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. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Children of Paradise”