Children of Paradise (1945)

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After the curtain rises on Children of Paradise, viewers are treated to a stunning opening shot of Parisians teeming on a wide boulevard in the 1820s. On this street is where our protagonists seek their fortunes and others come simply for a night’s entertainment. First up is Garance (the incomparable Arletty), a woman working for a sideshow that bills her as the epitome of Beauty. Deciding she no longer wishes to be hemmed in by such an archetype, she leaves her current employment and is met on the street by Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), a foppish ladies’ man and aspiring actor who engages her in flirtatious repartee. Though amused, she refuses his attentions and visits the office of another friend, the dandified thief Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand). These two return to the Boulevard of Crime, where an outdoor stage is being set up to advertise a pantomime show in a nearby theatre.

With a nearby nobleman distracted by the demonstration, Lacenaire steals a timepiece from the man’s pocket. Garance is accused of the crime, but exonerated when the mime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) shows the police, using his imitative skills, just who was the guilty party. For his actions, the silent performer is given a rose.

In these introductory 20 minutes, director Marcel Carné and his screenwriter Jacques Prévert introduce the main characters and their environs faultlessly. Baptiste’s mime of the watch theft is one of the most memorable scenes in the movies.

After this magnificent preamble, there’s still a wealth of material yet to come (the film is 190 minutes, with not one frame wasted). The hinge of Children of Paradise is Garance, who is pursued in varying fashions by Lacenaire, Lemaître, and Baptiste (a fourth suitor, the Count de Montray, played by Louis Salou, is introduced near the halfway point). But though Carné and Prévert don’t stint on the love story, the real depth of the work comes from the various counterpoints to it that are brought out with theatrical panache.

There are a number of long performance scenes in Children of Paradise, each of which reflect on the overarching drama. One instance offers Baptiste and Frédérick, playing the archetypal mime characters Pierrot and Harlequin respectively, pursuing Garance, as the goddess of the moon. When Harlequin runs off his beloved in front of a sleeping Pierrot, the parallels to the off-stage relationships are subtly and movingly demarcated.

One must also never forget the circumstances of Children of Paradise’s production; it was the most expensive French film to date and was made daringly during the German occupation. Thus, its theme of expressive freedom becomes even more poignant.

It would take much more space than the length of this review to truly detail this film’s mastery, the description above only gives the bare sketch of its richness. Suffice it say that I have seen thousands of movies thus far in my life and Children of Paradise is one of the few that might just be perfect.

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