177. Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)

Anybody who touts Children of Paradise as the French Gone with the Wind is kinda lazy. Yes, it’s a three hour plus costume flick. Yes, it deals with unrequited love. But where GWTW is overwrought melodrama—great fun, but histrionic as your southern Aunt Pittypat after a jigger or two of bourbon—Les Enfants is delicate as a spider’s web beaded with dew. Hold your breath. It could break.

Most of all, it is unabashedly, lushly French. American movies are never easy with ambiguity; one could blame the Hayes code, but the puritanical streak running deep in so many Americans continues to this day, and an American female character who changes men as quick as a pair of gloves will still pay some sort of price for it even today. The French, on the other hand, embrace it; the greatest morality is love, with its power to render conventions and legalism moot. There’s also deep comfort and complete lack of shame at full-blown romanticism, personified by the mime Baptiste, played to haunting perfection by Jean-Louis Barrault. The mime explosion in the U.S. in the mid-to-late 70s all but killed any shot the art form had at being taken seriously, but here, practiced by one of its finest exemplars, it’s spellbinding. Baptiste’s love for Garance, played by the perpetually world-weary Arletty, has a doom and fragility sweet and believable. It makes perfect sense that Garance will take up instead with Frédérick (a wonderful Pierre Brasseur), an actor scoundrel as jaded as she, but it makes Baptiste’s despair no less heartbreaking.

The story, as graceful as the cardboard silhouetted dancers that swirl through one of Baptiste’s pantomimes, was crafted by director Marcel Carné with his frequent collaborator, the poet Jacques Prévert. It couldn’t be more different than the Lower Depths grit of one of their earlier efforsf, Le Jour se lève, and yet both have superb agility and achieve gravitas without ever once feeling overweight. Like other movies in the perpetual top 10 Movies of All Time lists, Les Enfants is effortless to watch, fully absorbing you from the beginning. The characters stay with you, the marvelously unresolved ending echoes in your mind like a love song you’d forget if only you could.

It is also the greatest of all movies set inside the world of theater, opening with a literal curtain being raised on the stage that is the city of Paris. Contrary to there being no people like show people, Carné shows us that we’re all like them: carrying on in the face of adversity, immersing themselves in their parts, and falling in love as hard as Shakespeare’s teenagers. The Paradise of the title is both earthbound and heavenly: the upper balconies, the cheap seats. Its inhabitants are referred to as The Gods. Carné and Prévert discovered the monikers serendipitously, having never heard them. It’s just one more bit of grace in a movie filled with it.

The fact that it was made under the most adverse of conditions makes it all the more remarkable. In this fascinating interview over at Criterion, Carné talks about the difficult working conditions. They included not only wartime shortages, admittedly less dire than they had been for his previous movie, Les visiteurs du soir (literally, The Evening Visitors, release title: The Devil’s Envoys), where the crew had injected prop fruit with an inedible preservative so that it wouldn’t get eaten. The larger problem was the omnipresent Gestapo, deeply and somewhat rightly suspicious of Resistance activity; at one point, they tricked Carné into delivering an extra into their hands, something for which he never forgave himself. On top of that, Arletty was openly involved with a Gestapo officer and ended up on house arrest during part of filming; she was unable to attend the movie’s premiere, which was probably just as well given the French fury at women who’d fraternized with the enemy.

The greatest pressure may have come from a producer; in the interview linked above, Carné does not mention him by name, but it was likely Adrien Remaugé as the other credited producer, Pathé’s Raymond Borderie, came aboard later. “[H]e now wanted a great film with great impact. It’s rare for a producer to come to a director with such a proposal…” Obstacles emerged throughout, yet Carné proceeded, and, from the sound of the interview, remained undaunted even in the face of six months without pay.

It’s one of those freak occurrences where someone set out with a mandate to create art—and did. Having watched Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina shortly before seeing this movie for the first time, I was stunned at its influence. Every movie set in a theater can give a nod to this one, whether or not the influence is direct. But it’s impossible to imagine another movie that will be quite so perfect.

Paradise found.

Criterion, of course, has the definitive edition on blu-ray or DVD.