Children of Paradise
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Children of Paradise | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | Marcel Carné |
| Produced by | Raymond Borderie Fred Orain |
| Written by | Jacques Prévert |
| Starring | Arletty Jean-Louis Barrault Pierre Brasseur Pierre Renoir |
| Music by | Maurice Thiriet |
| Cinematography | Marc Fossard Roger Hubert |
| Editing by | Henri Rust Madeleine Bonin |
| Release date(s) |  March 9, 1945 November 15, 1946 |
| Running time | 190 min (uncut version on DVDs) |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| IMDb • Allmovie | |
Les Enfants du Paradis (released as Children of Paradise in North America, but more correctly translated as Children of the Gods) is a 1945 film by French director Marcel Carné, made during the Nazi occupation of France. The film is nominally set around the Parisian theatre in the 1830s and tells the story of a beautiful courtesan, Garance, and the four men who love her in their own ways: a mime, an actor, a criminal and an aristocrat. It is an epic, 3 hour film, described in the original American trailer as the French answer to Gone with the Wind.[1] The film was voted "Best French Film Ever" in a poll of 600 French critics and professionals in 1995.
Contents[hide] |
[edit] The film's title and its translations into English
As noted by one critic, "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."[2]
Thus, the title refers to the members of the theatre audience who inhabit the highest areas and cheapest seats. In the British theatre, especially, these areas are known as "the gods".
The film contains many shots of the audience hanging over the edge of these balconies, and screenwriter Jacques Prévert stated that the title "refers to the actors [...] and the audiences too, the good-natured, working-class audience."[2]
[edit] Story
Children of Paradise is set in the theatrical world of Paris around 1840, centred on the area around the Funambules theatre, also known as the 'Boulevard du Crime'. The film revolves around a beautiful and charismatic courtesan, Garance (famously played by Arletty). Four men, the mime Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault), the actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), the thief Pierre François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), and the aristocrat Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou) are in love with Garance, and their intrigues drive the story. Garance is briefly enchanted by them all, but leaves them when they attempt to restrain her freedom. However, the only one whose love is pure, the mime Baptiste is the one who suffers the most in pursuit of the unattainable Garance.
[edit] Plot Synopsis
Children of Paradise is divided into two "epochs," "Boulevard of Crime" and "The Man in White." The first begins around 1827, the second about seven years later. The action takes place mainly in the neighborhood of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, nicknamed "Boulevard of Crime" because of all the melodramas and bloody scenarios offered to the largely plebian public each evening. There are two principal theaters, The Theatre des Funambules ("tightrope walkers") specializing in pantomime, since the authorities do not allow it to use spoken dialogue, which is reserved for the Grand Theater, the "official" theater.
At the beginning of the film we meet Frederick Lemaitre, a young aspiring actor and inveterate womanizer who dreams of becoming a star. He meets and flirts with Garance, a beautiful woman who earns her living by exhibiting her physical charms (modestly) in a carnival show. Garance staves off Frederick's advances and goes to visit one of her acquaintances, Lacenaire, a rebel in revolt against society. Lacenaire is a proud, dangerous individual who works as a public writer to cover various and sundry shady activities. Shortly thereafter, Garance is accused of stealing a man's gold watch while she is listening to a barker (Baptiste's father) in front of the Funambules Theater. Lacenaire is in fact the guilty party. Baptiste, dressed up as Pierrot, saves her from the police by silently acting out the theft, which he has just witnessed. He reveals a great talent, a veritable vocation for pantomime, but also falls immediately and irremediably in love with Garance.
Baptiste's father is one of the stars at the Funambules. The daughter of the theater director, Nathalie, who is a mime also, is deeply in love with Baptiste. Before the performance that evening a used clothes peddler named Jericho reads in her palm that she will marry the man she loves. When a fight breaks out that evening between two rival clans of actors, Baptiste and Frederick manage to calm the crowd down by improvising a mime act, thus saving the day's receipts. The most enthusiastic of the spectators are those seated in "the gods" ("paradis", paradise, in the French theatre), that is, on the top floor of the balcony where the cheapest seats are located.
Later that night Baptiste catches sight of Garance with Lacenaire and his accomplices in a seedy restaurant, "La Gorge Rouge" (alternately translated as "The Red Breast" or "The Robin," a reference to the previous owner's throat having been slit). When he invites Garance to dance, he is thrown out of the restaurant by Avril, Lacenaire's partner. He turns the situation around and leaves with Garance, for whom he finds a room at the same boarding house where he and Frederick live. After declaring his love, Baptiste flees Garance's room, despite her clear invitation to stay. Frederick doesn't have the same scruples. When he hears Garance singing in her room, which is next to his, he quickly joins her.
Baptiste becomes the star of the Funambules, performing pantomime numbers with Garance and Frederick, who have become lovers. Baptiste is tormented by their affair, while Nathalie, who is convinced that she and Baptiste are "made for each other," suffers from his lack of love for her.
Garance is visited in her dressing room by the Count Edouard de Montray, a wealthy and cynical dandy who offers her his fortune if she will agree to become his mistress. Garance is repelled by him and mockingly rejects his proposition. The count nonetheless offers her his protection if the need were to arise. She is later unjustly suspected of complicity in an abortive burglary and murder attempt by Lacenaire and Avril. To avoid arrest she is forced to appeal to Count Edouard for protection. The first part of the film comes to an end with this development.
"The Man in White," the second epoch of the film, begins several years later. Frederick has become famous as the star of the Grand Theater. A man about town and a spendthrift, he is covered with debts - which doesn't prevent him from devastating the mediocre play in which he currently has the main role by exposing it to ridicule in rehearsal and then on opening night. Outraged, the play's three authors challenge him to a duel. When he returns to his dressing room, Frederick is confronted by Lacenaire, who intends to rob and kill him. However, the criminal is an amateur playwright and strikes up a friendship with the actor instead. He and Avril serve as Frederick's seconds the next morning, when the actor arrives at the duel dead drunk.
Baptiste is enjoying even greater success as a mime at the Funambules. When Frederick goes to a performance the day after the duel, he finds himself in the same box as Garance. His former mistress has returned to Paris after having traveled throughout the world with the Count de Montray, who now keeps her. She has been attending the Funambules every night incognito to watch Baptiste perform. She is still in love with him. Frederick suddenly finds himself jealous for the first time in his life. While the feeling is highly unpleasant, he realizes that his jealousy will help him as an actor. He will finally be able to play the role of Othello, having now experienced the emotions which motivate the character. Garance asks Frederick to tell Baptiste of her presence, but Nathalie, now Baptiste's wife, is first informed by Jericho. She sends their small son to Garance's box to speak to her of their family's happiness. When Baptiste arrives, the box is empty. When Garance returns to the Count's luxurious house, she finds Lacenaire waiting for her. The count is irritated to see such an individual in his home and tries to condescend to him. Lacenaire reacts with threats, showing a knife at his belt. After the rebel's departure, Garance declares to the count that she will never love him since she is already in love with another man.
Frederick finally plays the role of Othello. The Count de Montray, who attends the performance with Garance, is convinced that the actor is the man she loves. At the end of the play, the count mocks Frederick, trying to provoke him into a duel. When Lacenaire takes Frederick's side, the count insults him. Lacenaire takes revenge by calling him a cuckold and, pulling aside a curtain, reveals Garance in Baptiste's embrace on the balcony. The two lovers spend the night together in Garance's former room at The Great Post House.
The next morning, at a Turkish bath, Lacenaire assassinates the count for humiliating him the night before by having him thrown out of the theater. He then sends for the police himself to meet his "destiny," which is to die on the scaffold. Nathalie has gone to the rooming house, where she finds Baptiste with Garance. Garance leaves, pursued by Baptiste, but gets into a carriage which moves off into the frantic Carnival crowd, a sea of bobbing masks and white pierrots. Baptiste is swept away by the crowd and separated from Garance. At that point, the film ends, never presenting a complete conclusion to this love story. [3]
[edit] Sources of the story
The four men courting Garance are all based on real French personalities of the 1800s. Baptiste Debureau was a famous mime and Frédérick Lemaître was an acclaimed actor on the 'Boulevard of Crime' depicted in the film. Pierre Lacenaire was an infamous French criminal, and the character of the comte Édouard de Montray was inspired by the Duc de Morny.
The idea for making a movie based on these characters came from a chance meeting between Carné and Jean-Louis Barrault, in Nice, during which Barrault pitched the idea of making a movie based on Debureau and Lemaître. Carné, who at the time was hesitant about which movie to direct next, proposed this idea to his friend Jacques Prévert. Prévert was initially reticent at the idea of writing a movie about a pantomime, which of course would not well convey his strength in writing dialogue, but then he saw the opportunity to include the character of Lacenaire, the "Dandy of crime", who fascinated him. The Germans were then occupying the whole of France, and Prévert is rumoured to have said "They will not let me do a movie about Lacenaire, but I can put Lacenaire in a film about Debureau".[4]
[edit] Production
The film was extremely difficult to make, the external sets in Nice were badly damaged by natural causes, and exacerbated and compounded by the theatrical constraints during the German occupation of France during World War II.
The Vichy administration had imposed a maximum time limit of 90 minutes for feature films, so the film was split into two parts - Le Boulevard du crime (The Boulevard of Crime) and L'Homme blanc (The White Man).
Noted critic Pauline Kael allegedly wrote "that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed".[5] Many of the 1,800 extras were Resistance agents using the film as daytime cover, who, until the Liberation, had to mingle with some collaborators or Vichy sympathisers who were imposed on the production by the authorities. [6] Alexandre Trauner, who designed the sets, and Joseph Kosma, who composed the music, were Jewish and had to work in complete secrecy throughout the production and their work was attributed to others in the credits.
The set builders were short of supplies and the camera crew's film stock was rationed. The financing, originally a French-Italian production, collapsed a few weeks after production began in Nice, due to the Allied conquest of Sicily in August 1943. Around this time, the Nazis forbade the producer, André Paulvé, from working on the film because of his remote Jewish ancestry, and the production had to be suspended for three months. Pathé Cinéma took over production, whose cost was escalating wildly. The quarter-mile long main set, the "Boulevard du Temple", was severely damaged by a storm and had to be rebuilt. By the time shooting resumed in Paris in early spring of 1944, the Director of Photography, Roger Hubert, had been assigned to another production and Philippe Agostini, who replaced him, had to analyze all the reels in order to match the lighting of the non-sequential shot list; all the while, electricity in the Paris Studios was intermittent.
Production was delayed again after the allies landed in Normandy, perhaps intentionally stalled so that it would only be completed after the French Liberation. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, the actor Robert le Vigan, who was, ironically, cast in the role of informer-thief Jericho, was sentenced to death by the Resistance for collaborating with the Nazis, and had to flee, along with the author Céline, to Sigmaringen. He was replaced at a moment’s notice by Pierre Renoir, older brother of French filmmaker Jean Renoir and son of the famous painter, and most of the scenes had to be redone. [7]. Vigan was tried and convicted as a Nazi collaborator in 1946. One scene featuring Vigan survives in the middle of the second part, when Jericho snitches to Nathalie.[8] After the film was made, accusations of collaboration made against Arletty were met with her classic response: "My heart is French but my ass is international."[9]
Baptiste's father is played by mime and mime theorist Etienne Decroux, who was Jean-Louis Barrault's teacher (as well as Marcel Marceau's). Many of his character's lines about theatre can be interpreted as ironic statements on his own work in corporeal mime.[citation needed]
Carné and Prévert hid some of the key reels of film from the occupying forces, hoping that Paris would be liberated by the time the film was completed.[citation needed]
[edit] Release versions
The film had its premiere in Paris, at the Chaillot Palace on March 9, 1945, in its entirety. Carné then had to fight with the producers to have the film shown exclusively in two theatres (Madeleine and Colisée) instead of one and in its entirety and without an intermission. He also pioneered the idea of the public being able to reserve their seats in advance.
The producers accepted Carné's demands on the condition that they be able to charge double the price of admittance. Children of Paradise became an instant and monumental success, remaining on the screen of the Madeleine Theater for 54 weeks.
There are various alternate cuts of this film; the complete version, which is available on DVD, is variously described as 190 minutes (Second Sight Films, 1991) and 195 minutes (Criterion Collection, 2002).[10].[11]
[edit] In popular culture
- In 2006 London based theatre company simple8 adapted the film for the stage.
- In the Centre Pompidou in Paris, there is a theater named after Arletty's character, the Salle Garance (Garance's Room).
- A copy of the film plays a significant part in the plot of Flicker, a cult novel by Theodore Roszak.
- In the Tom Robbins novel Still Life with Woodpecker, the protagonist, an outlaw bomber nicknamed "The Woodpecker" (hence the title), cites the film - and its successful underground production in Nazi-occupied France - as a justification of his claim that even in the event of a global catastrophe, people will always have freedom and enjoyment.
- British musician Marianne Faithfull has written lyrics based on the story.
- Singer Bob Dylan has stated that this film was a large influence on his 1975 surreal film Renaldo and Clara.[citation needed]
- In the James A. Michener novel The Drifters, the narrator digresses that he learns foreign languages by listening to lectures by tutors. The "aha" moment for French was when the tutor, lecturing on French actresses, mentions Arletty. This starts another digression, that the narrator knew a psychiatrist who made every new patient go see "Children of Paradise," and would then quiz the patient about which character they identify with.
- Filmmaker Terry Gilliam did a five minute video presentation for the Criterion release, in which he saluted Children of Paradise as one of his favorites and a source of inspiration, because of its dreamlike quality.
- Simon Callow directed a stage adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1996. It was a notorious flop.
[edit] References
- ^ Original trailer, available on the Criterion Collection DVD edition.
- ^ DeWitt Bodeen, Les Enfants du Paradis, filmreference.com
- ^ Singerman, Alan, French Cinema: The Student's Book,(English edition) 2006.
- ^ Philippe Morisson essay, in French
- ^ Quoted by Roger Ebert, Children of Pardise, Chicago Sun-Times, 6 January 2002 review oif the Criterion DVD release
- ^ [1] Gio MacDonald, Edinburgh University Film Society program notes, 1994-95
- ^ Philippe Morisson essay, in French
- ^ Debi Lee Mandel, review of the DVD version on digitallyobsessed.com
- ^ Geoffrey Nowell Smith, The Oxford History of World Cinema, page 347. See also Arletty, allocine.fr: "mon coeur est français mais mon cul est international !"
- ^ The difference is likely due to the speed differences between NTSC and PAL video formats. The Criterion version has since been re-released by Pathé Classique with a remastered Dolby 5.1 soundtrack, unfortunately only available in Zone 2.
- ^ Comparison of DVD versions of Children of Paradise on Dvdbeaver.com
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Enfants du paradis, Les at the Internet Movie Database
- Les Enfants du Paradis at SensesOfCinema.com
- Children of Paradise review by Roger Ebert
- Criterion Collection essay by Peter Cowie
- Criterion Collection Marcel Carné Interview by Brian Stonehill
- Review by Debi Lee Mandel
- Review by Gio MacDonald
- Review By Christopher Null
- Essay By Stuart Fernie
- Essay by Philippe Morisson, In French
- Children of Paradise in Marcel Carne's website, In French
