“Le Jour se Leve” - Marcel Carne (1939)

Some of our most deeply felt experiences cannot be put into words, and we must turn to other forms of expression. Le Jour se Léve (Daybreak, 1939), Marcel Carné’s greatest film, is a truly exquisite exploration of those feelings. During the late 1930s Carné worked with screenwriter Jacques Prévert, and their moody, romantic dramas were said to be examples of “poetic realism”, a film genre that also featured works by Jean Renoir and Julien Duvivier. Certainly among the many great films of this genre, Le Jour se Léve and Renoir’s, La Règle du Jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939) were the high points. (Lamentably, remarks in Carné’s autobiography suggest that these two great visualizers of romantic humanism did not get along -- c’est la vie.) Ever since it's release and despite the deplorable condition of available prints since, Le Jour se Léve has been regarded as one of the greatest French films ever made.

It is particularly noteworthy that Carné’s greatest achievement in romantic expressionism was achieved without significant investment in set design. In addition, there are essentially only four characters of any consequence in the entire film, and each of these cast members plays his or her role to perfection. Like the preceding Carné-Prévert collaboration, Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938), Le Jour se Léve starred Jean Gabin, who had not only become the leading French actor at this time, but was also almost the iconic figure of “poetic realism”. What Gabin was able to project in these films was something similar to what James Dean and the early Marlon Brando offered later in American films: a sensitivity and passion for feelings that was communicated outside the usual theatrical modes of verbal discourse. Somehow we viewers can empathise with Gabin, as we can with Dean, even when others around him in the story do not understand him and cannot share his feelings. We not only understand the Gabin character, we assert that he is perfectly normal, like us – we identify with him, even when, as in Le Jour se Léve, he is driven by his passions to commit murder.

Le Jour se Léve is about love, of course, but more than that, it is about the existential despair that is felt in connection with the usually hopeless quest to open oneself completely to another and achieve a kind of soulful union – the one, true love. The narrative, the sujet, is told as a series of three extended reverie flashbacks that represent the main character’s reflections concerning events that led up to the murder that he has committed. Overall, the plot comprises four sequences in “the present”, which are separated by three separate flashback reveries concerning earlier events.

1. Present. From the top of a high-rise apartment building, a shot rings out, and an exiting figure falls down the stairs and dies. A crowd gathers and police quickly ring the building. From inside the apartment, Francois, fires some warning gunshots to hold the police at bay.


2. Flashback #1. Francois in seen working at his job as a sandblaster in a foundry, a noisy, grimy industrial environment cut off from normal human interaction. A young, pretty girl, Francoise, walks by looking for directions, and despite the overwhelming noise of the factory, they engage in some polite small talk. The delight in discovering the similarity of their names and the fact that they were both raised in orphanages.

Three weeks later at Francoise’s apartment, the two are shown to be in love, particularly Francois, who wishes to progress their relationship further. He asks to stay the night, but Francoise demurely says that she has a prior engagement for the evening. Francois masks his jealously and leaves, but then he surreptitiously follows her when she soon goes out to a cabaret. There he discovers that she is enthralled by middle-aged entertainer, Valentin, who commands his trained dogs to perform tricks. Despite his utterly tasteless performance, Valentin is utterly confident on stage, and Francoise, sitting in the audience up front, enthusiastically appreciates every bit of it. Midway through the act, Valentin’s stage assistant, Clara, walks off the stage and over to the bar, where she meets and strikes up a casual, but flirtatious, conversation with Francois. At the end of his act, Valentin exits the cabaret with Francoise (still oblivious to the presence of Francois), but he returns a few moments later and berates Clara for walking out on his act. Francois, standing next to her, steps forward and tells Valentin to shove off.

3. Present. The besieged apartment room is now subject to a fusillade of police bullets, but Francois barricades the door and holds out.

4. Flashback #2. Clara’s apartment, where Francois is now the paramour of the mature and worldly woman. Though cohabiting, their relationship is casual, with no long-term commitments. Much to their annoyance, Valentin shows up and cajoles Francois into having a private talk about Francoise. In that talk Valentin claims that Francoise is his long-abandoned daughter and that he is worried about her welfare. Shocked by this revelation, Francois angrily swears that he loves Francoise, and that Valentin has no claim on her affairs.


The scene shifts to a flower shop attended to by Francoise, where she is visited by an ardent Francois. He is happy to learn from her that Valentin had lied and is not really her father. After Francois proposes marriage, the two lovers exchange amorous caresses. Francoise gives him a ceramic broach as a keepsake of their mutual, passionate love.

Francois then goes to Clara to break off their relationship. Clara, hiding her hurt, cooly comments how the venal Valentin trained his dogs by torturing them with a red-hot iron. And worse, she says that he has a collection of identical, cheap ceramic broaches, which he gives as souvenirs to each woman that he conquers. Clara shows Francois her own broach from Valentin, and he recognises that it is exactly like the one Francoise had given to him.

5. Present. Francois angrily throws the tainted broach out the window and then screams down to the crowd of onlookers. Francoise, in anguish among that crowd, faints and is taken to back Clara’s apartment.

6. Flashback #3. Valentin comes to Francois’s room and starts putting on another phony performance, showing off a gun he had intended to use on Francois. But instead he starts taunting Francois about how he had seduced Francoise. Enraged, Francois grabs the gun and shoots Valentin, bringing the action to the film’s starting point.


7. Present. At Clara’s apartment, Clara is trying to comfort the still delirious Francoise, but both women are in tears. Meanwhile Francois awaits his inevitable fate as the police close in with tear gas.

The performances of each of the four principal cast members is superb. Jean Gabin was never better than in this role of Francois. He is the perfect mixture of brooding toughness mixed with romantic sensitivity. Jules Berry, a distinguished character actor who had earlier played brilliantly in Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), is perfect as the role-playing Valentin, who manipulates the civilized customs of our culture in order to grab what he can and avoid responsibility. This overt exploitation of culture is foreign and infuriating to the working-class Francois. Arletty, as Clara, is a sympathetic observer to the tragedy who is unable to prevent its fatal denouement. Jacqueline Laurent, who was eighteen at the time of the film shooting, is also just right as the guileless Francoise. Each of these players is able to express the crucial interpersonal overtones that make the film a special experience.

In Flashback #1, Francois is presented as someone with whom most men can identify: genial but reserved. He doesn’t put on a show for others, but wishes to retain an authentic bearing that is true to himself. By maintaining his balance, he retains his “cool”, and he avoids showing any jealous concerns that may temporarily upset him. His efforts to maintain his authenticity are sharply contrasted by Valentin, who is most self-evidently a phony in every way. In his looks, manners, and actions, Valentin is the essence of inauthenticity: a duplicitous worm who unashamedly slips from one slimy mendacious role to the next without batting an eye. Though he is internally infuriated that Francoise, the embodiment of innocence, is so easily fooled by Valentin’s cheap tricks, Francois tries not to show his feelings of jealousy to her.

In Flashback #2, which is the key sequence in the film, the romantic relationship between Francois and Francoise reaches its culmination. In it, they swear their true love, their authentic love. The amorous scene in the flower shop shows them building their own special world of tenderness and affection.


For Francois, his relationship with Clara was sensual, but it was not the true union of souls that he longs for. Francois and Clara have been too cool, too reserved, too adult, to let themselves go very deep into an interpersonal union -- although there are indications that Clara (in a subtly resonating performance by Arletty) is masking her feelings and is actually in love with Francois. We could say then that the affair between Clara and Francois, though it passes for a love affair in our society, is not an authentic union of souls. Similarly, whatever the relationship was between Francoise and Valentin, it, too, was undoubtedly inauthentic, even for the sincere Francoise – it was merely an inauthentic dabbling in romantic fantasy that had been conjured up by a lecherous shapeshifter.

In the end, Francois could not abide with the idea that Francoise had slept with Valentin. The mere thought of it tainted and cheapened his memories of the romantic moments they had shared. These anguished thoughts probably implied to him that his opening up of his heart to her had perhaps been no more meaningful to her than those cheap "magic tricks" of that elderly and disgusting con man. To contemplate that idea meant the death of his dream of love (and hence the existential death of his own soul), and he could not bear it – especially when Valentin was standing there taunting him, and the gun was lying there on the table next to him. But Francoise, crying out in Clara’s bed at the end and delirious with grief, was different. For the innocent Francoise, the authentic commitment had reached totality. Though Francois’s affair with Clara had worried her and made her hesitant, she forgives him. She says it was not his fault, that she knows that he really loves her, and that she really loves him.
★★★★

“Le Quai des Brumes” - Marcel Carne (1938)

Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Le Jour se Lève (Daybreak, 1939) were the two greatest collaborations between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, both films being far superior to their more celebrated but somewhat overblown Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945). Both Le Quai des Brumes and Le Jour se Lève were existentialist films noir, although they were classified at the time as examples of “poetic realism”, a term that now only applies to a few French films (mostly scripted by Prévert) made in the 1930s. Le Quai des Brumes is the more explicitly philosophical work, but its great strength lies not so much in its philosophical musings, but in the romantic relationship between its two main stars, Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan, in the last half hour fo the film. In other respects the films mannered stylistics may be off-putting to some modern viewers.

The story of Le Quai des Brumes is one of continual gloom and depression from the very outset. All of the principal characters are pessimistic and weary of life, and the expressionistic production values consistently maintain an environment shrouded in the fog and murky shadows of French seaport Le Havre. The pervading romantic mood is also considerably enhanced by the Maurice Jaubert's sombre background music. Carné seems to have wanted to present a visual tone poem dedicated to melancholia, and the details of the crime plot that drives much of the action seem to be of only secondary importance. In most narratives, there are two types of plot themes: one type based primarily on action and attainment in the environment, and the other type based on personal relationships in the story. Usually these narrative types are intertwined, so that the protagonist might both solve the murder mystery and win the heart of his beloved. In Le Quai des Brumes there are both types of narratives present, a criminal plot and a developing relationship, but the criminal plot seems to be almost window dressing compared to the relationship between Gabin and Morgan. In fact in the prints of the film available today, some of the key details of the criminal plot are somewhat unclear.

The story begins with a French soldier coming alone to Le Havre, and it proceeds in three main sections.

1. Setting the Scene (about 22 minutes). The French soldier, Jean, has recently served in the colonial army in Indochina and hitches a ride with a truck driver into Le Havre. The soldier may be a deserter, and it is clear that he wants to hide from the authorities. He runs into a drunk, known as “Half-Pint”, who guides him to a seedy, out-of-the-way tavern, Panama’s, along the coast near the harbour. Meanwhile the action cuts to a nightclub where two gangsters are attempting to bully an elderly gentleman, Zabel (played flamboyantly by Michel Simon, with his signature quirky voice and awkward physical mannerisms). The gangsters, the leader of whom is Lucien, are searching for the whereabouts of someone named “Maurice”. Back with Jean, he arrives at Panama’s, where he meets Michel, a gloomy, philosophical painter, who speaks longingly of the temptations of suicide and the hopelessness of existence. Jean also meets a beautiful young lady, Nelly, who he takes to be a prostitute.
2. Zabel and the Gangsters. Lucien and his thugs show up at Panama’s looking for Zabel (and perhaps Maurice – it is only later that we learn that Zabel has already killed Maurice and has dumped the body near Panama’s). A gunfight breaks out between the tavern proprietor and the gangsters, ultimately driving them away. At daybreak, Jean and Nelly, now casually friendly, walk into town, where they encounter Lucien and his men. After Lucien rudely tries to grab and embrace Nelly, Jean humiliatingly roughs him up in front of his own men and drives him off. Jean and Nelly then part, promising to meet that night at a street fair. Meanwhile, back at Panama’s, the painter Michel has committed the foretold suicide by drowning himself in the sea. The scene now shifts to Zabel’s gift shop in town, which is first visited by Lucien and the gangsters (who are still demanding something from Zabel) and then by Nelly, who turns out to be Zabel’s goddaughter. Jean happens to wander into the same shop, and discovers Nelly there and her relationship with Zabel.
3. Jean and Nelly. Panama gives Michel’s clothes, passport, and cash to Jean, which give him the new identity he needs to escape on a ship. After arranging passage on a ship headed to Venezuela the next day, Jean meets Nelly at the street fair. This is 65 minutes into the 91-minute film, and the narrative focus now shifts to their relationship, which has been minimal up to this point. Nelly melts before Jean, and they kiss passionately. While enjoying a ride at the fair’s bumper car concession, they encounter Lucien again, and once again, Jean slaps the bully around in a humiliating fashion. Jean and Nelly then continue their romancing and spend the night together in a hotel room. The next morning the lovers part, and Jean boards the ship bound for Venezuela. But after a few minutes, Jean wants to see Nelly one last time and runs back into town to find her. He discovers her with Zabel, who has admitted to murdering Maurice and is now throttling Nelly. Jean brutally bludgeons Zabel to death with a brick, but on his way back to the ship, he is shot to death by Lucien, who had been waiting for him. Jean dies in Nelly’s arms.

The principal attraction of Le Quai des Brumes is the comprehensive atmosphere of existential despair that pervades the entire film. In this connection the criminal action narrative is relatively confused and ultimately unresolved. The driving element in the film is the romantic narrative, which only really picks up after 65 minutes of the film. Prior to that point, although we expect that there will be something between Nelly and Jean, there relationship is hardly more than that of passing acquaintances. One could view the preceding action narrative as merely a setup that provides the noirish background and circumstances to their story.

Consider how the action plot starts off and then peters out. In part 1, we are introduced to a set of characters who all appear to have some significant narrative weight and are given some attention: Lucien, Zabel, Jean, Panama, Half Pint, Michel, and Nelly. There is also the mysterious Maurice. Yet Panama, Half Pint, and Michel quickly fade away into insignificance in Part 2, despite their atmospheric presences in Part 1. Maurice never appears (there were plans to show his severed head contained in a package, but this shot was cut by the censors). We never learn what business Lucien has with Zabel, and Nelly never tells whatever she knows to Jean about these circumstances. So the criminal action plot is more or less a red herring all the way, despite occupying much of the film. Nevertheless, the film is worthwhile to me, because of the hypnotic charm of the romantic tragedy that takes over the story in the last 25 minutes of the film and which is worthy of comparison to von Sternberg’s dream-like cinematic meditations. After the previous doleful proceedings, in which everyone was either glum or passively resigned to a dead-end existence, Nelly erupts with a passionate love for Jean and sweeps the two of them into romantic hopefulness. This dramatic appearance of hope had been cinematically foreshadowed by the depiction of natural innocence in the form of a little mongrel dog first befriending Jean early on and then tagging after him through much of the film.

Jean Gabin had emerged as a leading French star by the late 1930s, but the precise nature of his charisma is not easy to grasp. He is not tall, does not have an athletic physique, and is not particularly handsome. Perhaps as a consequence he has been compared to Humphrey Bogart, although his persona is quite different from Bogart’s. He represents a kind of gritty, working class hero, who is usually not demonstrative, but who holds strong passions inside and out of view. So it is in this film. At times he explodes with anger over his pent-up frustrations. He holds things in reserve, but when goaded into it, he’s a man of action, not words. Early on at Panama’s, he blows up at Michel’s melancholy musings about art and suicide, saying that he hasn’t eaten in two days and was fed up with such self-indulgent talk. Up to that point he had not shown outward signs of hunger, an example of how he typically held his feelings in check. Later when he sees Lucien hassling Nelly on the street, he blows up again and furiously slaps Lucien rudely across the face. In this explosion, he reveals his underlying, passionate nature. He repeats this violence on Lucien at the town fair, and when he finally beats Zabel to death with a brick, it is a shockingly violent scene that exposes the tragic flaw of his character.

Nelly, who is a 17-year-old-girl in the story, is played superbly by Michele Morgan in her first major role. Although to me she looks older than 17, she was actually that same age at the time of the filming. Her convincing looks of rapture are what stay in the mind after the film is finished. The mise-en-scene in Part 3, showing their mounting ardour, carries the audience along with them. This is a brilliant depiction of the sudden rise of hope and exhilaration that changes the world from shadows into sunlight. But at the end, dark fate puts and end to their dreams, the little dog runs a way, and the dreary port of shadows returns.
★★★½