Realism in les enfants du paradis

“Realism in Carné’s ‘Les Enfants du paradis’,” unpublished academic paper, fall 2000

In evaluating Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis, one cannot, by adopting even an expansive appraisal of the work, precisely term the film “realist.” In fact, to make any cursory appraisal in regard to the film’s realism would likely produce assertions of its very lack of realism, while a more thoroughgoing approach to the film would, with diminished categorical fervor, still vindicate those initial assumptions.

Released in 1945 with the onset of Liberation, though made entirely in the shadow of the Occupation, Les Enfants du paradis owes many of its formal and narrative strategies to the period of French filmmaking to which it belongs, a period that had made a decided turn away from realism, at least in any overt sense. Furthermore, the basis of any argument that the film negotiates an essential realism — an argument reasonably predicated on the film’s depiction of historic or “real” events, the authenticity of the sets, the milieu of its characters, and the naturalism of its performances — is vulnerable to refutation as each one of those components has its foil, which, in conjunction, expose the claim to the film’s realism as deficient.

In some senses, Carné’s film epitomizes the modes of French filmmaking of this period. The conditions brought on by Nazi occupation of France precipitated a different approach to the making of films in these years. There were two factors in place by 1942 that generally explain this change. The first was the formation by the Vichy government of C.O.I.C., a reform-minded agency concerned largely with securing the financial survival of the French film industry but which, according to Alan Williams, “subtly contributed to the more uniform, controlled style that would mark the period.”

The second of these is the creation of Continental-Films upon the resumption of film production in Paris. According to Williams, Continental “forced the rest of the industry to compete with its always polished” product, which had the consequence of placing a new emphasis in French film on “craftsmanship, production values, and technical competence.” This is not to suggest, of course, that these were principles that had been absent in French film to this point, but the shift in emphasis away from a discretely individualist aesthetic to which Carné belonged before the war (the bleak, misanthropic essays of his poetic realist period come to mind), to one which was more streamlined and, one could argue, more informed by American production methods, is revealing in evaluating the style of Les Enfants du paradis.

There is certainly the danger of over-generalizing, but Les Enfants seems to reflect these filmic and “extra-filmic” evolutions quite nicely. By assigning the film to a class of films characterized by “craftsmanship” and “production values,” certain critical and evaluative assumptions are unavoidable. These might include the use of seamless and self-effacing editing, unobtrusive camera positions and movements, and the use of any of the expressive devices (like lighting), all in the service of narrative and character development.

Carné, in a generic sense and in many specific ways, complies with these practices that would, again, seem to evoke classical Hollywood filmmaking, thereby pitting an argument for Carné’s realism in Les Enfants against the formidable “unreality” of the Hollywood style and the abstract anti-realistic means that such a designation implies.

The editing of sequences, for example, is carefully integrated into the continuity system. Throughout the film there are abundant examples of analytically arranged shot/reverse shot sequences with characters framed in medium close-up, in balanced straight-on compositions. In one early sequence, Nathalie sees Baptiste as he enters the room. The static camera watches her until she looks down, having noticed something. The next shot is an eye-line match that reveals a rose, in close-up. The shot reverses back to Nathalie for her reaction. Such sequences, cutting reality up into pieces rather than unifying it as a whole, contribute to the abstract unreality to which I have referred above. The point is significant in the way it so clearly evokes Bazin’s dialectical meditations on montage versus the shot-in-depth and the way each functions relative to the photographic description of realism. If one accepts the view that the latter configuration is not only more highly denotative of realism, but in fact renders the former (in such a pursuit) somewhat spurious and ineffective, then it would indeed be difficult to reconcile Carné’s fidelity to the precepts of classical editing to any sort of perceived realism.

Furthermore, the lighting in Les Enfants is very often anti-realist and expressive. In the first backstage sequence, Nathalie and Frederick are both imbued by a suggestive and nuanced lighting scheme, anticipating a subsequent scene between Garance and Baptiste, first as he asks her to dance in the Redbreast tavern and then as he walks her home.

Throughout this sequence both are illuminated in expressive ways, with light concentrated on their faces. Garance in particular is shown with a soft band of light playing on her eyes, a convention that recurs in scenes until the end of the film. These artificial effects are graceful and touching, but they hardly evoke realism.

The narrative content of Les Enfants du paradis seems also to reflect trends in Occupation-era French filmmaking. As Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prevert had done previously in Les Visiteurs du soir, Les Enfants mines the past — in this case the historically authentic past — for subject matter, eschewing the politically precarious present. This reflects a trend in Occupation filmmaking that found many filmmakers embedding commentary relevant to contemporary circumstances in historical and metaphorical contexts (something Les Enfants does but without any overarching consequence) while pursuing narrative and dramaturgical avenues not only at odds with contemporary circumstances but with the entrenched codes of realism. In this way, Les Enfants du paradis is unexceptional. Les Enfants may in fact be the idealization of this turn away from reality — and, in an imperfectly correlative sense, from realism as well.

As Jill Forbes points out, Carné and Prevert’s film is untroubled by historical incongruities and the kind of myth-making license that it applies. There are examples of this to be seen throughout the film — Forbes lists several of them — but that is not the aim of this project. Where it becomes useful for my purpose is in demonstrating variance with the contention that the film derives at least a part of its realism from its use of historical events and persons. The film presents only a very subjective approximation of history, making few claims to historical validity — or any sort of rigorous or authoritative realism.

To turn now to the set design: Despite circumstances that would seem to work against large, elaborate sets and grand staging, Les Enfants is only one example of an Occupation film that employs such audacious resources. The historic flavor of many of these films, Les Enfants chief among them, demanded a certain epic scale of design (Les Enfants was, according to Forbes, “the largest and most elaborate to be built in a French studio) and the film industry during this period was stable enough financially to support these demands. In a sense, such a scale intrinsically suggests a certain unreality, especially if one tends to demarcate film or theatrical realism in terms of everyday "small-scale” reality and fanciful “large-scale” unreality (in much the same way as Greek comedy and tragedy are theoretically distinguished). But to go further, the sets themselves, designed by Alexandre Trauner, cement the film’s look of unreality.

Forbes, in her analysis of the film’s fusion of history and fiction, writes: “The set of Les Enfants du paradis is the principal means by which a sense of historical authenticity is created and by which we are convinced the film is a historical reconstruction.” She also speaks of the act of “defiance” — of Germany and, in a different way, of Hollywood — evinced by these extravagant sets. But neither this defiance nor, more problematically, this “historical authenticity” liberates Trauner’s sets from artifice and, again, a ubiquitous sense of unreality in the film.

Authenticity is a term that needs to be carefully applied; it should not be used as a substitute for realism. To say that the set design in the climactic Mickey Spillane ballet sequence in The Band Wagon (to use a somewhat arbitrary example) is authentic would not be a misstatement. But to say that any sense of realism is created by the set design would certainly be a misstatement (and probably an invitation to psychological scrutiny.) The analogy, of course, is a flawed one: the set design of Les Enfants is intended to have a utilitarian and, admittedly, a more “realistic” purpose. But, as Forbes points out, the purpose is not strictly utilitarian. Speaking of Trauner’s method of creating his Boulevard set, she notes how the designer “thus heightens the Boulevard’s utopian quality, so that it resembles a memory enhanced and embellished by time, in the manner of childhood memories. In this way the set represents Paris in the 19th century not necessarily as it was, but as we wish to remember it having been.”

As I have suggested, Trauner’s set design, masterful a feat of (re)construction as it may be, accomplishes little in producing any sort of realism. Part of this, undoubtedly, derives from certain, pervasive codes of realism that would reveal themselves in the wake of Les Enfants’ release; I’m speaking of Italian Neorealism and the influence it had in placing an emphasis on location shooting, an influence seen even in the Hollywood musical by decade’s end. It is difficult, from our vantage point today, to see a film so entirely studio-bound as this one (where only one sequence — the duel — takes places in a location setting), as having a look of realism.

Again, the distinction to be drawn between authenticity and realism is apt. Authenticity seems to be the highest aspiration of a studio-bound period production, especially one as self-conscious about set design as this one. Photographic realism and contemporary subjects, on the other hand, seem particularly well suited, if not in certain ways linked irrevocably, to location shooting.

Given both the subject matter of the film and the difficult historical circumstances of its production, it is useless to assign too much blame to Carné, who, after all, had asked, rhetorically, “When will the cinema go out in the street?” in the French publication Cinemagazine. At the same time, however, Forbes, citing that same article, notes how Carné had not only become reconciled to the set design-dominated mise-en-scene of the early sound cinema, but had become its champion.

A final thought on set design. The most realistic setting seems to be that of the Funambules Theater — whether we are backstage, onstage or in the “gods.” This, along with the expansive Boulevard set, marks the height of authenticity in Trauner’s design. Ironically, then, it is when the film itself becomes most unrealistic that the set design seem to be the most “real.”

Another issue to consider is the way realism is — or is not — represented in the depiction of milieu. In any generic reading of realism in films, a simple expectation that ordinary, working-class characters will be the subjects is not unwarranted. Without wanting to appear overly captive to such arbitrary values, the characters in Les Enfants are neither ordinary nor, by the end of the film anyway, “working class.” Even in one of the film’s earliest scenes, Baptiste implicitly distances himself from the working classes, even as he identifies with the poor spectators in the gods: “They’re poor people, but I am like them.” In another scene, despite humble origins and a lack of job or a place to live, Garance, along with Lacenaire, is identified as “the high society.”

If there is a connection to be drawn between criminals and performers, which is certainly Carné and Prevert’s intention, it still offers little defense, applying those same arbitrary values that likewise install the criminal class in realist films, for Les Enfants as a realist film. (And the dandy Lacenaire is in no way archetypically “criminal,” though his sartorial extravagance does in some ways reflect the archetypal Hollywood criminal, the big city gangster).

Arbitrary values aside, there is a much more decisive argument to be found in defying this film’s putative realism, and that concerns not the social milieu of its characters but the professional milieu. Three observations — one made by Lacenaire, another by Nathalie, and the last by Baptiste — are revealing in placing the characters in Les Enfants du paradis at a distance from normal or everyday humanity. “Actors aren’t people,” Lacenaire notes with distaste. “They’re everybody and nobody at the same time.” Later, Nathalie says of Baptiste, “He’s not an ordinary sort of man,” while Baptiste reflects the assertion in remarking to Frederick: “We do prodigious things.” It is in the many extended depictions of professional milieu, in showing these characters doing “prodigious things,” where Les Enfants is the least invested in realism (even as art is reflecting life).

In telling the story of these actors — whether they are employed as actors or are in effect blurring the distinction between theatricality and criminality, as with Lacenaire; or still further, blurring the distinction between what one wants and what one does, as holds true with Garance — Carné and Prevert repeatedly cross the line between fiction and reality, and, both physically and metaphorically, between onstage fantasy and offstage reality. Late in the film, Prevert ties together theatricality and criminality in an extraordinary way, connecting Lacenaire with the celebrity of theater. “I have become famous,” he tells Garance. “I have pulled off a few sensational crimes and the name of Lacenaire has ornamented the pages of the Law Chronicles” (in much the same way that Baptiste and Frederick’s names would be “ornamenting” theatrical publications of the time).

Prevert’s dialogue and use of language, one of the film’s most celebrated features, is still another means by which to make the case against the film’s realism. Flowing and florid, and rich in allusions, paradoxes and puns, Carné’s dialogue is in its unique way too “good” to project any sort of sustained realism. To hear — or more accurately, read (if one does not understand French) — Baptiste speak the line, “The moon is my country,” is to revel in the gossamer language of Prevert; it is by no means to recognize an essential realism.

Garance and Lacenaire are particularly, even extraordinarily, adept with wordplay. But Garance also issues statements that disclose her impatience with the sort of glib give-and-take she so often engages in. She tells Lacenaire: “You talk all the time. It’s like being at the theater” (again connecting Lacenaire to theatricality). Later she attributes her unhappiness with Frederick to his inability to speak “simple words, everyday words.” In the following scene, with Count Edward, she comments dryly: “… and because you’re moved, overcome, you’ll go on talking platitudes.” The dialogue in all three of these examples is undue and inflated — and as exaggerated as the motions Baptiste makes in his guise as a mime.

Finally, there is the acting to be considered. It is illuminating to note how the three main characters each “act” in relation to the theater. Baptiste, the performer, is, to place less emphasis on what he says than how he says it, the least theatrical — and the most natural. In placing the emphasis on how Baptiste says things, it is useful to recall the scene backstage between Nathalie and Baptiste, when he has wandered back clutching the flower Garance has given him. “I love her,” he declares when pressed. Nathalie is stunned. “The way you said that,” she says. It is also useful to note that Baptiste’s avowals of his love for Garance, in terms of language, are just as threadbare and contrived as Frederick’s, but it is the way he delivers them, with sincerity and even pathos, that conceal these affinities.

Lacenaire, who is not a performer, acts in accordance with theatrical norms (or clichés), and with palpable theatricality, while Frederick, the only “actor” of the three, seems to at once rejoice in and parody those same conventions. Frederick seems not only more convincing as an actor offstage but also more striking. His line, “I want to be an actor,” in an early scene, is delivered with more delicacy and directness than any of his lines onstage, and is even underscored by music, which, though diegetic in origin, seems at that very moment to assert itself on the sound track. Unlike Baptiste, who as a mime establishes a clear division between his onstage/offstage persona, Frederick nearly erases any division between acting onstage, where he is most “alive” he says, and the histrionics of his offstage life. He often interprets offstage events through Othello’s eyes, and calls Garance Desdemona. When his creditors attack him, he exclaims, “They’re killing Frederick the Great, they’re beating Robert Macaire,” further confusing the factual and the fictional. This nimble obfuscation, of course, does little for the film’s realism.

A final consideration in evaluating the realism of the characters is to look at the performances themselves. Realism does not only result, as De Sica or Bresson would configure it, with minimalist, nonprofessional performances. But the high degree of theatricality in the film, even as it faithfully reveals the eccentric characters that are at its center, calls attention to a lack of realism. Again, to hear Garance speak the words to Baptiste near the film’s conclusion

My life was so empty, and I felt so alone. But I told myself, “You have no right to be sad. You’re happy in spite of everything because someone really loved you.”

is to be swept away by her disarming sincerity — and Arletty’s shrewd technique as an actor. It is not to recognize an essential realism.

Bibliography

Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema? Vol. 1. (Translated by Hugh Gray). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Forbes, Jill. Les Enfants Du Paradis. London: British Film Institute, 1997.

Williams, Alan. Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press