Filmlog: Port of Shadows
Before leaving the country, I often rent a series of foreign films in order to retrain my ear on Italian or French or even Serbian. The films, while they are good for my language skills--though not necessarily my grammar--often turn out to be tedious. I rented Port of Shadows, but when it came I had postponed it, night after night, in favor of a western or comedy. Last night was movie night, and this was all there was. The star, Jean Gabin, is a very fine actor, but it takes more than a good performance to make a good movie. I had forgotten that the director was Marcel Carné.
Le Quai des Brumes (which means literally The Dockside of Fogs) is one of Carné's best films, which is to say it is among the best movies ever made. Filmed in 1938, Le Quai lands army deserter Jean (Jean Gabin) in the port town of Le Havre, where he falls for the beautiful Nelly (Michèle Morgan), whom he rescues from the clutches of her lecherous guardian (Michel Simon) and from a gang of hoodlums. For the plot details, you can check out the IMDB entry.
Other than a good story, well played by good actors (particularly Gabin and Simon), Le Quai offers a variety of colorful characters: the hypocritical guardian, who sells antiques, loves good music, and deplores the moral decline of the youth, while virtually attacking his ward, "Panama" the proprietor of an underworld bar, who dresses exclusively in clothes he bought in Panama, a country he uses as a constant point of reference (They don't do this in Panama!), a melancholic painter who commits suicide, leaving his clothes to Jean who needs to ditch the uniform, and the bourgeois pretty boys (Lucien and his boys) in flashy suits who have been demoralized by war and turn to a life of gaudy criminality.
"Life's a rotten business," Jean observes near the beginning, but there is more to the movie than film noir cynicism. When the truckdriver with whom he hitches a ride complains of the fog (the constant theme of the film, making the translation of the title particularly stupid), Jean says it is foggy wherever he goes. Where have you been, asks the driver. In Tonkin. But there is no fog in Tonkin (that is, French Vietnam). It's the fog in my head, responds Jean. In actually falling in love with Nelly and beating up Lucien, the fog of cynicism and ennui clears in his head.
This is a familiar theme in French film--the tough guy who softens up for a girl or a child. One of the better more recent films, The Professional, puts Jean Reno (Gabin's worthy successor) in a similar situation. Carné's film, however, stops short of sentimentality and displays his masterful way with scene and mood. This film is miles away from his most famous masterpiece, Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)--perhaps my favorite film, but it is almost as powerful in its own way. I have not seen enough of his other films--many not easy to find--to evaluate him properly, but when I read that Truffaut turned against him, I knew he had to be a master. Jackals always turn on the lion when they can
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Dr. Fleming,
If you liked the "lecherous guardian" Michel Simon, rent "L'Atalante," where Simon crews on a canal barge that cruises from Le Havre to Paris through the lost world of pre-Vichy France.
Thank you, Dr. Fleming, for reminding me to restart my cultivation of cinematic classicism now that I have found my permanent apartment in Paris (and for quite possibly breaking my firm [brittle may then be a better word] resolve NOT to have a TV in here!).
A film which I imagine you've seen and every deeply Catholic Frenchman ought to know (though surprisingly, some in fact do not) is Le journal d'un Curé de Campagne, a stark refutation of the notion that explicitly Christian cinema is by necessity heavy-handed, cheesy and self-excusing, c.f., Left Behind. The difference, of course, is that directors such as Bresson and writers such as Bernanos were not in fact rooted in the same pop-sleaze culture they are simultaneously trying to rise above. It is in my view one other reason why a number of the watchable American films in recent years are more or less anti-American, this latter fact being one you once pointed out to me.
Nicholas,
What are your thoughts on the French Film, "Au Revoir, les Enfants?" I quite enjoyed it but fear that others might think it quite slow.
I once rented L'Atalante but watched it after a long and bibulous dinner party. I'll give it a second try. Au Revoir etc, is a film by Louis Malle, whom I generally dislike but will take a look. Bresson's film of Bernanos' novel is a wonderfully serious film, Catholic without being preachy. The thing I most remember of the novel--and I do not recall if it is in the film--is the older priest telling the younger one about a nun who spent all day scrubbing the church and the rectory in the delusion that she could permanently conquer dirt--a metaphor for the Calvinist/Jansenist delusion that sin can somehow be suppressed or eliminated by the virtuous. What Christianity teaches is that we have to begin each day with the same struggle. I should see more of Bresson.
@3: I have actually never seen that one. Considering that I worked for two years at one of the largest Alliance Française centers in the United States and have lived in Paris for a year's worth of time, I am almost embarrassed by how relatively little I know of the genre.
"Est-Ouest," about a Franco-Russian family trapped in the Soviet Union, by the director of "Indochine" (another one I've yet to see), was not particularly deep but was hugely realistic about life in the Eastern bloc and fairly decent "pop" as political suspense thrillers go, and with sympathetic characters (even if the protagonist was rather naïve). Although, whether by inevitable accident or clever design, by far the most formidable one, and one of the most short-lived, was the Russian aristocrat who, "dans une autre vie," grew up under a French governess. In any case it made for a fun matinée between Venetian financial history papers the last semester of university.
"The thing I most remember of the novel–and I do not recall if it is in the film–is the older priest telling the younger one about a nun who spent all day scrubbing the church and the rectory in the delusion that she could permanently conquer dirt–a metaphor for the Calvinist/Jansenist delusion that sin can somehow be suppressed or eliminated by the virtuous. What Christianity teaches is that we have to begin each day with the same struggle. I should see more of Bresson."
The scene wasn't in the film, and interestingly on that note Bresson's filmography is somewhat short compared to some other directors, so scrupulous a perfectionist was he, apparently. Claude Laydu, who played the Curé d'Ambricourt, was not an actor but a children's comedian who was subject to constant repetitions in order to remove his desire to "play" anybody. I keep meaning to see more of Bresson myself but the lack of a DVD player that is not a 12" PowerBook tends also to remove any desire to "play" a series of flickering images for a prolonged period (probably a good thing).
Dr. Fleming,
Thanks to the banksters, a bankrupt big-box bookstore (name withheld because it's not my place to plug stores on your Web site) is hawking its in-store stock of DVDs, including Criterion Collection DVDs, at half price. A chance to own "Children of Paradise" and many of the other cinematic masterpieces.
But more important to me, it's a chance to snap up more Mozart operas. When younger, I couldn't get enough noir, musicals, and art house videos and DVDs. Older, I turn to "Don Giovanni" and "The Magic Flute," works of the Enlightenment. I bring this up because I'm curious what a classicist and a Christian thinks about works written and composed by a radical Enlightenment thinker, the Freemason Mozart, helped by an Enlightenment scoundrel, Da Ponte, a priest who lived in a bordello where he fathered and abandoned several babies.
It wasn't just the Saleri of "Amadeus" that believed that the operas we attribute to Mozart were divinely written.