In the sixties and the seventies,it was not hip to mention this director among your favorites; then in the nineties ,"les enfants du paradis" was elected best French movie of all time ("quai des brumes" was also in the top ten)and today, Marcel Carné has the place he has always deserved in the French cinema and this biopic could not have come at a better time.
Carné 's work is timeless (mainly in his golden decade 1936-1946) and you can still discover something in all his filmsevery time you watch one of them ; although I read his autobiography "la vie à belle dents" (which I recommend ),and saw all his films,including his first short,I learned many things in this doc.
A sad childhood ,the loss of a mother when he was a toddler ,a father who would take him to the brothels , he was brought up by his aunt : ironically he became a journalist who would pan the French cinema (the same the NV young Turks would do later on)of the mid-thirties
Director Jacques Feyder and his wife/actress Françoise Rosay took him under their wing :he became the former's assistant and the latter would play in his first feature film "Jenny'"
But it was his meeting with Jacques Prévert which was pivotal ;it was de rigueur to claim that the poet/screenwriter was the genius responsible for all the masterpieces of the golden age , but who can still maintain such nonsense when you see the pictures of "le jour se lève" ?
Carné wanted the cinema to take to the streets,to show the people ,and it spawned masterworks such as "le jour se lève" ,the story of a worker -Jean Gabin then at his peak , who had triumphed in the legendary "quai des brumes" -and a florist ;"hôtel du nord" ,where Prévert was replaced
by Jeanson ,proof positive that Carné was an outstanding director ; he cast Arletty as a supporting actress and she stole the show ,became one of his best friends and utters the most famous line of the whole French cinema ("atmosphere")
Whereas Clair ,Renoir and Duvivier spent the war years in the US ,Carné stayed in his native land;he was asked to make films for German firm La Continentale during the occupation and would have made a sci-fi work "les évadés de l'an 4000": the drawings are impressive and show Fritz Lang's influence -which could already be felt in "quai des brumes" and "le jour se lève" -; this plan which came to nothing would have been the French "Metropolis" (one of Carné's favorites )
Carné turned down the firm's offer and went on to make two other masterpieces ,"les visiteurs du soir " (supposedly a resistance film masquerading as a middle-ages fable ,but Carné declared that the hearts beating in stone was a subconscious symbol ) and "les enfants du paradis" where every actor found the role of a lifetime .At time of release ,Carné was French greatest director ,but he peaked and slowly but inexorably his star began to fade .
"Les portes de la nuit" was still a great work (Carné ,true to himself ,had a metro station built.) but Gabin and Dietrich were replaced by beginners ,Yves Montand and Natalie Nattier :the movie suffered accordingly but it's still a great achievement(Reggiani stole the show)
The last phase of his career is not devoid of interest and ,if none of these films compares favorably with the golden age works ,"les tricheurs" and "Thérèse Raquin"
are musts .He met his friend Roland Lesaffre-an actor cast in all his films after the war- who later married Japanese actress Yoko Tani : the movie never speaks of a menage à trois ;although Carné was a closeted gay ,Lesaffre had always said his relationship with his director was platonic love .
Carné 's homosexuality -and it's perhaps the first time a doc has broached the subject- shows in his films : the soldier in "hotel du nord " , Lacenaire (played by Marcel Herrand,himself gay) in "les enfants du paradis" , a naked Jean-Louis Barrault in "drole de drame" (1937!) , Lesaffre in briefs in "l'air de Paris" ,a bisexual boy in "les jeunes loups" (a film the director disowned ); the doc points out that this "forbidden love" was the reason which explains the bad end of his stories :the admirable scene of Baptiste trying to follow Garance in the crowd of the carnival is revealing.
Then there were the NV attacks ;but his greatest works survived all of his detractors' and when he eventually met Carné ,Truffaut confessed he would give his whole filmography to have directed "les enfants du paradis". I would too.