character, but the idea that aristocratic masculinity has no room for character, that possessiveness smothers life and beauty. If he should suspect any man of depriving him of her affection, he murders him in a duel; yet seeing Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur) blaring away as the jealous, paranoid Othello like discovering his own loveless shadow, he laments “I don’t like this Monsieur Shakespeare: his debased violence, and his lack of decorum.” 

Frédérick, of course, was the renowned Shakespearean actor who started out as a Harlequin at the Funambules with Garance. Brasseur’s charming brashness and boisterous bounce seemed like a springboard for Alberto Sordi. He played him like a Cary Grant parody of Mercutio. Yet one wonders about his measure as an “acteur”. Contracted to perform hokum, Frédérick breaks the fourth wall and does a comic turn, bringing the house down in laughter. He lifts the weight off his bravura, with honeyed wordplays that put females under his spell. Yet, his womanizing fails on Garance, even though she’s happy to be in the same bed with him. She sees right through his act. “Aren’t you happy with me, Garance?” “You’re not happy with me either.” Later, after Frédérick ‘confessed’ to her of his jealousy for the Funambules mime Baptiste Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), she replied “You see? It wasn’t so serious. A slight attack and you’ve already recovered.” Turns out, he was trying to find his character for Othello. 

Soulful and delicate, Baptiste makes your heart beat for him. The uncanny makeup conceals the warmth and sensitivity underneath: 

I’m like them [the poorer audience in the paradis]. I love them, I know them. Their lives are small, but their dreams are grand. I don’t want only to amuse them. I want to move them, frighten them, make them weep. 

Barrault, himself a mime artist who came from the theater, embodies the very soul of the film. Upon meeting a blind beggar (Gaston Modot), whom he accompanied to a bar late in the night, he found a miracle—where he least expected it, ordinary, passing unnoticed: the blind man discerns gold for those who can see. “Out there, I’m blind. A hopeless case, blind as a rat. In here, I’m healed.” It was, put simply, a performance that eluded even the best in the craft. The man may be a fraud, may be a charlatan, and yet it’s here in the wake of dawn in this downtrodden bar where miracles happened. Such is the soul of theater, of dreams and illusions, where hope is found, and lost. 

The first time he met Garance he was instantly moonstruck. As a witness, he improvised a pantomime that gave her a way out of a false burglary accusation. Holding the flower she gifted him, everything else around him is gone. Later when they’re properly acquainted as he escorted her out of a storm, the disbelief in his face over having her so close with him gradually turns into an expression of pain, like the ones you’d have in your chest if a Cupid had taken a shot through it; “heartstruck,” so they say. Later still, when “heartstruck” turned to “heartbroken” over having learned that he might’ve missed the last chance they could be together, he had plunged into a depression so deep that a simple sigh could seem as if he were tearing his lovelorn heart apart. He makes you feel the anguish with his whole body. Barrault doesn’t need to prove his dramatic genius. He is a truer Shakespearean than the best Shakespearean actor. 

It is sometimes said that “all comedy is tragedy, if you only look deep enough into it.” You might as well add “all tragedy is comedy, if you think for only 2 seconds about it.” The Baptiste who plays for laughs on stage is really a hopeless romantic anguished by his romantic obsession, and the Frédérick who plays for dramatic intensity has a broad-hearted comic personality. There may be something to it after all when Mel Brooks said: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” As Pierre-François Lacenaire the murderer poet, the egomaniacal dandy-misanthrope who is himself his own theater, Marcel Herrand’s poisoned punctuations are devastating. He plays his debonair menace to a hilt, smiling caustically as he does the dirty. There’s no pretense in him because he is all pretense, with signs pointing to a repressed gay. A failed playwright with a disdain for actors, he turns his plays into reality, through heinous acts of crime: both having suffered through a rough childhood and learned to internalize their pains, with bearing and thinking that leave feminine connotations, he’s the Baptiste that could’ve been. 

In lesser roles, the granular Pierre Renoir was Jéricho the lousy bum informer, whose filth and gravelly growls put just about everyone in a state of revulsion. Marcel Pérès, the director of the Funambules who waves his arms around backstage as if he’s the one onstage, is pure theater; he’s wonderstruck to watch. If a Martin Scorsese with an adderall overdose had turned up in a Guinol show, he might look something like this. Pierre Palau is the stage manager he pushes around. María Casares as Nathalie, his daughter, has a burning unrequited love for Baptiste. 

The soap straightness that was a dud in a picture like Casablanca (1942) burns with passion and zeal in the convivial artifice of 1830s Paris. These children of the paradise—“the actors [and] the good-natured, working-class audience”—were sublimely amusing, even in their suffering. You don’t laugh at the earnestness in the melodramas of King Vidor and Douglas Sirk the same way: it’s not the campness, but that the performers can somehow elevate the romanticism of their roles into a ‘larger than life’ make-believe of a different class.

Seeing without knowing a word of French, no doubt part of it is our lack of the mentalese to cringe, yet the performers were so charming and radiant that the thought of how their lines would’ve sounded in an English tongue just doesn’t cross your mind. You’re still on the uptake when the scene has already moved on. It’s just about when the apathy of “seen it all before” has been beaten into you by overexposure to modern mass media, that the last thing you’d expect from yourself is to be moved by such thickly and conventionally constructed theatricalities. It’s as if Shakespeare’s words had come alive (the way it had been in your imagination but never in any live shows): everyone is indebted to the rich tonality and poetic ardour that Prévert brought to the film’s wit.

On the other hand, Carné was famously dubbed a “megalomaniac of decor” by critic André Bazin. Collaborating with Prévert, his Port of Shadows (1938) was one of the earliest to have been called a “film noir”, and Daybreak (1939) preceded Citizen Kane (1941) by two years for deploying the long flashback as a narrative device. Belittled by the French New Wave generation, many of whom saw Prévert as the real “auteur” behind the scenes, Carné fell into total obscurity after the war, despite this film’s unprecedented success and being the impresario of as many productions as 12 after it (twice his output before it). To tell you the truth, it’s rather hard to take Bazin’s words at their face value when the mise en scène wallows this much in actors whose bravura seemed to fill up the space around them (as the crowds did when that bravura wasn’t there), that the magic remains even without any of that florid “slum-glamour” that James Agee wrote about.

An ode to love like the best of its poetic realist cousins L’Atalante (1934) and The Rules of the Game (1939), Children of Paradise has lived on in the collective psyche of the French just as Gone With the Wind has in ours. Yet love is practically another word for danger: the film features an infamous ending, leaving us with no dénouement in sight. It all began with scarcely any slack in pace, and the bits of merry wonderment kept on coming, until everything fell right off a cliff when Baptiste’s face suddenly turned to ice in a heartbeat.

FRANCE | 1945 | 190 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | FRENCH

Cast & Crew

director: Marcel Carné.
writer: Jacques Prévert.
starring: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Herrand & Pierre Renoir.