The historical fantasy 'Children Of Paradise' is a three hour film divided into two halves : 'Part 1 : Boulevard Of Crime' which is set in the 1820s & 'Part 2 : The Man In White' which is set in the 1830s. The focal point of the story is courtesan Claire Reine (Arletty) who goes by the name Garance. Among her suitors are mime artist Baptiste Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault) who's the son of leading carnival performer Anselme Debureau (Etienne Decroux), classical actor Frederick Lemaitre (Pierre Brasseur) who's always chasing women, criminal Pierre-Francois Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) who has a day job as a scrivener and pompous aristocrat Count Edouard De Montray (Louis Salou). The City of Light's low-rent talents flock to work along the Boulevard Du Temple, either as street performers or at local freak attraction Theatre Des Funambules. A respectable performer with aspirations dreams of reaching bohemian Paris' official venue, The Grand Theatre.
"This mulled wine is splendid. It goes down like God in red velvet tights."
Marcel Carne
'Children Of Paradise' is a dense and intricate work of artistic intention from writer Jacques Prevert and director Marcel Carne, two of French cinema's leading exponents of poetic realism in the 1930s. It's meticulously staged and structured to delineate the differences in Parisian society of the time in the most flagrant manner possible. A culture of silence surrounds the Theatre Des Funambules where performers are encouraged to never express their thoughts, politically, socially or otherwise. These allowances are reserved for society's finest though the Funambules attracts some of the heartiest punters in Paris.
"Les Enfants du Paradis was inspired by the popular theatre of the 19th century, and translated into an epic cinematic romance that will probably never be equalled for both substance and style. Three of its extraordinary gallery of characters, are based on historical figures - the pantomime artist Baptiste Debureau, the romantic actor Frederick Lemaitre and the criminal Lacenaire. Each falls in love with, and is briefly loved by Garance, a beautiful actress who leaves them only when her freedom is threatened by their attempts to possess her.
They meet in the neighbourhood of the Funambules theatre in Paris, sometimes called the Boulevard du Crime, which was reconstructed, amazingly enough considering that the Nazis were occupying Paris, at great expense and with sets stretching over a quarter of a mile. Actually the Germans encouraged the production which caused it to be either sabotaged or halted when various members of the cast could not be found. Some of them, working for the Resistance, had their scenes shot secretly. And Carné and Prévert hid key reels from the occupiers hoping that, by the time the film was finished, Paris would be liberated.
Carné pointed out that "paradis" is the colloquial name for the theatre's gallery where the "real" people watched and vociferously commented upon their entertainments and to whom the actors pitched their performances. You could say the film is about freedom, symbolised by the sophisticated Garance, but it is as much about our reactions to what is going on, and the actors reactions to our own."
- Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
"All discussions of Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise begin with the miracle of its making. Named at Cannes as the greatest French film of all time, costing more than any French film before it, Les Enfants du Paradis was shot in Paris and Nice during the Nazi occupation and released in 1945. Its sets sometimes had to be moved between the two cities. Its designer and composer, Jews sought by the Nazis, worked from hiding. Carne was forced to hire pro-Nazi collaborators as extras; they did not suspect they were working next to resistance fighters. The Nazis banned all films over about 90 minutes in length, so Carne simply made two films, confident he could show them together after the war was over. The film opened in Paris right after the liberation, and ran for 54 weeks. It is said to play somewhere in Paris every day.
That this film, wicked, worldly, flamboyant, set in Paris in 1828, could have been imagined under those circumstances is astonishing. That the production, with all of its costumes, carriages, theaters, mansions, crowded streets and rude rooming houses, could have been mounted at that time seems logistically impossible (It is said, wrote Pauline Kael, that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed). Carne was the leading French director of the decade 1935-1945, but to make this ambitious costume film during wartime required more than clout; it required reckless courage."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
"The sad, elusive, and sublime presence of Garance is at the very heart of this film. Richard Roud praised Arletty’s towering performance and called it “one of the greatest portraits of a woman in all of cinema ... a performance for the ages.”
- Girish Shambu, Senses Of Cinema
Arletty
'Tout Les Garcons Et Les Filles' - Francoise Hardy
The period detail in 'Children Of Paradise' is palpable. There's beautiful music composed by Maurice Thiriet and the Hungarian Joseph Kosma, Egyptian stylist Antoine Malliarakis reinvigorates iconic performance art outfits and the art direction by a high-grade ensemble of designers is continually inventive; my favourite stage sequence introduces a mobile backdrop when the Pierrot, Baptiste, does some silent running. Speaking of the Pierrot, leading French fantasy filmmakers who mined the country's proud clown and mime traditions, such as Jean Rollin, Claude Mulot, Jean-Francois Davy and Jean-Claude Roy, all owe a significant debt to 'Children Of Paradise'.
"Few would deny that Marcel Carné’s output between 1936 and 1946 –that extraordinary run of films that began with Jenny (1936) and ended with Les portes de la nuit (The Gates of the Night, 1946) – contains the very DNA of French classical film-making. During this period, he surrounded himself with the most accomplished personnel of the 1930s. Films like Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945) remain pinnacles of achievement not just for Carné but for his production designers, composers, actors, and cinematographers. So why do biographical studies of Carné continue to marginalise – or ignore outright –his post-war work? Even Edward Baron Turk’s masterful Child of Paradise, the sole English-language critical biography of Carné, devotes only seventy-two pages (of a 500-page study) to Carné’s post-1946 career, and this despite the thirteen more films made after Les portes de la nuit (several of them prize-winners). And therein lies the paradox: Carné was, critically and commercially, one of the most successful directors of the 1930s and the epitome of the ‘Golden Age’ tradition of filmmaking, and yet his career is effectively split in half – post-1946, he was pushed to the periphery from where he was unable ever again to re-emerge. Dubbed a “megalomaniac of decor” by André Bazin, Carné’s concept of filmmaking was predicated on studio-constructed stylised landscapes, expressive camera movements, and a meticulous pictorial composition, properties all viewed with suspicion by post-war critics. While, say, Renoir embraced an aesthetic of impulsiveness and immediacy, Carné’s films were wrongly perceived as pre-planned, airless, frigid. Yes, there are some duds – Le pays d’où je viens (1956) and Les jeunes loups (1968) are difficult to watch, let alone defend, but they remain anomalies in a canon of virtually unalloyed artistic and ideological maturity."
- Ben McCann, Senses Of Cinema
"Marcel Carné explores the playfulness between reality and theatricality, between theater and film, and between art and the audience’s experience with it. The film’s characters act out a narrative structure designed to connect with the moviegoing audience by occupying non-traditional dramatic types. Whereas royalty and politicians are typically the stuff of high drama, in addition to their historical detail, Carné and Jacques Prévert approach realism by using lowly performers, criminals, and hard-luck cases. And yet, their realistic characters are written with ironic and melodramatic flourishes, hence the genre’s name: Poetic Realism."
- Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review
"A thirteen-year-old François Truffaut, who had surely read Andre Bazin’s review, raced to see the film 'Children of 'Paradise' as soon as he could. Evidently, he, too, emerged hungry for more, since he went back for eight additional helpings in the next couple of years. Some might expect him to have denigrated it, for he would make a name for himself by slashing away at the self-satisfied cinéma de qualité that developed during and just after the war. But 'Children of Paradise' doesn’t sport the cynicism and trendy liberal values he abhorred; instead, it boldly stands by the romantic view of life in the period of Hugo, Delacroix, and Théophile Gautier, the period that Baudelaire hailed in his famous Salon de 1846. A fanatic for novels from that time, Truffaut could only admire Carné’s courage in reaching for such unabashed romanticism. So that, although he relentlessly skewered him in the years to come, Truffaut ultimately admitted to Carné that he would have traded his entire oeuvre to have made 'Children of Paradise'."
- Dudley Andrew, 'The Romance Of Children Of Paradise'
Jean-Louis Barrault
'Les Yeux Bleus' - France Gall
It was in Paris that musician Joseph Kosma met poet Jacques Prevert and the pair would create somewhere in the region of 80 songs together. It's believed that Prevert introduced Kosma to the filmmaker Jean Renoir whose elder brother Pierre Renoir portrays salacious gossip Jericho in 'Children Of Paradise'. Prevert wrote the screenplay for Jean Renoir's left-wing political assault 'The Crime Of Monsieur Lange' (1936) which featured one of Kosma's songs. The success of 'The Crime Of Monsieur Lange' led to Nazi officials paying Renoir a visit and requesting that he start making appropriate films about the birthing of the "New France". It was around this time that Renoir decided to pack his bags and move to America, some believe at the urging of concerned filmmaker Robert Flaherty. Fortunately, Renoir was welcomed by America's booming film industry, but these were the kind of life-changing decisions being enforced upon every working individual active in France from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s.
"I believed that every honest man owed it to himself to resist Nazism. I am a filmmaker, and this is the only way in which I could play a part in the battle."
- Jean Renoir
'Tu T'Laisses Aller' - Charles Aznavour
Marcel Carne's textural innovations are essential to 'Children Of Paradise' which confronts the idea that art is reality through a myriad of styles. It could be argued that the film is the epitome of France's love affair with lush, soft-focus romanticism thanks to the gravity defying compositions of cinematographer Roger Hubert. At the other end of the visual spectrum are Carne's raw, earthy frescos of street life. Another strong visual component is the use of the theatre as a structuring narrative device, a venue that opens and closes conversations, inspires actions and even influences thoughts. There is a ballet inspired by the film, also called 'Les Enfants Du Paradis', which has been performed to packed houses by the Paris Opera Ballet.
"I studied with Eric Rohmer at The University of Paris-Michelet, also called Paris 1. I spent a year in Paris as a comparative literature student, in exchange from Brown University. While I was there I learned that Rohmer had an open class in in the Paris university system and I managed to get myself enrolled. It was this incredible class, which was a cinematography class. It was called Cinematography with Éric Rohmer — all in French. Over a semester, each class he would show a different film with no sound. Most of the films he showed were his own. He showed Pauline at the Beach, Claire’s Knee, Les Enfants du Paradis — Children of Paradise, the Marcel Carné movie — and what was great, particularly when he would show his own movies, was he would talk about the cinematography. He talked about Néstor Almendros. He talked about [Paul] Gauguin. He talked about color, composition, light. It was very much a non-technical discussion. He would tell anecdotes about how he would show Néstor Gauguin paintings and Néstor didn’t find that helpful because there’s no discernible light source in Gauguin. Néstor actually writes about that in his book, which is kind of amazing.
At the time what was great is that I’m a French speaker, I’m fluent, but he spoke his own French cinema language which a lot people in the class — even native French people — it was a bit like watching one of his films. You’re watching and trying to understand what’s happening. That’s definitely what the class was like. I really didn’t know what I had when I took that class. I had seen him films and thought he was amazing. What was funny, at the time, I had all these cinephile friends who were Parisian. They would say, “What are you doing taking Cinematography with Rohmer? You should be taking a screenplay class with him. His cinematography has no merit.” I was like, “You guys, just the fact that Néstor shoots for him, alone, was worth the discussion. You don’t know what you are talking about! And any movie that exists has cinematography and it’s worth the discussion.” And I was just like, “You guys are wrong. This cinematography happens to be great.”
- Sam Levy speaking at The Film Stage about his cinematography for Greta Gerwig's 'Lady Bird' (2017)
"There’s something about black-and-white movies that’s more beautiful than any amount of CGI. The way light falls on faces, the way the shadows move; it’s utterly captivating and way more visually satisfying than 7-foot blue people waging war in 3D."
- Rachael Jones, The Double Negative
"In British cinema, we have Brief Encounter (1945). American film has Casablanca (1942) and Gone with the Wind (1939). In France, meanwhile, the romantic film par excellence will always be Marcel Carné’s epic Les Enfants du paradis (1945). Seventy-two years after it premiered at the Chaillot Palace in Paris on 9 March 1945, this sweeping tragedy of France’s 19th-century theatre world remains within the pantheon of cinematic heartbreakers. Carné’s film brims with vitality in its tribute to love, Paris and the stage, at the same time that it courses with sadness at the idea that not all of us will end up with the ones we love."
- Samuel Wigley, The British Film Institute
Marcel Herrand & Louis Salou
'Misgynie A Part' - Georges Brassens
Marcel Carne made some extraordinary films in his career but none moreso than 'Children Of Paradise'. The conditions it was filmed under can't be ignored, nor can the bravery shown by many of those involved in its production. Now that technology has changed cinema forever, it's hard to imagine a movie like this ever being made again. This means it's never too late to experience the magic of Carne's remarkable technical achievement.
