TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

TinsHeadline Touches You

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

JoeytheBrit It's a wonder that nobody has made a film about the making of this film: it certainly has enough tales of resistance fighters, Jewish refugees and Nazi collaborators to merit one. Often hailed as France's greatest movie, it's undoubtedly an event, and has an epic feel to it, even though the story takes place in one small part of Paris over a space of a few years.Arletty (incredibly, closing in on 50 when she made this), plays Garance, a woman taking part in a sideshow attraction when we meet her, who meets a young mime artist, Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) who quickly falls under her spell. Arletty is also friendly with the marvellously roguish Pierre-Francois Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), who initially claims to have no feelings for her but who is, in truth, as besotted as Baptiste. It's Frederick (Pierre Brasseur), a budding actor, with whom Garance has an affair however. Until, that is, she is falsely accused of robbing a debt collector and must call on the help of wealthy admirer Abril (Fabien Loris).That this film ever got made at all is something of a miracle. It took eighteen months, in the midst of a world war which saw financial backers bailing out as the tide of that war turned. It sheltered refugees from the Nazis and gave them work on its crew, even as its leading lady conducted an affair with a Nazi officer. That all involved managed to create something so close to masterful under such trying conditions is, therefore, something of a minor miracle.This film contains individual scenes that achieve brilliance and that will stay with you to such a degree that you might be tempted to play just this scene or that every now and then to remind yourself of its brilliance. Despite including real characters, it creates a strangely isolated world of lovers and rogues, artists and drunks, tramps and eccentrics whose interplay is entirely believable, as too is the diverging paths through life each takes as they eventually converge once more to reach a tragic finale. The literate dialogue might be a little flowery on occasion, but the sophistication and depth of the story – just try imagining an American film from the same period, stifled by the restrictions of the Hays Code and the studio system, that could claim to come anywhere near to what this one achieves – draws the viewer in and immerses it in its world.The story is essentially a study of the various forms of unrequited love, of the way it can become a controlling force in a person's life, give them hope, or lead them to despair. Each character in the film is largely moulded into what they become by their love, which is why, perhaps, it ends in the way it does, because this is one of the few films where you can truly believe that the characters and the story will still go on once the film is over, and that the surviving characters' feelings for one another will never change.The film is long, but each scene is used with such incisive skill by Carne and writer Prevert to inform the audience of the thoughts and emotions of the characters that the time flies by and you come to understand them so well that, when the film is finally over, you really don't want to leave.

hasosch It is a fantastic and poetic world which Marcel Carné has presented to his public in his limited number of movies, almost everyone a masterpiece on its own. A world, in which fantasy and poetry have magical power. There is no gesture, no mimics, no sign without a meaning, a little character can change a world. Insofar, Carné is a late heir of Novalis. According to him, the sign is necessarily bound to its object, there is no arbitrariness and no convention. There is a "sympathetic abyss" between sign and object, and at the beginning of the creation of every sign therefore stands the Great Sign Creator, God. So, every syllable, every twitch and flutter and flicker and bicker and flash is a message from Heaven. No wonder, that in such a world practically everything is possible. And no wonder, that the gigantic fairground which Carné presents in his epochal "Les Enfants Du Paradis" is a world in the world that is protected by the Sublime. I even think that Carné's typical style, which is the style of a merciful and enchanted marionette-player, shows that the sense of life does not consist in enforcing everyone's alleged free will, but to learn how to communicate, to interpret and to act in this highly artistic semiotic world. Nietzsche had written that he supports an anti-metaphysic world-view - as long it is artistic.

blanche-2 "L'enfants du paradis" is a remarkable film made in Nazi-occupied France, actually done in pieces over several years. Even if it had not been made under such difficult circumstances, it will still stand as a magnificent masterpiece. With a script by the poet Jacques Prevert and direction by Marcel Carne, it stars Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault as its main characters, Garance and Baptiste Dubureau.The story takes place on the Boulevard de Crime in 1840s France, a street teeming with people and theater of all kinds. A mime, Baptiste (Barrault) becomes obsessed with a street woman, Garance (Arletty), a mysterious creature who becomes the artistic muse of two men, Baptiste and Frederick LeMaitre (Pierre Brasseur). Shyness keeps Baptiste from becoming Garance's lover, and he loses her to LeMaitre and others. Meanwhile, Nathalie (Casares) loves Baptiste and isn't afraid to say so. Garance finally realizes that she is as much in love with Baptiste as he is with her, but now they are both ensconced in other lives. What will they do? "Les enfants du paradis" is a dark film, going from intimate two-person scenes to massive crowd scenes on the boulevard, taking us into the dark alleys of Paris and the after-hours crowd in bars to the theater rabble-rousers, and demonstrating the power of mime in performance. This is a world of hungry actors, crooks, hustlers, casual sex, and great art.Only in France would a woman in her mid-forties be cast as a femme fatale - imagine Hollywood doing that in 1945. The Garbo-ish Arletty manages to be earthy and mysterious as Garance. The actress was not invited to the premiere of this film due to her fall from grace - she had a German officer as a lover during the war. In fact, she was arrested and spent time in a concentration camp, finally being put under house arrest. She did return triumphantly to film and worked until 1967, when blindness from an accident forced her to retire. She died in 1992 at the age of 94.The thin, sensitive looking Jean-Louis Barrault gives an exquisite performance as Baptiste, a role based on the real-life mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who invented the character of Pierrot. So successful was Barrault's pantomime work that it revived interest in the art form in France and made it possible for Marcel Marceau to become hugely popular. Barrault's performance is still studied in mime schools today. A passionate man, Barrault actually hid members of the resistance on the set of "Les enfants du paradis." This film is long, it's talky, but it is fascinating and detailed in every aspect. A no-miss for both film and theater lovers.

sc8031 One of the best films of all time? I'm not a weepy romantic wallflower, but this movie is good stuff.I won't summarize the characters for you, but the 5 or 6 main characters all represent different archetypes of the romantic experience. The acting here is superb. The first appearances by the primary male lead characters, Frederick and Baptiste, are brilliant and hilarious. Baptiste's physical comedy in particular is a riot.The whole film is carried by the acting and dialog. There are a number of violent and sexual moments, but they all happen tastefully off-screen. The writing is so fantastic, replete with hilarious puns, arguments and inspired homages to Shakespearean prose. Seriously, this writing is STRONG. Take notes, fledgling screen-writers! But the tragic elements are emphasized too. The film is full of despicable characters, ironic and painful moments, and wisdom too great for the characters to ever grasp. Even some of the comedic moments have a twist of tragedy to them, with artists who have unwittingly evolved into caricatures of themselves, actors who have become themselves on and off the stage and dreams which are so large they make the person forget to pursue them (if that makes any sense).And how about the layered elements of the tale? The movie opens with curtains to reveal a story about brilliant actors who cannot see the width of the world stage they inhabit outside of their careers. Except it isn't like a post-modernist method of layered presentation because such a method of telling the story is never a focal point. It's simply a nice bonus that leaves you thinking about your own life after the curtains are drawn.Do we love ourselves, other people, or just the feeling of love that other people can evoke from us? Sometimes one is not in love, but only enamored by the other as a muse. I feel like French culture is one that has meditated on these themes profusely and Children of Paradise certainly covers all the bases.