Saw the DVD again last night. It is a sublime film, and every time I see it, I fall in love all over again - with the French language.
Some observations & tidbits:
- Arletty plays Garance in a modern manner. Her (understated, forceful, "modern") acting was hailed by critic Richard Roud as "perhaps the greatest performance by a woman on film, ever". She was arrested and jailed soon after the film opened for having an alleged affais during the Couupation with a Luftwaffe officer. It was a time when the French, a great number of whom enthusiastically collaborated or remained apathetic during the Occupation, were looking for scapegoats to cleanse their guilt.
link
- Although screenwriter Prévert is considered a "classic", the play unfolds in a revolutionary manner, as far as the relationship between play and audience is concerned. Everyone seems to be play acting and the actors on stage (screen) seem to be reminding us about that, at every oportunity, even at the moments of greatest pathos - and this is a film full of pathos. The protagonist of a theatrical play breaks with the script and comments freely on it, causing the audience to laugh instead of cry, as the play's authors intended; the criminal admits to be always play acting, tellingly never giving out his real name, if he has one (viz. the scene where Decenaire monentarily cannot understand what Garance is calling him); in the carnival scenes, everybody is dressed up and play acting, but a lead character of the film, the mime, cannot make way towards his love because the crowd/audience gets in the way; at a dramatic climax, the arch-criminal in the film draws apart sharply the window curtains to reveal to the cuckolded Count his lover kissing the mime, as if in a movie theatre; etc.
- Paradise refers to the upper gallery in 19th century popular theatre hall, i.e. the cheap seats. The theatre set alone is spectacular enough, but these guys recreated a whole neighborhood! In the middle of the German Occupation, as well. The actor who was supposed to play the criminal fled the movie set because he was allegedly a collaborator and the Resistance condemned him to death. The arch-criminal's right-hand man (who gets karate-kicked by the mime!) is supposed to be extremely tough but blanches when his boss knifes someone. And at the bar, his drink is "hot chocolate".
...I'm hungry for more!
Therefore, I'm soon going to watch Le jour se lève (Daybreak), Hôtel du Nord (Hotel North) and Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows). Nobody does films of urban melancholy and nostalgia better than the Frogs , which is why they are the masters of
noir. In the movies and in the comics (
link).