I watched Marcel Carne’s “Children of Paradise” without any prior knowledge to what it was or the history behind it. The 1945 film is a sprawling epic romance from France set in 1860s Paris. The scale of the film is impressive but not distracting, the performances are spot on and the screenplay is possibly one of the best ever written. Although it does not have the cynical bite of the French New Wave films less than two decades later, it is poetic, witty, deep, complex in its painting of even the smallest characters and wholly alive in its portrayal.
I was simply immersed in the dialogue, specifically with how many intelligent and quotable lines about love, life and philosophy presented themselves so effortlessly. And some of the characters are just so well spoken, most notably the Shakespearean actor Frederick Lemaitre, that you wonder how a script so clever could not be a comedy.
More accurately, it’s the romance between four men all competing for the love and affection of one woman, Garance, as played by the legendary French actress Arletty. Her main love is for Baptiste, a brilliant pantomime on the Parisian stage. The film offers him a number of chances to perform with full freedom, and he wordlessly bestows such expression and emotion in stage scenes that wonderfully parallel the actual plot. These silent moments are an energetic joy to behold.
Upon finishing it, I couldn’t speak more favorably about the film and was surprised to know I didn’t know more about it. Truth be told, the film was made during the Nazi occupation of France. Carne was forced to work with Nazi-supporting extras without letting them know what allegiance he or anyone else in the crew held, and he does this numerous times in street scenes, playhouse scenes and more with hundreds if not thousands of extras. He broke the film up into two parts each roughly an hour and a half long solely for the reason that he needed to get it past Nazi censors. And to conceive of a costume drama of this scale under these circumstances is impressive to begin with.
It is so impressive that it was once named the greatest French film of the century while screening at Cannes. It was billed as the French answer to “Gone With the Wind,” and the films do have their similarities in scope, theme and setting. The film is beloved by actors as eclectic as Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman, and although Godard, Truffaut and Renoir may have some of the critical edge over Carne, his film is one of the most staggeringly successful of all time.