Homage to the Gods (and Their Offspring)
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) has a strange, convoluted production history, and a somewhat strange history with me personally.
Directed by Marcel Carné in 1943-44 in occupied France—actually, under the Vichy puppet government—it was the victim of German and Vichy antagonism, bureaucratic limitations, anti-Semitic laws, natural disasters and, as a result, protracted delays in production.
Exactly how Carné and company could put together a 19th-centuiry costume drama involving 1,800 extras and running twice as long as “permitted” by Vichy dictat has never been totally clear. How amazing, then, that it emerged as one of the monuments of movie-making.
The first time I saw Children of Paradise I hated it. I sat bored for two hours in the auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology watching a disconnected bunch of declamatory larruping about actors and mimes in 1830s Paris. So why on earth did I go back to see the uncut version, running over three hours? It defies justification, but I thank my peculiar instinct, because I’m a better person for it.
The original version runs 190 minutes, and it builds emotionally during every minute. Despite the lavish setting, it is wholly a movie of character, detailing every form of human interaction imaginable. As a wracking document of love and obsession, it has no equal I know of.
The milieu is the theater district of Paris in the1830s, especially the Funambules theater along the “Boulevard du Crime,” where pickpockets and conmen ply their trade amongst the pulsating throngs. “Paradise” refers to “the gods,” the high, cheap seats of the lower classes, to which the actors, their children, paid theatrical homage.
Supposedly, the incident that inspired the story line was the bludgeoning of an old-clothes seller by a mime, an inexplicable act that Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert hoped to illuminate. To do that….
Garance (“comme la fleur”), played by the single-named Arletty, floats through life on a raft of boredom, blown by some unattainability within, magnetizing men in part through her beauty, but more through the unfathomable mystery of who she is and why. She becomes the focus of a convoluted love pentangle, sought, semi-possessed, but never won by four men:
Baptiste the mime (Jean-Louis Barrault), unfaltering in his adoration, which is returned by Garance in equal measure—but at an agonizing distance.
Frédérick Lemaître the actor, who takes her body as lover for a time but can never reach her soul.
Comte Édouard de Montray, a loathsome aristocrat who uses his position to ensnare Garance as his mistress.
Lacenaire, the brilliant, egomaniacal criminal entrepreneur, a man without scruples yet an odd, undeviating honesty of person.
Baptiste, Lemaître and Lacenaire were historical figures. Montray was closely based on another. Though all that is hardly important. What gives the movie its extraordinary depth is that these four characters (along with Garance) embrace virtually every human emotion, motivation, and range of moral and ethical involvement.
Starting with the most admirable, Baptiste loves Garance with a passion that almost devours him, yet he treats both his rivals and Nathalie, his wife, with a consideration that is almost as lethal to him as his devotion to Garance.
Lemaître is driven by ambition that enflames and ennobles his acting even as it blinds him to his own limitations. He and Baptiste remain true to each other; when, at last, Lemaître realizes that he has no hope of overcoming Garance’s love for Baptiste, he thanks Baptiste because, “Now I can play Othello.”
Montray, arrogant as much by nature as position, feels no compunction in using Garance for his own ends. The acme of upperclass worthlessness, he deems whatever he does right simply because he does it.
Lacenaire: Ah, Lacenaire is one of the most remarkable characters ever put on film. A boundless cynic with no moral base, he treats crime as a commodity, openly boasting that no one outside himself matters, no one influences his actions or limits his reach. All of humanity is open to his grasp, and he refuses pointblank to deal on any terms but his own. Challenged to a duel by Montray, he answers, “Absolutement pas!” for only he will choose the time and place to administer justice. He could easily be branded a sociopath, and yet… while perhaps fully believing his denial, he loves Garance as tormentedly as the others, and he it is who gives his life for her, stabbing Montray in a Turkish bath, then calmly waiting for arrest and the guillotine.
Carné proves himself an actors’ director, for each of these conflicted, tortured souls is fully inhabited:
Arletty as Garance is letter-perfect. Never flirting, seldom fully engaged, making no effort to attain what she gains so easily but does not value, she smiles with easy grace but seems neither content nor disillusioned. She knows instinctively that whatever it is she might want cannot be had. The world washes over her but never cleanses.
Barrault’s Baptiste radiates an unforgettable beauty—small, slim, tight as a watchspring offstage, as the mime he projects a sinuous delicacy that avoids the maudlin (of the same school as Marcel Marceau, he projects Marcel’s simple grace, economy of movement and unerring choice of telling detail, without, as was too often the case with Marceau, that underlying whiff of the effete).
Pierre Brasseur keeps Lemaître charming even when most self-involved, a rake with blunted teeth who wallows in his own emotions, from the sublime to the mawkish. The perfect loose companion, yet the worst sort of cohabiter.
Lacenaire could not have been realized without the eviscerating intensity of Marcel Herrand. Never does this magnificently coifed symbol of inhumanity step outside his self-concern, yet the something—that something underneath still radiates.
Everything rests on the superb screenplay by Prévert. Both before and after, he collaborated on several films with Carné, but this was his culmination. The dialogue, like the filming itself, is a distillation of emotions. The characters claw at each other’s innards—though far more often at their own—without descending into melodrama. They speak from the heart even when taking the greatest pains to disguise their spirit.
I have the English translation of the full screenplay from 1967, part of a wonderful series of “Classic Film Scripts” put out by Simon and Schuster and, like everything else, now out of print. It includes every word of the final version, including those scenes cut in editing. What amazes me: No matter how simple or complicated the scene, the decision to cut was correct. The very last scene to be removed, during the wrenching ending, was the death of the ragman that had set the script in motion.
Is this my favorite movie of all time? Yes. Close second in the “epic” realm: Seven Samurai. I’m sure it’s hard to imagine how a three-hour movie can be the epitome of tight, cut-to-the-bone editing, but I think that’s the case with Children of Paradise.
by Derek Davis